The recent release of Möet Hennessy’s Ao Yun cabernet blend, for around USD300 a pop, poses some interesting questions about Chinese wine. The first one, obviously, is ‘are they worth this kind of price?’ While I am yet to taste this particular wine, I have indeed tasted enough of the extremely limited volumes of serious wine from Chinese producers like Helan Qing Xue and Silver Heights to see no considered reason not to believe that China can compete at the pointy end of wine quality.
I have also tasted equally expensive wines from China’s largest makers that tend to fetch similar prices to this, especially in very traditional Chinese restaurants in Tier-1 cities such as Shanghai and Beijing. Conversely, these wines are typically over-packaged and their labels feature years such as 1992 and 1994, from which vintages these wines certainly are not. Older generations of Chinese wine drinkers buy these wines and don’t complain about them. They’re a generous audience. But herein lies the issue facing China right now.
Today it’s not difficult to get away with labeling Chinese wine whatever you want to. To be specific, Chinese labelling laws are presently such that a bottle marked ‘Product of China’ is required to have only 10% local Chinese content. With that ‘freedom’, China imports a lot of wine in bulk and blends it with wine made from Chinese grapes. This practice is generally not revealed on a wine’s label.
Furthermore, there is no enforced requirement that the vintage specified on a label of Chinese wine must correlate with the vintage in which the grapes were harvested, as occurs elsewhere around the world. Consequently a high percentage of Chinese wine producers will allocate a ‘vintage’ that is not really the wine’s vintage at all, claiming its use is as a ‘brand’, as with the ‘1992’ and ‘1994’ wines mentioned previously.
There is a similar lack of control over the use of regional and varietal names. As a consequence, there is in China today with many wines not a great deal of a relationship between what is labelled and what is actually bottled. Yet Chinese wine is now being sold for USD300 and thereabouts. There’s an obvious disconnect here.
It’s not unusual to taste a ‘Chinese’ red wine only to ponder on the rather obvious level of the fashionable cabernet gernischt within its varietal mix. My mind typically then wanders to regions like Ningxia where this variety is not uncommon and quality can be good, given the grape’s tendency to smell of pine needles and liniment. Sadly, however, the grape in question often turns out to be carménère, the alter ego of cabernet gernischt: grown and made in Chile.
Trust plays a significant role in Chinese life and trust, deeply valued, takes time to be established. While Chinese people are right to be concerned today about issues such as label and product integrity and safety, about counterfeit foods and drinks (not to mention many other kinds of product), Chinese wine seems to have been offered an exemption amongst its local market. More educated Chinese wine drinkers view many Chinese wines with great scepticism, but enough locals drink their ‘local’ wines for Wine Intelligence to report that in 2015, 36% of Chinese wine consumers were likely to drink domestic wine 1-3 times a month, an increase from 31% in 2014.
Imagine how many more Chinese, especially the wine-aware ones of which there are very many indeed, would drink Chinese wine if they could actually trust their labels? The Chinese Government is so concerned with the safety and integrity of wine imported into China that it will shortly be sending teams around the world to observe and certify the supply chains of wine exporters to China, including Australian companies. I’d like comparable focus on the local industry and I’d argue that the industry really needs some legislative tightening for its own good.
It’s my hope, as a genuine supporter of the emerging brood of serious Chinese wine of integrity and quality, that the Government moves to fill the vacuum in wine labelling requirements, which robs this massive and emerging industry of its chance to be taken seriously around the world. It could do far worse than to replicate Australia’s Label Integrity Program.
This kind of legislation would help develop the trust so lacking between so many Chinese wine drinkers and their domestic producers. And once this happens, makers of quality Chinese wine from 100RMB all the way to USD 300 and above should find that demand for their wines escalates dramatically, within China and without. I’m sure Möet Hennessy would agree.
