Feature: Argentine winemaker tries to "decipher" Chinese tastes

Argentine winemaker German Di Cesare from high-range winery Bodega Trivento refreshed his confidence in Asian wine consumers after a recent visit to various Chinese cities.

The winery, founded in 1996 in Mendoza, has been exporting wine products to China since 2005 and registered a rapid growth in the past five years.

China is "a market to explore and when it 'explodes', they are going to need wineries to provide wine," said Di Cesare, who has worked as a winemaker for Trivento for 13 years.

However he also recognized how difficult it would be "to compete with the French wineries that have been present in China for longer time."

"The day when the market 'explodes' could potentially be the day when it (China) turns into the number one (wine consumer in the world). We need to continue working in educating the consumers and little by little captivate the palate and tastes of the Chinese consumers," added Di Cesare.

While travelling around China to promote Argentina's Malbec wine, Di Cesare thought that it was very necessary to "decipher" Chinese tastes and foster the Chinese consumers' taste for the Argentine wine.

In China, consumers seem to prefer sweeter wine and French wine has been very well received there, said the vintner.

Di Cesare has travelled to various provinces in China to supervise the wine training for people working in restaurants, hotels and other places and offer help where needed.

"It was a difficult experience at first because in the first tasting there weren't many people and they tried the wine in whatever order they wanted. Afterwards a little bit of order was achieved, starting with white wine or the most fruity or the bitterest," he said.

Di Cesare listed "developing wine tasting knowledge" that goes from "the worst quality to the best quality or from the most fruity to the bitterest" as a future challenge for the winery.

"It is a market that we will have to convince because it (China) is convinced that good wines only come from France...," said Di Cesare.

"The Chinese market is really very important. It has an incredible potential," said Daniela Hernandez, coordinator for Bodega Trivento's Asian market.

"In fact, our sales (in China) increased a lot in 2014, at around 300 percent," said Hernandez.

"(We are) Half-way through 2015 and we have already sold everything that was exported in 2014. We are expecting a very notable increase. The market is going to expand and it will be a very important market in terms of the winery's sales on a global level," said Hernandez.

Wine consumption in China will increase between 40 percent and 60 percent from 2011 to 2018, according to the Wine Economics Research Center of the University of Adelaide, Australia.

Argentina is the fifth largest wine producer in the world but Argentine wine only makes up 1.01 percent of China's wine imports, even though its imports have grown by at least 400 percent over the last five years, the center said. Endi