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The renowned Viennese winery "Mayer am Pfarrplatz" has had a lot of experience with exports to China. Their export manager Paul Kiefer explains what vintners have to watch out for.
And he warns that neither purchase quantities nor investments can be reliably planned for China. But at the moment, business is going well for him there.

The expansion of wine sales to China worked quickly for Mayer at Pfarrplatz in 2013. It went well. But suddenly a plagiarism of the winery's brand appeared on the market. The winery name was copied, but the composer Johann Strauss was depicted on the label. The original still bears a picture of Ludwig van Beethoven, who had lived for a time in the Mayer's main house on Pfarrplatz. This had never happened before in Austria, so not only the wine media but also the daily newspapers reported on the case. Shortly afterwards, even the Chinese embassy in Vienna offered to mediate. "In the Chinese legal system, there was little chance of clarification at the time; it was not worth the high financial outlay for us," says Paul Kiefer, export manager of the renowned company. The fact that only the best and most sought-after wines are counterfeited in China, as country experts like to point out, was little consolation for those involved. They decided to stop exporting. In the meantime, however, the winery is again working with an importer in China. But the basic problem remains, Paul Kiefer emphasises: "We don't know who buys our locally. We only very rarely know the sommeliers who work with our wines, the distribution structures are hardly traceable."

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