Tag Archives: CHEERS Wine

Putao-a-thon! Win your weight in wine with CHEERS

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By Jim Boyce | I help organize an annual China charity campaign called Maovember that teams bars, restaurants, shops and customers for fun events throughout November. This year’s effort supports Library Project furnish reading rooms in needy rural schools and Beijing bakery Bread of Life to train and employ disabled orphans when they reach workforce age.

One of our wine-focused events will see someone win his or her weight in vino! Starting Friday at 2 PM, Mike Wester will try to walk to as many of the ~30 CHEERS wine shops in Beijing—a city officially over 16,000 square kilometers—by Sunday evening. It’s part of his 30-day, 900-km “mao-a-thon“: let’s borrow the Chinese name for grape and call it a putao-a-thon. Here is how distant some of those shops are from city center:


In any case, the person who guesses 1) the number of stores Mike visits during his three-day tour and 2) is closest to how many km he walks during this adventure will win his / her weight in wine! (For someone who weighs 60 kg, the prize would be over 40 bottles!)

The contest ends when Mike arrives at CHEERS Shuangjing store on Sunday at 6 PM. Expect bubbly and baozza.

Sound good? To participate, scan the WeChat QR Code below to guess how many stores Mike will visit and how many km he will walk doing it. The entry fee is 90 rmb, with 100 percent of the money to Maovember. Can’t decide the number of stores? Then enter twice—or more!

If you don’t have WeChat but want to support Maovember, you can also come to one of our events or make a straight-up donation. Any questions, just let me know via nihao (at) maovember.com.

Maovember is 100-percent volunteer driven which means 100-percent of the funds go to our partner charities for visible results, such as readings rooms and bakery equipment.

CHEERS has been a Maovember supporter since the first campaign in 2013, including last year’s mulled wine tour.

Note: This walk is part of Mike Wester’s 30-day 900-km mao-a-thon, which has included a ~50-km walk around the Third Ring Road on November 1 and a 75-km walk in Ritan Park on November 7, his 50th birthday. As of November 8, he had completed 280 km. Here are some photos from his recent adventures:

See more Maovember events here and how to support Maovember in other ways here. You can also follow Grape Wall on Facebook and Twitter. And sign up for the China wine newsletter below.


CHEERS Wine turns six | Q&A with CEO Claudia Masueger

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By Jim Boyce | Wine shop chain CHEERS just marked its sixth birthday so I asked CEO Claudia Masueger a question for each year of business.

In 2010, your warehouse burned down, all your wine was lost and, while waiting for new stock to arrive, you decided to shift from B2B to retail. My question: how did that fire start? Was it a gluehwein experiment gone wrong?

Of course not! That’s a mean question. The fire was due to an electrical problem.

The interesting part is ten different wine importers had their stock in that warehouse and we were the only ones with insurance. Being Swiss, I took out that insurance, even though my team members had major doubts. They said I was the typical foreigner throwing away money and that insurance never comes through. I had to find an agent on my own to even get insurance. After that, my Chinese partners trusted me more.

What’s been the hardest part of running CHEERS?

Finding decent locations, especially in Beijing, as so many small shop areas are being bricked up. Basically the plan seems to be to push businesses into shopping malls. But shopping malls are suffering because many clothing and accessories stores are losing business to online retail. And while there are big locations in the malls, the spaces we want are 40 to 60 square meters and hard to find because lots of other people want them, too.

How has the CHEERS portfolio changed over the past six years?

We started with lots of entry-level value-driven wines and then added more and more mid-priced wines as our customers became regulars and became more sophisticated. We definitely see a growing desire for mid-range and higher-quality wines.

We also have to do a lot of pre-selection because our portfolio is limited to 150 products, that’s the most our stores can handle. When we update our listings, we usually change about 40 percent of the portfolio.

How about wine styles?

In the early days, people only talked about red wine. In our stores, we had no such assumption. We see no right wine or wrong wine because we are dealing with real customers and what they truly like.

If you give people Bordeaux as a first wine, they often don’t like it or they want to add Coke. Customers need to start slow, with easy drinking, perhaps New World wines. With something maybe a little bit sweet.

Our Jumper series wines are incredible. [These feature grapes associated with a particular place, like Californian Zinfandel or Argentine Malbec.] They have won a lot of medals and are all priced around rmb100. For me, the Malbec is best, while [wine educator] Angqian likes the Pinot Noir. We also find Moscato is popular because it is an easy way to start.

What are six of the best events held by CHEERS?

The 2015 and 2016 anniversary parties at our Gulou stores. Many people came—more than a thousand—and it was great to see the community have such a good time.

The wedding party for our commercial director David Schaumann. I pretended to be the justice of the peace and pronounced them Mr and Mrs Cheers. We had clip-on bowties for the men, lots of flowers and food, and everyone had fun.

The endless parties at our Sanlitun South shop, especially during the first three years, whether for Beaujolais Nouveau or an alpenhorn and gluehwein event at Christmas.

The opening of CHEERS in Zhuhai was amazing. We spent all afternoon handing out fliers. By the end of the day, the place was full and almost everyone became a regular customer. People told me it was the first time they had found good-value wine without going to Hong Kong.

And our very first shop, in Xizimen. We opened at 10:59 on April ninth of 2011—we were told that was a very auspicious time and date—with about 30 people.

Oh, and we once had a marathon that involved many CHEERS stores. We started with 100 people but only 25 arrived at the final store. Most people started to drink along the way and never got to the finish.

What are your six favorite wines at the moment?

These:

Learn more about how CHEERS started here and read my story about the company in Meininger’s here.

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Liù Jiǔ | CHEERS to Celebrate Sixth Birthday with Free-flow Bubbly

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By Jim Boyce | Resilient* wine bar chain CHEERS will celebrate its sixth birthday on May 6 at 1949: The Hidden City in Sanlitun South. The party will feature free-flow bubbly as well as food, music and hundreds of prizes. Guests can spin the “wheel of fortune” to win items from Plastered 8, Papp’s Tea, Moka Bros, Kokomo, Pachakutiq, Paddy O’Shea’s, XL, Mikkeller , Caravan and more.

The party goes from 4 PM until late. The 1949 complex is also home to Jing-A, Okra, Traitor Zhou’s and Duck de Chine. If you have any questions, email events (at) cheers-wines.com. And check below for the event poster and a gallery of CHEERS photos I’ve taken over the years.

* Having lived in Gongti-Sanlitun since CHEERS started, I have seen the resiliency of the company as it has overcome many obstacles, including the closing of shops near Yashow (part of our first Maovember charity campaign), at the market itself (home of a nice drinks special) and near the Canadian Embassy (where I watched The Big Lebowski outdoors in near-freezing weather while sipping mulled wine). Good times! Those closing have been offset by the shop on the Sanlitun bar strip (host of a raucous Beaujolais Nouveau party last year) and openings at Tuenjiehue (a Maovember stop this year) and in Topwin (my local).

If you really want to talk resiliency, consider CHEERS had its warehouse burn down in 2010. During the long wait for new stock, the company shifted from business-to-business to retail. Who knows what comes next!?

In any case, CHEERS has ranked among the most intriguing wine companies to watch in China. And it has supported many projects by this blog and sibling Beijing Boyce. All the best for the company’s sixth birthday.

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Wine in China | CHEERS Starts ‘Smile Or Else’ Campaign for Consumer Inclusivity

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By Jim Boyce | The CHEERS wine shop chain will soon tweak its famous “CHEERS Makes You Smile” motto in order to stop a growing consumer crisis and promote more inclusivity.

“Not everyone is smiling,” explained a frustrated Claudia Massager, CEO of CHEERS. “I was in our Gulou shop last week and saw one customer frown and another with a blank look, and I thought to myself, what is wrong with these people!? Smile, damn you, smile! So I created a 218-point plan to force every single customer to act naturally and properly.”

The campaign will start next week when each shop receives a giant red poster with the new motto, “CHEERS Makes You Smile—Or Else.”

Or else what?

“We Swiss have many ways to force people to follow our completely reasonable orders,” says Massager. “Have you ever seen a Swiss army knife? Also, we have fondue. Perhaps I will pour bubbling hot cheese on the bottoms of these frowners. How will they like that!? Answer me now!”

Massager says repeat non-smilers will be forced to return their CHEERS VIP cards and drink a shot of that horrible Swiss whisky the company somehow got through China Customs quality control a few years ago.

“Then we will kick them out and into Beijing’s streets—where there are no smiles!” she says.

Massager says smiling releases endorphins and that the best wine pairing for those particular neurotransmitters is a chilled Marquis Bernard off-dry bubbly. Find your local CHEERS shop here and give it a try.

And if it isn’t already abundantly obvious, this is just a April Fool’s joke. Check out more of Grape Wall’s past jokes:

Follow Grape Wall on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for the free China wine e-newsletter below. Check out these wine books and sibling sites World Baijiu Day and Beijing Boyce.