Red Obsession

Lately, our trade journals have been full of stories about wine and China. In the Winter 2013 Issue of Practical Winery & Vineyard Journal, Dr. Richard Smart weighed in with his views on China an emerging global producer? Many articles have been written about China being a great market for exported wines, but in this article, Dr. Smart wrote about China's growing wine industry. China is now the third largest grape producer in the world after Italy and the U.S. and China has the land and the water resources to greatly expand its wine production.
There are 4 major vineyard regions in China:

• Shandong Province on the coast
• Hebei Province west of Beijing
• Ningxia Province in central China
• Xinjiang in the far west

In the second half of the article, Dr. Smart wrote about his visit to Ningxia Province where there are approximately 25,000 hectares of vineyards. The Great Wall a Chinese wine company has planted 500 hectares here. Currently there are about 20 wineries in this region. There is a government program to expand this number to 100 wineries in 10 years.¹
The August 2013 issue of Wines & Vines, contained a 5-page article called Brands at Risk about the rise of counterfeit wines, refilled bottles, reworked logos using Photoshop, and other intellectual property (IP) issues in China. The counterfeiting is not necessarily limited to imported wines such as Chateau Lafite, but local brands such as The Great Wall are also targets. Bruno Paumard of Chateau Hansen, a winery in Inner Mongolia, now uses bottles with the winery’s logo embossed in glass, making it more expensive and difficult to copy.²
Given all this hype about China in the news, I thought it was very timely when my husband showed me the trailer for a movie called Red Obsession after reading about it on the Wine Beserkers Forum. The synopsis of this movie mentions that it is a film about the link between Bordeaux and China.
We were wondering if we would have a chance to see this movie. My husband occasionally checks into what is happening in Newport, Rhode Island and learned that the Newport Film will be showing the movie on September 19th. May be we'll see you there.
Refer ences:
1. Richard Smart, Practical Winery & Vineyard Journal, China an emerging global producer?, Winter 2013, pg. 92-93, 97.
2. Jim Boyce, Wines & Vines, Brands at Risk, August 2013, pg. 30-34.