Does China overpay for Bordeaux?

At dinner last night at the excellent Tang Dynasty restaurant in Shanghai, there were no Bordeaux bargains on the menu to go with the bullfrog boiled in hot chili oil or deepfried big snake. Chateau Dauzac was R9,000 a bottle and Lafite R38,000, so we settled on Asahi beer at R30 for 625ml (curious volume).

But where do these crazy prices come from?  Hein Koegelenberg, whose Leopard’s Leap sells one in every two bottles of SA wine in the Middle Kingdom, says to add a nought to the wholesale price to get retail. The old Alan Pick zero % markup.

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Last week’s Rabobank report on the wine market in China Mind the Gap, disclosed that Bordeaux realizes €7.66 a litre on exports to China while Germany delivers €4.40. Both markets are over two thirds red, so does Bordeaux ripoff the East? “Yes” said Marc Soccio, the Rabobank bibulous bankster from Sydney. But it probably really comes down to how many cases of Lafite are shipped to Stuttgart as opposed to Shanghai, shown below.

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