http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/27/AR2007012701515.html?sub=AR

BEIJING - Cocooned in a wood-paneled, members-only bar on the 50th floor of a private business club, Yao Yi, a corporate lawyer in Beijing, hunched over her glass, swirling and sipping a 2003 merlot from Washington state.

"It's quite young. So, not France. There's no Australian option here. Maybe we can choose New Zealand, it's close," Yao said, laughing during a blind wine-tasting quiz at Beijing's Capital Club.

In the end, Yao and her friends guessed that it was an American wine. They also got the vintage right, scoring five points for the team and more credibility for increasingly educated Chinese wine consumers.

Yao's interest in imported wine began five years ago. Now, critic Robert Parker's wine scores roll off her tongue as she compares the best of Napa Valley with wine from Australia's Barossa Valley. Over New Year's she spent more than $2,100 on 14 bottles of French Bordeaux.

It wasn't always this way. In fact, many Chinese consumers still treat wine as a ceremonial prop for toasting, sometimes downing an entire glass as if it were a popular Chinese grain alcohol known as baijiu. Selection of wine by the glass is still very limited in most Chinese restaurants. And wine is expensive, compared with beer and other alcohol.

But these days, the cost is part of the charm.

"More and more Chinese drink wines, because it's fashionable and a kind of social status," said Zhou Ning, market strategy manager of a Beijing-based real estate company whose ads often feature young couples drinking wine or beautiful women lounging with a glass of wine. "We include wine in our ads because we want to tell potential customers that people living in our apartments are elegant and cultivated, and they pay attention to quality of life."

Luxury good boom

This country has a growing urban middle class; experts estimate that roughly 500,000 Chinese earn as much as $64,000 a year, though exact figures are hard to come by. Meanwhile, the tastes of the newly affluent in Beijing and Shanghai have driven sales of a wide variety of luxury items.

Citing data from China's customs bureau, the Shanghai Daily newspaper recently reported that wine imports surged by 91 percent in the first nine months of 2006. According to industry experts at a conference in Beijing this month, consumption of wine rose 13 percent between 2004 and 2005, to about 564 million bottles.

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