WINES: Red Still Rules the Asian Table. Europe Has Already Moved On.

The colour in the glass now says as much about age and occasion as it does about taste. For hotel food and beverage teams, getting the by-the-glass list right means knowing which side of the divide the room sits on.

A guest in Tokyo asks for a glass of red, and nobody blinks. In Lyon, the same request is no longer the safe assumption it once was.

Around the world, the colour of the wine on the table now says as much about a guest's age and the occasion as it does about taste, and the gap between Asia and Europe is wider than most wine lists admit. The global picture looks balanced.

In 2021 the world drank about 47 percent red, 43 percent white and 10 percent rosé, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. But that average hides two very different businesses. In Europe's biggest markets, red has been losing ground for twenty years. In much of Asia, red is still the category.

China is the extreme case. Of roughly 10.7 million hectolitres consumed in 2021, 9.8 million were red and only 0.9 million white, which makes about 92 percent red and puts China first in the world for red's share of national consumption. Rosé barely registers. Older observatory figures put Chinese rosé drinking at around 0.1 litres per person a year.

The Philippines follows a similar pattern on a much smaller base. Red made up about 77 percent of wine sales in 2025 and was still growing, up 1.3 percent, while white slipped 2.3 percent. Rosé was a small slice but the fastest-growing colour, up 3.2 percent, helped along by sweet pink Moscato.

Across Asia-Pacific, one 2025 market estimate put red at about 68 percent of still wine, with rosé again growing fastest.

Japan is the outlier, and the most useful one for anyone writing a hotel wine list. Trade figures put still wine at about 80 percent of the Japanese market, split roughly 50 percent red, 40 percent white and 10 percent rosé, with sparkling adding another 20 percent of total wine. White and sparkling are big enough there to deserve real staff training rather than a token place at the back of the list.

Part of Asia's attachment to red is simply how wine arrived. Per person, China drinks around 1 to 1.5 litres a year and Japan around 2.5 to 3, while France and Italy are above 40.

Wine in Asia is still an occasion drink, something for a banquet, a gift or a date, more than a weeknight habit. For a generation it was also a red drink. Business gifting favoured Cabernet-style imports, red carries deep cultural weight in China, and the old French paradox health story reinforced the habit.

That story is now cracking at the edges. Trade reports describe white wine, including semi-sweet styles, gaining among younger Chinese buyers and in the south, after decades in which red meant status.

In South Korea, retailer Emart found that white and sparkling rose from 37 percent of purchases by people in their 20s and 30s in 2021 to 44 percent last year. Before 2020, red made up 75 to 80 percent of those sales.

Europe, meanwhile, has already turned the page. France, Italy, Spain and Germany have all cut red consumption since 2000, and the OIV is explicit that the countries where red takes the biggest share of drinking now sit mostly outside Europe, in East Asia and South America. Growth in red over the past two decades came from China, the United States, Russia and Brazil, not from the old cellars of the continent.

France drank about 9.1 million hectolitres of red in 2021, alongside 7.6 million of rosé and 6.6 million of white, out of 23.3 million in total. That works out at roughly 39 percent red, 33 percent rosé and 28 percent white. France still produces and drinks more than a third of the world's rosé, about 15 litres per adult in older figures. In supermarkets the shift is sharper. Red was 57 percent of bottles sold in 2010 and about 42 percent by 2024, so white and rosé together now take 58 percent.

Italy has moved toward white. Of 24.1 million hectolitres in 2021, white accounted for 14.2 million, red 9.0 million and rosé 0.9 million, or about 59 percent white, 37 percent red and 4 percent rosé. Prosecco does a good deal of that work. Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States account for most of the growth in white and rosé demand since 2000.

What drives the change, on both continents, is age far more than gender. Older drinkers still want red. In Italy, about 60 percent of people over 65 name red as their favourite, against 25 percent for white, and preference for red climbs steadily with each age band. Younger drinkers want something lighter. Among Italians aged 25 to 34, white already leads red by 40 percent to 33 percent. Among 18 to 24 year olds red still comes first at 39 percent, but rosé and sparkling together reach 28 percent, far above the national sparkling average of 8 percent.

The Korean shift among people in their 20s and 30s, and the Chinese tilt toward white among younger buyers, are the Asian version of the same move. In the Philippines, younger drinkers are reaching for rosé because it is lighter in alcohol, sweeter on the palate and looks good on social media.

Gender is a weaker divider than occasion. A Vinexpo survey of women in China, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea found more than two-thirds preferred red, and 84 percent of Chinese women did, with Japanese women the exception, more open to sparkling.

In Europe, men simply drink wine more often. In Italy, 21 percent of men drink it daily against 11 percent of women, and 26 percent of women do not drink wine at all against 11 percent of men. Younger women are a large part of the rosé and sparkling occasion on both continents.

So what should a food and beverage team do with all this?

The first lesson is not to copy and paste. An Asia-based hotel that borrows a European by-the-glass list will over-serve white and rosé to the guests who still build the cheque. A European hotel that assumes wine means red will miss the table that now starts with a glass of white or pink.

Keep red as the backbone of the list in China, and most of Southeast Asia. Approachable, fruit-forward New World reds still do the heavy lifting, and the list should not be built as though every guest is ordering Bordeaux.

At the same time, give white and sparkling a real by-the-glass presence wherever the room skews under 40, or wherever Japanese, Korean or Western guests make up a large share of covers. Japan is the template. Red still leads there, but white at 40 percent of still wine is no side list.

Rosé deserves a different kind of thinking. Treat it as a small, fast-moving, younger occasion rather than a fifth of the cellar. It is the growth colour, and across Asia-Pacific estimates, it already makes up a third of French drinking, yet it is not a third of anyone's Asian cellar, and it should not be priced or stored as though it were.

The guest who asks for red is still the majority in most Asian dining rooms. The guest who is about to stop asking for it is already sitting there too, and the best floor teams will be ready for both.