What does the figure 996 mean to you?

If the answer is ‘nothing’, or the figure prompts a vague attempt to name an event at the end of the 10th century, you haven’t been paying attention to what is happening in China, a country where numbers often have a lot of significance.

Until recently, 9-9-6 referred to a grim work culture that involved toiling from 9am to 9pm six days per week that is now supposedly illegal.

Since around 2018, however, Chinese consumers increasingly associate the three digits with packs of six 75cl bottles of wine costing just 99 yuan ($13.80 at current rates of exchange).

Against a background of a flat or shrinking wine market, the 996 concept, which relies on bulk shipping and bottling in China, has been a quiet success for the online retailers that have been exploiting it.

Enter Aldi

Now, however, as Morris Cai reports on the Hong Kong specialist platform, Vino Joy, it has been embraced by Aldi’s 50 stores in Shanghai. Sales of six-packs of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, Australian Shiraz and South African Moscato are reportedly brisk, with the last of these being the German discounter’s biggest seller.

Other successes for the chain include a single-serve 25cl Merlot ‘designed for light casual drinking and marketed as an easy-drinking wine for “gentle intoxication”’.

All this information, plus the news that Aldi is bucking the trend by growing its wine sales in China by 33% last year, and that its other best sellers include dry and off-dry German Riesling, Australian Chardonnay, Lugana and Cava, should give wine professionals pause for thought.

Among the questions to consider

1. How does the ‘trading up’, ‘less but better’ messaging of recent years fit with a growing market for bottles of wine retailing for a little over $2 apiece?
2. How does ‘gentle intoxication’ match the way wine-in-moderation businesses talk about their products in the west?
3. How do the successes of Moscato (from South Africa), off-dry German Riesling and Spanish sparkling wine square with the traditional notion that Chinese consumers have no interest in sparkling wine or white wine of any description?
4. How do these packs fit into the traditional Chinese model of bottles of wine being ideal for gifting?
5. Are you trying to ship the kinds of wine the Chinese really want to buy?
6. Is it time to give serious thought to bulk-shipping wine to China?
7. Will shipping cheap wine to China solve western producers’ problems of excess stock?
8. Will bargains like these help to convert young Chinese to wine drinking?
9. Will a tsunami of cheap imported wine kill the market for premium/super-premium fare?
10. If you have any interest in the Chinese wine market (and you probably should), are you taking the time to keep track of what is happening there?

My advice is that you read everything Iain Langridge and Natalie Wang have to say on Linkedin, and that you spend the $60 or so per year to subscribe to Wang’s Vino Joy News news platform. For a broader range of alcoholic beverages across Asia as a whole, I also recommend Jean-Charles Letellier’s Wine-To-Asia Substack, and posts by long-standing Jim Boyce, both in his Grape Wall of China blog and pieces for Wine Searcher like this.

I will also be sharing information about China here, and quite possibly elsewhere