Illustration: Liu Rui

By Jim Boyce 

Many foreigners come to China, try the local wine, and have the urge to spit rather than swallow. But as with bad news, it is sometimes best not to shoot the messenger or in this case, blame the wine maker.

While the best wine makers and technicians in China might lag behind their counterparts in countries such as France, Australia and Italy, the wines they make do not always reflect their talent. They are stuck doing the best they can with what they have, which includes their grapes.

To make good wine, you need good grapes. One key factor in getting them is to control yield. Sacrificing some grape bunches during the growing season allows those left on the vine to get more nutrients. It is a matter of quality over quantity.

The opposite happens in China, a country that tends to have an annual shortage of wine grapes. Many leading wine producers, including massive ones such as Great Wall and Changyu, grow far fewer grapes than needed.

Instead, they buy from farmers. Because these producers pay based on weight, the farmers have an almost irresistible incentive to increase yields. Case in point: One wine maker tells of vineyards being irrigated three days before harvest in order to add weight to the grapes.

Grapes are also sometimes picked before they're ripe, including in Hebei and Shandong provinces, two of the major wine producing areas of China. Call it a case of "grape chicken." When big producers start to buy grapes, others must follow or risk ending up empty-handed. This means a free-for-all in which the loser is quality. Such grapes tend to have too much acidity and not enough sugar, which means the producers might have to sweeten the wine.

Another issue related to the grape shortage is that some wine makers are faced with blending locally made wine with imported bulk wine. According to statistics, bulk wine represented about 12 percent of the market in 2008.

In reality, its share is higher. Ma Huiqin, a professor at The Agricultural University of China, explains that if a producer in Shandong buys surplus wine from a producer in Xinjiang, both count that wine as output. This inflates the numbers. She says bulk wine actually has about a 40 percent share.

To be fair, adding bulk wine can improve the overall quality, but one wonders about consistency, especially since the wine's origin can change. For example, eight years ago, two-thirds of bulk wine came from Spain, while last year almost half came from Chile.

In sum, a wine maker focused on using only local grapes deals with farmers who pursue high yields and might pick the grapes early. A wine maker with a company that imports bulk wine faces the additional factor of blending.

Not surprisingly, the result is often a poor and inconsistent product that leaves wine makers frustrated.

The obvious questions is: Why do consumers tolerate this poor wine?

For one thing, taste is not the main reason Chinese buy wine. Some associate wine with health benefits and see it as an alternative to stronger drinks such as baijiu (white spirits). Most associate wine with wealth, sophistication, and status, something evident from the use of wine in TV commercials, print ads, and movies. This makes it attractive, particularly as a gift or in business meetings or other social gathering.

Thus, selling wine is more about marketing than product quality. And given that domestic labels represent over 90 percent of the market, the average consumer likely assumes wine is supposed to be the dry, thin, and tannic stuff they find in the supermarket.

As with everything else in China, things are rapidly changing. The big producers are planting more of their own vineyards, thus giving them control over the grapes. Good foreign wines are reaching more consumers, thus giving them insights into what quality means.

And some Chinese operations, from Grace in Shanxi Province to Silver Heights in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, are defying the odds and showing it is possible to produce decent grapes and wines in China.

That alone provides hope that Chinese wines will further improve.

The author is a Canadian communications consultant whose hobby is writing the bar blog, beijingboyce.com