(PD) - What is it going to take to get the Chinese consumer to like white wine? It’s a question that has perplexed U.S. wine exporters to China for years.

Studies from the early 1990s that showed a connection between resveratrol, a key ingredient in red wine, and a reduction in heart disease have had a strong hold on the Chinese wine drinker. Mix in peer pressure and a culture that has viewed white wine more akin to liquor, and you have a tough market for chardonnay and pinot grigio to crack.

“It’s education. … Gradually, I think it will take a few more years,” Jiang Lu, professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing.

That topic and others were covered Thursday during a symposium at UC Davis examining “jiu” — the Chinese name for alcoholic beverages — which brought together scholars and business officials to examine the country’s history with wine, beer and spirits and the future for the potential biggest market for those beverages.

There is great interest in China within Wine Country. Last year, Sonoma County vintners made a two-week trip to China to make inroads into the market. The Wine Institute, a trade group that represents more than 1,000 California wineries, sponsored the trip.

China is still a relatively small market for the U.S. wine exports as it only represented $71 million of the total $1.5 billion in 2014, according to the Wine Institute.

The figure represented a 7 percent decrease from 2013, attributed to an ongoing austerity campaign by the government that has hampered wine sales across the board.

But U.S. industry has a positive outlook for the market given it is the largest populated country at 1.4 billion people with an emerging young middle-class that has a more global outlook.

The data back that up. The alcoholic beverage industry in China is now six times greater than 10 years ago, with $84 billion in sales revenue, said Xu Yan, professor at Jiangnan University in China.

In fact, China now has become the largest red-wine drinking nation in the world with 155 million cases consumed in 2013, followed by France with almost 150 million cases and Italy with 141 million, according to Vinexpo, an international wine and spirits exhibition.