Mr. Steffen Schindler, the Director Export Marketing of Deutsches Weininstitut GmbH

In order to introduce the German wine industry to Chinese wine market, we interviewed Mr. Steffen Schindler, the Director Export Marketing of Deutsches Weininstitut GmbH who made zealous answers and gave us some basic data on German wine as follows:

Question: Can you tell us the history and the mission of your organization?

Answer: The German Wine Institute was founded in 1949. We are financed by all wine-producers in Germany as well as the German wine trade (more info, unfortunately in German language on our homepage www.deutscheweine.de). Our aim is to enhance the quality and the sales of German wines in Germany and abroad by creating a modern, dynamic and positive image of the German wine industry.

Question: What services do you supply to your customers in production, trade and tourism?

Answer: Our activities include sales promotions, PR, advertisement, event marketing, POS-material, wine-fairs, trade-fairs, seminars and education, brochures, internet-pages, trips to Germany etc.

Question: Can you give us an overview of the wine industry of Germany? The present situation and the prospect?

Answer: Germany is the fourth biggest wine-drinking country in the world. Our consumption is about 20 mio. Hl, but we only produce about 9-10 mio. Hl annually. This is why half of our consumption is foreign wines, making Germany the world biggest wine-importer. Our wine-market is today dominated by discounters who stand for more than 50 % of all wine-sales in Germany. German wine is market leader both in the white wine and red wine segment. When it comes to wine-growing, we have only about 100.000 hectares, about the size of the Bordeaux wine-region. Our most important grape-variety is Riesling. Red wine is becoming very popular so that today 36 % of our vineyards are planted with red varieties.

Question: What is your opinions of the Chinese wine industry and market? How is the exports of Germany wine, especially the wine export to China, and the business of your members already in China? How do you help them?

Answer: German wine exports are going very well, mainly to the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, Japan and Scandinavia. Overall, we export to more than 100 countries, especially our best known variety Riesling which is very much in demand and seems to be the most trendy white variety in the world at the moment. China is so far not very much in the focus of the German wine industry. There are a few companies who are selling well to China, others have been trying for many years without much success. We think that China will be a very important wine-market in the future, but the German Wine Institute is not present on this market yet. We will participate in Vinexpo Asia-Pacific with a German pavilion, though. For German producers who wish to work on the Chinese market we have gathered a lot of information and we have produced a little brochure on German wine in Chinese, but this is all we offer at the moment.

Basic data on German wines:

Annual wine harvest in Germany 2005: 9.16 m hl
Per-capita consumption in Germany 2005: 19.9 wine liter/capita, 3.4 Sparkling liter/capita, Total 23.3 liter/capita
Consumption according to colour in Germany 2003: 40% White wine, 52% Red wine, 8% Rose
Taste profiles for German wines (production) 2004: 35.9% dry, 20.9% semi-dry
Market share in Germany (volume) 2003: 46.2% Germany  16.7% France  12.1% Italy  4.4% Spain  5.1% New World
% of vineyard-surface in Germany 2004 – white vs. red: white (64.0%)  Red (36.0%)
German wine exports: Value 474,647,000€ Volume 2,645,021 hl 179€/hl increase by +9.9%