Ao Yun is the first luxury wine from China. It costs around $300 per bottle and it’s hard to get. Only 2,500 cases are produced each vintage and 30% of that is sold in China. When you think of high-end wine you think about places like France, Italy, or maybe Napa Valley. So is Ao Yun worth $300 a bottle?
There are three primary factors that determine the price of a bottle of wine: how much it costs to make each bottle, the weather — the amount of wine produced each vintage can vary dramatically, and sales and marketing costs.
Ao Yun received an average critic score of 90 out of 100. The company also has some firepower behind it: Moet Hennessey’s parent company LVMH also owns Dom Pérignon and Veuve Cliquot. In 2008, Moet Hennessy sent famed Australian winemaker Tony Jordan to China in search of a new terroir.
Four years later he found a perfect plot for a vineyard in a remote area of the Yunnan province, about 8,000 feet up in the Himalayan Mountains four hours from Shangri La.
The location had exactly what Moet Hennessey was looking for: A micro-climate with optimum temperature, high elevation, mountains to shield it from too much rain, strong sun and a good diversity of soils.
It makes sense for Moet Hennessey to look to China as a growth area. In 2018 China ranked fifth in terms of total wine consumption consuming 18 million hectoliters just behind Germany and Italy. One hectoliter is equal to one hundred liters. Americans drank some 33 million hectoliters of wine, which was good enough to put it in first place.
So far, all of the vintages of Ao Yun on offer were made with grapes from the pre existing vineyard, which were planted in the year 2000. Those bottles launched in 2016. Ao Yun is meant to prove that Chinese wine can compete with the best in the world.
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Is This Chinese Wine Worth $300 A Bottle?