Before every winemaker starts sending cases over to China, however, they should take a long, hard look at the difficulties of selling there. Despite the growth in wine sales, imported bottled wines account for less than 1 percent of the wine consumed in China.

The Chinese buy more domestic wine from companies like Dynasty and Changyu partly because of national pride, but cost is a bigger factor. The average bottle of Chinese wine costs $4, while the average imported bottle goes for more than twice as much. The majority of the price difference is due to taxes and tariffs imposed on foreign wines. When China won admission to the World Trade Organization, it agreed to eliminate most of its tariff on foreign wines, which at the time was 65 percent. Now it's down to 14 percent, but the government levies a steep value-added tax and consumption tax as well. Some industry observers fear that if foreign winemakers enjoy too much success, to the detriment of Chinese wineries, the government will impose higher markups.
 
And though China may someday be a global economic powerhouse, right now it's enduring some growing pains. The laws on foreign companies operating there are fuzzy enough that local officials can make things difficult for wine importers. The banking system is a mess. The red tape can be endless. Good transportation and distribution is almost nonexistent in many parts of the country. To overcome these obstacles, importers have to create their own networks.

"It is exciting, but as with all businesses, you have to get paid, and China is notorious for that being a major hurdle," admits Henderson. "It is a big, big hurdle in a country that has no banking; you cannot finance working capital or finance receivables. You can't do any traditional banking,   it is not in place yet."

Since more than two-thirds of wine sales take place in restaurants, good relationships with restaurant owners are a must. In many establishments, wineries or importers have to pay a listing fee to get a spot on the wine list and another fee for each bottle uncorked.
 
China is the capital of pirated DVDs and counterfeit sneakers, so it's no surprise that a large gray market for illegally imported and counterfeit wines exists. Bong Ha, national sales and marketing manager for Miguel Torres, which distributes Mouton-Cadet, one of the most successful brands coming into China, says counterfeits are such a problem that the bottle shape had to be changed to make it harder to fake. Now Ha has heard that there is a market for empty first-growth Bordeaux bottles in Guangzhou. More common are wines with poorly faked labels, where wineries simply copy the packaging of a more popular brand.
 
With all these headaches, wineries have to decide if China is worth the investment. Most of the biggest players are saying yes. One major international wine marketer, who didn't want to be named, spent more than a year in intricate multiparty negotiations to set up a distribution company for major import brands and private labels. After hundreds of hours of discussions and thousands of miles of intercontinental travel, the deal collapsed, for undisclosed reasons. But the company believes so much in the potential of the Chinese market that executives are starting over. That's how most big wine companies see China -- it's too big to pass up, no matter the obstacles and risks.