Everyone here has heard the story or seen it for themselves. A Chinese party is celebrating in an upmarket restaurant or in a club. Someone orders a special treat, a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, costing the equivalent of £250. It is brought with reverence by the manager and a little poured out for a tasting, whereupon the party-goer snaps open a can of Sprite, tops up the glasses and drinks down the fizzing mixture with approval.
Wine drinking has arrived in China but wine culture lags far behind. China was a wine-drinking country many centuries ago, as ancient wine jars dating back 18 centuries to the Han Dynasty testify, but two decades ago virtually the only liquids drunk were tea, beer, and rice wine.
Reform and opening up began to bring changes to the tastes of the new Chinese. When encountering wine for the first time, people anywhere in the world usually prefer the sweeter white wines, but red is considered more fashionable in China - the East is red after all - and has a greater romantic appeal. To counteract its drier taste, inexperienced drinkers add Sprite or some other fizzy liquid.
Only the very rich Chinese can afford a Lafite, and the great majority of people would never think of forking out large chunks of their wages for an imported burgundy or chardonnay. Now wine-drinking in China seems set to take a great leap forward, with lower prices for imported brands from France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
In the small print of the agreement reached in Beijing on Friday between the EU and China which eliminated the last barrier to China's entry to the World Trade Organisation was a list of 150 items on which Beijing promised to slash tariffs. These included wines and spirits - one item was listed as "whisk(e)y" ensuring that Scotch and Irish get equal treatment - with import duties on wines reduced from 65 to 14 per cent.
Three years ago wine accounted for only one per cent of alcohol consumption in communist China but demand for wine has been growing by 30 per cent a year and cheaper imported wines will inevitably mean more widespread usage. It is still a night club rather than a dinner table drink, and people out for the evening continue to add Sprite or Coca Cola, and even berries sometimes for medicinal purposes. Experimenting with drinks is quite popular.
President Jiang Zemin likes a little vinegar in his Sprite, a concoction which is called Drink Number One. Chinese people now imbibe a third of a litre of wine on average a year, which accounts for five per cent of the world's wine consumption per capita, according to the latest statistics. This is still less than 0.5 per cent of that in Western Europe, says the China Food Industry Association.
China is increasing its own production of wine. It now stands at 350,000 tons a year and last year the number of wineries was up by a quarter on 1998. But its output is still only 5 per cent of that of France. Much of the locally-produced wine like Great Wall is pretty awful, often oxidised, and with no way of knowing where the grapes come from or what is added, but other popular brands called Dynasty Red and Dragon Seal have been described as "passable". Some Chinese wine is excellent, and the country is just now beginning to produce really world-class wines, like the chardonnay of the Huadong Winery in Qingdao.
One can see a change in wine appreciation coming in the next few years by looking at what happened in Hong Kong, which usually sets the trend for other Chinese cities. Consumption of wine has doubled in Hong Kong in the last five years, and 77 per cent of that is red wine mostly bought for home consumption, unthinkable a few years ago. Evidence of growing domestic wine consumption in mainland China comes from the biggest wine importer in Beijing, which three years ago sold 90 per cent of imported wines to hotels and supermarkets catering to expatriates. Today that accounts for only 12 per cent of the company's business.
Another sure sign that wine is on the up and up is the discovery of fake wines, like the 12,000 bottles of phoney Mouton Cadet seized by Hong Kong customs. Much more of this stuff got through to supermarkets and restaurants in places like Guangzhou. A wine writer in the Asia Wall Street Journal organised a blind tasting to see how good it was but the real wine won easily against the mislabelled plonk.
Those who add Sprite, and would therefore hardly be able to tell the difference, but who still want to make sure they have the real thing, are advised to look in the lower left-hand corner of the label. The real stuff has a little serial number; the counterfeit label does not.