China Wine – CWSA Winners Announced

Last week’s China Wine and Spirits Awards saw an unprecedented number of entries from 25 countries around the world, tasted blind by over 100 judges from Hong Kong, China and Macau in a bid to find the wines most suited to the respective markets across the mainland. Judges spent an entire day tasting through 3,300 wines and spirits and this morning we are happy to bring you the winning results from the wine categories.

With so many entries and, as with all awards these days so many medals given out, we are not going to give you the entire list as (like with all other awards) nearly every entry gets a mention with bronze, silver, gold and double gold medals on offer, the list is long and ‘distinguished’ (if you want to see the whole list you can go to http://www.cwsa.org/cwsa-best-value-2013-results)  Thus, we picked out the most known winners (see bottom of page) in our eyes to give you a quick run-down of how it all went.

Wine categories were rather longer this year with winners from countries placed with winners from regions within countries and, I might add, very few of the wines actually being available her in Hong Kong. This is not surprising these days as it seems that most people that have wine in Hong Kong will have their wines in China already and those that do not, have these awards to draw attention to their wines on the mainland.

China is viewed in the same light as the legendary “Golden Goose”, that is, if you have wine in China you are sure to make a fortune. Certainly wine consumption is increasing in China – according to the IWSR consumption has grown 142.1 per cent from 2007 through 2011 and China is now the fifth largest wine consuming country in the world. However, because they are consuming so much wine and because so many exporters have their fingers in the pie, competition is rife there and wine sales are, in general, not based on quality as they are in many ‘wine educated’ countries, but based on price.

Wine sales in China on the internet are also soaring with wine websites like TaoBao and YesMyWine taking the lion’s share of the market and wines around the 150 Yuan mark being the most popular. If the tasting I conducted in Shenzhen recently is a reflection of the quality of wines being sold in the mainland, then they really have a long way to go as, personally speaking, a major proportion of them were just bad (they are commercial, fruit sweet, over extracted wine-like-beverages much like Yellow Tail).

China is also poised to be the world’s sixth largest producer of wine by 2016 according to Vinexpo Chief Executive Robert Beynat and by that time, average consumption is set to rise to 3 bottles per person per capita. However, the consumption facts do not lie – four out of five bottles consumed in China are produced there and, if we break that one bottle left over up, 50 per cent of imported wine consumed is French and almost 20 per cent is Australian. It does not leave very much for the rest of the world does it?

Anyway, back to CWSA. Winners were announced for Best Australian Producer (Taylors), Best Chilean Producer (Balduzzi), Best China Producer (Helan Mountain), Best New Zealand Producer (Babich), Best Portuguese Producer (Quinta dos Vales) and Best French Producer (Chateau Patarabet). Regional winners were Giesen (Marlborough), Fox Creek (McLaren Vale), Trapiche (Mendoza), Chateau Cazeau (Bordeaux), Wynns (Coonawarra), Wolf Blass (South Australia) and many others from regions around the world. So, instead of just listing them, here’s the link so you can read the full list of 41 Trophy winners - http://www.cwsa.org/cwsa-best-value-2013-trophy-winners