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Beijing - China's rapidly growing urban middle class has fuelled a boom in wine sales over the past decade and offered a lifeline to ailing European vineyards, especially in France.
That lifeline could be jeopardised if Beijing decided to impose tariffs on EU wines, analysts said on Thursday.
"The EU countries were the first to introduce and import wines to China," said Deng Yutian, general manager of importer and distributor Blue Beacon Fine Wines.
"The French government and district trading associations made collective efforts to promote their products, leaving Chinese consumers with a strong first impression," Deng said, adding that other EU wine-producing nations were slower to enter the Chinese market.
"Countries like Italy produce wines that are equal in quality to the French wines, but their sales fall far behind," he said.
France is Europe's biggest supplier of wine to China with exports last year reaching a value of €546m the European Commission's data shows.
Spain and Italy are also among the top exporters.
But China said earlier that it would carry out an anti-subsidy and anti-dumping investigation into EU wine, a day after the commission imposed duties on imports of Chinese solar panels after finding evidence of below-cost selling by Chinese producers.
The Chinese investigation was a cause of "legitimate concern" to French producers, who count on new markets like China's to keep 500 000 people employed, the French Federation of Wines and Spirits Exporters said.
Subsidised
Overall, EU producers shipped 257 million litres of wine to mainland China last year, the EU statistics agency, Eurostat, said.
China was the third-largest consumer of EU wine outside the bloc, behind only the United States and Russia.Chinese data showed 68% of wine imports came from the European Union.
If China imposes additional duties on EU wines, pushing up their prices, 'new world' wines would gain market share, Deng said.
"The current tariff is around 47%", he said.
If the Chinese investigation concludes that EU wines had been illegally dumped or subsidised, the tariff could increase to about 70%, making EU wines "really too expensive," Deng said.
China is already the world's largest wine market and remains the fastest growing market, according to London-based International Wine and Spirit Research.
Consumption in China rose by 142% from 2007 and 2011 and was forecast to rise by another 40% by 2016, the research group said in a report for the Vinexpo wine trade fair.
Online sales in China accounted for 27% of total wine sales in 2011 and were expected to jump to 47% in 2016 with sales at supermarkets also soaring, the Vinexpo report said.
Avoiding the cheaper wines offered by shops and online retailers, some wealthy Chinese wine drinkers and dealers travel to Hong Kong or Europe to buy high-end vintages.
