from over 1000+ handpicked wines: WE ARE PUDAO WINES PUDAO WINES is proud to present a broad and comprehensive selection of more than 1000 great wines at every price point from all over the World. Langton’s Launches in East Asia Langton's Classification: Australia's fine wine ‘form guide' NZ's Best and Worst Kept Secrets Tasting@ShanghaiIt wasbound to come to an end eventually. Having spent years fantasising about the cloud of bliss life would be if only I could pass all my Master of Wine exams and “just” have the research paper left, I now find that peachy cloud slowly evaporating and myself settling into the rather less fantastical realisation that there’s still work to do. This is not to say that I don’t find my topic really rather interesting – I more or less took all the sexy topics I could think of and jammed them into one research paper: “selling wine”, “to Chinese”, “millennials” “online” However, with a whole 500 survey responses I need to log before January 31, it begins to occur to me that I really ought to get cracking.

Master of Wine student on the power of group study and breaking down blind tasting The research paper is the often glossed over third portion of the Master of Wine exam (technically, yes, it is an exam, even though, thankfully, I’m allowed to do it from the comfort of my home office/cocoon). When completed, it should be an original piece of research on a wine-related topic that expands the global wine community’s collective knowledge base. While this used to necessitate the gathering of hard data, forcing many a would-be Master of Wine into an unfamiliar world of lab coats, pipettes and conical flasks, mercifully, as of a few years ago, the scope of inquiry has been greatly broadened so that now candidates can delve into subjects as diverse as history, literature and anthropology. Personally, I decided long ago that sticking to what I know (consumer research) was the best way to preserve my sanity this 2016-17 academic year. My inquiry itself is fairly straightforward.

The goal is to gauge which particular elements of a wine’s product page are more likely to get somebody to hit “buy now” and which are the digital equivalent of window dressing, i.e. nice to have, but hardly the determining factor. All those close-up shots of bottle punts and unwrinkled foil capsules you will see if you keep scrolling down on a Tmall product page leap to mind, but only the research will tell. For the sake of nice, round numbers, I have decided that millennials are people aged 20 to 35. I have not limited my pool by geographic or socioeconomic factors, in the hope that we will get an attractively diverse group and be able to draw some conclusions about different categories of millennials (e.g. do 20 to 25 year olds in western China need dramatic visuals or if 30 to 35 year olds in the greater Beijing area abide by community scores). Given millennial internet users in China total around 418 million, surely I can tempt a measly 500 into giving me five minutes of their browsing time?

Especially with incentives factored in (a painful, but inevitable part of market research in China, I have been assured again and again). For those of you not particularly turned on by the topic, the reason why Chinese online wine consumers (millennials especially) are the height of research sex appeal is that they are arguably well ahead of their Western counterparts, at least in terms of the percentage of wine sales made online vs in person. best super sweet red wineWhile in the US – a market burdened by labyrinthine interstate alcohol shipping laws – online penetration of the wine market is a mere 3 to 4 per cent by volume, in China it is a whopping 30 per cent and predicted to grow steadily. best red wine for cakeEven in the relatively well networked UK it is only around 10 per cent.best wine for special occasions

Yet there are certainly headwinds. Anecdotally, many online wine orders are in the one-to-three-bottle range, but the expectation is that shipping will be totally free. The challenge with shipping small orders of wine around a vast country is that wine is heavy, temperature-sensitive and fragile. red wine brands mOnce it arrives, it requires special storage, meaning most people avoid massive bulk buys. good cheap wine bars londonMeanwhile, trucking within China remains painfully costly.glass of wine size uk However, things may be about to change. , the China wineAmazon is also re-entering the Chinese online wine sales space, so my guess is that wine e-commerce will continue to tick along nicely – at least, I hope, until I’ve finished this research paper.

Sarah Heller is a Hong Kong-based wine writer and the author of Diary of a Master of Wine StudentE-commerce driving China’s wine sales 3rd August, 2016 by Lucy Jenkins Almost half of wine drinkers in China buy online, making it’s the world’s largest and fastest growing e-commerce market, suggests a new Wine Intelligence report. China now boasts around 21 million online wine buyers mainly made up of the urban middle class who look for imported wine and in particular, wines which they perceive to offer value for money. which is the most popular online retailer with Chinese consumers and the third most popular retailer overall, with 35% of wine drinkers using it to buy imported wine. The price is the star attraction – with 65% of online buyers citing this as a main reason – but choosing wine because of the quality jumped from 18% in 2014 to 26% in 2016, suggesting a market which is moving away from purely shopping for bargains. Elsewhere, respondents reported that they felt their friends’ Weibo and WeChat accounts were the most reliable sources of information online, while official websites for wine brands and producers had the most impact on their buying decisions.