Wine sales fall but dealers' outlook still rosy

Customers visit a winery in Qinzhou in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. China's decrease in wine sales has mainly hit domestically produced wine, according to a Vinexpo study. Provided to China Daily

Wine consumption in China, after almost one decade of robust annual growth at around 25 percent, fell for the first time in 2013.

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The decline was 2 percent from the previous year, the latest study on the global wine and spirits market revealed on Thursday.

However, the confidence of the global wine industry in the world's potentially largest market remains intact. China is now the fifth-largest buyer of red, white, rose and sparkling wine.

The Chinese government's fight against corruption since the end of 2012, which strictly prohibits fine dining and presenting gifts paid for with public money, may have had an effect on wine sales, Xavier de Eizaguirre, chairman of Vinexpo, the world's leading wine and spirits exhibition, told China Daily.

The Bordeaux-based exhibition company has been in partnership with International Wine and Spirit Research, a London-based intelligence provider, for 12 years to conduct and release studies of the global wine market. The latest covered 28 wine-producing countries and 114 markets.

Eizaguirre, who is in Shanghai to promote the company's annual wine fair in Hong Kong in May, "strongly believes" the market will take off again over the coming five years despite the government's austerity measures, because "what drives an emerging market is the middle class".

In 2013, China bought 171 million nine-liter cases of wine, more than 80 percent of which was produced at home. China joined world's top five wine-producing nations in 2012.

The decrease in sales has mainly hit domestically produced wine, according to the study, while imported wine has enjoyed uninterrupted double-digit growth between 2007 and 2013.

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