| China's eager oenophiles are reviving the flagging French wine industry. So what if they mix their cru with Coke, asks the writer in an Article in the March 7 issue of Newsweek, as reported by MSN.
China's novice wine drinkers can be a pretty gauche bunch. To hide the actual taste of foreign wines, some dilute their Bordeaux with ice or, worse, Coca-Cola. After business people raise their glasses for a toast, they tend to drain them as if they were shots of tequila.
Ying Qunhua, China's elegant young first secretary of the Chinese Embassy in France , recently admitted during a visit to the limestone village of Saint Emilion in Bordeaux that her colleagues back home sometimes fear wasting a bottle of fine wine on "people who won't actually taste it."
Guardians of France's grandest grapes are asking another question entirely: red, white or rosé? Tired of declining international market share through 2005, French wine merchants are reaching out to China as a potential saviour.
Bordeaux recently began publishing a Chinese-language listing of its main châteaux. "It may not become the biggest market," says Jean-François Bourrut Lacouture, who sells high-end wines to spot markets in Shanghai , Hong Kong and Singapore, "but it will be near the top within 10 years or so."
The average Chinese has doubled his wine intake over the last five years. In 2005, the Asian giant joined as one of the world's top-10 wine-consuming countries. Last year Chinese wine imports doubled over the previous year, from 1.15 million cases to 2.2 million
Bordeaux wine maker Fabrice Dubourdieu, whose winery sells 80 percent of its product to Asia (mostly Japan but increasingly to China ), is so confident of the Chinese boom that he spends an hour each day studying Mandarin. "For me, it is the future," he says. "What is at play is enormous. It is a sign of what is happening in many areas, but wine is at the forefront."
Chinese government is actively encouraging people to switch from hard rice and other grain alcohols to wine, for health reasons. Taxes on many wine imports have plummeted from 120 percent to about 48 percent since 2001. Low-end imported wines now sell in China for as little as €4 or €5.
Read the complete story in http://www.msnbc.msn.com
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