How will China wine evolve?

In the latest edition of FORBES ASIA (July, 2011), we ran a book excerpt from Wine Wars: The Curse of the Blue Nun, the Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers), in which author Mike Veseth takes a look at China’s emerging wine business (its output recently surpassed Australia’s). I asked Veseth, the Robert G. Albertson Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Puget Sound in Washington State and author of The Wine Economist blog, a few questions about the wine world in general.

We mention Grace Vineyards and Changyu in the excerpt we ran. Changyu’s tasting notes were hilariously bad (“urinal crust” being a particularly evocative one). Any more thoughts on how bad China wine is now and how it will evolve?

Karl Shmavonian：I think the wines will get better quickly. Technical winemaking improvements will come first, of course, but the final improvements will take longer because they involve the entire supply chain. Quality wine begins in the vineyard and requires that both the raw materials (grapes) and final products (the wine itself) are handled really well. If either the grapes or the wine spends much time in overheated trucks or rail cars, for example, the final product will not be very good.