China is a complicated market

 Despite a history of viticulture stretching back thousands of years, China's relation to wine is very different to that of your average Aussie, yank or Brit.

''China is just such a complicated market at the moment,'' says wine industry consultant John Weeks. The whole culture of drinking is very different to how we think of it.''

The current Chinese experience of wine is of it playing more of a ceremonial role in wedding toasts, gift giving, or socially in restaurants rather than in the home.

Weeks says the vast majority of wine sales take place around festivals, Chinese New Year and the mid-autumn Moon Festival.

McLintock says this is why 55 per cent of sales are ''on premise'' in restaurants and the like, compared to just 15 per cent in Australia.

But the market is changing rapidly and Australia needs to get its branding and marketing in order to chase the growing westernised tastes of China's new middle class who threaten to become the sort of wine consumer more recognisable to a western consumer.