Labels – Grape Wall of China

By Jim Boyce | Fake, funny, odd or old, China has no shortage of intriguing wine labels. I took some of the photos over the past decade; most of the others come from friends or wine groups in which I am active. I make no claims about the legality of a given label: some are no doubt registered here although they do, in my opinion, make me think of other brands and that feels misleading. Anyway, scroll on through or click one of the links below to jump to a category.

CURIOUS

A sparkler is haunting China? Nope, that’s just Karl Marx bubbly, one of many curious wines I have come across during the past decade. Place your mouse over the image for more details. Or click one to open a gallery.

A sparkler is haunting China? Bubbly inspired by the author of The Communist Manifesto. Class-y.

Back label of the Karl Marx bottle. My local supermarket in Beijing once stocked this German bubbly.

Speaks to an era that might have given us LOL, Hacker and Pwn wine. Hate it? Click delete. Love it. Forward to friends. Pairs with spam.

â€˜Prune and faint tobacco aromas, with a whiff of spent youth. The body is a bit flabby but shows complexity, with a wrinkle of dried fruit and a finish strongly disapproving of todayâ€™s generation. Ages well.’

What does Foreign Girl taste like? Strawberries, says one friend. Also of note, it “moistens the lung.”

Named for Li Hua, who graduated from University of Bordeaux in the mid-80s and returned to China to become something of a legend.

Leigh Causby! Not much is known about him but he is an oft-used face for Changyu.

A sweet, er, screw up. “Sweet fuck might not exist on the ‘aroma wheel’ but the translators didn’t shy from using it for this Australian wine.

Basketball and booze: two popular hobbies in China are leveraged by Australia’s Wolf Blass.

My April Foolâ€™s Day joke blended two legendsâ€”French wine and Chinese martial artsâ€”for a wine called a â€˜durian fist in a stinky tofu gloveâ€™.

Given drinking is a huge part of culture in China, it makes sense the president would feature on a bottle, but why Austria?

No way that Stalin was going to be on anything other than bottles of red wine.

The Panama-Pacific Int’l Expo is endlessly evoked by Chinese wine and spirit companies.

Nothing says colony handover like a commemorative bottle of wine, especially by a company called Dynasty.

A playful shot at Premier Cru, with egg splattered on the chateaux of Lafite Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion and Mouton Rothschild.

Vienna calling? Label honoring Balboa, Austrian consultant to Changyu, founded in Shandong in 1892.

Why did ‘Red Camel’ from Hansen in Inner Mongolia launch at ~USD600? Because that price would get media coverage.

Two-for-the-price of one. Poetry and wine from this Xinjiang winery.

LAFITE

Lafite is the best-known foreign wine brand in China, in part, the story goes, because a gangster in a Hong Kong movie once said that if it ain’t ’82 Lafite, it ain’t worth drinking. Translations of Lafiteâ€”La Fei /Â æ‹‰ è²â€”are found not only on wine bottles but everywhere from bank ads to housing estates.

There is no “i’ in Lafute. Bordeaux for team players.

You can trust this. It’s the “official” one.

“Life is free”in Shunyi? Not the one in Beijing!

PENFOLDS

The ‘new world’ sibling of Lafite is Penfolds, a brand that gained great favor among officials, especially before the big government crackdown on entertainment spending. Consumers at large are also big buyers of Penfolds. As with Lafite, there is no shortage of labels that feature similar names, fonts and designs as the original from Australia.

FRANCE

Beyond Lafite, there is a wealth of chateaux with which the creative draw inspiration, from Latour to Petrus do Domaine Romanee-Conti–and sometimes several of these at the same time. A white from RomanÃ©e-Conti Made in southern France. By Lafite. Yes, a label claimed that.

Did they change the 1855 classification system at last?

“What should we put on this label instead of Romanee?” “I don’t know.” “C’mon, what sounds sexy?” “Guangdong?”

Some wines are good. Some are very good. But only a few are very very good. (Tks Helene Ponty)

AUSTRALIA

A few labels that evoke Australia brands, including Hill of Glory, a tribute to Hill of Grace. More to come.

UNITED STATES

That Silver Oak-ish label was spotted while I took a group of Napa Valley wine trade people on a tour of Beijing.

ITALY

Sassicaia?

VANITY

Why bother with famous brands when you or your company can be the focus? Major producers like Changyu and GreatWall do a good business with vanity labels, but smaller operations are active as well. Weddings, parties, anything is apparently a good time for a commemorative wine.

Hey, when you said we were going to the Loire for our honeymoon…

“Let’s commemorate tea time with 240 bottles of wine featuring our mugs.”

School’s over, kids. Let’s get drink, drank, drunk.

HISTORICAL: CHANGYU

I’m a fan of the Changyu wine museums at regional operations in Yantai, Ningxia and elsewhere, partly due to the old labels on display. Note the popularity of Riesling. As has been noted many times before, there is plenty of evidence that China is not inherently a “red wine” country, as many pundits and producers would have us believe, and here is some of the historical kind. (See this “The East is White” piece for more.)

Wine or beer? Can’t decide? These guys were ahead of the curve a century ago.

Riesling from 1931. Just another sign that the idea China is destined for red wine is misguided.

MORE HISTORICAL LABELS

And here are a few more, including from Gansu province and from Grace Vineyard in Shanxi. This is a section I intend to grow.

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