How wine became Francis Ford Coppola's consuming passion

Francis Ford Coppola has just spent a month in Beijing, an experience the 73-year-old film director found revelatory. "Chinese people are very much like Italians," he says.

Coppola is dismissive of the idea that Beijingers are obsessed with brands. Out buying a toothbrush one day, he found himself in a mall, surrounded shops such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton. His first thought was that he might as well have been in Beverly Hills.

"You know, those brands bore me. At first I thought, 'So they can afford to buy a €1,800 (HK$18,000) wine so they can impress,'" he says. However, on another shopping trip he had a "key moment". In a coffee shop, he saw a television was displaying an insurance commercial depicting a regular family together with the grandparents, toasting with a glass of red wine at the table. It made him think: "That must mean something very important. Wine is not just a prestige thing. The scene in the commercial is about happiness. Using wine as part of the family will remain in the culture."

During his time in the capital, Coppola was also invited to many artists' homes and found further parallels with Italy and his own experience of growing up in an Italian-American family. Just as in his childhood, the Beijing gatherings often entailed eating vast meals and drinking wine with 18 other people, and children running around.

Sharply dressed, even for an 8.40am wine tasting and interview, Coppola talks about a love of wine that has led to his ownership and revitalisation of California's Inglenook winery. When he predicts an optimistic future for Chinese wine culture, where it will be "regular" people drinking wine much the same way as the wine culture evolved in America more than 20 years ago, he is no doubt hoping they will be drinking Inglenook wines.