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INTERVIEW





WINES FROM CHINA ARE GETTING BETTER AND BETTER”


but this is starting to change. In this interview, Jeannie Cho Lee, Galaxy Macau’s master of wine, explains wine consumption patterns in the mainland, the regional preferences and her experience in the field


By Luciana Leitão


hen did you first become interested in wine?


When I was 19 years old. I was an


exchange student at Oxford University and I went to formal dinners where I was served different wines. You would have, typically,


three or four different wines. Some of them were wines that the college had purchased a long time ago – older Bordeaux, some with very high quality. I had tasted wine before, but it was really only when I


started to taste very good quality wine that I began to realise it was a really fascinating beverage. During that year, as I was travelling to different countries in


Europe and understanding that wine was like a condiment or a normal part of any meal, I started studying it more.


How about professionally? It was much more recently, because I really didn’t pursue


the wine industry as a profession. I got interested in wine as a writer, and started to do a lot of freelance wine articles. My first wine article was in 1994, in Hong Kong. Actually, my first few articles on wine were for the South China Morning Post and I also wrote for The Far Eastern Economic Review magazine. Then, I worked for a few years in Malaysia – first as a


journalist, then as editor of a weekend magazine where I started to write a weekly wine column, starting from 1996.


Over the years, have you noticed any big differences in the way Chinese consume wine? Absolutely. In fact, the reason why I didn’t become a full


time wine writer was because there wasn’t enough work. No one was interested in reading about wine and this has changed dramatically over the last five to ten years. When I arrived [in Hong Kong], I was writing business


articles and writing about everything else, but wine. Even though I wanted to write about wine, there just wasn’t enough interest. Almost from day to night, there has been a huge change in attitude.


Wine has definitely become very trendy; it’s something that


a lot of people have embraced, whereas in the early 1990s only a small community had.


102 I think the way you can tell is by looking at Macau and Hong


Kong supermarkets. Before there was hardly any wine there and now there is a huge section devoted to it.


What kinds of wines are Chinese drinking? It goes into different categories, mainly because of their


budget. Someone who is buying in a supermarket is probably looking for good value wines under HK$300 or HK$400 a bottle. There, you have a lot of choices - Chile, Argentina and France are always popular. At that price level, people are trying to get good value


[for money], but are still going mostly for reds. Whether you are at a large supermarket like Carrefour, in the mainland, or in ParknShop here, people who are buying off the supermarket shelves probably look for value [for money], and then where the wine is from and whether it is red or white. If that is what you are looking at, still the largest volume


is French [wine]. Australian reds are number two in the market in Hong Kong and in the mainland. If you are looking for fine wine over HK$800 or HK$1,000, it ends up being predominantly French. There still is a really [strong] attraction and luxury status associated with the very best French wines.


How about in Macau, do you see a different pattern of wine consumption compared to Hong Kong and the mainland? In Macau, when people are looking for everyday drinking


wine, good value, instead of going for Australia, Chile or Argentina, they are going for Portugal. In Macau, there is a strong support and community of Portuguese red wine consumers that is different from other markets.


But wine consumption in the mainland is still in a beginning stage, particularly when compared to Western countries. I would say so. If you compare a region with hundreds of


years of history with [one that has] 20 years, of course there is a huge difference. But we are also catching up very quickly. There is [now] a huge difference in the way information is communicated and the whole globalization of the world means that we have very easy access to goods and products we may be


There has never been a strong wine tradition in China,


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