A China é o novo paraiso para o vinho

O crítico de vinhos Olyr Corrêa manda mais uma contribuição de suas leituras internacionais. O surgimento da China como mercado para o vinho:
Hong Kong provides vaults for pricey wines
Frederik Balfour, Bloomberg Businessweek
Monday, August 8, 2011
Fergus Fung swipes his card across a sensor and waits as his face is scanned by a computer to verify his identity. A steel door opens, and the Hong Kong entrepreneur enters a vault that holds his treasures: bottles of high-end Bordeaux and Burgundy.
This is the Hong Kong Wine Vault, where the temperature is a constant 13 degrees Celsius, the humidity is 75 percent, and the insulation on the walls, ceiling, and floors is 4 inches thick.
"The facial-recognition thing is a bit gimmicky," said Fung, founder of the WOM guide to Hong Kong restaurants. "But with any wine cellar, security is a key issue."
Hong Kong Wine Vault is one of more than 15 repositories for high-end quaffs set up in the past three years in the city.
Since Hong Kong axed wine duties in 2008, it has overtaken London and New York as the world's biggest auction market for top wines such as Château Lafite, Domaine Romanée-Conti, and Krug. Imports surged to $858 million last year, from $185 million in 2007. Auction house Sotheby's hasn't had an unsold bottle in the city in its last 15 auctions and broke the world wine price record in October with three bottles of 1869 Château Lafite-Rothschild that fetched $230,930 each.
"It's exploded, and you need logistics to support that," said Robert Sleigh, who runs Sotheby's Asia wine business. "Now there are world-class wine storage facilities in Hong Kong."
The city needs them. The high temperatures and humidity could render a $75,000 bottle of Château d'Yquem undrinkable. Hong Kong storage costs -roughly $26 to $110 per 12-bottle case per year - is a pittance compared with the cost of a fine wine. Moreover, in a city where nearly everyone lives in apartments, few collectors have cellars.
Still, it wasn't until the government eliminated the 40 percent wine duty in February 2008 that the storage business took off. For speculators, the climate-controlled vaults can mean a difference of thousands of dollars in the value of their bottles. Provenance, or the history of how and where a bottle is kept, is important because it's impossible to know the quality of a wine without opening it. Visible inspections provide limited protection against counterfeits, and even bona fide vintages could be ruined by heat or humidity during handling.
A 1982 Château Lafite-Rothschild, which received a perfect score of 100 by wine critic Robert Parker, with good provenance sells for more than $12,000 per bottle, while one of dubious heritage may fetch $500, says Greg De 'Eb, general manager of Crown Wine Cellars, which opened its first cellar in Hong Kong in 2003, 60 feet underground in a former munitions bunker.
Crown now has three sites, including a $10 million, 44,000-square-foot facility that houses two of the three record bottles of Lafite. Their exact location is kept secret even from their owner, De 'Eb says.