China may be decades away from Yang’s dream of rural Chinese drinking native vin de table nightly, but wine culture has arrived in the nation's rapidly swelling cities. Who are the Chinese who are buying all this wine and driving companies to make millions of dollars in investment in wineries? They are the xinguizu, the faces of a new economic power, and they're China's best hope for developing a wine culture.
Francesco Pantalone has seen firsthand the growing demand for wine among these newly affluent, young urban professionals, the so-called xinguizu, or "new nobles." As manager and sommelier at one of Shanghai's top Italian restaurants, the Palladio, a Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence winner, the Italian has seen city dwellers develop more sophisticated palates and increasingly confident attitudes toward Western-style dining. Pantalone has looked on with astonishment as customers spent extravagant sums on food and wine.
One evening, a Chinese diner asked Pantalone and the chef to join him as he sampled the restaurant's collection of Dom Perignon vintages. "During the course of the evening, we got through four vintages," Pantalone recalls. "He started with the 1988, then moved on to the '73. We also tried the '66, the '59 and another '88. The bill came to about $5,000, but it was not about money, it was about enjoyment."
All this extravagance would have been impossible to imagine just 25 years ago. China's gross domestic product has quadrupled since then. In the past decade alone, as the People's Republic moved past its pariah reputation after the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square and won approval to join the World Trade Organization, the world has come to see China as the next big economic player and the next great investment opportunity. In 2004, foreign businesses invested $60 billion in China, and China exported more than $500 billion in goods and services. The effects of this boom are visible in major Chinese cities, such as Guangzhou, Shanghai and Chongqing. A whole new consumer culture has developed.
The country has opened its doors to visitors from the rest of the world as well-- Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics, and Shanghai will host the World Expo in 2010. A few years ago, many of China's western provinces were off-limits to tourists; that's no longer the case. And the cities on its east coast are becoming increasingly international, with top restaurants and hotels.
To most of the xinguizu, wine is a symbol of their new success and worldliness. Wine knowledge is also a crucial skill for these young business leaders when they take clients out to dinner at high-end restaurants such as Jean Georges, the Shanghai outpost of the Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence-winning New York restaurant.
"The profile of the average wine buyer is someone working for a joint venture, or for a wholly owned foreign enterprise, or one of the up-and-coming local companies," says Don St. Pierre, president of importer ASC Fine Wines. "It is usually someone in their mid-20s to mid-30s, and someone who is aspiring to a more sophisticated lifestyle, which usually includes driving a car, owning an apartment and drinking wine in a restaurant, as opposed to beer or spirits."
Some older business executives have also become wine aficionados. Singaporean Yvonne Chiong, the widely respected sommelier at Jean Georges, has been surprised at the level of their knowledge. "The older generation of Shanghainese who have been dealing with a lot of foreign businessmen and have made a lot of money are referred to as 'old carats'," Chiong says. "They know the first-growths and have been entertaining for many years. They don't ask questions like 'How come Latour is so expensive?' They will say, 'Find me a Mouton today. I feel like a Mouton.' This is the generation--in their 50s now -- that was the first wave of self-made businessmen."
Several other factors have made wine popular with the xinguizu and old carats. One is wine's health benefits. Since 1987, the Communist leadership has been promoting putao jiu (which literally means "grape alcohol") as healthier than more traditional ba jiu (clear alcohol, usually made from grain). Another reason might be the Chinese predilection for tea. "When the Chinese started to drink wine, they went straight to the big reds," says Henderson. "They drink a tremendous amount of tea, and the tannins in tea are exactly the same as in red wine."
With China's economic growth showing few signs of slowing, one Chinese winery estimates that wine consumption will grow 35 percent in the next year. But the average Chinese citizen currently drinks just two glasses yearly; even the average city dweller drinks only about a bottle a year. To truly tap China's potential as a wine market, wineries and importers will need to work hard to spread the gospel of wine. Many are doing just that.
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