Meiyu Li, the wine director of Park Hyatt Beijing Hotel, a five-star hotel shares with us how she is selecting wines.
VINEXPO: Can you make a self-Introduction?
Meiyu LI : ” Hello everyone, I’m LI Meiyu. I am the wine director of Park Hyatt Beijing Hotel. Park Hyatt Beijing Hotel belongs to Hyatt Group, and is a luxury five-star hotel, it is also a business luxury hotel in Beijing CBD area. Our guests are very international-oriented. As a result of their international tastes our wine list selection pays close attention to balance of diversity and balance of old and new world wines.”
VINEXPO: How do you see the development of Chinese liquor market and what will be the consumption trends?
ML: “Wine sales accounted for a very large proportion in our hotel’s total turnover. We sold about fifty thousand bottles of wine in 2015 alone. The development of the whole industry is very promising. Although the growth rate of the Chinese liquor market, affected by the environment in the past two years, It’s declining on a certain percentage, the overall trend is still upward especially in the food industry, in our hotel you can clearly see that although customers rarely ordered wine when consuming in our “China Grill” restaurant seven or eight years ago. Now almost everyone will order a bottle of wine, or at least a glass of wine for their meal.
Wine consuming has become our customers’ and guests’ usual concept of consumption.
I think now our guests’ concept of consumption is no longer as blind as before. They no longer blindly by certain chateaux or well-known brands. They now tend to become rational consumers especially for some very cost-effective wine they are very fond of them. For example 3-4 years ago, people blindly bought French wines, while now
We see more and more guest drinking some New World wines, produced in California, Australia, Chile, Spain, Italy, and even Austria.
They are very willing to communicate with the Sommelier and try some new niche grape varieties or niche boutique wineries. So I think these are all proofs that people now have a more mature concept of wine consumption.
I think this is overall a very good thing. Being a Sommelier myself, I believe this is also an encouragement to all Sommeliers.”
VINEXPO: Why you attend Vinexpo? What kind of experience make you interested in visiting Vinexpo again?
ML: “I think Vinexpo is a great event in the wine industry that brings together elites from various wineries and wine regions around the world in just a few days.
I believe attending Vinexpo will bring you very large harvest. I still remember a few years ago when I attended Vinexpo as a student, stayed in the exhibition from morning to night and tasted hundreds of wines produced around the world with various wineries, wine regions, and grape varieties every day. For me that was a tremendous harvest.
Today, working as a sommelier, I think the greatest achievement I get from attending Vinexpo is the updated information.
The content Vinexpo is different every year, with different participating wineries.
Thus the products of each winery in different years can all be experienced and well tasted there. At the same time there will be many lectures during the exhibition, big or small and top elites in the wine industry sharing different information, that are all very beneficial for us.
Last but not least, attending Vinexpo enables us to meet old friends as well as new friends!”
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Cet article [INTERVIEW] How does a luxury five-star hotel choose its wine list ? est apparu en premier sur Beverage Insight.