How Does Wine Affect My Esophagus? Insights On Marketing In China

(Forbes) - Imagine you’re a wine producer in Portugal. You’ve come across a supply of 150-year-old Port wine. You choose to export this unique product to Asia, where demand is high for niche, luxury goods. You bottle a very limited quantity and export it via your enthusiastic buyer in China, who has exclusive distribution rights for all of Asia. You agree on a retail price universally of 3000 euros per bottle.

If this happened to you – as it has to João Ferreira Álvares Ribeiro of Quinta do Vallado in the Duoro region of Portugal – you may be quite satisfied with the situation. At least until you learn that, once the wine leaves his hands, Ribeiro has absolutely no control over the sale or marketing of the wine, much less its brand perception. He also doesn’t know where, or even if, the wine is actually being sold.

That lack of information and control comes as no surprise to Stevie Kim, managing director of VinItaly International and their active engagement in Asia. “Often the culture is, ‘I paid for your wines and now it belongs to me,’” she says. “Or, ‘What I do with it is up to me.’ A little bit of that attitude still exists today.”

Kim says that it’s almost impossible for exporters to get correct sales figures for their wines in China. Data is speculative at best. China’s Ministry of Commerce recently launched an anti-dumping, anti-subsidy probe against European wines. And there are widely publicized, almost laughable, cases of fraud: by some estimates there is more counterfeit Château Lafite in China than the winery’s actual production.

All of which can leave some Chinese wine consumers – and the European and American wineries who want their business – somewhat jaded.