This week’s “Wine in China” case reminded me of a funny wine memory I hadn’t thought about in years. After graduating from my undergraduate university in 2012, a good friend and I moved to Shenzhen, China, for the summer. We had been asked by a tutoring company to lead workshops for Chinese high schoolers on how to apply to American universities, specifically focusing on that elusive personal statement essay. Long story short, we soon realized that Shenzhen is not a glamorous city. Its stifling temperature and lack of activities other than shopping resulted in our spending a considerable amount of time inside together. We obviously needed wine.
On our first wine shopping adventure, we discovered Great Wall Wine (images below). As recent college grads easily pleased by Charles Shaw, we thought the $4-5 bottles were fantastic. We picked up several and made our way back to our apartment, excited to dive into a wine-accompanied Netflix marathon.
I never got around to researching Great Wall Wine, but was inspired by this case to poke around online. In line with the timeline provided in our case, the company was founded in 1983 and is China's largest wine producer. Most interestingly, in my opinion, it is a subsidiary of state-owned COFCO Group. COFCO, or “China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation,” is the largest food processor, manufacturer, and trader in China. Yet the company does market is wine around the world, including USA, the UK, and even France. Needless to saw Great Wall wine isn't available in Menlo Park's K&L Wines, but it is available for purchase online.
Given last session's discussion of family-owned wine operations, I found this comparison of a state-owned winery quite interesting. Based on my tastings alone, however, I think my personal bent will be to by from the former.
Annie, I love this post, and I'm sorry that you had to endure such terrible wine :)
ReplyDeleteOur glorious TA, Kate, mentioned to me in passing the counterfeit wine market, and your post reminded me of that. I decided to look into some more - and I was shocked. The total value of fake wine available for purchase is $3 billion! As it turns out, people can counterfeit wine in lots of ways. You can slightly amend names of famous wineries, or fill up empty bottles with cheap wine. One fraudster sold north of $500 million in counterfeit wine, and is now serving several years in prison.
In the wake of all this fake wine, a new industry of fraud prevention has shot up. There's a great article that you can read on Forbes that details the best tips and tricks to uncover fake wines: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanniecholee/2017/02/17/fake-wine-is-a-billion-dollar-market-and-here-are-the-ways-to-identify-them/#6154e10c42a2
Maybe your wine truly wasn't wine at all!!!
Annie – Thank you for sharing your story with us! (Like Ali, I am sorry that you had to endure such undrinkable wine.) Reading it reminded me of two things.
ReplyDeleteFirst, when I visited China years ago with my family, I remember sitting down to a nice – good, but not incredible – dinner and being appalled by the wine list. I had a decent sense of what were normal wine list prices in the US, and there were no normal prices to be found. The starter wines were multiple times as expensive as I was used to seeing.
The second story came up just last week. My brother and his wife are going on their honeymoon to Nicaragua, and I wanted to send them a bottle of wine on her birthday. When I noticed that the La Marca Prosecco, which I’m used to seeing for ~$10 (granted, in the store), was priced at $55, I knew I was in trouble. After checking the differential prices for the $40 sav blancs and chardonnays, they were also at a 5x mark-up over US retail. Harrumph. I picked one of the white wines and moved on with my life. But why is it so expensive??
I know that restaurant mark-ups are much higher than retail mark-ups even in the US, but both of these stories made me wonder: is the price differential in foreign countries, for the same wine we drink in the US, due to duties, shipping, exclusivity, other, or E, all of the above? And a more practical question, do we care enough to stop drinking those bottles, or do we let everything go because we’re on vacation? Wouldn’t we love to see those financial statements…