When in China, I used to drink cheap maotai - a sorghum vodka - although it tasted like burning alcohol (known in my infancy as "spiritus") or gasoline. I liked the imaginative bottles looking like a dome-headed old sage or a phantasy dragon. The bottle made a nice present but no one liked the drink. It is too strong (more than 50%) and has a sorghum aftertaste (sorghum was used in my time to make street sweeper's brooms - yes, I used to clean my teeth with it). Now it appears that it is a 3 billion dollar business, larger than the Scott whisky franchise.
4 comments:
Erguotou (another name for the stuff) tastes awful to Western palates but the Chinese love the stuff - they are not big drinkers but they are steady drinkers - every Chinese grandmother consumes a little flask full every day. With a billion and a half people, that adds up to a lot of erguotou, even if a little flask sell for $1.
K
In this small things we see how large is China. The West is becoming marginal.
It was always the dream of the West since the industrial revolution to tap the Chinese market with its millions upon millions (now billions) of consumers. To some extent this dream is coming true but for the most part the Chinese masses (as opposed to the elites) prefer (and can only afford) Chinese products made to Chinese tastes.
When I was there I looked for "Russian baiju" (meaning vodka - baijiu means "white liquor" or spirits in general), because like most Westerners I found the taste of Chinese liquor to be detestable (the more expensive it was, the more it was repulsive to a Western palate) and I wasn't able to locate any in any normal shop. I'm sure you could find it somewhere in Shanghai or Beijing - maybe at the bar in a Western hotel, but it's not a mass market item - I never saw a single bottle of it and I looked. Chinese spirits were incredibly cheap - the cheapest grades were sold in plastic water bottles for not much more than bottled water.
Chinese beer and grape wine are done in Western styles - some are not that good but they are modeled after the Western products. But when it comes to liquor they don't seem interested at all in the Western types. They have their own rich history of Chinese spirits and are just not interested in ours.
K
Another data point - I just heard this morning that last month there were more iPhone and Android phone activations in China than in the US.
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