Last month, a Beijing-based billionaire splashed out £250,000 on 27 bottles of wine – a far cry from what the man and woman in the street spends in China. What they drink is largely the £1-a-bottle home-grown brands from big wine companies like Changyu, Great Wall, Dynasty, Huaxia and Vini Suntime, the latter one of China's fastest-growing wineries, established by the People's Liberation Army.
These days, most city dwellers in the People's Republic can afford a bottle of local putao jiu ("grape alcohol") – though needless to say, the expensive stuff bought by the Beijing entrepreneur did not come from China. It was Romanée-Conti, the world's most expensive wine. Despite the glaring inequality between the prices of everyday Chinese plonk and the increasingly popular French imports, one thing is clear: wine, whether of the Chinese or imported variety, has become a booming business in China with consumption growing each year by a healthy 10-15 per cent. More...
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