NEWS
BORDEAUX WINE SHIPMENTS TO CHINA DOUBLED AHEAD OF CHINESE NEW YEAR
By Susan Lewis
16-2-2021
Credit: David Mathews
Bordeaux wine shipments to China more than doubled ahead of the Chinese New Year, a piece of good news to Bordeaux wine producers who have seen poor sales in 2020 due to COVID-19 pandemic.
According to data released by Business France, the French trade promotion body, in December 2020, 42,499 hectolitres of Bordeaux wine worth €28.8 million were shipped to China, translating to volume and value increases of 123 percent and 44 percent respectively.
Bordeaux wine merchants said shipment uptick in January 2021 was as strong as December 2020, but no official data is available for the month yet.
The first day of the Year of the Ox fell on 12 February 2021.
Anecdotal reports from Bordeaux wine merchants said there was almost no order at all from China in the first seven months of 2020, sales only started to pick up in August and got very intense towards the end of the year.
“Starting in January 2020 we felt a shudder, then a halt. The first orders arrived in August, but really got underway in November. We shipped a lot of wine at the end of the year, it was quite intense in November and December, and continued through January,” Roland Coiffe, head of Roland Coiffe & Associés, told French vine and viticulture media Vitisphere.
With 40 percent of its business related to Greater China, the company has noticed that the Chinese market maybe undergoing a period of consolidation.
Of the 200 Chinese companies Coiffe Roland Coiffe & Associés has dealt with in recent years, it has noticed that half of them did not place an order in 2020.
“You can feel there is market consolidation. There is a constant boom and bust cycle in China, where the number of importers skyrockets then contracts,” Coiffe told Vitisphere.
(the writer can be contacted at: info@thewinechronicle.com)
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