Red Obsession Page #3

So, if you were polite,

and you say that for every

one person that we've found,

we've missed at least one,

that means, today,

China's probably got around

600 US-dollar billionaires.

That's more than the US.

It's going to be a great tasting.

I hope you get a chance to

taste these wonderful wines.

So, thank you very much.

Hey, everybody, come here.

Put your hands together. Come on.

Let's do it. Yeah?

Yeah!

Right now, I think

everyone has the wine fever.

How extreme that is

depends on their time

and disposable income.

It's a real honor and a pleasure

to have Robert Parker in Hong Kong.

The economic

growth rate of China

over the past 10 years

has been the fastest in human history.

China, including Hong Kong,

has now become the largest importer

of Bordeaux wines in the world.

They just erupted,

and we were afraid

of not being able to cope

with such a fast change

when we didn't know the country

and we didn't know the

people, the culture.

So we thought that it was very necessary

to have somebody based there.

Welcome to Beijing!

We're very happy to sponsor

one of the best events

in China this year.

And we are very, very happy to be here

with so many beautiful girls.

The idea was to promote the

beauty of women in China,

and to promote the beauty

of wine from France.

So we did a kind of combination

for the election last

year of Miss China Universe

in a very special party

where the goal was to

teach how to drink wine

to 32 of the most

beautiful women in China.

Compared to France,

where my generation is less

excited by wine than before,

because we've had wine

for hundreds of years -

in China, it's very new.

In some small cities

in China, you arrive,

there's a big red carpet,

they bring two Rolls-Royce

to take care of you,

with hundreds of people

on the side of the carpet.

And you feel, "Am I at the

Cannes Film Festival, or what?"

But this is China

getting excited by wine,

getting obsessed, in a way, by wine,

because it's new, it's fun, it's French,

and we have so much

potential in this market.

The Chinese

market has been so enthusiastic

that they have driven prices

up to unprecedented levels

where a lot of traditional customers

can't or don't want to follow.

It would be terrible for us to

lose our traditional markets,

because still the traditional customers

share our taste and culture.

It would be a big loss, and

we are slightly worried, true.

The problem is that we don't see

what we can do to change that.

I think the

Bordelais run the risk

of relying on the China market too much.

I think that China has got a way to go

in terms of the overall market.

And there's no track record

or any long-term relationships

or anything like that.

I mean, that market can disappear

as quickly as it appeared.

The voracious nature

of Bordeaux's newest customer

can partly be explained by

events in its recent past.

Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution

saw nationwide

repression and persecution

in the name of change.

I worked with many people

who had suffered in different degrees

in the Cultural Revolution.

All of them had one thing in common -

that they never wanted to

look back to that period.

In the late '70s,

China's leadership began

lifting the sanctions

on private ownership

and personal wealth.

The transition to a market

economy was meant to be gradual.

But after 30 years of isolation,

the Chinese people had other ideas.

There was a huge pent-up

energy that you could sense,

particularly amongst what

many people would call

a 'lost generation'.

By that time the lid was off

and the people were looking

to regain, if you like,

the entrepreneurial space that

had always existed in China,

but had been contained for so long.

There was a lot of catch-up to do

and I think one of the

most astonishing things

over the last 30 years, that I've seen,

is the speed of that catch-up.

When I first came to China

to do the television shows,

there was no middle class,

there was only one class.

So it was a very interesting time.

And to see it grow, like

in the last 25 years,

to this type of a degree, is amazing.

The Chinese have always been taught

that a nail that sticks

out has to be pounded down.

So that has been the culture.

You always want to hide in the masses.

So they used to wear the

same kind of hairstyle,

the same kind of clothes,

the same color of clothes even.

But it is in the last 20 years

that the opening has

done to the Chinese,

that they are beginning

to have an individuality.

20 or 30 years ago,

when China opened up for the first time,

nobody had any cash.

So all the money has been made,

really, over the last 30 years.

It's been the largest

privatization in the world,

pretty much, ever.

I'm looking forward

to our skiing holiday.

Yes.

If they've lived through

the Cultural Revolution,

this means they've gone

to hell and come back.

So, when the Chinese do things,

as is so obvious now

to the modern world,

in a business venture, or

any venture, for that matter,

the Chinese have no fear.

Because they say, "Well,

how worse off can we be?

"We can just start from zero again. "

It wouldn't bother them at all.

This is why China is so dynamic.

People shoot for the stars.

As China began opening up,

it looked to the West

for ways of expressing its

wealth, power and modernity.

Now, China's newly affluent

are a magnet for the most

luxurious brands in the world.

The Chinese

luxury consumer today -

you could say he's on steroids.

He's had every single luxury

brand pumped into his system,

and it's really been happening

over the last 10 years.

And competing in

this aggressive luxury market

are the fine wines of Bordeaux.

Margaux is always compared

like a luxury brand.

But, for me, we are

very... a bit frustrated,

because Margaux can't do

what Herms or Louis Vuitton is doing.

Because if they train a few more people,

if they buy the right raw

material, the right leather,

they can always produce a few more bags.

We are limited by nature, by climate,

so we can't make one

more bottle of wine.

I mean, how many companies

didn't see their potential

production change for 400 years?

It even went down,

because we had to be more

selective to make more quality.

Wine now is the new Silk Road.

It is one of the intermediaries

to connect China to

the rest of the world.

I mean, you look at China now,

they're all dressed in

a shirt and tie, like me.

It's part of the Westernization -

they wear it on the top of their skin.

Now you're talking about

wine, that they swallow it...

...inside their body.

I mean, now they swallow

the Western civilization

inside their body, in their bloodstream.

I think there's

always been an interest

in wine made from grapes

as an element of exoticism.

Now, normally, in the West,

we view exoticism as

coming from the East -

Orientalism, if you were -

but here there is a type of exoticism

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