When it opened in 1982, the Beijing Jianguo Hotel offered a rare taste of international luxury to weary business travelers from Hong Kong and around the world. The first partially foreign-invested luxury hotel on the Chinese mainland, a single night’s stay cost between $90 and $120, or more than half the average annual salary of a Chinese worker at the time. To lend it an air of old-world luxury, Hong Kong wine trader Thomas Yip helped stock the Jianguo’s wine list with expensive bottles from some of Europe’s most respected châteaux.
At the time, the average Chinese person knew little about wine: At banquets, business executives and government officials often downed whole glasses of expensive French vintages in a single gulp, as if it was sorghum liquor. Nonetheless, wine consumption, especially French wines, quickly became an important symbol of class status, in large part due to dealers like Yip and the influence of Hong Kong cinema, in which filthy rich investors and CEOs popped bottles of ‘82 Lafite with astonishing regularity. Chinese consumers of that generation might not have been able to locate Bordeaux on a map, but they knew what it represented: money, status, and sophisticated taste.
That’s no longer the case. Too many young Chinese wine-lovers, expensive bottles from the world-famous vineyards of southwestern France now seem dull and old-fashioned, while so-called new world wines from non-traditional wine growing regions like Australia, Chile, and South Africa are on the rise. This shift is as much conceptual as it is a matter of taste, as Chinese consumers rethink their drinking habits and perceptions of wine.
Old-world European wines dominated the Chinese market for decades. Availability expanded dramatically after 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization and cut import duties on European wines, and the market peaked in 2012.
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