In 1996, Chinese premier Li Peng surprised his audience at the National People’s Congress by toasting the Ninth Five-Year Plan with red wine: “Drinking fruit wines is helpful to our health, does not waste grain, and is good for social ethics,” he announced. For China’s rapidly growing underclass, this gesture signaled a commitment to rein in the fraud and waste epitomized by party banquets, where officials were known to drink each other under the table with bottles of Moutai Flying Fairy and other spirits derived from grain. For the elites in question, it was an unmistakable signal that business as usual required a new currency. Within a few years, they were using bottles of Château Lafite Rothschild to gain favor and ease transactions.

As Suzanne Mustacich relates in Thirsty Dragon: China’s Lust for Bordeaux and the Threat to the World’s Best Wines, representatives from Bordeaux, France’s largest wine-growing region, saw Li’s endorsement as an invitation to “conquer” the Chinese wine market. It was a goal that they believed themselves uniquely positioned to accomplish. Bordeaux’s wines—such as Château Haut-Brion, Château Latour, and Château Cos d’Estournel—communicated luxury, and Bordeaux’s official classification system, which dates back to Napoleon, was easy to sell as a lengthy gift catalog “ratified by pomp and history.” Although Bordeaux’s 1855 Classification rules created for the Exposition Universelle de Paris in that year were never meant to be permanent, the rankings they generated were considered so successful that only a few changes have been made in the century and a half since. In Mustacich’s words, what began as a price list for visiting tourists became a “calling card” and “an immutable promotional tool” for businessmen seeking to introduce Bordeaux wines into new markets.



Although the Chinese market was just a fraction of a percent of the country’s population, châteaux and their middlemen moved huge quantities of product by offering entrepreneurs a very clear hierarchy of the finest wines already ratified as international status symbols. The precise rankings of each wine could be easily mapped onto the numerous positions within the Chinese bureaucracy, allowing gift-givers to save face by offering the appropriate wine at each level of officialdom. At the time, few Chinese had a taste for wine, but the social liquidity of a First Growth like Lafite—which in China is widely considered the best—was rated sublime. One real estate developer was inspired to commemorate a bottle of the château’s 1982 vintage in verse as both “the greatest treasure” and “the moment of death”—“the appreciation of which is greater than the desire to taste it.”

As well as importing wines and their prestige, China is also building its own formidable wine industry. According to industry analysts, within five years, China will bottle more wine and devote more land to vineyards than any other country. For instance, the government of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region announced its plans to construct 50 new châteaux and a regional classification system modeled on Bordeaux in November 2013. To qualify for a listing, a château must not only meet industrial production quotas but build a four-star restaurant and hotel for guests. The vineyards are to be staffed by ethnic Hui, the Muslim farmers and herders the government has arranged to relocate or “move out” of rural poverty. “In fact, this is incorrect,” Grape Flower Industry Development Bureau director Cao Kailong tells Mustacich. “We have plans to develop one thousand châteaux.”

As Bordeaux gained outsized sway in luxury sales in China, it awakened the behemoth Mustacich alludes to her in title. From this point, her book hews to a familiar narrative whereby China’s state-owned conglomerates and assorted tycoons assemble to “absorb foreign expertise” and capitalize on the enthusiasm for French reds. “Wine education” camps begin to sprout up where elite buyers can train their tastes. The Chinese wine grower Dynasty builds a replica of Versailles complete with a copy of I.M. Pei’s glass pyramidal entrance to the Louvre as part of a wine tourism venture. “This was a humble decision,” the company’s chairman explained somewhat ironically after the castle opened in November 2010. “Because we believe and we know that all wine actually originates from Europe and is very much related to the culture of Europe.” Less than a year later in the northern industrial city of Dalian, a tycoon named Qu Naijie held a press conference to announce that his company, Haichang (“Sea Fortune”), which had lately diversified from oil shipping into theme parks and real estate, would build a 5,000 acre luxury development with vineyards called Château de Bordeaux.