Hoping to woo China with white wine

DAVIS - What is it going to take to get the Chinese consumer to like white wine? It’s a question that has perplexed U.S. wine exporters to China for years.

Studies from the early 1990s that showed a connection between resveratrol, a key ingredient in red wine, and a reduction in heart disease have had a strong hold on the Chinese wine drinker. Mix in peer pressure and a culture that has viewed white wine more akin to liquor, and you have a tough market for chardonnay and pinot grigio to crack.

“It’s education. … Gradually, I think it will take a few more years,” Jiang Lu, professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing.

That topic and others were covered Thursday during a symposium at UC Davis examining “jiu” - the Chinese name for alcoholic beverages - which brought together scholars and business officials to examine the country’s history with wine, beer and spirits and the future for the potential biggest market for those beverages.

There is great interest in China within Wine Country. Last year, Sonoma County vintners made a two-week trip to China to make inroads into the market. The Wine Institute, a trade group that represents more than 1,000 California wineries, sponsored the trip.

China is still a relatively small market for the U.S. wine exports as it only represented $71 million of the total $1.5 billion in 2014, according to the Wine Institute.

The figure represented a 7 percent decrease from 2013, attributed to an ongoing austerity campaign by the government that has hampered wine sales across the board.

But U.S. industry has a positive outlook for the market given it is the largest populated country at 1.4 billion people with an emerging young middle-class that has a more global outlook.

The data back that up. The alcoholic beverage industry in China is now six times greater than 10 years ago, with $84 billion in sales revenue, said Xu Yan, professor at Jiangnan University in China.

In fact, China now has become the largest red-wine drinking nation in the world with 155 million cases consumed in 2013, followed by France with almost 150 million cases and Italy with 141 million, according to Vinexpo, an international wine and spirits exhibition.

France is the largest wine supplier to China, followed by Australia and Spain.

Still, grape wine is still considered a niche market in China, as it not as widely sold as beer and spirits. It “is still very minor,” said Xu, as sales of wine in China represented only 5 percent of the nation’s alcoholic beverage market in 2014. Despite the small slice, it’s the fifth-largest wine consumption market in the world.

“Wine is very new … very young,” said Jiang, noting that it is still an emerging industry, even though China has become the sixth-largest wine producer in the world.

In contrast, beer still remains big in China. In 2003, the country became the world’s largest beer consuming country by volume, said Xian Yin, group director of brewing raw materials for SABMiller. He noted that the major players have established strong footprints there, mostly in partnerships with Chinese brewers. Three Chinese brewing groups are now in the world’s top 10.

The symposium also covered the historical and cultural effects of Chinese wine while also examining current wine market issues. For instance, there is evidence that the first distillation occurred in China.

“China is a drinking culture,” said Patrick McGovern, scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia.

Still, cultural differences can present problems. McGovern found that out firsthand when he worked with Dogfish Head Craft Brewery Inc. in Rehoboth Beach, Del., to recreate a beer similar to an alcoholic beverage brewed 9,000 years ago and derived from a recipe created from the residue of pottery jars found by archaeologists. The beer, Chateau Jiahu, introduced in 2006, included orange blossom honey, muscat grape juice, barley malt and hawthorn fruit.

But its reception was less than favorable in China, as a debate ensued with critics put off by commercialism and complaining “about these Americans who have come along and stolen the recipe,” McGovern said.

He noted that the Chinese at the time were still wedded to baijiu, a strong distilled spirit typically derived from sorghum, and didn’t understand how complex the American craft beer was.

“They emphasized that it was their earliest (alcoholic beverage). They were proud of that. At the same time, they were put off by the commercialism,” McGovern said.

You can reach Staff Writer Bill Swindell at 521-5223 or bill.swindell@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @BillSwindell.