Transforming the Chinese desert vine

After the ebb of the financial crisis, global wine exports to new heights. They represented more than 22 billion euros in 2012. The vineyard is reduced in Europe, but is expanding rapidly in Asia. The Chinese have become the first consumers of red wine and also prove producers increasingly savvy.

 For fifteen years, the area of Chinese wineries has doubled. It was nearly six hundred thousand hectares in 2013. China could become a global wine giant, while the decrease vineyards in Europe (three and half million hectares, of which eight hundred thousand in France). The wine attracting unprecedented interest. Production increases very rapidly, as a consumer whose remains considerable room for improvement - a little more than a liter per capita per year, as against forty-seven liters in France or thirty-seven in Italy. This constantly growing market appears as a new Eldorado for both local producers and foreign exporters. In 2014, Beijing already ranks first customers of the Bordeaux region.

If the vine is known in China for two millennia, winemaking and mass production go back only to the 1980s until 1990, only the provinces of Hebei (around Beijing), Shandong and Xinjiang produced wine under the control of a handful of large state enterprises (Changyu, Dragon Seal, great Wall or Suntime) that still dominate the industry. At the turn of the century, China has, however, developed new cooperation with overseas joint ventures amount to the spectacular success fifty-nine thousand companies now host Western capital investments and allow for the gradual transfer of a set of skills. Associations are concluded with multinationals like Miguel Torres, Domecq, Pernod Ricard and Castel. Beijing opens its economic space, but retains certain principles: agricultural land remains an inalienable right, and access to land through long-term leases contracted with the state or local partners.