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News
Australian wines being passed off as Chinese
Australian wines are being passed off as local products in China, a wine judge has revealed.
Beijing-based wine consultant Fongyee Walker, a guest judge at the Melbourne Wine Show, said Chinese wine companies are frequently marketing imported wines as their own creations.
“I was judging in a Chinese wine show in Yantai and it was supposed to be a trophy-winning wine from Shandong,” she said.
“I thought ‘this really tastes like it’s from McLaren Vale’; there was no way that Shandong could have produced a wine like that, there’s hardly any Shiraz there at all.
“I said to the organisers: ‘Isn’t this supposed to be all Chinese wines?’ and he just sighed. Maybe it was bottled in China, but there’s no way it was made there.”
One of Australia’s leading wine companies, Treasury Wine Estates, discovered last year that an imitation of its Penfolds brand was being marketed in China.
The Chinese version is called Benfolds, but features marketing material with Penfold’s chief winemaker Peter Gago.
Sales of premium bottled red wine in China increased almost 50% for the 12 months until December.
“There’s a backlash coming in China – you hear it a lot that the world thinks they can dump their garbage wine in China, and the Chinese don’t understand why,” Walker said.
“When Chinese consumers’ drinking habits mature, the Australian wine export market will have a real opportunity to increase volumes.”
this “revelation” is old hat to anyone with a bit of basic experience in the chinese market. cheap bulk wine from the NW, especially australia and chile, has been used to fortify or replace domestic juice since the chinese wine industry began.
unfortunately, this “news flash” only reveals how out of touch the media – and even a specialized publication like thedrinksbusiness – is with the chinese wine market. there appears to very little actual research and analysis happening regarding the trends, consumption habits, etc. most media seem content with regurgitating the hype and vastly exaggerating the size of the market, which in turn leads to inflated expectations from all the wine producers seeking to export to china. it does not help that many self-styled “china experts”, MWs and what not who do not even reside in china or speak mandarin are liberally used as references. it would behoove journalists in general to take a long hard look at facts, such as the chinese import statistics, and try to identify the nature, location, distribution network, etc of the companies who import the majority of wine into china. this kind of information would be a true revelation, at least to the vast majority.
If they can replicate an Apple store, what’s a bottle of wine?
This is no surprise to me. When I lived and worked in Hong Kong, during the emergence of Chinese grape wine, I was asked to taste a wine live on air which I was absolutely certain was Australian.