China Goes Sideways
China Goes Sideways
Qingdao is best known as the birthplace of Tsingtao Beer, a relic of the German concession here and China's most famous brew. But recently the town fathers decided to diversify their tourist offerings, building the fancifully titled Qingdao International Wine Street. The boulevard, completed last year, boasts 19 stores selling imported vino, three hotels, and an 8,800-square-meter subterranean wine museum. What it doesn't have are tourists. A year after opening, the wine shops make a feeble profit selling discounted bottles for Carbon molecular sieve local Communist Party banquets. When I visited recently, a security guard at the museum whispered to me conspiratorially that he sees fewer than 20 guests a day.
The empty storefront in Qingdao doesn't seem to reconcile with China's booming thirst for putaojiu ("grape alcohol"). As the country's prosperous class grows -- Euromonitor International predicts the middle class will expand to 700 million people by 2020 -- Chinese consumption of wine is mushrooming. The country is already the seventh-largest wine market in the world and will pass number six, Argentina, by the end of 2010. Vintners worldwide have gloated over the Middle Kingdom's newfound taste during some of the worst years on record for the industry (worldwide wine sales dropped 3.6 percent by volume in 2009).
But a nation of uneducated drinkers who show little interest in learning about wine's subtler notes (exhibit A: the empty halls of the Qingdao museum) and rampant counterfeiting mean that China's nascent wine explosion may end up corked.
Wine has a long history in China, dating back the 2nd century B.C., when the imperial envoy Zhang Qian returned from Europe with China's first grape seedlings and wine-brewing know-how. But for two millennia, wine remained on the fringes of Carbon molecular sieve Chinese alcohol, giving wide berth to beer and baijiu, the ubiquitous (and rather foul) rice wine that can reach up to 120 proof.
Chinese consumers have given wine a second look over the last 15 years, as the middle class embraces status symbols and health-conscious drinkers look for alternatives to the traditional firewater. Chinese wine consumption increased by 29 percent in 2009, according to International Wine and Spirit Record. (Brazil,Lace wigs, the next fastest-growing market, rose by only 10 percent.) And that growing interest has been a shot in the arm for foreign wineries from Bordeaux to South Africa's Breede River Valley to California's Bay Area. Chinese wine imports were $477 million over the first eight months of 2010, an 85 percent jump over the same period last year, according to Global Trade Information Services.
But many wineries are having a hard time getting a line on Chinese oenophiles. Wine drinkers can be broken down into those drinking imported and domestic wines. The import-drinkers are wealthy, label-conscious consumers, Carbon molecular sieve concentrated in the economic powerhouses of Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou (and increasingly some second-tier cities as well), where wine from far-flung vineyards has "an aspirational place among middle-class consumers, the affluent, and super-affluent," said Edward Ragg, a Beijing-based wine consultant.
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