I was speaking to some friends from Hong Kong today from the wine trade and I’ve begun to wonder whether China’s wine boom is slowing.
My one friend spoke about how hard 2010 Bordeaux futures sales were in China, mentioning a number of reasons. One was that officials from a large national company were caught using wine as bribes. Another was that credit lines in China have been diminished. He also mentioned that top wine consumers were starting to view Bordeaux as too expensive and looking for other wines that offer better value. And finally he talked about a famous fortune teller in China who said that he was ripped off by a wine merchant in Singapore by 2009 en primeur. (Not sure about the last!)
My other friend simply said that wine has lost some of its “panache” with the Chinese cognoscenti and that they were talking about other things at dinner parties instead of wine. “Conversations are back to more normal things like business and travel or whatever,” he said.
This is all second hand, and I will check it all out next time I am in China this autumn. But it makes you think. I believe that some wine merchants are not very realistic about the China market. It’s not a vast and endless market for fine expensive wines. I wonder if a real wine market in China has been built or not?
China is, in my mind, an established wine market, however, I am hoping that it's level of influence does dwindle to a certain degree, especially with my love of fine Bordeaux, that has become almost jokingly expensive for the last two stupendous vintages - '09 and '10.