New York Times, March 13, 2000


Aggressive Little Wines? China's Acquiring a Taste
 
By CRAIG S. SMITH
SHANGHAI, March 12 -- Yao Yun pulls the cork on a bottle of red wine in a fashionable restaurant here and does something that might horrify a Frenchman: he pours himself half a glass and tops it up with Sprite. 

"Wine tastes too bitter, but the more we drink mixed wine, the more we like it," says the young graphic designer, pouring a second glass for his friend. 

Red wine is à la mode in China's increasingly prosperous cities these days, particularly at wedding banquets and karaoke bars. It has replaced the Cognac that people here downed by the tumblerful a few years ago. 

But thanks to lax regulation and unscrupulous vintners, much of the wine in China is of poor quality. Many people mix white wine with Coca-Cola or red wine with Sprite to make the wine more palatable. 

Though Mr. Yao's bottle of wine carries a local label, it might contain cheap table wine from Spain that has sat for months in a giant plastic shipping bag. Or it might not hold what people in the West would consider wine at all: there is no law that red wine be made from grapes, though there is a "recommended standard" that grapes be used for at least half the content. 

Bottlers are supposed to list the ingredients on the label, but there is often plenty left unsaid. Some wine is made from cheap apple-juice concentrate, with grain alcohol and color added, viticulturists say. Some is just colored sugar water, with flavoring and alcohol but no fruit juice at all. Counterfeiting is rife, with only a printing press needed to turn cooking wine into claret. 

That disturbs Western merchants who had hoped to cultivate a billion winebibbers after Beijing began promoting fruit-based alcoholic beverages as an alternative to traditional 160-proof Chinese spirits a few years ago. Chinese liquor is made from grain the government would rather people eat than imbibe. 

Helped by reports of the health benefits of moderate wine consumption, the government's nudge started a stampede for red wine. The Chinese do not ascribe any special aphrodisiac qualities to wine, as they do to some hard liquor, but as in the West, wine has a romantic aura. The sudden demand quickly sucked dry China's small vineyards, mostly vestiges of Western wineries from pre-Communist days. Wine factories even used up Chinese grape varieties like Cow's Nipple or Dragon's Eye, which are considered too sweet for dry Western wines. 

To slake the sudden thirst, Chinese bottlers started importing cheap European wine, shipped in 22,000-liter bags that each fill a 20-foot steel freight container. Fernando Rovira was in charge of international sales at the Bodegas Félix Solís winery in Spain at the time. The dapper Spaniard says his fax machine began whirring with order after order from China in 1996. "People wanted four, five containers in the first order, no sample required," he says now from his mostly empty warehouse just west of Shanghai. 

The world's wine business quickly fell under the spell of the potentially vast China market. Winemakers from Australia to Peru came to scout for customers. Mr. Rovira moved to Shanghai, established a bottling plant and began pumping wine from truck to tank as if it were home-heating oil. 


Soon, even China's best-known local labels were wrapped around bottles of cheap Western table wine, though they continued to claim that they were made in China. "China doesn't have enough grape fields to meet the market demand, so it's hard to believe that any of the big companies aren't importing from other countries," said Wang Jiajian, an official at the Alcohol Monopoly Agency in Shanghai. 

The number of Chinese winemakers grew from a few dozen to more than 300, bottling such wines as Grand Dragon and Tonghua, whose label carries the ambiguous English phrase, "save and preserve five years in oak wood bucket." 

But the dipsomania ran out of control: though wine consumption nearly tripled from 1996 to 1997, imports grew sixfold. China was soon swimming in surplus wine. Twenty-year old French wines appeared on supermarket shelves at $3 or $4 a bottle, cheaper than even local wines. Some were fake but some were genuine, smuggled in and later dumped by cash-starved importers. 

China tried stemming the flow, first by enforcing oft-underpaid duties that more than double the cost of imported wine, then by banning French wine imports after detecting traces of cow's blood in a few bottles. (Blood is sometimes used to clarify wine, but the practice is outdated and limited to a few small regions of Europe.) 

Nonetheless, the Chinese press was soon warning consumers that they could catch mad cow disease by drinking French wine. China lifted the ban after just two weeks last year, but the damage was done. "A lot of people are afraid to drink any imported wine, especially French wine," says Sun Cheng, manager of the Golden Gate, a brightly lighted Shanghai restaurant that only serves Chinese wines -- including one listed on the menu as French Champagne Wine, though it comes from northern China. 

With the customs service cracking down and the market saturated, importers began abandoning shipments at the docks. Wine executives estimate that as much as 10,000 metric tons -- the equivalent of about 13 million bottles -- was abandoned last year. A lot of it is still sitting in government warehouses. 

"They've imported so much wine that if they stopped today, there's enough in the warehouses to last three or four years," said Mr. Rovira, whose profit margins and market have withered because of competition from cheap wine. 

If no one claims the wine after three months, customs agents are free to sell it -- which they do, at happy-hour prices. By that time, the wine has been in plastic shipping bags for at least four months, including time on the water. A lot of the wine on the market today sat in shipping bags through the sweltering heat of summer. 

That does not matter to most Chinese, who drink wine as they do traditional Chinese spirits, in a ritualized swallow meant more for show than for sensation. In the second- floor ballroom of the New Asia Thomson Hotel in Shanghai recently, tables of flushed young women and crew-cut young men gulped goblets of Imperial Court wine -- produced by a grapefruit farm -- to a chorus of "gan-bei," a toast-cum-challenge that literally means "dry cup." 

But it does concern those people trying to educate China's palate. Sam Featherston, an executive at the Montrose Food and Wine Company, an American-owned importer and distributor of fine wines in China, recalls that he was awakened one night by a bartender at a karaoke club in Beijing who wanted a case of Château Lafite-Rothschild at roughly $170 a bottle wholesale for the cheapest vintage, one of Montrose's most expensive wines. 

Mr. Featherston delivered the wine personally by taxi and was invited to spend the rest of the night with a party of toughs and a dozen hired women, who swilled the wine mixed with Sprite and watermelon slices. 


"People say, "it's just like drinking the local stuff, so why spend so much money," Mr. Featherston said, referring to such ill-fated fine wines. But when they drink the local stuff on its own, he adds, their eyes water and their throats burn and they decide they do not like wine. 

Montrose is nurturing a growing band of oenophiles with its 60,000-bottle cellar -- actually a Mao-era bomb shelter in Beijing. The company holds frequent wine tastings and caters to a few connoisseurs. A director of the state arms trading company buys $100 bottles of Sauternes by the case, Mr. Featherston says. 


But most of the wine is consumed in places like Shanghai's Famous Grouse karaoke club, where black-clad young women carry $10 bottles of El Guardamonte from Spain through the bright yellow halls to dark private rooms. Such nightclubs across Asia were once the main drain for much of the world's brandy and plenty of whiskey. "No one wants to drink Cognac anymore; most of our customers want red wine now," said the club's general manager, Huang Jianmei. 

The real losers are people trying to produce quality wines in China. In the 1980's, Group Pernod Ricard of France began coaxing villages near China's Great Wall to switch from sweet Chinese grape varieties to chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon, which the company could use to make quality wines. They taught farmers to bury the frail European plants in the sandy soil during the frigid northern Chinese winters and to dig them out in spring. 

The company now makes about a million bottles a year under the Dragon Seal label, using strict European standards -- even aging the wine in oak casks imported from France. But the market is increasingly difficult. "The price is always decreasing," says its winemaker, Gérôme Sabate. 

Mr. Rovira of Félix Solís has decided to approach the market another way: he is selling jugs of sangria.