By any measure, China 's market for wine is significant - and it is growing rapidly, reports an in-depth report that appears in www.winebiz.com.au.

Per capita consumption may be well below international benchmarks: depending on the source, at somewhere between 0.2 litres (a recent People's Daily newspaper report) and 0.91 litres per person (as recorded in the OIV or Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin's international statistics series).

But there are lots and lots of persons, so even at these levels consumption is anywhere up to double the size of the market for wine in Australia (in volume terms). And yet this represents considerably less than 2% of total alcohol consumption in China, so the potential for further growth in this market is enormous.

Alcohol statistics in China are problematical. Wine is a heavily taxed item (import duties, value-added tax and consumption tax account for just under 50% of the retail price) and therefore declarations can be unreliable - understated for tax purposes and, sometimes, overstated for marketing purposes. This is in addition to the usual problems in data collection in a country such as this - including definitional issues.

The word 'wine' is used for a broader range of alcoholic beverages than this term implies in the western context. Rice-based alcohol is colloquially referred to as 'wine', so are various fruit alcohol concoctions and even, occasionally, the local distilled white spirit ( baijiu ): these are not separated from grape wine in some analyses, creating even more confusion.

The OIV records grape wine consumption at 1,158 million litres in 2003 (latest available year). This would put it at more than double that of Australia 's domestic consumption of wine, as recorded by the OIV (419 million litres in 2003).

Market research agency Euromonitor takes a much more conservative position, based on the sales data it collects, and puts total "still light grape wine" sales at 498 million litres in 2004 (latest available year).

Extrapolating from Euromonitor sales data and retail price data from various sources, the value of wine sales would have been in the range of A$4.4 billion to A$7.5 billion in 2004 - but there are publicly available figures from various sources both above and below this range.

( Editor's Note: India, too, faces the same problem with figures, but our consumption, despite the figure ranging from 6,00,000 nine-litre cases to 1.2 million cases, is way below China's level. We have a long, long way to go.)

For the complete story, go to http://www.winebiz.com.au