Wave Maker | Tiansai Winery's Julie Li: "Play Master" Doesn't Chase Trending or Put on Airs, Turning Wine into Everyday Life

Waving a glass of red wine, Julie Li casually rests one leg on the chair. Sitting in a café in Beijing’s most bustling district, unconcerned about others’ gazes and free of any burdens, she instantly makes it clear why this “familiar” young owner can borrow wine and exchange insights with strangers at a roadside stall in a remote county.

Born in 1993, Julie Li launched the “Young Owner’s Wake-up Wine” account six years ago. At a time when “factory second-generation” and entrepreneurial IPs hadn’t yet flooded the scene, she seized the short video boom’s opportunity. Not only did she elevate Tian Sai Winery in Xinjiang to become one of the most well-known domestic wine brands, but she also completely overturned the traditional mysterious, small-circle marketing narrative of Chinese wine over the past decades.

“People who can grow good grapes are usually steady and conservative. Getting them to play on the internet is somewhat difficult. But domestic wine consumption still hasn’t reached its ceiling—if just 1% of users are willing to drink, that’s enough,” says Julie Li, a graduate in clinical nutrition. She doesn’t promote the benefits of alcohol but recommends the most suitable options when consumers show interest. “Life is only 30,000 days—You Only Live Once. Seeing the sea, learning to ski, drinking wine—these are all life experiences.”

A team of 10 online staff supports one-third of the winery’s sales: traffic is part of business management

The optimistic Julie Li has a decisive side in business. Before the Spring Festival, due to insufficient freight capacity from Xinjiang to Beijing, Guangzhou, and other places, her e-commerce team struggled to secure supplies because communication was overly polite. Frustrated by delays caused by approvals and procedures, Julie Li picked up the phone and directly called the owner, demanding to see the wine in the warehouse by a certain date and time. “Of course, the owner is my mom, but I say this not because of our mother-daughter relationship, but because I have the confidence of Tian Sai’s largest distributor—my e-commerce team of 10 people achieved 30 million yuan in sales last year, accounting for one-third of Tian Sai’s total.”

Starting from zero, her e-commerce business took only five years to grow. Even as global alcohol sales shrank and many wine merchants lamented the difficulty of sales, Julie Li’s team achieved impressive results—beginning in 2020, they operated the “Young Owner’s Wake-up Wine” content account, and the following year, they entered e-commerce. By 2022, sales reached 16 million yuan, maintaining over 30 million yuan annually for the next three years.

In contrast, several leading wine companies have seen less optimistic performance trends over the past five years, with some alternating profits and losses or experiencing revenue declines starting in 2024.

Julie Li at ProWine Germany

“Over the past few years, consumer habits have really changed: people now drink less—down from three times a week to two—and alcohol isn’t the only spiritual comfort anymore—you can buy LABUBU, raise virtual pets to soothe your mind,” she says, sitting in a Starbucks at Wantong Center in Beijing, holding a glass of red wine. The AI era has accelerated the decline of offline community concepts. “Today, I went to support a friend’s new bar, bought a drink, and left with a glass of wine. I also often bring wine to local markets and fairs to shoot videos—kind of replacing friends who don’t have time to go out and play.”

Open the current Young Owner’s account, and about half of the videos feature street food from across China—Julie Li, relaxed in front of the camera, a 90s girl with two dimples, eats potato strips and braised pork rice at a rural market stall costing only 30 yuan, with a bottle of aged Maotai or a local white liquor. This starkly contrasts with traditional white wine ads depicting successful men at business banquets, creating a strong visual contrast. Yet, these seemingly “nonsensical” street stall videos garner far more traffic than the “serious” content about wine expos, wine tables, or wine education.

Since a barbecue “dirty stall” in Beijing in June 2022, her content, featuring contrasts like skewers, candied tomatoes, and a bottle of wine, has garnered over a million views—three times the views of other winery visit videos at the same time.

“Nobody wants to be lectured,” Julie Li explains the shift in her account content. People interested in food and drink outnumber those interested in drinking wine, and more than those who follow wine. As long as her “mini variety show” videos generate enough traffic, they can help the niche wine industry reach a broader audience. “Now, 60% of my live viewers have never tasted Chinese wine.”

But when the funnel is large enough, different opinions flood in. Mid-last year, Julie Li posted a video of driving 300 km from Chengdu to Longchang to drink lamb soup. While some viewers weren’t moved by the street food, a comment appeared: “Your overseas experience was a waste.”

Julie Li, who rarely interacts in comments, responded immediately: “Going abroad is to broaden horizons, including not pointing fingers at others without knowing the facts, and not judging others from a position of ignorance. The more I see the outside world, the more I realize how vast the world is, and how different cultures, people, and voices can coexist.”

“I hate all practices that classify people into hierarchies. That comment clearly tries to rank people—like studying abroad is something high-level,” she explains a year later when revisiting the incident. “I don’t argue to prove myself. But ignoring negative comments doesn’t make them go away. Only when they get negative feedback will they likely stop being voiced publicly.”

The “factory second-generation” who don’t follow the typical script of life are often targeted by social media criticism. Good looks, a nice education, simple dance moves, and rustic factory backgrounds once became traffic secrets. Many viewers, just looking for entertainment, leave comments like “Dancing can’t save a business.”

“Can’t dancing save a business? Then just dance,” Julie Li says bluntly. Many criticize second-generation entrepreneurs for chasing traffic, but traffic itself is essential for business management. “If you see e-commerce as a department store, short videos are like showcasing how bustling the street is. If you open a restaurant alone and no one comes, building a Disneyland in front of it will definitely attract visitors,” she jokes. “At the department store entrance, you need to find ways to attract people—whether they dance or not, just don’t be vulgar.”

In Julie Li’s view, the industry’s past over-elevation of white and red wine has distanced it from everyday life. “It’s just alcohol, meant to serve people. When I eat barbecue, I drink both wine and white liquor. I can, so can you.”

From medical student to winery “player”: using emotion and empathy to restore the equality of wine

Julie Li exudes a relaxed vibe both on and off camera. She recalls that in middle and high school, she was top of her class. She once missed just one point on her high school Chinese exam because she hadn’t read “Water Margin,” leaving a question unanswered. “Actually, I can memorize every annotation of classical texts I’ve studied,” she says. Perhaps her “photographic memory” helped—after graduation, she worked as a tour guide, and now she films videos in unfamiliar cities without scripts, drawing on her knowledge and improvising.

“The biggest creative bottleneck now is switching between e-commerce and video creation—one is data-driven and very rational, the other is highly emotional, and it’s hard to switch between the two,” she explains. So she divides her time equally—half traveling and shooting, half sitting in live streams.

“E-commerce live streams are the most painful because you have to repeat the same script forever. For example, our stream retention is 50 seconds, meaning you have to repeat your spiel like a robot to let new viewers know what I’m doing,” she admits. Compared to the freedom of creating videos, she feels a conflict when returning to sales pitches.

“I’m not someone seeking fame, and I don’t like exposure. These are less important than making money,” she says frankly. She’s increasingly focusing on e-commerce sales, but her small team of ten doesn’t evaluate individual performance.

“First, I don’t like competition. Second, we interview 20-30 people and only hire one. If they’re here, I trust them—trust their self-discipline and responsibility to do things well,” she explains. She compares school exams with clear answers to the workplace, where there are no graders. “What we need is not to find the right answer but to understand the question of life and find better ways to solve it.”

Unlike many “factory second-generation” kids who plan their lives around “succession,” Julie Li was in a free-range state before officially returning to the winery in 2020.

Because of her interest in biology and chemistry in high school, she chose clinical nutrition for her undergraduate studies. But when she started dealing with real cases in her third year, she was overwhelmed. “I have very strong empathy. Hearing those case recordings was too painful—I told my teacher I couldn’t do it.” After switching to wine studies in graduate school, she traveled across Europe alone within a year, exploring new places every weekend, and even worked as a tour guide after graduation.

Once, she visited a medieval church in Italy and wasn’t impressed by the architecture’s grandeur but thought, “This is the result of exploiting the labor of the lower classes.” Her strong sense of “equality” makes her eager to show the democratization of wine drinking. This preference isn’t just about market positioning at affordable prices but also rooted in her childhood.

“Elementary school was very happy; the school rules were strict but emphasized equality,” she recalls. “The principal would greet students at the school gate every morning. Once I was caught chewing gum, and he said, ‘Julie Li, please spit the gum into my hand.’ That was a kind and inclusive way of education, not one based on fear.”

Julie Li, who insists on sharing half of her team’s annual profits with her partners, strongly opposes “competition.” “Many people see pain as profound, but pain is just pain—it doesn’t bring anything,” she says. For her, happiness comes from achieving goals. “I don’t think so. Life should be like calculus—you’re happy with every slice. Suffering first, then sweetness, is pointless.”

She recounts a childhood conversation with her mother: “Lili, you play at home every day, now you’re fifth place. If you work harder, can you surpass the others?” She asked her mother, “Why surpass others? What’s the difference between third and fifth?”

This Spring Festival, she visited the God of Wealth and only wrote her mother’s name. “My mom is 58, right at her prime!” she says seriously, showing a photo with her mother. “Look at her—she can keep going for at least another 30 years. So whenever someone asks if I’ll take over, I say, my mom is still in her prime.”

Epilogue

Mother and daughter work hard in their respective fields. Julie Li, who has traveled across China, never stops moving. On the evening of March 10, after a fast-paced live stream, she set off for Europe to attend a German wine exhibition.

“As in movies, exploring the world is a journey of seeing the universe, understanding others, and discovering oneself. The more places you go, the more you realize how small individuals are, and the more you can embrace different customs and understand others,” she recently shared in a video about dipping sauces for dumplings. Some comments said, “How can it taste good without sugar or Sichuan pepper?” others said, “Too much seasoning, can’t taste the dumplings.” She also recounted her trip to Inner Mongolia to buy shao mai, where some places weigh by skin, others by filling. “People’s rules vary even within the same place, but everyone doesn’t realize the differences between each other.”

“History is full of unpredictable coincidences in individual choices,” she notes. Her favorite book last year was Kangxi’s Red Ticket. It traces Kangxi’s 1716 edict to Europe, focusing on his interactions with Jesuits like Verbiest and Nian. It details how missionaries used astronomy and mathematics as “keys” to enter the Qing Palace. For example, Kangxi’s comment on algebra’s “mediocre algorithms” wasn’t out of arrogance but to understand the algebra book.

“Historians have long hoped to write beautifully, to reveal the underlying trends behind events, like studying physical phenomena—finding the laws of history,” says author Sun Tianli. “This leads to a focus on grand, abstract history, neglecting individual lives and the randomness and uncertainty in personal trajectories… If we accept that history isn’t abstract but composed of vivid individuals, we should respect personal destinies and the element of chance and unpredictability.”

“This book offers a very different perspective on history,” she says. “China’s thousands of years of history are rooted in different regions, with distinct customs and landscapes—just like wines from different places, each with its own style. I want my friends in Fujian to see life in the northeast, and those in Hebei to experience the local flavor of Hunan.”

“Last year, I visited Wuliangye and Luzhou Laojiao, explored the distillery fields, and tasted freshly distilled 70-degree liquor—so fragrant,” she recalls. “This year, I plan to visit Moutai in Guizhou. Young people don’t complain about high proof when drinking whiskey, so lowering alcohol content isn’t the point for Baijiu to appeal to the young.”

At this moment, she’s no longer the middle school student who memorized classical annotations word for word. Instead, she’s recording the spontaneous expressions of strangers who happen to appear on camera.

Writings by Lin Chen

Edited by Xu Nan