In a small city in eastern China, a new $900m theme park has just opened.
I n a small city in eastern China, a new $900m theme park has just opened. Set over 1,000 acres and built with the help of the designers of Disneyland, it has an Italian-style castle at its centre, transporting you to straight to Tuscany.
This is not meant to evoke a fairytale, but instead to celebrate and educate visitors on China’s newest obsession: welcome to Wine City.
Set up by China’s oldest winemaker, Changyu, it is surely a contender for the world’s most surreal day out. At peak capacity it will produce 450,000 tons of wine a year; it also has a research institute designed to appear like an oak barrel surrounded by towering champagne flutes.
I t’s the latest in a rush to accommodate the changing tastes of the burgeoning middle class. In 2014, China overtook France as the biggest consumer of red wine, and it is on on track to become the second biggest consumer of wine in the world by 2020, drinking 6.1bn litres, worth $21.7 bn, which is up 39.8pc from 2016, according to International Wine & Spirit Research.
Much of this wine is made in China by companies such as Changyu, which produces brands such as ‘Great Wall’ and ‘Dynasty’ . Such is the demand that China is setting up its own answer to Bordeaux in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, 600 miles west of Beijing. There, entrepreneurial vintners, some of whom have trained in oenology in France, have set up chateaux on the edge of a desert where temperatures fall to -25 degrees.
B ut the share of imports is growing, up by 37pc last year, as tastes become more refined. Last year, China imported 642m bottles of wine, worth $2bn; 40pc of that comes from France. Earlier this year, a train carried 14,000 bottles of Bordeaux wine straight from Lyon to Wuhan, as part of its ‘New Silk Road’ strategy.
T his unquenchable thirst for wine has had a surprising effect in France. Chinese buyers purchased three of the five highest-priced vineyards in Bordeaux last year, according to Christie’s International Realty. They now make up 40pc of all the buyers currently snapping up vineyards in the region, according to Michael Baynes, founder of the agent Maxwell-Storrie-Baynes.
This is still a small part of the overall ownership – just 2pc of the 7,500 chateaux in Bordeaux are Chinese-owned, but “it’s a big story, ” says Baynes. Tuscany also saw a big influx of international buyers last year, fuelled by Chinese wine lovers reaping rewards of tax breaks. There have also been a few high profile buyers, such as Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba, who now owns three vineyards in Bordeaux.
T he investors started coming in 2009-10, when the Chinese wine market exploded, says Suzanne Mustacich, author of the book ‘Thirsty Dragon: China’s Lust for Bordeaux and the Threat to the World’s Best Wines’ . “There were initially a lot of problems and misunderstandings with cultural differences in negotiations, ” she says, adding that there weren’ t any translators to help dealmakers.
