On Chinese New Year’s eve, I was invited to a Chinese colleague’s home for dinner. Not wanting to come empty-handed, I brought with me a bottle of good Cabernet Sauvignon. My hosts gladly accepted the wine, poured it and… added a good measure of Sprite to all the glasses.

This anecdote is not an isolated incident, but rather represents a country-wide phenomena in China. As part of the fast changes in China for the past few years, Chinese were quick to adopt western habits: among them culinary habits, such as wine and coffee. These habits, however, were adopted mostly because they were hip and stylish - indeed, most Chinese are completely unused to the flavors of these beverages, which are an acquired taste.

Coffee is a good example. Up to a few years back, all the “coffee shops” in China were more or less the same: often located in or near vacation resorts, these fancy restaurants had a list of around 10 types of coffee in their menu. These coffees were named “Blue Mountain” (always at the top of the list), “Columbian”, “Ethiopian”, “Brazilian” and so on. All of them tasted bad. The Chinese would fork up for a single cup of coffee the same amount of money that they had just paid for lunch. The shop owners could get away with serving bad coffee because the customers could not tell the difference anyway; I had even seen a waitress explaining to a patron that the white chunks floating in her coffee were perfectly normal and were the expected result of adding warm milk to coffee.

The coffee scene has recently started to improve slightly with the growing popularity of Starbucks. While in my opinion this chain (which is very successful in China) serves only medium-quality coffee, it had at least started acquainting Chinese with coffee-drinking culture. Nonetheless, it seems that most Chinese still go to drink in Starbucks because of fashion and not because of love of coffee; and so it would come as no surprise that one of the most popular drinks is their Caramel Macchiato, in which the sweet caramel almost completely overrides the taste of coffee. Recently, a few higher-quality coffee chains (a good example is the Italian chain Illy) have started establishing footholds in China, and I hope this means that Chinese are slowly beginning to develop an actual taste for coffee.

Which brings us back to wine, where there is still a long way to go. Adding Sprite to wine is extremely popular in China, up to the point that some bars offer “buy a bottle of wine, get a bottle of Sprite free” promotions. It is interesting to note that while “red wine” has the same meaning in Chinese as its English language counterpart, the word “white wine” actually refers to Baijiu, a traditional Chinese liquor made from sorghum. To refer to white wine as known in the west, you would have to say “white grape wine”. Although supermarkets will usually stock quite a few types of red wines, they will often not have even a single bottle of white wine.

To be perfectly honest, I can’t really blame the Chinese, as these sort of cultural gaps exist all over the world and work both ways. I can picture the dismay of a Chinese who brings high-grade Longjing tea to his western friend, only to see him sweetening it with sugar, or - heavens forbid - artificial sweetener…