The world is not quite ready for Chinese wine

Earlier this month Moët Hennessy became the latest French winemaker to announce a Chinese joint venture, this time to produce sparkling wine in the remote north-western Ningxia, but some wine experts believe the world is not quite ready for Asian wine.

Vintner and contributing editor at Decanter magazine Steven Spurrier that the West’s insatiable appetite for cheap Chinese goods is unlikely to be matched by a foreign market for Chinese produced wine.

“I think that it will be a long time before the Chinese market and the Chinese export their wines; they might export them in a very small amount, but the European and other New World wine producers have been educating the wine drinkers for the last thousand years - or the last fifty years - and the market’s not ready for Chinese wine,” Spurrier said.

“You have to think of the great wine regions, so one is Bordeaux, one is Burgundy, one is Rioja, one is Chianti, one is possibly the Barossa Valley, one is Marlborough in New Zealand … these are regions which have become known for their wine production and they’re visually recognizable by everyone,” he explained. 

“Chinese vineyards or Indian vineyards is something which people can hardly conceive of and this is what I mean, it’s difficult to get into the market.”