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Mia Nurmamat

Chinese-French wine merchant Arsen Zhao says business remains strong in Paris, but he is welcoming far fewer customers from Asia than before.
“We’ve seen a much sharper drop in customers from China,” Zhao said. “Consumers are trading down, while large volumes of European wine imported previously have yet to be sold, leaving inventories high and weighing on new orders.”
As demand has weakened and unsold inventory has piled up, prices have come under pressure. “Some high-end French wines are now selling for less in China than in France,” he said.
Zhao is among a growing number of wine merchants shipping fewer bottles to China – formerly one of the industry’s most promising markets.
Demand has withered as consumers tighten their purse strings amid weaker income growth, drinking habits shift and Beijing tightens its scrutiny over lavish banquets and official entertaining.
By volume, China’s bottled wine imports from the European Union fell 16.6 per cent year on year in the first half of 2026, according to Chinese customs data, with their value dropping 7.9 per cent to US$251 million.
Shipments from Spain fell 24.9 per cent, by volume, those from Italy were down 17.7 per cent and France witnessed a fall of 14.3 per cent.
The retreat has been years in the making. China’s per-capita wine consumption peaked in the mid-2010s, while wine sales plunged 47 per cent between 2019 and 2022, compared with declines of 17 per cent for spirits and 9 per cent for beer, according to a study published last year by University of Adelaide economist Kym Anderson.
Wineries in regions including Shangri-La in Yunnan, the eastern foothills of the Helan Mountains in Ningxia and Shandong have developed rapidly
Arsen Zhao, Paris wine merchant
While slower income growth and disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the decline, alcohol consumption had already begun falling three years before the pandemic, the study noted, pointing to a broader structural shift in drinking habits.
Zhao said that as China’s vast wine market weakened, many merchants had begun shifting their focus towards markets with stronger consumer spending power, such as Singapore and South Korea.
European producers were also facing growing competition from China’s domestic wine industry, Zhao said.
“Wineries in regions including Shangri-La in Yunnan, the eastern foothills of the Helan Mountains in Ningxia and Shandong have developed rapidly, with improving quality encouraging some consumers to turn to home-grown bottles,” he said.
A wine merchant in Madrid said China was never the biggest part of his business, but it was a steady one. Some years he shipped more than 3,000 bottles a year to China, mainly to Western restaurants in major cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, but this year he expected that figure would fall to below 900 bottles.
“Business has been difficult this year, and wine merchants everywhere are struggling,” he said. “Even here in Spain, we always complain that young people either don’t drink wine any more or simply can’t afford it.”
He said he began noticing a change when Australian wine returned to the Chinese market in early 2024, after China removed punitive duties imposed in 2021 amid a broader deterioration in relations sparked by Australian calls for an international investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“To be honest, I haven’t really asked why, but since China started importing Australian wine again, our business has become more difficult,” he said. “Australian wines are more competitive on price.”


However, according to Chinese customs data, imports of bottled Australian wine fell 11.6 per cent year on year by volume in the first half of 2026, even as their value rose 20 per cent to US$297 million, making Australia China’s largest source of imported wine by value.
Others have responded to China’s slowdown by looking elsewhere. Victorien Renier, a wine merchant from Dijon, France, said American buyers had increasingly filled the gap left by Chinese customers. “I personally felt that the American market took over from the Chinese market, with a wider variety of clients and bigger numbers,” he said.
The volume of wine consumed in China fell by 13 per cent last year, according to the Paris-based International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV), the global intergovernmental body for the wine sector.
Wine demand in China was particularly sensitive to changes in income and prices because of its discretionary nature, OIV said in a report released in May, while consumption was moving away from its traditional reliance on official entertaining and gift-giving towards more fragmented, consumer-led drinking.
It said global wine consumption had fallen 14 per cent since 2018, with China recording the largest contraction among major markets.
Some smaller European producers are wondering whether selling to China is worth the cost.
An employee at Ysios, a winery in Alava in northern Spain, said high shipping and other export costs meant it would need to sell substantially more wine to make the Chinese market commercially viable.
“We are still divided over our China strategy,” she said. “To make the costs work, we would have to ship much larger volumes, like the bigger producers do. But that risks compromising both our quality and the exclusivity our brand is built on, especially as demand from China is declining.”


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Imports of bottled wine from the EU fell 16.6 per cent by volume in the first half of this year, according to Chinese customs data


Imports of bottled wine from the EU fell 16.6 per cent by volume in the first half of this year, according to Chinese customs data.


European wine producers seek new markets as China sales dream sours

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Imports of bottled wine from the EU fell 16.6 per cent by volume in the first half of this year, according to Chinese customs data

Imports of bottled wine from the EU fell 16.6 per cent by volume in the first half of this year, according to Chinese customs data