KEY POINTS:
Rapid development in Asia is fuelling increasingly sophisticated tastes in wine, opening up promising new markets for premium New Zealand vintages, a Hong Kong-based wine educator and market analyst says.
International Wine Centre director Simon Tam said while Asian cities had to be considered as separate markets, the general trend was a growing thirst for wine driven by increased purchasing power.
"New Zealand could well be an exciting and important provider of wines," he said.
China was at the start of a steep wine consumption growth curve, despite government statistics from 2005 showing consumption was only half a litre per person annually.
And while just 10 per cent of China's 1.3 billion population could be categorised as wine drinkers, Tam said that still equated to about 130 million people.
The perception that Chinese only drank red wine was wrong with increasing interest in white wines from sauvignon blancs to riesling, pinot gris and chardonnay.
China produced 11 per cent more wine than Australia in 2006 but most was consumed domestically.
Tam said although China lacked quality winemakers, its drinkers were quality conscious but not price aware, presenting a big opportunity for NZ premium wine producers.
"They don't make a lot of quality wines in China but they are thirsty," he said. "As long as something is good, they're prepared to pay for it."
Chilean, Australian, Argentinian and European winemakers were extremely keen to to get into the Chinese market and NZ needed to get on board while the market was still young.
Tam said a wine-drinking culture was also developing in China's second-tier cities beyond Shanghai and Beijing.
Macau, a special administrative zone with a large number of casinos dubbed "the Las Vegas of Asia", also presented great opportunities. It had plans for many more hotels by next year.
The Korean wine market was also growing rapidly, with professional women driving expansion.
Tam said that although large brands, such as Cloudy Bay and Montana, were already present, there was room for some of New Zealand's many boutique wines and now was the time for brand building.
Asia was extremely diverse and each city had to be treated as a separate market.
"There is no homogeneous Asia or homogeneous China," he said. "You need to get right down under the skin of the market."
Negotiating the red tape to export to China was no harder than somewhere like Germany, provided people did their homework. "Gone are the days of people looking at China as the Far East," Tam said.
