Wine Mall'ed

Pick up the essentials at Shanghai's new wine outlet - By Ben A., May 26, 08

If you head west on Wuzhong Lu and go far enough you will eventually come across an officious looking government building on your right. Ignore this menacing structure and continue on the lookout for Shanghai's largest wine shop. Although the Wine Mall doesn't sell the biggest amount of wine in Shanghai, nor does it have the widest selection available, at 18,000 square meters this is the largest wine shop in Shanghai, physically speaking.

Wine Mall aims for that niche between the fancy boutique shops/bars and the supermarkets selling Great Wall. As the name suggests, they're not looking to compete with the high-end wine shops in town. They also have no interest in selling cheap plonk - they import all of their wine from the world's principal wine producing regions. What they do have is their eyes firmly set on the bigger prize.

"Do you know that some of the major wine retailers and distributors in China are selling 2-3 containers of wine every month?" says Shah Saleh, the Operations Manager/Wine Guru, at Wine Mall. "There are about 14,000 bottles of wine in a container so at the moment there is a lot of wine being sold in this country.