9KaCha, the wine app likened to China’s Vivino, has entered a partnership with Portuguese Cork Association (APCOR), to enable the app’s 8.3 million users to “more intuitively” identify fine wine through cork closure, as consumers in the market overwhelmingly link cork with quality.
With the partnership between APCOR and 9KaCha, wine drinkers can tell the type of closure a wine used by scanning through 9KaCha app, in addition to other information such as winery, grapes, region, wine style and alcohol content, says APCOR in a press release.
According to a recent study conducted by the IULM Behavior and BrainLab in Milan and supported by APCOR, when people believe a wine is closed with cork stopper, they would have much higher cognitive and emotional engagement than that of a wine perceived as using screw cap.
In China, the perception is even more deepened. Wineries particularly from Australia and New Zealand often had to replace their usual screwcaps with corks in order to sell their wines in the market, even though wines sealed under screwcaps can be as good as corks.
Reinforcing the perception, Carlos de Jesus, Operational Director of International marketing program of APCOR, commented: “We want to facilitate Chinese wine consumers to make informed buying decisions more easily through this exercise. Our most recent study provides additional proof that people perceive wines using cork stopper are of better quality, therefore they would regard closure type as an important information when selecting wines. This is also one of our many efforts in educating the local market about the inseparable relationship between cork and fine wines.”
“We are also aware that China’s millennials and Gen Z have become the key driving forces in supporting and expanding the local wine market. They are avid smartphone users that mainly rely on their mobile devices to search and share information with others. Combining these two factors together, working with an influential app such as 9KaCha to provide Chinese wine consumers with closure type intelligence is a logical marketing decision,” he said.
Shao Chaoyang, co-founder of 9KaCha, added: “Chinese wine consumers are now very mature and discerning. They would like to know a wine inside and out before making a buying decision, and this is exactly what we want to achieve since our inception. We are pleased to work with APCOR to add this important piece of wine information into our offerings for 9KaCha users.”
According to APCOR, the coverage of this collaboration is far-reaching. At present, the 9KaCha wine database consists of over 3 million wine information from 90 countries and 500 regions. This time 9KaCha has added closure type to about 56,000 red and white wines from different regions including France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Chile, America, China and Argentina, and the information update is still ongoing.
Established in 2013 and dubbed “China’s Vivino”, 9KaCha provides users with a Chinese language app that allows them to scan wine labels for garnering its background information, share reviews and source wines on China’s leading e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Tmall. 9KaCha has also signed a deal with WeChat in 2021, the country’s mega social media app, to provide wine search function for its over 1.2 billion users.
