The Guangzhou Wine Market

There is certainly no lack of procurement platforms to support those producers, with more than ten exclusive wine and spirits trade fairs in China in 2012 alone, as well as countless food or gourmet fairs, which wine exhibitors also use to promote their events. One of these is Interwine, held in May in Guangzhou, China’s third biggest city, with a population over 10m.

For more than 50 years, Guangzhou has been a centre for trade fairs, hosting the Canton Fair, which is the largest export and import fair in China, and it’s been part of the wine trade fair since wine tax was reduced from 40% to 14% in 2005. According to Rita Jia, managing director of Interwine, more than 30,000 visitors now flock twice a year to the air conditioned halls of Interwine in the giant Pazhou complex. Indeed, the fair is now growing at such a rate that Jia has already booked the 50,000 m2 larger hall complex B for the ninth running of the event in November 2012. Whether the organisers will be able to fill nearly double the exhibition space within six months remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, Guangzhou plays an important role in trendsetting in the south China market, having a developmental lead of about 10 years on its neighbours. So, despite the subdued growth rates of Chinese wine imports, the local trade fair scene is characterised by optimism and a pioneering spirit. For Juan Pablo Casas, the managing director of Viña Sutil in Chile, this manifests itself in a satisfactory increase in sales volume in China of 175% from the first year 2010 to the following year 2011 (11,000 cases). This was made possible by his Chinese business partner Han Bao, with whom he had previously already exported fresh and dried fruit from Chile to China.

Many successful exhibitors at Interwine can testify to the fact that it is only a Chinese business partner with an appropriate network that makes marketing wine in China possible. Australian Heino Hinrichsen, managing director of the Australian-Chinese importing firm Tall Trees in Guangzhou, began his Chinese venture with his Chinese partner Bobby Lee the other way around, initially by exporting goods from China to Australia. As a sideline, they both tried to export Australian wine to China from 2005, at first without much success. It was only with their trade fair activities at Interwine, starting in 2006, that things turned around. Hinrichsen now works with 1,200 distributors all across China and has an enormous local warehouse, to offer guaranteed prompt service. “Many newcomers underestimate the time you have to put in after the trade fair in China,” said Hinrichsen. Making repeated contact with potential buyers can take weeks, requiring an extended presence in China. This is where the importance of having a good Chinese business partner locally becomes obvious.

One successful partnership came about through a lucky coincidence for WeinAllianz, a German group of producers from several cooperatives, according to executive director .