Imported wine hidden rules

Chateau, wine cellar, winery, hotel... Why are imported wines surging?

How expensive can wine be? 358,400 yuan!

This is a 0.75-liter bottle of 1982 Lafite wine produced in China. In front of it, the top Moutai, which had been exclaimed by the Chinese media as “crazy”, was also unable to afford the top Maotai. What's more, 358,400 yuan is still its price more than a year ago. With more and more Chinese people pursuing it, the price of top imported wine is still rising further!

Accompanied by this is the winery, wine cellar, and experience shop all over the country. Wines from all over the world are gathered here and there are many kinds of diversification. Bordeaux, France, Napa Valley, USA, Aconcagua Valley, Chile... These exquisite red wines make people feel almost travel around the world.

However, when you are looking for new things in this strange wine world, the pitfalls in this industry may have been waiting for you not far away.

The beginning of chaos

“Wine is not an industrial product, and wine is a culture.” Faced with the reporter, Zhu Feng, the person in charge of the wine cellar, said without regret: “But now the wine has been messed up by some people.”

Before the import of wine, Zhu Feng was a first-class distributor of well-known liquor manufacturers in China. Why not make homemade wine? Zhu Feng cited an example: In March 2010, he saw a bottle of domestic brand dry red in a supermarket, the label is written on the "1991 production", the price as low as 38 yuan! "My God! For 20 years, the wine is only sold for 38 yuan. What is the concept of this? Plan to go to the supermarket for 25% to 30% of the admission fee, and the manufacturers to promote the transportation and sales costs, this money even the 20-year storage Fees are not enough!"

Once, with the advantages of industrial production, low prices, and high brand concentration, domestic wines have reduced the share of imported wines in the Chinese market to less than 8%. However, due to the short history of the domestic wine industry, industry standards are confusing. The foreign wine industry has a long history and has strict legislation and industry norms. Those who truly understand wine naturally tend to import wine.

With the increase of China's spending power and deeper understanding of wine, imported wine is making a comeback. In 2008, the share of imported wines already accounted for 15% of the entire Chinese market, more than doubled in the past! Due to the impact of the financial crisis, in 2008 and 2009, the wine export volume of Bordeaux, a famous wine producing region, continuously dropped by 16% and 14%. The only exception to China’s exports continued to rise against the market, rising by 62 years. % and 97%!

The period of import of imported wine is up! It was not only Zhu Feng that saw this business opportunity, but the wine cellar, which mainly consists of selling imported wine, began to spread all over the country. In areas where Wenzhou and other private capitals are active, a large amount of hot money has poured in and even created a “vintage wine cellar street”.

But prosperity is only a representation of the market. Behind the splendid crowd, Zhu Feng suddenly discovered that the merits of imported wines that he had cherished at the beginning—a strict and regulated market and a long and profound cultural accumulation—had been lost in chaos.

Ignorance is power

How does imported wine "chaos"? The lack of knowledge about wine is its greatest source.

Zhu Feng once encountered such a thing: once he visited a friend, the enthusiastic friend asked him to taste the top wine he had just obtained—a bottle of “eight years of aging”! Hearing these words, Zhu Feng was simply crying and laughing. Affected by climate change, even if it is the same vineyard, the grapes produced in different years are also different, so that the wines of different years have different characteristics, not the better the better, "Xiannian aging" is less likely to become a selling point This shows that it is unintelligent businessmen who sell liquor by selling liquor.

In fact, the laymen are increasing with each passing day. According to an industry insider, the newly-increased imported wine merchants have a variety of backgrounds, including real estate, building materials, kitchen utensils, and textiles... “I feel that the market is good and there are no hard thresholds. Come and do it."

Will the layman be at risk? Zhu Feng admits that if a young wine merchant lacks professional knowledge, he may “suddenly die” if he is not lucky. However, "do not understand and do not understand the benefits." So many newcomers in the industry, it is naturally another mystery.

This has to start with the other side of the market - consumers. As a highly professional and cultural wine, businessmen who do not understand wine are very clear: Compared to themselves, consumers do not understand!

According to the survey, only about 15% of the current wine consumers know what type of wine they like. What are the characteristics of wines from different regions? This is just the most basic requirement for buying wine. More than 85% of consumers are almost ignorant about the wine's professional knowledge, which allows the wine traders to have a wide range of opportunities.

For those winemakers who are doing their job, consumers' innocence is a huge challenge - they need to spend a lot of time to educate consumers and cultivate the market. However, for those winers who have just entered the market and do not know what they are doing, their purpose is only to chase profits. And now, the opportunity for profiteering is coming!

Since consumers do not understand, what is the basis for their selection of wine? price! Consumers who lack common sense about imported wines generally believe that “money can identify goods” and “cheap goods are not good”. Therefore, if you want to sell wine, you must first raise the price. A wine dealer in Jinan said: “While the price of wine is determined, you can do it anyway. Anyway, consumers don’t buy right, just buy expensive ones. The same wine, you may not want to sell tens of dollars; the price is changed to a After two hundred years, it will sell well!"

Selling packaging, this is another trick for bad wine merchants. Originally, imported wines were not boxed at all, but Chinese consumers favored gorgeous packaging, and they also developed a bizarre theory of “a wooden boxed wine is better than a carton-loaded wine”. Therefore, “As long as the wine merchant puts the wine into a large wooden box made in Shenzhen that costs only a few bucks, the price can be doubled. The wine that was originally sold for 100 yuan and 200 yuan will instantly become 200 yuan and 400 yuan. Many places are doing this, it is completely unspoken rules of the industry!” Jin Wei, president of the famous brand chain of Beijing's famous wine industry, was very indignant.

With so much price increase, a bottle of very common imported wine suddenly has several times the profits.

The original bottle imported tricks

If you have some interest in wine, but have not systematically studied the relevant knowledge of wine, and just learned some scattered concepts from the friends' word of mouth or words in the media, then congratulations, you have become the most current Mainstream imported wine consumers.

For such consumers, Zhu Feng has a description of “very kindly”: “The media used to say that the wines from Chile were good some time ago. Everyone felt that it was good. As a result, they asked which of the three major wineries in Chile were. None of them can be said.” Such consumers are essentially the same as consumers who are “expensively good”. However, if you want to whisper them, the business still needs some concepts, such as “original bottle imports”.

According to the merchants, their wines are imported from the original winery, which naturally maintains the original high quality of the imported wines and is absolutely worth the money. Is this really true?

"The original bottle import is a complex concept." Jin Wei said that the so-called "original bottle import" in the country currently contains three modes: First, estate wine, which must be brewed with the estate's own grapes and in the estate. Filling; Second, the manor filling the original bottle of imports, said that this wine production and filling in the estate; Third, the ordinary original bottle imports, only required to fill the country outside the customs, but do not insist on the origin. And this third kind of original bottle import is the biggest place for the trick.

As the third original bottle imports only require filling outside China, many wine merchants have already played the idea of ​​the bonded zone. At present, many bonded areas in China have newly established large and small wine international packaging centers. The wine merchants shipped the imported wines to these bonded areas, and legally speaking they still belonged to “filling outside the customs,” and naturally they were “original bottle imports”.

Taking into account the tax difference between the original liquor and the bottled liquor, the cost of the worker and the wine bottle, the cost of filling the “Guanwai territory” filling of the wine merchant was between 20% and 40%.

In theory, filling in the country of origin or filling in China has little effect on the quality of the wine itself. But in fact, the great wines of the Grand Chateau do not export this way at all. Only small wine producers that are particularly sensitive to the cost will do so. The wines have relatively strict requirements for preservation and transportation. In order to save costs, small wine producers who use the "Guanwai territory" to fill their liquors are basically unable to meet the standards for transportation, thus causing damage to the quality of wine.

So, is it reliable to import the original bottle imported from abroad? This is not always the case. Zhu Feng said that although some wines are indeed filled in foreign countries, wine is poor quality wines that are found by bad wine traders according to domestic needs. “Maybe they are all rotten grapes, they are not fermented in oak barrels, but they are Some crushed oak bars are thrown away in the fermented concrete pool.” The cost of each bottle of wine is not more than 1 Euro, and it is still 200-300 RMB high in domestic market, and the profit is as high as 20-30 times, which is more than the filling of Guanwai territory. It is bad.

Origin Bureau

The original bottle import is emphasized because the wine is a very personalized product, and the nature of the production area is very obvious. The value of different countries, different regions, and different wineries has a great influence on wine. However, based on the lack of relevant knowledge of consumers, the country has no special laws and regulations. The incidents of changing hands and changing princes and cats in the country of origin are also emerging in the imported wine industry.

Zhu Feng told reporters that he knew that a colleague had gone to Australia and selected a small winery. After the selection, he asked the winery to change the origin of the wine label to France. All the signs on the bottle were also changed to French. . In this way, he will be able to sell 150 Australian dollars in price to 250 yuan, but also particularly popular.

At first, the Australians still couldn't understand why, because in their opinion, the wines of different origins have their own characteristics, and consumers need each one. Later they learned that French wines are famous in China and are easy to sell at high prices and they are also better sold. "A lot of foreigners think that Chinese wine traders are chaos, because counterfeiting origin is illegal for them."

Since unscrupulous wine merchants can forge origins abroad, it would be logical to move this business to a lower-cost, less-regulated country. A reporter had surveyed a bottling plant in Changli, Hebei, and the salesman told reporters: “Which country do you plan to fill? France, Spain, Chile, or Australia? It is completely based on your needs, to ensure that it is exactly the same as the original bottle.”

"The worst case is that we don't use foreign wine at all, instead we use local Chinese wine and do a bunch of foreign language on the wine label. Then we take it out and flick the consumer." Jin Wei said that this is the worst cheating. Even the customs declarations are not available, and one investigation can solve the problem. "It is the worst wine."

In fact, the wines that determine the value of wines are not merely the countries in which they are produced. Wines of the same country, different producing areas, and different vintages have different values ​​and characteristics, and wines such as France, the United States, Australia, and Chile are exported. Big countries also have their own quality production areas.

Take France, a famous wine country, for example, the wines in France are also divided into AOCs, fine regional wines, regional wines, and ordinary wines. In the wines of the statutory producing areas, the principle of “the smaller the producing area is, the higher the quality is”, it is subdivided into several levels again.

For example, the Bordeaux region is a famous statutory producing area, but in the AOC class, only Bordeaux is the lowest level of AOC wine. Upper Medok is a smaller production area under the jurisdiction of Bordeaux. The AOC marked as Shangdowoker is higher than the one labeled as Bordeaux; and if the label is labeled as Poylak (Shang Mei A village in the Dow area) has a higher level. The top wines are simply labeled with the names of the wineries, such as the world-famous Rafi Manor.

"AOC is like a wine GPS positioning system." Jin Wei said that a strict classification system like AOC is conducive to consumers to accurately identify the origin of wine and the advantages and disadvantages, although the wine traders can also change the label, but as long as Consumer inspections of imported wines' customs clearance codes usually reveal flaws. In addition, because bottle stoppers are relatively difficult to counterfeit, it is also a good idea to reject the flicker by comparing the wine labels with the bottle stoppers.

Long way ahead

"Actually, the chaos of China's imported wine market today can be said to be a certain degree of certainty." Zhu Feng believes that arrogant capital is fierce in industries that require a lot of knowledge accumulation and cultural accumulation. . Both Zhu Feng and Jin Wei said that the imported wine market urgently needs to be standardized, even if an industry regulatory agency comes forward to formulate an industry regulation, it will be able to have a significant deterrent effect on the current market chaos.

However, it is more important than the signing of regulations to cultivate the market. Although China claims to have thousands of years of wine culture, in fact, Chinese consumers are not used to really treating wine as a cultural product. However, if consumers can't get taste, evaluate the fun of wine, do not know what kind of wine they like, and do not know what kind of characteristics the wine has behind it, it will be difficult for imported wine to truly achieve healthy and orderly development.

In this respect, the long history and complicated knowledge of imported wine is a huge obstacle. Zhu Feng admits that although he has studied wine culture for ten years, compared with real experts, he just entered the door. To help consumers break through this barrier, wine makers must work hard to cultivate the market and provide professional guidance and training to consumers.

However, the cultivation of this market will be a long process. "It will take about three years for the market to really get hot." Zhu Feng said, "But when it comes to letting consumers understand and accept the wine culture, I'm afraid it will take much longer."