Q&8 | 25 Years, 10,000 Students, Countless China Wine Lessons

Twenty-five years. Ten thousand students. Countless China wine lessons.

A wine appreciation course launched in China in 1998 turned into a quarter-century experiment that reveals trends in student preferences.

Professor Ma Huiqin has led that course for two semesters per year at China Agricultural University with students from up to 19 schools in Beijing.* That totals more than 10,000 students, some going on to important positions in China’s alcohol business.

Ma talks about this and much more in the Q&8 below, including the new generation of drinkers, red-white wine trends and the role of imported and local labels.

Also check out Ma’s website here and past Grape Wall posts featuring her thoughts on Australian wine reentering China, her joining the wine bureau in Ningxia and her 2012 take on that region’s emergence.

* The only break Ma took was for post-doctoral work in Stellenbosch, South Africa, even maintaining the class during the COVID era, in some cases delivering wine samples to students.

Let’s start with the basics. How many students are there, what majors do they come from and what material does the course cover?
 
We have around 200 students per semester. For the fall semester, the students come from different majors from 16 colleges at my school, China Agricultural University. CAU not only has majors in agriculture but also in business, economics, electronics, even vehicle and computer science.
 
For the spring semester, we have students from 18 other universities in the Haidian District in Beijing. This means an even wider range of majors, although we see the most students from the language university and the athletic school, which is close to our campus.
 
The general topics are how to taste wine, the different types of wine and a basic knowledge of winemaking and grape growing. These are the ABCs of an introductory wine appreciation course. We also cover wine history.
 
Students also have their own sets of glasses to bring to class. In the beginning, we used a set of four ISO standard-sized glasses, but in recent years we changed to two bigger higher-quality glasses, which work better for us.

China is often stereotyped as a red wine nation but we now see strong growth for white wine. What trends have you seen with your students? Are there any particular styles they enjoy?

In our class, we also see this change through the wine selections of the last 10 or 15 years. At the very beginning, I chose the wine. But starting 15 years ago, my graduate students began to play a bigger role, and in recent years they have made most of the decisions. In the last two years, since the end of COVID restrictions, we have been tasting far more white wines than in the past.

For every lecture, there is at least one white wine and sometimes two. I also found that when my students make the selection, they almost always add sweet wine.

For white wines, Chardonnay was initially the easiest one to find but in recent years we have chosen a lot of aromatic wines, such as Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc. There is quite a good range we can afford and the students like it.

As for the sweet wines, these are more welcomed by the class so I think my graduate students are trying to make them happy. Many students like Moscato d’Asti and similar sweet wines along with the aromatic white wines.

As for red wine, it still takes up about half of the list, much less than earlier years. The tannins in red wines generally made them hard for many students to enjoy. But now students have more experience and are more accepting of red wine.

For international wines, we also have more choices. Previously, when we thought about foreign wines, it was French wine, usually very cheap wine, or Chilean. Now, we include more wine from other countries because they are relatively inexpensive and quite competitive.

That means French wine is a smaller portion of our selection, and Australia wines, too. Now we also taste some Italian and Spanish and other wines. In today’s class, for example, we tasted three wines from South Africa.

When you started, there were few international-quality Chinese wines, but now we have a wealth of choices. I wonder how your students have reacted to local wine over the years?

The quality of the Chinese wines has increased very much in the past ten to fifteen years. Still, I don’t think the students really care if a wine is Chinese or imported. What they care about is if it brings pleasure and if it is a price they can afford.

You told me recently about a shift in student attitudes toward wine, namely, students used to learn what is good wine and now many of them define it themselves. Could you talk about this and other differences in the current generation?

The students are more confident now. In the past, they joined the course to gain wine knowledge, but now some students are looking for enjoyment, a kind of escape from campus life. They drink and they ask for wines they like.

This also seems to be part of a shift in attitudes to education. When I started 25 years ago, the way to spread information was very different from today, when students are flooded with all kinds of information and knowledge. In the same way, the market is now flooded with wine choices.

The role of teaching is changing and I am thinking how to do wine education for this generation. After I teach something, I encourage students to use their phones to research and find answers themselves, to discover what they think is good. For example, they can taste wine in class, then use the Internet to check prices, see other people’s comments and so on, to gather information to use before buying.

Some students initially had no experience with wine but eventually went on to work in the business, including as distributors, salespeople, marketers and educators. What kind of influence do these former students have in the China wine business?

Yes, many of my students are still in the wine business. Gus Zhu became an MW and stayed in the wine business. Gao Wei, Guo Wenjuan and many other students are in the wine business.

Many of them graduated during the booming of the Chinese economy and the enlargement of the wine business, including education. It was a lucky generation, at least as far as the beginning of their careers.

They have become a very active part of the China wine business. For example, Wenjuan is a very important manager in the team of [KOL] ‘Lady Penguin’, and even today a high-profile influencer asked if there are any similar graduate students who can join her team.

However, in the last five or six years, not many students have joined the wine industry as it is not very strong now.  But I don’t teach this course for students to join the wine industry. It’s an appreciation course and I hope many of them will continue to enjoy wine and become good customers.

You have had many guest speakers for your class over the years. Who are some of the people who have come to the university?

Yes, we have many guest speakers. They are in general wine educators. Some are from universities, like Li Demei, others are from private companies, like Fongyee Walker, and still others are from distributers, like Jim Yang. In general, they are not salespeople, but instead play a role in the area of education.

When students finish your wine appreciation course, what do you hope they have learned?

I want my students to have some knowledge of wine, to have tasting experience, so they know the differences among red wines and white wines. To have some skill in purchasing wine, to know a Sauvignon Blanc from a Chardonnay, to know what to expect from a Pinot Gris or a Marselan. To have a positive impression from smelling, tasting and understanding wine, and to have more confidence.

More than that, education is not only about the wine itself, it is also about history and culture. I hope my students will be more open to the world and the many places that make good wines with different styles and different customs for drinking it. I really hope they learn something from the cultural side of the course.

Looking back over the past 25 years, what are you most proud of in terms of your wine course? And for people just now starting to teach students about wine, what advice would you give them?
 
I’m most proud that this course not only talks about the technical side of wine, it also talks about culture, about humanity, about tolerance and understanding people. Wine is something to share and talk about. I can also teach my students to enjoy food, to enjoy wine, to enjoy life.
 
And for the second part of this question, my student Emma Song, after her post-doc this semester, started to teach a wine culture and appreciation course in Yunnan Agricultural University. This is her first semester and I’m very proud of her.
 
She is starting to teach in very different circumstances than I did 25 years ago. And based on my experience, I would say that we teach the students but we also learn from the students. What do people need to learn? What do they want to learn? And how are the circumstances changing?
 
For these new teachers, it might be more than instructing, it might also be sharing and learning together.

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