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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.”

Sounded reasonable to me.

"But did you know that 95% of this wine is locally produced?"

That I didn't know. And it came as something of a surprise because locally produced wine can be ghastly. Here's the interesting thing: up until recently most of the people buying wine weren't too concerned with taste. In fact, mixing a bottle of red with coca-cola or seven up was common practice in restaurants around the country. "Many people didn't know how to drink wine, they assumed that because it was alcohol it needed to be mixed with some kind of soft drink. Thankfully these habits are changing and you now see a lot more local people appreciating the enjoyment that comes with drinking a good bottle of wine."

This increased confidence around wine is reflected in the spending habits of consumers. "We had one customer in here recently and he walked out with 30,000 rmb's worth of wine. A few years ago that same man would have been happy with buying 50 bottles of any label. Now more thought is going into bottle selection."

And that's what Wine Mall is all about. Yes, they claim to undersell most of the other retailers out there because they deal directly with the wineries and only purchase in bulk, but Wine Mall also wants to teach consumers that wine needn't be a scary hobby only undertaken by people with too much money and too much time.

But it's tough to educate people in such a short space of time. Saleh agrees: "Local customers are still picking wine based on the design of the bottle, the price, in fact anything but its actual taste. We need to show people that there is more to choosing a fancy bottle of wine than a pretty label."

This is what Wine Mall aims to achieve with their weekly Saturday event. Like most wine clubs/bars they open up their doors and invite people to sample a selection of wines, unlike everybody else they have large amounts of space to do this in. Often Wine Mall hosts a guest speaker to address issues ranging from different types of grapes, to all-important health topics.

With a new generation to enlighten, Wine Mall has their work cut out but the message from Shah is very clear: "We aim to bring high-quality, imported wine to people for the best prices in town. Simple."

Drop by their store on Wuzhong Lu or call 6459 1429 ext 828.

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