Brand is king in China, but the king you buy could well turn out to be a pawn in disguise. Wine has been faked for several decades in this market and fake wine today in China is harder to detect than ever before.
While the first attempts I saw of counterfeit wine would not have fooled a western wine enthusiast, they were certainly good enough to penetrate the defences of the Chinese buyer of ten to fifteen years ago. The western wine drinker would have surely twigged on some very questionable use of the English language on front and back labels, bottle shapes that were unfamiliar for the wine in question, print jobs that looked like the could have come from a garage and even mistakes in the spelling of the brands themselves.
The so-called ‘Benfolds’ brand, a Chinese imitation of Penfolds that has almost became legitimized through its persistence, was first observed by many a westerner at the 2009 China National Sugar and Alcoholic Commodities Fair in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Knock-off bottles of most key Penfolds wines were being promoted and sold, complete with misspelt labels and even featuring a portrait of Penfolds’ chief winemaker, Peter Gago. It has since been closed down through the efforts of Penfolds’ owner, Treasury Wine Estates.
A couple of years later the New York Times reported on perhaps the most fanciful Chinese wine fake of all time: bottles of so-called Romanée-Conti (the name of one of Burgundy’s elite domains) sporting the logo of Chateau Lafite (the Premier Cru Classé in Pauillac) but purporting to come from the southern French city of Montpellier. Anyone fooled by this probably deserved to be!
In early November 2012 police in Wenzhou Province China seized nearly 10,000 bottles of Chateaux Lafite Rothschild, which proved to be counterfeit. In fact there is so much fake Lafite in China these days that in 2013 around 30 million bottles were selling per year of so-called Chateau Lafite, whose total production is around 200,000 bottles and whose China allocation was 50,000 bottles maximum .
It’s commonly observed in China today that there are still more bottles in the market of the 1982 Lafite or Petrus than were ever made by either chateau. I’ve seen many examples – typically with pristine labels and virtually no ullage and looking like they might have been bottled yesterday… I’ve seen them in expensive restaurants and wine museums. They are everywhere.
A report released by The National People’s Congress of the PRC in 2014 suggested that more than 41.3% goods selling online are counterfeit. This is interesting in itself, since many Chinese consumers have told me they buy ‘direct’ online in order to avoid fake products.
Today the fakes have become harder to pick, and they’re not just restricted to the more expensive labels. Any wine brand in China that has developed a market presence is subject to fake, regardless of whether cheap or expensive. I have seen Government-owned promotional display centres largely filled with inexpensive wines, the overwhelming majority of which were either fake or impressions of other brands intended to mislead consumers into thinking they were buying something else.
A few months ago I was sitting in one of the most prestigious Chinese restaurant in Beijing at a table in a private room with the guy who owned the hotel in which it was located. I knew he liked Penfolds Bin 407, but there was no vintage against the wine’s listing, so I asked the wine waiter for some help. Eventually I ended up in the cellar, holding two bottles of what looked very like Penfolds Bin 407 but which for some reason left me unconvinced. However, being unable to place a finger on the reason for my doubt, both were duly opened. The wines inside were indeed Australian, but they were certainly not Penfolds. Oaky riverland cabernet, more like. Yet you would have thought you were safe in a place like that…
Several months prior to this I was in another high-end Beijing restaurant, sitting with its owner. This time not only were the two Penfolds fake (both purported to be Bin 389), but the two beautifully presented bottles of Medoc reds were fake as well. In my view, neither contained any French wine.
While imitation has become accepted as the sincerest form of flattery, it’s important to remember that while a fake watch is unlikely to do you harm apart from making you late, a fake wine can surely hurt you, badly. I’m less concerned at the prospect of wealthy Chinese opening and drinking fake bottles of Lafite – for in most cases they and their guests will know the bottles are not likely to be genuine – than I am about less affluent and younger Chinese getting into harm’s way by wine that was not only affordable but fake. There are no health or labelling controls with fake wine – how can you create compliance requirements for something that claims to be something else?
Brands occupy a higher space in China than they do here, so the more a brand is successful, the greater the chance of it being ripped off. Wine, because it’s such an important part of they way modern Chinese people like to express their personalities, is particularly subject to imposter products. The first step that the global wine industry needs to take to counter this issue is to educate the China market of the existence of fake wines and the dangers they represent. That’s no small task. But only then will the issue be taken seriously and the bottle of wine being purchased become subject to scrutiny. That’s the job ahead.
