Winner of the André Simon Drink Book Award
Winner of the Louis Roederer International Wine Book of the Year Award
Named Among the Best Books of the Year in Financial Times
Named a Best Wine Book by The Wall Street Journal and San Jose Mercury News
"Delectable reading.”―The Wall Street Journal (The Best Books for Wine Lovers)
"Riveting....[Mustacich has] a deep understanding of the wildly differing but now heavily entwined cultures of Bordeaux and China."―Jancis Robinson, Financial Times
“As a wine correspondent in Bordeaux for the past decade, Mustacich has compiled an impressive amount of research on the product’s global flow, recording comments from both tight-lipped châteaux owners and Chinese businessmen.”―The New Republic
“Fascinating…. Mustacich's excellent narrative…depicts both the frenetic unpredictability of life in China and the befuddlement of the Bordelais as their clubby world is overrun by people whose language they do not speak and whose motivations the do not understand.”―The Street.com
"This is a major contribution to wine literature. I can’t think of any books since George M. Taber’s The Judgement of Paris (2006) and Elin McCoy’s The Emperor of Wine (2006) that have dealt with such a pivotal moment in wine in such a thorough and professional way. . . . This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Bordeaux really works – and who wants to understand how China is changing the world of wine."―Meininger's Wine Business International
“You think you're Bordeaux obsessed? Nothing compares to China's unquenchable thirst for these storied French wines. Suzanne Mustacich delves into this lust with historical references and stories of the famous first growths, importers and collectors.”―San Jose Mercury News (5 Best Wine Reads)
"Suzanne is an experienced journalist and writer, and a great storyteller…Thirsty Dragon tells a story…of what happens when history, tradition, commerce, greed and politics merge, seen through the lives of a great cast of characters. Reading this book is like walking alongside the winemakers, market makers, politicians, investigators and salespeople as they live through one of the most amazing, and intense, changes in the balance of power in the world."―Thirst for Wine
“Mustacich's tale will hit a sweet spot. A well-researched look into yet another global market undergoing significant growth due to Chinese businesses and consumers.”―Kirkus Reviews
“I enjoyed reading Thirsty Dragon, or should I say, savoring it. It goes far beyond the typical tale of Bordeaux wine connoisseurship. It's a riveting roller coaster ride through the past decade of the West's relations with China, offering a front-row seat on China's relentless rise to economic power, while exposing a bitter residue of counterfeiting and corruption, all packaged in the form of an easy-to-drink glass of fine wine.” ―William Echikson, author of Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Revolution
“China's fraught encounter with Bordeaux is usually depicted as a tale of mutual incomprehension, but Suzanne Mustacich reveals a more surprising story: In their appetites for risk, wealth, and prestige, the two sides have more in common than they ever imagined. For those who dream of fortune in China, this is a tale of business, hubris, and discovery.” ―Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
“Thirsty Dragon is an intriguing, comprehensive, often suspenseful, and sometimes hilarious account of the unlikely courtship dance between Bordeaux and China. Suzanne Mustacich spares neither side as she unravels the history of this unholy alliance.” ―Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar
“Thirsty Dragon is a fascinating look inside China through an unusual, and illuminating prism - wine. The story of China's growing appetite for wine and the storms of adventure, greed, corruption and folly that it unleashes are well-told in this book. I found myself learning more about China from this ground-up approach than from many books that look at the big picture. Worth reading, especially with a nice glass of wine at your side.” ―Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World and The Future of Freedom
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Thirsty Dragon
China's Lust for Bordeaux and the Threat to the World's Best Wines
By Suzanne MustacichHenry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2015 Suzanne Mustacich
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62779-087-1
Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Author's Note,
Maps,
1. First Growths,
2. No Boundaries,
3. Planting Vines,
4. Lucky Red,
5. Château Mania,
6. All in a Name,
7. Standoff,
8. Shifting Winds,
9. Gan Bei,
10. Adjust Measures to Local Conditions,
Epilogue: Shangri-La,
Notes,
Index,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1First Growths
Uncertainty hung over the Place de Bordeaux in the early spring of 2009.
Jean-Pierre Rousseau hoped the First Growth estates would release their prices early, setting the tone and tempo for that year's sales campaign. During a bullish year, the five most prestigious Bordeaux châteaux — known as the First Growths — sat back and waited, calculating exactly how high the prices for their wines might go, dragging out the campaign into late June, when everyone would rather be at the beach. During a bad year — and the campaign for the 2008 vintage was shaping up to be particularly bad — the merchants hoped the First Growths would release their prices early, because there was no campaign to speak of, and the pricing hierarchy for Bordeaux's wines was set from the top down. This year, however, banks were collapsing in the United States and Europe and the economy was in free fall; there was really no telling what the First Growths would do.
The Place de Bordeaux isn't a square or a leafy promenade or even a physical building; it is the virtual exchange through which Bordeaux's wines have been sold for centuries, and Rousseau was a négociant, which meant he was a wholesale wine merchant. As was the custom, he bought wine from the châteaux through a licensed intermediary, called a courtier, who brokered the deals. Courtiers were famously tight-lipped, taking 2 percent on every transaction for settling the price and amount of wine — called the allocation — granted by a winegrower to a négociant, and guaranteeing the quality and provenance of the wine. The arm's-length nature of the deals buffered some of the natural suspicion and animosity between growers and négociants. For as long as they had been trading, more than eight hundred years, the négociants tried to drive down prices, and the growers tried to push them up. The négociants needed lower prices to ensure that they could sell the wines to their clients around the world without losing money. Some vintages might be sold instantly, but others might not find a customer until they were in bottles and ready to ship, two years down the line. And some might not sell even then.
In the spring of 2009, the courtiers and négociants fervently hoped they were not going down in flames. For the past several months, the market for Bordeaux wine had been collapsing, a casualty of the global economic crisis. Importers couldn't place orders because their credit lines were frozen. Restaurants closed their doors for lack of customers. Collectors, hit hard for cash, emptied the contents of their cellars at fire-sale prices. And for the first time since the Asian banking crisis of the late 1990s, canceled orders were flooding into the Place de Bordeaux. In a matter of days, the châteaux would offer six hundred million bottles of their new vintage
