WINE ON THE WEB: BRINGING GOOD TASTE TO CHINA
I'll be the first to admit that when I walk into a wine store, I have no idea what I'm looking at. I always envy those knowledgeable connoisseurs who know the French pronunciations of every type or how a wine will taste according to its country of origin. Steve Han, the founder of TasteV, had the same problem just a couple years ago.
“Wine is everywhere, but in my experience, I go to a place, I buy wines, and I pay a price much more than I used to pay in California,” Han says. “Some of those wines are okay. Some of those wines are just bad. I have no idea how to pick.”
To solve this problem, he and his team created a website to find good wines and recommend them to Chinese consumers. Only one in 20 wines make the cut, and most of them come with expert and/or customer reviews. This might lead you to think only the most expensive bourgeois bottles are listed, but Han wants to ease the stress of choosing a wine at every price tier. Many of the most popular bottles are sold for less than 100 RMB. Very few of the wines sold in China are scored by the big magazine reviewers, and they don't care to rate the cheap stuff.
But cheap doesn't mean bad, says Han. His customers often belong to the expanding Chinese middle class. They want to taste good wine, and they're spending their own money to do so.
“There are wine drinkers who don't care—who are perfectly happy drinking Great Wall,” he says. “They don't care. Those are not my users.”
Find better wine, share better taste
The wine market in China is booming. Han says building relationships with suppliers wasn't too difficult, as many of them don't have a retail channel. The real challenge is creating a standard by which to rate a wine's quality and value. Everything is human-based. You won't find a spreadsheet with statistics and specs here. TasteV has two experts on staff, as well as a circle of collaborators who help choose the wines, which are guaranteed to be genuine.
TasteV ships wine all over China from a warehouse in Beijing. In the city, you can usually receive your bottle within a day of ordering it. The company has a lot of competitors out there, but Han emphasized beating them isn't the point.
“Our purpose is to put good quality boutique wine into our customer's hands, and they're not doing that,” says Han.
TasteV's website functions in both English and Chinese, but they unfortunately stopped developing the English half due to lack of demand from expats. Han says expats are often better at choosing wines from a store and tend to already have more refined taste.
I'm certainly not in that category, so Han suggested I be very open-minded and taste everything. He says it's just four or five basic principles to learn and apply to better appreciate wine. But without knowing the right food to pair with it, appropriate temperature, et cetera, even a great wine can taste horrible.