I’ve spent some time digging into the background of the company behind ChinaWine.org.cn. What I’ve got and what I’m thinking is:

These people should be pretty new in the wine game. The domain name sounds very familiar because it’s too generic, like many other of its peers playing with terms like “china” and “wine”. Because of the weird translation, I’m not entirely sure what kind of service they are proposing to Belgravia. For example, they mentioned pushing Belgravia to key business decision makers via “corporate Intranet system”. So far as I know, there is no such thing as a huge “intranet” connecting and only connecting key business HQs throughout China. This point is further proved after I traced the domain name through China’s extensive website (“Internet Content Provider”, aka ICP) registration and management legal system. My speculations are:

1. The guys behind ChinaWine.org.cn has something next to zero technical capability. The domain name and ICP authorization were all acquired through an unheard of IT company located in Hebei Province (very close to Beijing). The domain was registered to, and according to the legal documents managed by (in theory), by that Hebei company, and very likely had the entire website constructed by that company as well. Suppose if ChinaWine guys have any access to this shadow broker intranet that connects big cheeses all across the country, they should have built the website by itself, or at least hired a better agent.

2. There are many more websites registered to the same IT company in Hebei, several of them marked as managed by the very same guy in charge of ChinaWine.org.cn. None of them related to wines. Some of these sites are:

    – chuguo.org.cn A portal style website with all sorts of information concerning working or studying abroad.

    – http://www.uqchina.cn/ A self-claimed official Chinese website of the University of Queensland (English version available)

    – http://www.glionchina.cn/ A self-claimed official Chinese website of the Glion Institute of Higher Education (English version available)

And a tour through ChinaWine.org.cn has made the following points clear:

1. The service of this website is exactly like a Craigslist for wines. Instead of opening up to everyone, this site only serves *companies*, be it wine producer, retailer, reseller, wholeseller, or buyer. There’s nothing more to it. A member could post want-to-sell or want-to-buy kind of advertisements there for others to see, but that’s about the whole thing.

2. The entire sources of income for the website are:

    – Selling banner ads on its front page. 11 of them in all, in various size. No price given. Presumably need to contact them for a price.

    – Selling “integrated online marketing campaign” to members. No price or explanation about what exactly is “integrated online marketing campaign” given.

    – There is a navigation tab for an “online shopping” page, but so far it’s given just a blank link. Intention of online sales failed to be implemented so far.

3. There are sections about basic wine knowledge, wine industry news, and upcoming exhibition. But these are basically must-have stuff on any Chinese wine website these days.

So, all in all, I don’t think this website has the marketing power they claim, don’t think they could even raise enough income to feed itself. The most likely story behind the website is that some local rich dude just heard about how wine in China is becoming the next big thing, and decided in a hurry to hop onto the wine wagon as soon as possible by hiring the nearest IT guy and trusting everything to him, and feeding the new site with whatever revenue he/she is already making through other business. This site might have existing or even extensive business connections in other sectors (where the owner made his/her money), but I don’t think it has any real influence among the wine folks or in the cyber space. This website is pretty typical. Similar sites exist in huge number in other sectors across China. Always a Craigslist for some specific sector; always built in a hurry to catch the “next big thing”; alwasy several steps slower than the real keen players on the start already; always trying to sell things like “searchable on our extensive industrial list”, “pushed to millions of business owners”, “access our huge corporate member database”, “integrated marketing service package”; and always dying or vanishing in a couple of years, three at most. Such gold rushes come every once in a while in China and they never last very long, but gold diggers are constantly there chasing the trend with the same old trick.

For a quick conclusion I’d say it’s nearly pointless to invest anything into this potential deal. But it doesn’t hurt to just play along with them in the beginning, as long as they don’t ask for any money. Real influence or not, it doesn’t hurt to throw a few more instances of the Belgravia brand into the Chinese web for free. Walk away if they come asking for payment per post, or aggresively trying to persuade you into buying any banner advert. Ask for a week or a month of free trial if they insist you should buy annual membership. Ask them for very detailed campaign plan if they propose anything grandeur, dramatic, or ground-breaking marketing bomb without explaining what it is. Otherwise it should be very safe to use it as a practice dummy for playing in the China jungle.

And send them some inquiry about their offline sales business since they mentioned “we are dealing with large and increasing numbers of business enquiries sent by specialist wine imports as well as high quality hotels and restaurants across China”. Play it a bit more heartily if they do have such business without involving bulk wine, relabeling, rebottling, or rebranding…

And lastly don’t trust Chinese business websites ending with a .org domain too much… Firstly a profitting entity taking up a .org domain is weird already, secondly the Chinese people are obsessed with .com instead of anything else. You would very frequently see very un-business Chinese websites like personal blogs or BBS forums buying .com domain names, but never anyone taking up a .org without an extraordinarily good reason.