Jane Lai
CITY quality supervisors raided a Moutai specialty store in Luohu District on Wednesday and seized 121 bottles of fake Moutai, the fiery national liquor favored by the Central Government at state banquets.
This was one of a series of inspections before the Spring Festival, the Shenzhen market supervision administration said Thursday.
Enforcement officers found the fake Moutai at a store on Dongmen Road South. The store was not an authorized distributor for Kweichow Moutai Co. which produces Moutai. The spirit was priced from a few hundred yuan to tens of thousands.
It was not known whether the manufacturer of the fake liquor had been detained or whether anyone had fallen ill after drinking the liquor.
Moutai, a pungent spirit made from sorghum and containing 53-percent alcohol by volume, had seen retail prices increase by 40 percent late last year to 1,288 yuan (US$196) a bottle. But the distiller said Dec. 16 that the average price of the alcohol would rise by only 20 percent.
The surging price had prompted a number of people to make fake Moutai. On Jan. 12, quality supervisors in Longgang District raided a house where a wide variety of liquors, including Moutai, had been bottled using syringes and used bottles.
There had also been a sharp rise in the price of empty Moutai bottles. People collecting the bottles to make fake wine were offering 15,000 yuan for a set of two empty Moutai bottles from the 1980s, a 50 percent increase over the same period last year.
In China, deals were done at the dinner table, not the boardroom, said Guo Haoda, 37, who paid 2,200 yuan for two bottles of Moutai at a supermarket last week. Breaking out the Moutai is still the easiest way to build trust with prospective customers and officials.
