China’s bottled wine production dipped by 10.4% in the first half of the year to 4.64 million hectolitres, despite the country’s growing vineyard production area.

Different from crop harvest, the wine production figures released by the National Statistics Bureau refers to the volume of bottled wines, explained professor Li Demei, China’s leading oenologist.

Xuanyan winery in Xinjiang

The country’s total wine production has been dropping since 2013 and last year its total production reached 11.37 million hectolitres, a 1% decline compared to 2015.

Based on the latest figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the country’s wine production from February to June (the January figure was not released) has seen negative growth each month, which will likely bring down the country’s total wine production number by the end of the year.

China, whose area under vine was ranked the second largest by OIV only after Spain, has planted 847,000 hectares of vineyards, following a steady increase since 2010. Spain’s area under vine is numbered at 975,000 hectares.

China’s main wine producing regions are in Ningxia, Shanxi and Xinjiang provinces in northwestern China and Shandong, Hebei province in eastern China as well as the emerging wine region in China’s southwestern Yunnan province.