Why China’s wine exchange is crashing: 110-proof grain alcohol all tastes much the same

(QZ) -  Imagine a stock that jumps 25.5% on its first day of trading, coming to rest at $159 a share. Three months later, though, shares tank, plummeting to $54. Now, 17 months after going public, it’s worth $58.70.  

Nope, it’s not Groupon. It’s “Crystal Shede 2012 Collector’s Edition,” a 110-proof rice wine (or baijiu, as it’s known) made by a Sichuan distiller called Tuopai Shede, and it brought in 77 million yuan ($12.4 million) from its public offering on the Shanghai International Wine Exchange (SIWE).

The first wine exchange—where wines are traded (usually by the case) like shares on a stock exchange—is the London International Vintners Exchange, which was launched in 1999 in order to make prices transparent and provide capital to vineyards. Liv-ex, as it’s known, lets merchants and vineyards trade, but bans customers.

In Shanghai, however, ordinary people are allowed to invest. And most of what they buy and sell isn’t complex wines of distinguished pedigree, but baijiu. The bubble they engendered started bursting in mid-2012 (link in Chinese), as Southern Metropolis reports. In addition to losing investors a fortune, the Shanghai wine crash exemplifies the distorted incentives that abound in China’s financial system.

It all tastes the same