In conversation, two things about Chinese independent wine critic Alexandre Ma become clear almost immediately: an obsessive passion for wine, and an unwavering candour about the industry’s problems. Whether the subject is markets, regions or criticism itself, he doesn’t shy away from controversy or soften the truth. He is, at the same time, remarkably modest, more inclined to talk about what he’s still learning than to present himself as an authority.
Now based in Bordeaux, Ma works as an independent wine critic. He previously reviewed for La Revue du Vin de France (RVF), becoming the first Asian wine critic in the French magazine’s history. In 2016, he and his teammates represented China and won the World Blind Tasting Championship. He has since earned the WSET Diploma, France’s D.U.A.D. wine-tasting diploma, and French, Italian and Spanish Wine Scholar certifications. all with Highest Honors, along with France’s national professional sommelier qualification. He is also an honorary knight of Bordeaux’s Left Bank wine fraternity and the wine fraternity of Pomerol.
But the accolades aren’t what matter most to him. More than titles, Ma wants to build something else: a system of wine criticism rooted in Eastern modes of expression, capable of speaking to consumers as equals.
Always learning
Ma jokes that before becoming a critic, he spent years “repeating the same grade.” Asked what that means, he explains simply: he was always studying.
From the Rhône Valley to Bordeaux and then London, he moved between places of study, completing programmes including the WSET Diploma while trying on different roles across the industry. “France has an internship system, and I experienced almost every part of it – winemaking, viticulture, sommelier, French exporter, a Chinese importer,” he says. “I wanted to find out what I was genuinely suited to.”
None of it stuck long-term, until his final internship placed him at the renowned French wine-review publication Bettane+Desseauve, as a trainee critic. Travelling with Michel Bettane to tastings and winery visits, Ma saw for the first time the close relationship between wineries, regions and critics – and the direction of his career shifted.
“I was 26 and had just finished graduate school,” he recalls. “I thought: this is what I want to do.”
Committing to that path proved harder than he expected. For someone with an Asian face, becoming a professional wine critic in Europe was no easy task.
“There was no problem with being an intern,” he says, “but when it came to actually reviewing and scoring wines, many European wineries initially found that difficult to accept.”
He compares it to a foreigner arriving in China to evaluate Chinese tea: people naturally wonder whether the person really understands it.
In the end, it was his professional ability that overcame the doubts. The 2016 championship win prompted more of the European trade to take a second look at the young Chinese critic, and in 2017 he was invited to join RVF – the first Asian critic in the magazine’s history, and the true start of his career in wine criticism.
A happy period
Ma still remembers his more than three years at RVF fondly. “I could choose my own topics, plan interviews and study a region in depth according to my interests,” he says.
For him, one of the biggest differences between a critic and anyone else in the trade is the access critics get to a winery’s most important information. “When an importer visits, the conversation is usually more about introducing the brand and maintaining the commercial relationship,” he says. “When a critic visits, the discussion is completely different.” A winery might explain exactly which parcels supplied the grapes, why it chose a particular blending ratio, what went wrong during the vintage and how the team responded and once the relationship is close enough, producers will even talk about experiments that failed. “That’s extremely valuable technical information,” Ma says. “You’d almost never encounter it during an ordinary winery visit.”
The visits were only part of the process. “After every winery visit, I recorded everything,” he says. “When I began writing, I effectively reorganised and digested all the information again.” That repeated digestion, he believes, is what lets critics develop a deeper understanding of wineries, regions and terroir than many other professionals in the trade.
Starting out, though, Ma was acutely aware of what he lacked: experience. Veteran critics could recall exactly what happened at a given château in the 1970s or 1980s, what the weather was like, how the estate adjusted its winemaking in response. He had none of that historical knowledge. “My greatest advantage at the time was that I had reasonably good tasting ability,” he says. “But I could only assess a wine’s condition in the current vintage. I didn’t know what it had been like in the past, and I had no historical database for comparison.”
To close the gap, he accumulated experience almost obsessively, attending every tasting he could, joining other critics on winery visits, talking to winemakers, placing himself in any learning environment available. “What I accumulated in those years wasn’t only knowledge about wine,” he says. “I met many excellent winemakers and became friends with quite a few of them. Later, when I became an independent critic, those friends became guides along my path.”
Becoming an independent critic
“Those years were fascinating,” Ma tells Vino Joy News of his time at RVF. “I was almost constantly travelling between wine regions. I would take my press card and go.” Even so, he eventually chose to leave one of France’s most influential wine magazines to become an independent critic.
The decision took shape during the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020. “When the pandemic began, I kept asking myself where my real value lay,” he says. As a Chinese critic, he wanted to share what he’d observed in Europe through a Chinese perspective, in language and references his audience would find easier to understand. Just as importantly, after a decade of accumulating knowledge, it felt like time to give some of it back. “I had visited so many wineries and gained so much experience over the years,” he says. “I felt it was time to share it.”
With his wife’s encouragement, Ma struck out on his own. His audience today spans trade professionals and consumers across both Europe and Asia.
Although Asian wine critics remain a minority in Europe, Ma has long believed Chinese palates carry a natural advantage. “Chinese cuisine is extraordinarily diverse,” he says. “From childhood, we encounter a wider range of spices, fruits and vegetables than many Europeans do.” Asian consumers don’t lack sensory ability, he argues — what they lack is the chance to connect their existing sensory memories to wine. “Our task is to use professional knowledge to make that connection,” he says.
That belief shows up directly in his reviews, which lean more heavily on Eastern food references than most Western criticism does. Dried cranberry, a common descriptor among European and American critics, closely resembles the hawthorn jelly familiar to Chinese consumers. Wines with a gelatinous texture that seems to melt in the mouth remind him of tremella soup, the traditional Chinese sweet soup made with snow fungus.
The comparisons have intrigued his European colleagues in turn. Some have sought out water chestnut drinks and guilinggao, a traditional herbal jelly, while travelling in Asia, just to experience the flavours he’d described for themselves. “They came back and told me the comparisons were incredibly accurate,” he says, with evident pride. He believes that with systematic training, Chinese critics are fully capable of developing their own language of wine. “Our aromatic memory is already extremely rich,” he says. “I believe it’s only a matter of time before we see more outstanding Chinese wine critics.”
Bordeaux en primeur is losing its investment appeal
Turning to Bordeaux en primeur, Ma doesn’t avoid the market’s most sensitive issue. In his view, the fundamental problem is no longer the quality of the wine, it’s the market’s declining confidence in the en primeur system itself.
He considers the 2025 Bordeaux red-wine vintage one of the finest he’s tasted since he began reviewing en primeur wines in 2013, and believes it offers exceptional value, particularly because prices aren’t substantially higher than those of some markedly weaker vintages. And yet, when he speaks with importers, price is no longer their primary concern, what worries them is whether they’ll be able to sell the wines at all, with large volumes of older inventory still being liquidated at steep discounts.
“No one knows whether prices will continue to fall three months or three years from now,” he says. “Many friends who bought the 2021 and 2022 vintages en primeur have lost money.”
That uncertainty, in his view, is eroding the foundation the system was built on. En primeur survived for more than a century because buyers who committed early had a real opportunity to earn a return; in a less transparent era, merchants who secured strong vintages ahead of time could expect to profit with relatively little risk. “The original purpose of en primeur was to reward the people who accepted the risk of buying early,” Ma says. That logic no longer holds, and as the investment appeal weakens, more buyers are returning to wine’s fundamental purpose: consumption.
Ma has noticed that many of those still buying en primeur in mainland China and Hong Kong are no longer investors but genuine wine lovers, purchasing from estates they love to cellar and drink rather than to profit from.
“They will buy a little, but not very much,” he says. “They put it away to drink and collect themselves.” If Bordeaux wants the system to stay attractive, he believes it needs to reconsider how value is distributed across the supply chain. “In the future, châteaux will have to set prices at a level that allows buyers to make money,” he says. “Only then can the system continue to operate.” For now, he adds, everyone can only keep watching the market.
Bordeaux was once overmarketed
Bordeaux’s continued vineyard removals in recent years are widely read as a symbol of the region’s crisis. Ma sees it differently. To him, the uprooting programme is a normal market correction. “At the height of Bordeaux’s prosperity, everyone planted vines wherever they could because growing grapes was profitable,” he says. “Large areas of land that weren’t genuinely suited to viticulture were developed during that period. Within just a few decades, Bordeaux’s total production increased dramatically.”
In China, meanwhile, Bordeaux picked up an outsized set of commercial and social associations marketed, Ma says, as indispensable at business banquets and turned into a symbol of status.
As investment fever intensified, large numbers of Chinese investors travelled to Bordeaux to buy châteaux, while a wave of inconsistent wine entered the market. For many Chinese consumers, their first experience of Bordeaux wasn’t with its best bottles. Some importers, Ma says, chased short-term profit over cultivating long-term demand, a pursuit of immediate returns that laid the groundwork for the correction that followed, and more damagingly, squandered the chance for consumers to develop a lasting interest in wine.
Even so, Ma doesn’t believe Chinese consumers have abandoned Bordeaux. In his visits to markets across China, he still finds consumers willing to seek out excellent Bordeaux. The difference is that they’re increasingly prepared to pay for genuinely strong classified-growth and reputable château wines, while less willing to accept ordinary products with no quality behind them.
That’s why he doesn’t read the large-scale vineyard removal as a sign of the region’s decline: many of the parcels being uprooted, he says, are ones that should never have been planted in the first place.
Wine critics must not talk only to themselves
Over an interview lasting more than an hour, Ma barely paused, responding quickly to every question on winemaking, terroir, market shifts, consumer trends and the evolution of wine criticism, and backing his judgments with example after example.
His expertise has helped his independent reviews gain real influence; his tasting notes and scores are now carried by several major wine platforms, including Wine-Searcher, Wine Decider, Wine Services, Millésima and Wine-World.
But what stands out most isn’t the technical knowledge – it’s how he communicates. Describing wine aromas, Ma draws on references familiar to Chinese readers rather than repeating the obscure terminology inherited from European wine criticism, a choice that reflects the principle at the centre of his work: helping ordinary consumers fall in love with wine and find bottles they genuinely enjoy.
Since last year, he’s placed greater emphasis on engaging consumers directly, increasingly defining his audience as Chinese-speaking wine drinkers around the world.
Traditional wine criticism, in his view, was built during an era of severe information imbalance, where the critic’s role was closer to that of an authority. “The old model was essentially: I taste it, I tell you what I think, and you listen to me,” he says. That system worked once, but it’s poorly suited to today’s consumers, particularly in China – as people born in the 1990s and 2000s become a more important consumer group, they’re increasingly inclined to trust their own experience over the verdict of an authority. Ma strongly opposes critics speaking down to consumers. “I think that is completely wrong,” he says.
Rather than establish authority, he wants to share experience. “I take what I have genuinely experienced and communicate it in an honest and unvarnished way, using language that Chinese people can understand more easily,” he says. “I want consumers to know why a bottle is worth buying and whether it is genuinely right for them.” For Ma, the purpose of wine criticism has never been to create distance. It’s to reduce the cost and uncertainty of making a decision. If a consumer reads a review and finds a wine that genuinely suits them, the review has created value.
As he puts it plainly, his job is to help wine consumers “discover more bargains and avoid more disappointments.” “A wine critic becomes genuinely valuable when consumers can say: this bottle is truly delicious, and it really suits what I was looking for,” he says.
He pauses, then adds one final thought: “Otherwise, wine critics fulfil a need that does not really exist. They are simply talking to themselves.”
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