Middle Class Boost China Wine Drinking

More and more Chinese drink wines, because it's fashionable and a kind of social status," said Zhou Ning, market strategy manager of a Beijing-based real estate company whose ads often feature young couples drinking wine or beautiful women lounging with a glass of wine. "We include wine in our ads because we want to tell potential customers that people living in our apartments are elegant and cultivated, and they pay attention to quality of life."
This country has a growing urban middle class; experts estimate that roughly 500,000 Chinese earn as much as $64,000 a year, though exact figures are hard to come by. Meanwhile, the tastes of the newly affluent in Beijing and Shanghai have driven sales of a wide variety of luxury items.