Illustration: Liu Rui

I went to an annual wine-tasting this weekend where there were hundreds of bottles of different wines from all over the world now on offer in China, and hundreds of people from all over the world tasting them. Some, it appeared, forgot to always spit out the wine after tasting each one with the inevitable result.

Many people I meet these days have switched careers and are now on the wine-import bandwagon. A typical conversation goes something this: "I used to be a molecular biologist (or actor or teacher or lawyer) but now I'm importing wine from France (or Italy or Austria or Australia)." There's a stampede in China but it's for wine and it seems like every other person in China is hitching his or her Conestoga wagon to red or white gold.

But like the California gold rush, this market looks much easier than it is. Earlier in the year I wrote in these pages about how the Chinese nouveau riche were over the moon about the Bordeaux wines, especially Chateau Lafite Rothschild. At that time they were driving up worldwide prices, creating a wine bubble, while merrily, it was reported, chugging the wine, which cost a minimum of about 15,000 yuan ($2,362) a bottle in a restaurant, sometimes mixed with Coke or Sprite.

This gave the host face, showed him or her to possess both good taste and a fat wallet. While there were better wines, you couldn't go wrong with Lafite. In fact there is even a trade in empty Lafite bottles, with good vintage empties going for as much as 2,500 yuan ($393). This gives a modern twist to the Bible's mention of new wine in old bottles, except that today the new wine is not at all what was proclaimed on the label of the old bottle.

But it appears that in China, Lafite's current 15 minutes of fame at the top of the charts may have expired, at least in the larger cities. Since June, decreased demand for Lafite has resulted in lower prices. One wine expert even snickered that in Beijing and Shanghai people might be laughed at for drinking it.

Instead, the new "it" wine appears to be from the Burgundy region of France and is the much rarer and dearer Romanée-Conti, of which an average of only 450 cases are produced annually. This is compared to Lafite, which aside from all the counterfeits, produces 15,000-20,000 cases. As of July, in China a bottle of this liquid Burgundian gold ranged from roughly 110,000 yuan ($17,326) for the 2007 vintage to?265,000 yuan ($41,741) for the 1990 vintage.

So does this seismic shift denote a greater sophistication among the rich or is it taking gaining face and showing off to the next level?

Earlier this year Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of the Hurun Report, China's rich list, said that although China's new rich may be wealthy or powerful, they generally don't have good taste. But I think that Chinese are quick learners and in this demographic they travel frequently for business and pleasure and they are keenly observing their more experienced peers.

I do think that most people here are competitive and that rich Chinese are hyper-competitive or they wouldn't have acquired so much money in such a short time. So given the scarcity of this wine, flaunting it is a game of rich one-upmanship.

Yet because there are so few bottles of wines like Romanée-Conti, and so much demand for them, fine wines are a natural investment, especially with other investments such as stocks and real estate not always performing at previous levels.

To prove my point, the Chinese government has just approved the country's first Chinese investment fund specializing in wine. The Dinghong Fund will invest $148 million over five years in Bordeaux wines. The minimum investment is $1.35 million for a company and $135,000 for an individual. Meanwhile for us mere mortals there are more and more good wines at reasonable prices available here. After all, China is the world's fastest growing wine market. The days of only Great Wall, Golden Seal and the like are now long gone.

The author is former director and vice president at ABC Television. hdzodin@hotmail.com