Wasn’t there some medieval or Renaissance noble who declared sugar water (as in literally, an aqueous solution of sucrose) to be the finest drink ever?
I lived in China from 2011 to 2016, and I never found a good Chinese wine. There were very expensive Chinese wines in the Metro store, but I never gambled my hard-earned RMB on them. Reviews of Chinese wines were hard to come by in English, and so nothing was there to help me.
I read a feature article in an airline magazine about a couple of Chinese wineries, but I failed to write them down (no, not “Great Wall”). Run by Europeans of note, they were supposedly good. I know I’ve also read about some Chinese wines winning international awards.
Restaurants that served wine were generally foreign or Western or 5 star hotels, and so usually only served imported wines.
Imported wine was dirt cheap, and I was able to keep wine a heck of a lot cheaper than I can here in Michigan. There are some really good Australian, New Zealand, and South African wines. My “budget” wine was only 32 RMB and came from Italy, and in general, I really, really detest Italian wines, but this was good for the price.
Except that wine making is both an art and a very sophisticated science, and the techniques, knowledge, equipment have advanced enormously over the years, even over recent years. In many cases even the grape varietals themselves have been cross-bred and improved to better adapt to climate, soil, and desired wine characteristics. By comparison, ancient wine was extremely crude stuff, often contaminated, poorly preserved so it was either too young or too oxidated, and frequently mixed with other flavorings or cut with water (even seawater) to make it more palatable. This article talks about what wine was like from Roman through Medieval times, and it generally sounds like awfully putrid stuff. It did start to improve in the Medieval era, but it was still very primitive, and the cold period of the Little Ice Age from around the 14th century through to the latter part of the 19th might have had an adverse effect on viticulture in much of Europe.
There’s a documentary film called Red Obsession that talks about the growing Chinese demand for good wines, particularly French reds, that’s been fueled by growing prosperity in China. This suggests that they don’t have a lot of good stuff domestically, and it’s been raising fears that this might create scarcities and drive up prices.
Eh, it might mean that they don’t have good stuff domestically, or it might be that people are looking more for the reputation of French wines than they are for the actual product. Not all wine afficionados are snobs, but there’s certainly quite a bit of wine snobbery out there.