(Yicai) March 24 -- Industry experts have forecast China’s fruit wine market will usher in a period of prosperity, with its market size expected to surpass that of grape wine this year.

The Chinese fruit wine market will likely reach a scale of CNY40 billion (USD5.5 billion) this year, compared with CNY30 billion for the grape wine market, said Wu Yong, a wine industry insider.

Sales of fruit wine in China were between CNY15 billion and CNY18 billion in 2023 and rose to between CNY20 billion and CNY24 billion last year, Zhou Jinsong, executive chairman of the Sichuan Wine and Fruit Wine Industry Association, told Yicai at an exhibition yesterday.

With the expansion in youth consumption, the fruit wine market has ushered in explosive growth in recent years, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 20 percent in the past five years.

Even though the size of the fruit wine market will exceed that of the grape wine market, the former’s brand concentration is low, and its standardization needs improvement, so it still needs to strengthen, said Du Yan, deputy general manager of Kweichow Moutai Group Ecological Agriculture Industry Development.

Editor: Futura Costaglione