Last month a Beijing-based billionaire splashed out £250,000 on 27 bottles of wine. A far cry from what the man and woman in the Beijing street spends. At two and half glasses per head, what they drink is largely the cheap, £1-a-bottle home grown brands from big wine companies like Changyu, Great Wall, Dynasty, Huaxia and Vini Suntime, the latter, one of the fastest growing wineries in China, established by the People’s Liberation Army. In China, almost everyone can afford a bottle of putao jiu. Along with hong jiu (red alcohol) and bai jiu (white alcohol), putao jiu, or grape alcohol, is the closest the Chinese come to a word for wine.

Needless to say, the expensive stuff bought by the Beijing entrepreneur did not come from a Chinese grape production factory (China’s unglamorous term for a winery) but was Romanée-Conti, the world’s most expensive wine. Despite the glaring inequality between the prices of everyday Chinese plonk and the French imports increasingly seen on the lists of fancy Shanghai and Beijing restaurants, one thing is clear: wine, whether of the Chinese or imported variety, has become a booming business in China with consumption growing each year by a healthy 10 - 15 per cent.

Health was one of the kick-starters of the new boom when the government leapt aboard the red-wine-is-good-for-your-heart bandwagon in the mid-1990s. Before that, the first Great Leap Forward was made when China opened its doors to the outside world in 1978. Overseas companies Rémy Martin (Dynasty), Pernod-Ricard (Dragon Seal), Seagram (Summer Palace) teamed up with locals, bringing technical know-how, modern equipment and European vine varieties with them to steer the Chinese sweet tooth towards drier but fruity Western-style wines. The second Great Leap Forward came as a result of government encouragement of winemaking in the early 1990s as a way of cutting down on the use of wheat for alcohol production.

Most vineyards in China are state or collectively owned and subdivided into individual units of less than half a hectare. With more than 100 wineries opening since 1996, there are nearly 500 wineries now in China spread far and wide throughout this sprawling giant. Changyu is the big one in the Shandong Peninsula south-east of Beijing, where a similar latitude to California combined with a maritime climate makes this, monsoons notwithstanding, one of the most suitable regions for wine production. In the north west of Xinjiang Province, where winters are bitterly cold, Vini Suntime manages 10,000 hectares of vineyards.

East of Beijing in an area known as ‘the oriental Bordeaux’ for its high concentration of wineries, Hebei province is home to Bodega Langes, a 200 hectare vineyard-cum-hotel-restaurant-vino-therapy spa owned by the Austrian crystal family Swarovski (who also own Norton in Argentina). In Shanxi province south-west of Beijing, Grace has established a reputation for quality wine also based on premium French grapes. The latest growth area is Yunnan in China’s southwest highland province, where extensive plantings of cabernet sauvignon and other classic French varieties supplement the local Chinese grapes, Rose Honey and Crystal.

As they swell with national pride over the forthcoming Games, the Chinese plan to expand wineries such as Dynasty, Changyu and Great Wall to cope with the growing shelf space of the burgeoning Wal-Marts, Carrefours and Metros. Since China drinks almost all the wine it produces and its thirst for wine appears insatiable, the one dark cloud on the horizon comes from critics who suggest that Chinese brands are poor value for money. Hardly surprising when imported bulk wine can still be blended with native-grape wines to end up labelled cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay. China’s wine needs to up the quality ante, but as its consumers start switching from tea and beer with their meals to wine, both domestic wines and imports from Mouton Cadet to Mouton Rothschild look like becoming an essential staple of the Chinese diet. Now that’s equality for you.