Wine growers go online to boost sales

Edward Ragg, co-founder of Dragon-Phoenix Wine Consulting, leads a class on burgundy wines at Temple Restaurant in Beijing. Provided to China Daily

Internet purchases accounted for 27% of sales in China last year

Although domestic brands hold the sway, the Internet is proving to be a great equalizer for foreign wine producers as they deliberate on how to pop the cork in the world's fastest-growing wine market.

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Smartphones in tow, the country's young generation of tech-savvy wine drinkers are now using the medium cut out the middleman and make informed purchases of wines from across the world.

"Chinese people are very sophisticated. They're armed with smartphones now," says Jim Boyce, author of Beijing-based wine blog, Grape Wall of China.

'Ten years ago they might have gone to the department store and just stood in the aisle looking at French wines thinking - What are these? What is in these bottles?"

With more than 500 million Internet users nationwide, online wine sales accounted for 27 percent of all the wine purchases made in China last year, says a report published by the France-based Bourdeaux Management School.

This was compared with just 8 to 10 percent of wines purchased online in Europe and 2 percent in the United States, the report said. Global wine sales are worth more than $5 billion every year.

Capitalizing on strong online sales, Amazon began offering Californian wines through its Chinese portal in October last year. More than 50 percent of the initial sales conducted online went to Shanghai.

Californian wine exports to China hit an all-time high of $35 million last year, making it the fifth-largest export market, says Linsey Gallagher, vice-president of the Wine Institute, a Californian wine advocacy group representing more than 1,000 wineries.

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