(More wine news on www.vitabella.fr). On June 19, a Maotai bottle (the traditional chinese wine) produced in 1959 sold for 1.03 million yuan (around $150,000) during a wine auction. At the same time, Lafite Rothschild was announcing its historical most expensive En Primeur Price for the 2009' vintage and, among explanations, comments were that this price was fuelled by a strong demand from the chinese market. In fact, China often comes back as a major subject when talking about wine in general because this country shows strong capabilities on the production side, the investment side and the consumption side at the same time.
- On the consumption side, most has been written about realities and potential. On the high-end market, the strong demand on Chateau Lafite Rothschild and its wide range of wines with the "five arrows" logo shows the power of this market.
- On the investment side, Chinese wine companies are interested in expanding their wine portfolio. They intend to sell more in China but also to produce more in some other parts of the world where harvest seasons are different from China. The last rumor came recently when, immediately right after Foster's announced the split of its wine and beer operations, the Shanghai-based Bright Food company was considered as eyeing the Hunter Valley operations focused on the Rosemount brand. On its part, the sino-French listed Dynasty Fine Wine Group announced at Vinexpo Hong Kong they may buy vineyards in Australia, New Zealand, Chile and France. Over the next few years, Chinese companies will invest more and more in the global wine industry.
- On the production side, the objectives of chinese wine companies could be summarized by a comment recently made by Bai Zhisheng, chairman of Dynasty Fine Wine Group, in an interview to Bloomberg: "I want the best quality of the old world vintages and the production scale of the new world wines." Chinese companies develop their own production (Chinese wine production is about 1 million metric tons a year) and at the same time want to go up-market. Visitors in China can not ignore about Great Wall or premium brands Château Junding, Changyu, Dynasty and Dragon Seal. But there are many other brands now focusing on high quality such as Silver Heights produced by the female winemaker Emma Gao up in the Helan Mountain region of Ningxia province. Or Grace Vineyard, a successful producer of Chinese red and white wine based in Shanxi province. In fact, quality is improving dramatically and these wines are showing to the world that delicious wines are produced in China. And this is not a coincidence if the successful wine producer Torres decided to include these two chinese estates in their distribution network throughout China....(More wine news on www.vitabella.fr)
Posts
