Five questions with Helene Ponty
5th-gen Owner & China Importer, Vignobles Ponty
Helene is one of the only people in China importing her own family’s wines. Seriously! As large as the market is for imported wines is, there really aren’t that many family-owned wineries with wines distributed nationally in China — and if they are, it’s usually through a big national importer. I met with Helene while she was stateside, over what was likely the last bottle of Ponty in US (!) — a 2004 Chateau Grand Renouil from Canon-Fronsac.
1. Why China?
I was in Boston doing consulting for pharma companies, nothing related to wine. I wasn’t even thinking of getting into wine, because I saw it from my parents’ perspective — very technical, very Bordeaux-centric as a winemaker. Anyway, my boyfriend wanted to move to Beijing for an opportunity. At that point I had never been to Asia, at all — so I thought, since I’ve already been in the US for two years, it was time to see something different — let’s do it. He moved first while I stayed behind to finish a project.
I visited him for a week, at a pretty bad time — Beijing in November. The pollution was so bad, it looked like science fiction to me. I had never seen anything like that.
But still, in January, I moved to Beijing. At first I still didn’t know what I was going to do, and my boyfriend was kind of pushing me to look into wine. It’s not that I didn’t want to do it, but more refusing it because I kept approaching it from the perspective of a winemaker and the traditional way to sell wine — I didn’t want to do that.
Still, I kept thinking about it. I had some friends who were importing wine in China and helped me look into it… and it just kind of happened. It was low investment — we could ship a container of our own wine, my friend would store it for free — we pretty much just had to pay the import tax. I knew I could sell it, just from people I know telling me, “Oh I want to try your family’s wine.”
At the time I didn’t know what the prices were, so I was giving really cheap prices… everybody was happy, you know? I wasn’t really worried about selling it.
2. So you got your container into China and started your business — what was it like in the early days?
I would say the first year and a half was just trying to understand the market. At first, I wanted keep costs low, so I worked from home and did everything myself. I was just starting to learn Chinese, so even just going somewhere to print my brochures would take the whole afternoon — “I want A4 size!” “This is not properly formatted!”
I did a fair with Saint-Emilion Pomerol Fronsac — they organized an event in Chengdu to meet distributors — sponsored by the AOC, as long as you import wines from those regions. But that was tough, doing an event by myself, not really speaking Chinese.
At the time, there was pretty much no Canon-Fronsac wine in China — so at the event, it was just Saint-Emilion, Pomerol, Saint-Emilion, Pomerol… and then there was me, with my own wines from Canon-Fronsac that no one had heard of. Everyone was interested, and there were so many people at the booth, but I had no idea what any of them were saying. I was just trying to collect business cards, and say what I could. Afterwards, I had to follow up on QQ (note: Chinese messaging app) because it was easier than calling — on QQ, I can copy-paste, Baidu translate*, see what it says, respond, translate it back to Chinese… it would take three hours just to get to “this is my price list,” “no discount!” It was the worst.
At the same time, I felt that because I did it, people appreciated that I was really trying hard, and they kind of saw that they were getting a wine at the beginning of what we were doing in China. We got our first few distributors like this.
After a few months, after I saw that it was going ok, I hired my assistant, and it was like ah! My life got so much easier.
*Google is blocked in China. The struggle is real! BTW, so is medium.com
At the beginning, we were still trying different price points, different stories, and taking into account what people at the fairs would react well to. After a year and a half, it all kind of clicked.
Something we always talk about is “handcrafted.” Handcrafted is kind of a hot term in the US, but in China, nobody would talk about handcrafted wines. We explained to people what it’s like to hand harvest from small lots, using no machines, and just my dad tasting and deciding what he wanted to do with the wine. Basically, the philosophy of how we make wine very traditionally, rather than what the big wineries do. Now, more people are asking us about what handcrafted means — they really care about it.
Another thing, for the distributors — at first, we were called 康廷酒业 (Ponty Wine Company), and then we changed to 康廷酒庄 (Ponty Winery), because they didn’t know we were a winery. I didn’t realize that at first, but we figured out that distributors prefer to work directly with wineries, not an importers. It’s just little things like this that you wouldn’t necessarily know at first, but attending events, you learn that it makes a really big difference.
3. What’s something weird you experienced that would only happen in China?
Something I always find funny — at trade events, particularly in the smaller cities, where the wine knowledge is still not that good — some people would come up and be very assertive in how they behave with the wine: they’d take the bottle, pour the wine themselves, smell it a bit, and be like “ugh, no, this is bad.” Then they’d say something that makes you realize that they don’t really know what they’re talking about, like “it’s way too sour,” — well, it’s Bordeaux, it’s not supposed to be sweet. At first, I didn’t know how to react, because they’d say things that seemed really mean — your wine is bad, it’s too sour, too bitter. I mean, one thing I’m confident about is the quality of my wine. So, even if I knew they were only saying those things to make it seem like they knew a lot about wine, I still didn’t know how to respond to that.
After a few times, I realized that with these people, you sort of have to get back at them. One time I just got tired of it, and I was like, “You’re just saying bullshit right now, because this wine is not sour — this is how Bordeaux tastes. This is actually a good wine.”
He replies, “Oh, ok… how much is it?”
So I realized they just want you to be assertive too, to show that you know what you’re talking about. That’s what they’re waiting for.
4. You’ve talked a lot about the foreigner experience — do you feel like being a woman has had an impact on how things have gone? For example, guys are expected to pound the liquor…
Yes — one, it helps me stand out. Usually I’m the only woman, or at least the only French woman. As for the drinking, yes, for women, people are more forgiving in that you can say “I don’t want to drink,” or “I can’t drink that much.”
But… for me, I can’t really do that. I feel like, even more, people want me to show that I can drink. If you’re a guy, you’re kind of expected to — but for me, they’re not sure. And the fact that I can drink is important, because they want to know they can bring me to client dinners and be able to drink with the guys.
5. What advice would you give for a smaller winery looking to get into the China market?
You need to be willing to invest a lot of time and a lot of money. People used to think of China as the El Dorado — like, “it might be difficult, but we can make a lot of money.” That’s said less now, but still, I don’t think people realize how difficult it actually is. It’s not just about attending a fair to meet some distributors, and immediately they’ll buy containers of your wine. It doesn’t work like that.
The main thing is, once you have found your importer, it’s not finished. You have to go to China often and try to understand what they do. I see so many people — they sell their wine to China, but they have no idea how much it’s sold for, where it’s sold, nothing. Try to understand these things, actually talk to them, ask questions.
The other thing that’s so important is the control of your market. I know this one winery, their wine was on Taobao for 99 yuan (note: should have been 200+). That’s because in Bordeaux most wineries sell through a negociant (export broker), and they sell to anyone who wants to buy, so it ends up online and screws up all your other channels. A lot of wineries don’t realize this — in China, distributors are really paranoid — they want exclusivity, always worried about others selling at a lower price. If you want to sell online, that’s fine, but if you want to sell to distributors, don’t put it online. Do your homework, spend time there, understand the market, and come up with a strategy. I feel like you could say the same for any market, but with China, it’s even more like that.
Editor’s note
I went in thinking I would hear some funny drinking stories with Chinese uncles picking on Helene, but it turned into a holy cow she really pulled this off kind of thing (starting to see a bit of a trend here with these interviews). See, the cool thing about Helene’s story is that it starts out similar to lots of other wineries looking to get into China, but the other stories end prematurely — at finding an importer, at negotiations, at logistics, at marketing strategy, at distribution, at continuing the relationship past the first shipment. Every hurdle to clear is a potential end if one doesn’t aggressively stay on top of things, and it’s just staggering to me that Helene pulled this off without even knowing the language.
The other thing that stood out for me, probably because it’s in such contrast with Jason’s story, was that this wasn’t a labor of love. Selling wine in China wasn’t some lifelong passion for Helene — the opportunity just sort of presented itself and she took it, and did the things she needed to do to see it through. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the thrill and romance of being an entrepreneur that we forget that success comes from spending hours on Baidu translate, from attention to detail, from choosing to do the right thing and not the easy thing, even if it means grinding it out over months and months.
Want to try Helene’s wine? If you’re in the EU, try contacting the winery via the information on their website. If you’re in China, look up the “Ponty 康廷酒庄” Official Account on WeChat. And, if you’re in the US — sorry, we drank the last bottle, and it’s not imported here. One more picture for jealousy purposes:
