In the back corner of the local supermarket chain store, behind the tissue and toilet paper and adjacent to a rattling freezer full of ice cream, are a half dozen bottles of "grape wine" barely recognizable for the layer of dust that covered them.
That was five years ago. The bottles are still there, but beside them now stand several new bottles from France, Germany, Italy, Australia and a host of other nations -- and these aren't staying on the shelf nearly as long as the dusty originals.
"A big part of the reason wines have started selling well in Taiwan in recent years is because we now have wines that are worth drinking," said Marianni Tsai, head of wine and gourmet foods for Eslite Corporation's line of luxury goods. "If you tried drinking one of those bottles of generic red wine, of course you'd stick to rice wine or beer."
Another reason for wine's increased acceptance, according to her and other sommeliers, is availability. Where there were once few companies importing wine to Taiwan, now there are several. The competition, they say, has driven down prices on a product that used to demand a premium.
"The market is bigger now than Hong Kong," said Gregoire de Boisse, a French national who moved to Taiwan five years ago to open his Sommelier Wine Expert shop. "We say the industry is seven years on the back. Soon it will be much more developed."
De Boisse, who attended a wine university in his native Lyon, came to Taiwan following what he said was one of the biggest wine deals in history: "In 1998 there were 32 million bottles of wine imported here. It was far too much and there was a lot of spoilage and dumping."
Still, he said, the deal signaled the opening of a new market for vintners and merchants alike. De Boisse now sells an estimated 60,000 bottles a year to hotels, restaurants and a growing list of individual clientele. He points to his stock of some 10,000 bottles of wine from hundreds of vineyards around the world. All of it, he says, will be gone in a few months. While most of the wines de Boisse and Tsai sell are uncorked a short time after they're purchased, both cite a increasing number of customers interested in starting collections.
"When Taiwanese first started becoming wealthy [during the "economic miracle" of the 1980s] cognac became the status-symbol drink," Tsai said. "Now we're seeing more people interested in fine wine and some who are willing to spend serious amounts of money to acquire prized wines."
To protect their investments, Tsai advises storing the bottles in climate-control boxes that protects the wine from fluctuations of temperature and keeps them out of Taiwan's often stifling humidity, which can have harmful effects.
There is also the problem of transportation. Besides temperature
fluctuations and sunlight, heat and vibration are wines' worst enemies.
"All wines are shipped here," de Boisse said. "They spend three weeks at sea in specially insulated containers and, we're told, are kept at a place on the ship where movement is minimal. But it's impossible to control this."
The exception, he said, is Beaujolais nouveau which, if it came by ship, wouldn't be Beaujolais nouveau by the time it arrived.
To celebrate the season of the wine notorious for next-day hangovers, de Boisse throws a party that in the past has been attended by several hundred people. The event is a special edition of the wine parties he throws on a monthly basis for his clients and potential customers interested in learning more about wine and finding wines they like.
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