Italian wine market in China: defining the right approach – A study on levers and criticalities to set up a winning strategy for Italian wineries

This dissertation has been developed with the aim of investigating the first market in the world, China, in one of the sectors that best represents the Italian style and the Made in Italy: the wine market. The Chinese wine market has a huge prospective for the Italian wine producers, since in the last few years it has been having an extremely relevant development. However, just a few are the Italian wineries that consider China as an opportunity and contemplate the Chinese market as a market where Italian wine has to participate in. Going through the paper, the reasons why China is for Italian producers a great opportunity, especially in terms of profits, will be investigated and brought to light. In order to do so, an introductive analysis of Chinese wine market will be presented, in order to provide the lector with an idea of the context and all the tools he needs to understand the matter of debate. Furthermore, case studies of Italian wineries which have or had contacts with the Chinese wine market will be presented. Some of them are present in China with their wines, someone else are not present, whereas others are still trying to penetrate it. Using such case studies’ results and experts’ in the fields opinions as references, the reasons for which China still remain an extremely tough market for Italian producers and Italian wine will be explained. The main criticalities and strategic drivers will be disclosed, in order to endow Italian wineries with a reference background that they can use to perfect their approach to the Chinese wine market and to set up a successful strategy.