Shanghai smugglers, and Vega Sicilia goes white

Smuggling charges for China's wine guides

On September 29 a court in Shanghai heard a smuggling case against the two companies behind TasteSpirit, one of China's best-known wine media and retail platforms, and five people, among them its editor-in-chief, Zhu Siwei, Vino Joy News reports. TasteSpirit says it reaches 12 million readers.

The charge is smuggling ordinary goods: lawful goods brought in without the full duty paid, with sentences that rise with the tax evaded, from up to three years to life. No verdict has been published but he motive is clear: China taxes imported wine at about 43%, counting duty, consumption tax and VAT, while Hong Kong and Macau charge nothing. In February customs in Zhuhai broke up a ring accused of moving more than half a million bottles of wine and spirits worth about $80 million. TasteSpirit is still selling wine, though its annual tasting has been put off until next year. Its controlling shareholder is not among the defendants.

It is the second case of its kind this autumn. On September 1 a Beijing court heard smuggling charges against the company behind Lady Penguin, the influencer who taught six million Chinese followers to drink wine and, at her peak, sold about $52 million of it a year. Wang Shenghan, the woman behind the name, is not a defendant. In October the same court opened an enforcement action against the company for 111.3 million yuan, about $16.6 million.

For a decade the French courted China's wine drinkers through guides like these. Now the guides are answering questions about how the wine came in.

The house of Único makes a white

Vega Sicilia has made red wine in Ribera del Duero since 1864. Its Único, released about a decade after the harvest, is the Spanish bottle the world's great cellars are built to hold: the 2016 sells for $465 to $825 at American retailers. On October 28 the house opened a winery in Galicia and presented its first Spanish white.

Deiva 2024 is an Albariño from Rías Baixas, the Atlantic corner of Spain just above Portugal. Pablo Álvarez, whose family bought Vega Sicilia in 1982 and who has run it since 1990, started buying vineyards there quietly in 2018 so as not to push up prices, paying as much as €240,000 a hectare, Vinetur reports. Eight years and about €20 million later, the group farms more than twenty hectares across five sites and has a winery of its own. Álvarez calls Albariño the best white grape in Spain for serious wine, and told the Spanish press this first vintage will be the worst they ever make.

The family has made white wine before, at Oremus in Tokaj, Hungary, but never in Spain. There will be just over 32,000 bottles, at €35 to €40 each, the winery says, on sale from February 1, 2027. Like the reds, they will be sold by allocation.

The number on the shelf

Marvin Shanken, who bought Wine Spectator in 1979 and ran it for the next 47 years, passed away on October 29 at 83. When he took it over it was a free newspaper handed out in San Diego wine shops, with about 5,000 readers. It now prints more than 385,000 copies, his magazine reports.

Robert Parker usually gets the credit for scoring wine out of 100, and his own verdict could move the price of a Bordeaux vintage. However, Shanken built something broader: a panel of editors tasting blind, region by region, and a magazine that carried their numbers to the mass market. The restaurant awards began in 1981 with 13 winners and now number more than 4,000. The Top 100 followed in 1988. A Wine Spectator 92 is the number on the shelf tag in a liquor store, and the Wine Experience, his yearly tasting, has raised more than $40 million for scholarships.

The system had its critics. The magazine takes advertising from the industry it rates, and its restaurant awards charge an entry fee, which a writer exposed in 2008 by winning one for a restaurant that didn't exist.

He passed away in the magazine's fiftieth year, days after its New York Wine Experience, and no successor has been named. The numbers on the shelf tags are still his.

Until Thursday.