Bordeaux Meets Beijing; China's eager oenophiles are reviving the flagging French wine industry. So what if they mix their cru with Coke?

Byline: Eric Pape

China's novice wine drinkers can be a pretty gauche bunch. To hide the actual taste of foreign wines, some dilute their Bordeaux with ice or, worse, Coca-Cola. After business people raise their glasses for a toast, they tend to drain them as if they were shots of tequila. Indeed, Ying Qunhua, China's elegant young first secretary of the Chinese Embassy in France, recently admitted during a visit to the limestone village of Saint Emilion in Bordeaux that her colleagues back home sometimes fear wasting a bottle of fine wine on "people who won't actually taste it."

But rather than mock or belittle these unschooled wine drinkers, the guardians of France's grandest grapes are asking another question entirely: red, white or rose? Tired of declining international market share through 2005, French wine merchants are reaching out to China as a potential savior. That means overlooking Chinese nectar naivete, as well as welcoming Chinese tourists to the wine-growing regions; Bordeaux recently began publishing a Chinese-language listing of its main chateaux. "It may not become the biggest market," says Jean-Francois Bourrut Lacouture, who sells high-end wines to spot markets in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore, "but it will be near the top within 10 years or so."

It is already well on its way. The average Chinese has doubled his or her wine intake over the last five years. In 2005, the Asian giant eked into the world's top-10 wine-consuming countries. Last year Chinese wine imports doubled over the previous year, from 1.15 million nine-liter cases to 2.2 million--still just a fraction of the sweet local swill that most Chinese prefer. And with annual consumption at a mere .7 liter per person--compared with 57 liters in France--there's plenty of room for growth. No wonder wine-market analysts foresee a 36 percent increase in Chinese wine imports by 2010.

France desperately needs it. Local wine makers and sellers have been watching in dismay as French wine consumption sinks. France is still the world's biggest wine drinker, but the United States and Italy are set to sip their way to the lead within four years. Beyond high-end wines, the French have also struggled to sell to English-speaking countries in the face of aggressive and heavily consolidated competition from New World wine makers and distributors, ...