Kym Anderson, one of the world's leading wine academics, has just published a shorter version of his latest paper 'What's happened to the wine market in China? ' in the Journal of Wine Economics.  

In his paper, Anderson points out that between 2005-2017, China’ share of global wine imports grew fourfold,  to 7-8%.  But, by 2022, its consumption of wines, both domestically produced and imported, had fallen back to 2006 levels. 

Anderson suggests that “The decline in China’s local wine production may be a consequence of new domestic producers disinvesting because their earlier profit expectations were not realised.”

There are echoes here of Chinese distributors’ disenchantment with wine as a sector, especially when compared to baijiu which offers higher margins and greater scope for promotion.   If Chinese speculators fell out of love with Bordeaux en primeur in 2011 after discovering that it offered smaller and slower returns on their investment than they had anticipated, importers of more basic wines have been similarly disappointed with the profits available to them.   This is despite widespread efforts to increase wine margins through the use of private labels which — according to Chinese customs — at one point raised the total number of supposedly individual wines in the market to over 100,000.