The BBC carries a good summary of what’s happening in the Chinese fine wine market – essentially, it zoomed up and then although it hasn’t crashed, it certainly slipped and before hitting a plateau.
What’s missing from the article is any mention of something several of us discussed during a restaurant dinner last night: the Chinese market is very young. Fine wine as a market won’t really develop until there is a broader base of people who enjoy wine, even if they are not particularly knowledgeable. In fairness to the author, the BBC article is a business one on investing.
I see close parallels between the growth of the Chinese and US wine markets, with a difference of 60 or 70 years – and look at the US market today! Wine in the US in the 1940s or 50s was an uncommon and puzzling beverage drunk only by immigrants from Italy, Spain or France or small, sophisticated urban groups.
We had chicken and dumplings on Saturday nights at our house and it would not have occurred to anyone to buy wine for that, or if it had, they wouldn’t have known where to buy it or what to pay. There was no corkscrew in the house. My father would have been shocked if someone had suggested he pay $3 or $5 for a drink you’d consume during one meal.
Americans learned to drink after that – mostly badly. You know the story: glass filled to the brim, whether it was a juice glass or wine glass, and it was either presented as white or red, or in sophisticated bars you could get Chardonnay or Burgundy.
That’s how I started to drink wine, and I managed to outgrow that phase, so I hold out hope for a good Chinese wine market – in several years. The problem of what wine with Chinese cuisine will sort itself out, in part because the diet is changing, but so are wines, which have spent centuries adapting to our shifting moods, habits and whims.
Chinese wine is improving and will continue to do so, along with the market. I first had Chinese wine in Shanghai in 1985, Dynasty, the one wine you could find, and it still ranks as one of the all-time worst wines I’ve had. I rode my bicycle across China that summer and drank tea during the day and beer at night, excellent Tsingtao, cold and safely bottled. Wine made no sense. But I’ve had a couple of bottles of Chinese wine since then and believe me, it has improved.
That isn’t much help to today’s wine investor looking at China. But how many people made big money investing in fine wine in the US in 1946?
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