Wine advances on China

(JancisRobinson) - 'A very famous Bordeaux Château is about to announce a major investment in China.' This was Li De Mei's tantalising sign-off at the end of perhaps the most relevant of many presentations given at a recent get-together of international wine luminaries in Hong Kong, WineFuture. Could this be connected to the rumour that Pierre Lurton, director of LVMH's Châteaux Cheval Blanc and d'Yquem, has been overseeing vine plantings near the Tibetan border? I certainly spotted Cheval's public relations person at the conference. But of course the much-hyped Chinese wine market is about very much more than a handful of investments by the likes of Château Lafite, the first growth whose wildly inflated prices in China are now on the wane and which is engaged in a joint venture to produce wine in Shandong in the east of this vast nation. Per capita wine consumption in China is still minuscule but the total wine market has grown exponentially, which is why there were quite so many wine producers gathered in Hong Kong, both for this conference and the official Hong Kong trade fair immediately before it.

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