Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hi Linden.

• Speaker #1

  Hi Antoine, how are you doing?

• Speaker #0

  Good, thank you. How are you?

• Speaker #1

  I'm very good, thanks. Thanks for coming in. No,

• Speaker #0

  no worries. You told me you're a little bit tired of the event.

• Speaker #1

  This is the life of a wine person. It's night time as well as day time.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, we take you at 9 a.m. for an interview, so we are drinking coffee instead of wine. It works at this time of day. It works at this time of the day. Yeah, thank you very much for taking this time. Thank you very much for welcoming us in Club battle. Very welcome. Which is one of the most wonderful place for wine, I guess, in Hong Kong. I guess the people can see that behind us. We'll talk about this place, about this adventure, about your wine journey. But first, can you introduce yourself?

• Speaker #1

  I'm Lyndon Wilkie. I'm a co-founder of the Fine Wine Experience, a wine merchant business in Hong Kong, and one of the founders of Club Batard, which is where we are today.

• Speaker #0

  Nice. So let's talk about this.

• Speaker #1

  wine journey fine wine experience is one of the great merchants here in hong kong but what did you do before fine wine experience how did you get into wine so my wine journey began at university in the first week when you join all the clubs and societies and everything's very exciting i joined fencing which lasted two weeks and i joined the wine club and we did some wine tasting i was taught wine tasting and I loved it. I just absolutely loved it. So I got very involved during my student years and started to organize wine tastings while I was at university.

• Speaker #0

  Which university?

• Speaker #1

  University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. So I'm from New Zealand. And so that was my introduction. We had a cellar so we could taste older wine. So I was very interested in that. We could work with local winemakers as well and taste their wines and have them come and speak to us. So that lit the fire, really. And then I got a proper corporate job after university, but would keep attending a lot of wine tastings. By the time I turned 30, which was a while ago now, I realized wine was really what I needed to be doing full time. And to continue that journey of really learning. because the passion is really driven by curiosity, right? I moved to London. I did an MBA and then set up my own business called the Fine Wine Experience. So the first version of the Fine Wine Experience was in London. It was focused on a lot of wine tastings, a lot of vertical tastings, rare wines. I was very curious. Didn't have the money to try all the great wines, but I figured if I could create a program of events.

• Speaker #0

  uh hosting the wine tastings others would pay for it and then i get my wine education it's funny because i'm thinking about the exact same thing at the moment good idea everyone get someone else to pay for your wine education this is the ticket yeah so

• Speaker #1

  i did that for for quite a few years um and then moved to hong kong uh in 2010 and was continuing doing that but it was a challenging environment at that time ironically because hong Kong was booming already in wine after henry tang removed the taxes in 2008 and it so it was a very competitive environment um the fine wine experience 2.0 came along uh i made friends with mike woo passionate wine collector who was working in finance and he said uh let's create a wine business uh wine import merchant business you We'll bolt onto the front of that, the fine wine experience that existed, but create a new business. So he and I set that up in 2013 and have been growing it since then.

• Speaker #0

  All right. So I have plenty of questions on this journey. The first one about this university tasting club.

• Speaker #1

  Yes.

• Speaker #0

  Were you already like...

• Speaker #1

  passionate about wine and were you used to tasting or did you arrive like knowing almost nothing about it arrived intimidating yeah no i arrived knowing almost nothing about it i mean i tasted some wines i was interested in wine i was very interested in food um i had this great great teacher on the very first tasting i went to a chap called david weir he called it wine 101 and of course when you're a first year student lots of papers that you take are called 101 And he just had seven different wines, seven different grape varieties laid out. We tasted them one by one. And he was speaking and I was tasting and somehow each wine made sense. And I say, okay, that's a Sauvignon Blanc, that's a Chardonnay, you know, that's a Merlot, that's a Cabernet, that's a Shiraz. And I thought, oh, I love this. I love this. There's a language in the glass. There's a language in what he's saying, but there's a language in the glass. This makes sense. And then through other tastings, I could see the influence of the dimension of time. Like you have one wine and then a vintage that's five years older, comparing side by side. I think from that moment on, I've always loved at least two wines. It's a great excuse to have more than one. But if you can compare two wines, then you understand a bit more about both of them.

• Speaker #0

  100%.

• Speaker #1

  Otherwise, you're comparing a wine to the abstract, to information. That's actually very hard to do. But all of us intuitively can compare two things. And so, yeah. And I think after that, I realized that, okay, you need to read a lot of books. ultimately need to travel to wine regions. But seeking out mentors is also a key part of the journey. In London, I was very fortunate. People like Michael Broadbent, who was my inspiration, actually. When I was in New Zealand, I had his vintage wine book. I used to read his tasting notes like chapters in a novel. Tonight, I'm going to read about the 1953s. So in my head, I had this sort of imagination of what these wines might be like. but no experience. But in London, he was very kind. He would attend some of my tastings and help to tutor. Anthony Hansen, who had written a book on Burgundy, tutored my Burgundy tastings. And we still work with Anthony, actually. He's a consultant for us in Burgundy. So mentors were the key. I would say to anyone getting into wine, yes, read.

• Speaker #0

  form your tasting groups but find someone uh who can help you on the journey yeah yeah 100 percent and i um i completely agree as well on the on the fact of discovering different wines at the same time uh for me it's been uh the first the first time i did that was a bit intimidating you know you arrive you know not that much you have six seven glass in front of you or well displayed but actually when you taste it's in that moment that you can uh You forge your palate and understand the differences between these wines. And traveling to the wine regions is definitely a must.

• Speaker #1

  I think some of the intimidation that people feel in wine comes from the fact that maybe you have some expert speaking. And you feel like, oh, they're saying that it should taste like this or you should find this or that. And you don't quite. And then you think, oh, you know, am I not cut out for this or do I not understand? Actually, I think it's more the other way around. I would rather people, once you have the wine in front of you, you can be guided to understanding things. But in the end, there's a very personal experience, right? A very personal relationship between what's in the glass and how you feel about it. I always have voting in my wine events to try and recenter things back on the people participating rather than the person leading. and so that people can focus on their own pleasure. You know, in the end, what you vote for is the right answer.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I have an amazing memory of that in Chateau Lagrange. So we were having dinner there, and, you know, they were just doing a blind taste of wine, and we were ranking them, but not knowing what it was. Obviously, Chateau Lagrange won this time, but it was so fun to, you know, just rank wine and taste it that we didn't recognize. So... After this first job, you arrive in London. You start this Fine Wine Experience 1.0. Yes. How does that work? Because you do great tastings. So for that, I guess you need to recruit clients. You need to recruit the guys who will attend the tasting. Yes. And you also need to find the bottles. And you said that you wanted to focus on like niche tastings or like... very high-end bottles, so some things that are not easy to find. How do you manage to do these two parts of the business?

• Speaker #1

  So I put a lot of time into it. I researched a lot. You know, I love the geeky side of it all. Talking to specialists in wine, learning about the vintages, but learning about what to look for, how to buy, how to source. I put a lot of time into that. If I wanted to do an event, the process of... creating the event might start more than a year before the event, because I was very focused on trying to get just the right bottles to tell the story of the estate and to make the event attractive enough that people would come in and join. And in the end, that took time, you know, but after a while you get a little snowball effect that word gets out and people recommend other people to come and join.

• Speaker #0

  It was a full-time job for you? Yes.

• Speaker #1

  And then I did a little bit of, let's say, light trading. You know, I would buy a little bit more than I needed and sell bottles to people who were attending the events. But it was a very small enterprise. Yeah. But it gave me a really great education in wine. I tasted everything pretty much that I wanted to. Because London is also a great city for trade tastings, for every other merchant tastings. So I attended a lot of things. So I would say in a way that those were, you know, I lived not an ostentatious life, except for the wine. But it was a lean operation. But I, you know, got to drink a lot of great wine. So I consider in a way those years my long apprenticeship in fine wine.

• Speaker #0

  And so then 2010, you decide to move to Hong Kong. You decide that because you just love the vibe. You want more sun than what you have in the UK. And you arrive with like a backpack and be like, I'm going to set up a business here. Or what's in your mind at that time?

• Speaker #1

  Let's see. So 2010 or 2009, we'll remember there was a global financial crisis. And this hit UK, London. pretty hard um and and just at the same time you know 2008 henry tang here had lifted the taxes on wine which is a remarkable thing to have done uh and it created a boom here in hong kong and he wanted to create hong kong as a hub for wine not just for hong kong but for the region help develop a really professional industry and it succeeded and i wanted to be part of that um I had known Hong Kong a bit before because I was actually an exchange student here in my last year of high school. So I had a feeling for the city, love the city. But yes, a very simple business plan to try to replicate what I was doing in London, but in Hong Kong. And that didn't quite succeed. I did some events, but what was happening at that time, all the auction houses, all the big merchants were also... moving into town and they had lots of wine to sell so they provided a lot of events free or very discounted to to to exactly the same people that i wanted to pay to attend my events so it struggled um but over that period of time i made a lot of contacts here and the key one was mike that was in the end uh the right person at the right time uh perhaps for both of us and so we were able to create this just making each other i had a wine dinner okay all right wine dinners so i've met a lot of people at wine dinners um and so yeah so we would um attend different dinners together and we became friends uh and he uh had had been doing well in finance but he he had the bug for wine really bad you know uh he he really wanted to be in wine is something i recognized and and so we we started together just working at one desk together in 2013 okay and it was uh importing wines and selling wines here importing wines and selling wines no place like that it was a like i guess it was not in your mind even to have a tasting places a club or something it was it was down yeah down the line so initially it was a very lean operation. We had no shot. And... What we did was we started to acquire all the right kind of wines. So if you would search on WineSearcher, we would be a stockist. And so that attracted a lot of clients because we would buy. We had quite a good portfolio of wines ready to drink, and that attracted the clients to allow us to start trading. At the same time, immediately we made a start on the agency portfolio, trying to get domains to work directly with us. So we built a portfolio focused on Burgundy. We work with over 40 domains now in Burgundy. Also the Mosul. We have seven domains there and more lately Champagne and some other places too. But we knew that ultimately if you're only buying and selling the wines that everyone's looking for, then you're going to compete on very tight margins. You'll attract the clients, but your margins will be very tight.

• Speaker #0

  And clients may be captive like... They can buy from you if you have stock at a good price, but they would give you another one. Exactly.

• Speaker #1

  So hard to develop the relationship. Although having had the stock, we continue to do a lot of wine events. So we had a lot of connection actually with the clients through the wine dinners that we put on. But building up the agency portfolio, that takes time. You know, we've had some agencies that we've wanted and it's been years of conversation. to get to the point where they'll work with us. So that's a more robust business. We have some barrier to entry when you have a direct relationship with a domain. And so we didn't start with a shop, but having created this relationship with clients, we needed our own space. So our first shop was... 800 square feet, something like that. Very, very tiny. And dominated by a tasting table.

• Speaker #0

  A big tasting table.

• Speaker #1

  But from that, we then opened the larger space in Saingpun. Actually, it was 10 times the size of the first shop because I had all sorts of ideas about event space and wine lounge. Mike and I wanted the place not just to be a shop, but to be a place to enjoy for customers. And that's when enters our other partner, Randy C, a successful restaurateur in Hong Kong, who we knew socially and through his Bistro Du Vin and some other restaurants. And he said, you know, you guys should put a restaurant right in this shop. And we said, yeah. In the end, we did it. And having done it, we thought that looks like the obvious thing we would have planned to do at the start. But it wasn't. That was his idea. And then we thought, what do you do about wine prices? If you're in a wine shop and you can see the price, but you're dining and you see a different typical price, you don't feel good about that. And in the end, we said, why don't we just list all of the wines to drink at the retail price? So, you know, 60, 70% lower than most restaurant wine lists. That restaurant was called Batar. And right from the beginning, it was booked out. You know, we took reservations the first Monday of the month and then for one month later, and it was full. So that was the transition or the genesis for where we are today, Club Batar.

• Speaker #0

  And this... So this restaurant was in Saint-Pon, so just not that far from here, actually, like 30 minutes walking. But then you had this opportunity in the building. How did that work for opening Club Batard afterwards? Because this place is absolutely massive. A shop of 4,000 square foot is already big, but I don't know how many square foot you have here.

• Speaker #1

  We're 18,000 square feet. Yeah, so... But Bataar, inside the fine wine experience in Tsai Ing Poon, provided the proof of concept, really. That there was a... And particularly, I think, coming out of the pandemic, there's an increasing focus on very good value. And we were providing that. So that restaurant continued to be very busy, even as the restaurant sector in Hong Kong was beginning to suffer. So, actually, it was Mike and Randy had the idea to create Club Bata. And so the idea was to take what we had learned, but move it into Central. So we're right in the heart of Central here to combine a great location. We searched and searched because we knew we needed an iconic location, the Pedder Building. In the end, once we knew it was possible, we kind of locked it. Locked on this one. Needed to be a beautiful design. We got Joyce Wang Studio to design the club. We knew we had to have great food and service, so we closed the Bata restaurant that we created and moved it into the club. Um, we, another restaurant, which was a favorite of ours for Cantonese food, Hopsi. We, we asked them to close that to move into the club and we created, this all day dining concept here. So three floors, three different, chefs, teams, one on each floor and linked by this wine cellar where we're speaking today. So three floor wine cellar. So you can traverse the club in. inside the cellar um offering an enormous selection of of fine wines uh wines of all types for all occasions and critically still at the retail price but that whole package uh is a membership model so um the people who have access to the club to come in and dine here are the Embers. But we had the clients already. from Batar and the Fine Wine Experience and from Hopsi. We were able to get about half of the membership before we opened the club.

• Speaker #0

  Which is pretty encouraging when you know that your rent bills are going to arrive.

• Speaker #1

  So in fact, we opened the doors here in September 2024. And by Christmas, the club was full. Membership was full. So which was a great relief. and, and we're really grateful for the support that we received here for that. It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's great.

• Speaker #0

  So the, the concept is that, you pay a yearly membership to, to be in the club and then you have access to all the spaces for breakfast, having a coffee, having, having a dinner, even buying bottles, I guess. Yes.

• Speaker #1

  So you pay a joining fee. Um, at the moment we have a wait list where we encourage people who are interested to get in touch with us. But, You pay a joining fee and then you pay a monthly fee. But just as an example of how that so the monthly fee is $1,500 Hong Kong dollars, you know, around let's say $200 US dollars. Here, a bottle of Dom Perignon is about that price, a little bit lower. But anywhere around here, it's more than double that price. So I say if you drink one bottle of Dom Perignon per month, you're already even. on your membership fee. And then every bottle after that, you're saving a lot of money.

• Speaker #0

  And you're, this is a bit girls' math. I'm actually saving money.

• Speaker #1

  Saving money by shopping more, right? Yes. You called it girls' math. I'll say nothing on that. And then, okay. So the obvious use for the club is dinner, wine dinners, or even lunch. But actually, as you see, people are here for breakfast, coming for a quick coffee. They've got meetings in Central. They need to meet somebody or they need 20 minutes by themselves with their laptop. They can come here. They can come in for a cocktail, have a meeting before dinner. They can come after dinner somewhere else and drink some more wine. And we have a great whiskey bar here as well called OBE. So whiskey lovers have a great time there. And even non-whiskey lovers because we do classes for our members to learn about whiskey. So that sort of completes the package here at Club Bataille.

• Speaker #0

  And it's, so we talk about the membership, but, and the fact that if you drink one bottle of Dom Perignon, you're basically saving money. But what's amazing about this model is that people are actually, when the people dine here, they actually are not afraid of opening bottles and like going into the cellar and having good things. And I guess for the winemakers, it's always something that they have. especially for people making fine wine is that sometimes you know they sell their bottles out of the estate at a certain price and then they travel the world and they see this bottle at like 10 times or 20 times the price that they sold it and they're like they most of them don't like it because they they want their bottle to be drink their wine to be drink um and i guess it's the case here that wine is made to be shared and to be in the glass and it's something that you do here

• Speaker #1

  Absolutely. you know it it's nice to see a fancy bottle on display uh or i suppose for some domains it's nice to know that their wine is listed in a lot of famous restaurants But in the end, the wine is for pleasure and it needs to be opened. And that's our focus here and the focus of the members. They enjoy the wine. Yeah, it's nice to see all the wines on the rack. But in the evening, you come here and you see a lot of these bottles are open and people are enjoying the wine. They are wine lovers, but they're also smart people. They don't want to pay the wrong price for the wine. And here they have the confidence. It's the right price, so they open the bottle, they might open another one. And so, yeah, the wines get drunk. And then wine producers come here, they see that. And in fact, we also work with some other merchants, not just Feynman Experience here at Club Bataar, but we also have a special program called Domain Seller Direct. So some wineries that we don't work with necessarily to sell and distribute the wine in Hong Kong. give us older vintages directly from their cellar to put on the list here. And those wines have to be drunk here.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, okay.

• Speaker #1

  But we also offer those at the retail price. So that gives the members a confidence and a chance to try wines. It means that the estate making the wine knows that that bottle is going to be opened. And that the person opening it is going to get a very fair price. It's not just going to sit on a list as a trophy at some inflated price.

• Speaker #0

  Plus for this estate, even if they work with other importers and distributors, it's a good way to, I guess, enter the market, making consumers discover this bottle. Then they can sell younger vintages to a larger amount of places. Yes. So it's also good for them. Yeah. So this is the experience of Club Bata. You live in Hong Kong now?

• Speaker #1

  So I lived here for 12 years. And at the end of the pandemic, I moved to France.

• Speaker #0

  Okay.

• Speaker #1

  Well, I think two things. One, we're wanting to maintain relationships in the wine-growing regions and to continue to have our eyes on new things to bring to the club, which we've been able to do. But also, we all learned how to do Zoom. during the pandemic. So my day starts quite early in France. I'm on Zoom every day with some of the team here.

• Speaker #0

  And you still live in France?

• Speaker #1

  I live in France. Oh, where in France? I'm in Paris and in Burgundy in Bonn.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, worst place. Worst place.

• Speaker #1

  And then I'm here quite often in Hong Kong. And we have a business in mainland China as well. So I just came back from Shanghai yesterday.

• Speaker #0

  Okay, so this is what I was going to ask you, is that you have, so, Find One Experience, Club Batao. Do you have any other projects elsewhere, maybe replicating displays or, like, spin-off of displays?

• Speaker #1

  So, Find One Experience, we have a shop in Shanghai, and we have an import and distribution business there, too. We've been there for quite a few years now. But we've just opened a shop in Shanghai, in Jing'an. which is great. On the Club Batard side, yes, we have quite a few irons in the fire, quite a few projects that we're working on. We're anxious to get the next thing open and announced, but I don't have anything specific to share on that now. But just to say, yes, we're quite actively working on new projects for Club Batard. So I'm very excited about that.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, that's a... I guess it's a lot of pressure because when you have the first one right, then you need the next one to be at the level and you need a lot of investment.

• Speaker #1

  And you're only as good as your last project. So we have to get those things right. But we knew that we had to get those elements right here. We've learned things from operating the club. And so we're working on applying that elsewhere.

• Speaker #0

  We'll do an episode two in a few years. I look forward to it. Yeah,

• Speaker #1

  I look forward to it.

• Speaker #0

  So we talked about the fact that wines are made to be drunk and opened here. But one of the, and you mentioned a little bit the economic landscape of Hong Kong changing in the F&B. Can you tell us a bit more about the consumer profiles that you have and maybe the change that you have witnessed in Hong Kong over the last... 10 years so you mentioned covid um and i guess like the yeah i guess the consumer profile is changing i've been in hong kong just for one year but i hear people uh talking about that and being like yeah you know before covid it was more more expressive in terms of fnba and now it's a bit on the expressive is a good term yeah yeah like people just tell me parties

• Speaker #1

  were everywhere it was pretty wild uh there was a there was a

• Speaker #0

  boom period leading up to the pandemic period. And, you know, wine prices were rising, interest in wine was rising, but maybe it was a little too hot. But yeah, that was a great time, a great time in wine. But each cycle teaches something new and develops something. And what I see is the wine culture in Hong Kong deepening, becoming more established, more sophisticated, more complex. I think that's a good thing. That takes time. So actually,

• Speaker #1

  the cycles, economic cycles can help. You have to refocus a bit. I guess for you, it's okay because you're selling precise wine. You're not doing mass market wine. So I guess the fact that the market is getting more educated and more specific is good for you because then you have all the references and the events and the place. Maybe it's harder for people who were doing like table wines or just wines for daily consumption.

• Speaker #0

  I'm sure in the sort of fast-moving consumer good end where, you know, as we know, storage costs are high in Hong Kong. one of the other great things that, um, henry tang and others did uh back in 2008 was they recognized that the industry has to work to a high standard to develop a good reputation and so um there was created the hong kong hkqaa accreditation so actually logistics and storage in hong kong are at a very high standard two levels uh wine and fine wine we do all of ours at the fine wine level but if you So the quality is good, but there's no cheap land in Hong Kong. So in the end, storage is expensive. If you are dealing with wines that you need to turn over fast or storage will eat up your margin, then that's tough. If there's a downturn and you're paying storage costs. Our, I guess, center of gravity is a little higher in the fine wine space. So the storage is still significant. less of an issue. I think quite tough if there was a downturn, you know, affecting your business here. But, you know, there are a lot of good players in the Hong Kong market. You know, it's great. I love seeing what others are doing. I love being part of that. So, no, I'm confident for the wine market in Hong Kong. I think we just have to keep adapting. to new trends, to new interest from younger generation. I mean, here in the club, you asked about profile. I mean, it's quite broad. So actually we sell a lot of traditional things, as you might expect. We have a lot of mature Bordeaux. That does very well. It's not the trendy thing in the wine market, but honestly, Bordeaux offers amazing wines at great prices. You can drink mature vintages. So we always keep a very good stock. So the younger Bordeaux, that market is quite tough, I think. But this is just amazing supply of older vintages that offer really good value, really good experience. So that actually sells very well here. Burgundy is very strong. That's probably more than half of what we do. And then again, in Burgundy, you have a mix of quite traditional producers, but also new styles, new things that appeal to a younger demographic.

• Speaker #1

  And maybe new places also, like maybe the Grand Creux, Premier Creux, where you're focused at some points, but you can witness some new places kind of emerging.

• Speaker #0

  That's exactly right. So I think in two senses. One, the sort of map gets extended. People are now interested to drink Cisin, Marcenet, or a bit further south, Aussie, Duret, Saint-Romain, villages that they might not have known even five years ago. But the prices of the really fancy villages and the fancy...

• Speaker #1

  It's just so high that someone wanting to drink at a reasonable price,

• Speaker #0

  and I count myself amongst those, are looking more broadly. But the quality of those wines being made today is... often much higher than it used to be. So that rising tide has actually helped those villages. The prices there have risen to a level where they can do all of the same.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, they can reinvent.

• Speaker #0

  And harvesting, sorting, you know, qualitative. So it's made those wines better, but at a reasonable price. And then the other side is, you know, young winemakers in Burgundy, you know, live there part-time. They can't afford to buy land in these, you know, very expensive plots. So places like the Haute Côte, Haute Côte de Mille, Haute Côte de Beaune, or over in the Jura, for example, or down in Beaujolais, you know, they find a bit of land at a much more reasonable price. and they can bring those wines to market. And so I think that's very interesting. I'm very hopeful on that side, actually. I think those very top vineyards and domains, yes, they will remain quite expensive, but there's a broadening of what's going on in Burgundy. You can find great wine at a good price.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, we love to see that as well. And Haute Cote is a very interesting... You're drinking those? As well. Started... tasted a few things. You know, we had Laurent Delonay on the podcast and he's like one of the biggest advocates of the road code. So, we had the opportunity to discuss that with him.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, for him, it's the next revolution of Burgundy.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. Yeah. It's great wines being made there. I love it.

• Speaker #1

  And even Beaujolais, for example, in one podcast, we had Thibaut Ligier-Belard and, you know, he's doing, with Yvon Massonat, they are doing Domaine de Jeune Pousse. in Beaujolais. So it's basically like incubators for winemakers. And like the wines are, honestly, they are super cheap. Yes. 15 US, I think, or 20 US the bottle. And it's actually very good. And the story is amazing. It's like the type of things that you can start to see in Beaujolais of people trying to express something and making precise stuff at a price that is like... Nothing to compare with other Burgundy, even like Morgon, for example. Yes. Things in Morgon are super cheap.

• Speaker #0

  Super cheap and great.

• Speaker #1

  And it's amazing.

• Speaker #0

  You can find a great producer and you can drink, let's say, the Cru Basic for a very good price. But you can drink single vineyards for not a lot more. It's still really affordable. I think Beaujolais is really exciting.

• Speaker #1

  Beaujolais is really something amazing. So now you live in France What comparison do you have Between the wine market In Hong Kong And the one in France For me it's super interesting to see it that way Because I have the other way around Immigrating to Hong Kong But you're immigrating to France Spending more time How do you see the wine market Maybe Bonne is different But actually in Paris When you spend time there How do you see this wine place

• Speaker #0

  I think, you know, you have your traditional bistro, these kind of places, and they, you know, you still go to places and it'll say Fleury, but it won't say anything else, the vintage or the maker or anything. And I think, so there's on one level, not quite that engagement with wine in the way that we would here, where we wouldn't do that, I guess, because of the long tradition of just listing wines by places. But then you have some quite exciting places in Paris that are really passionate about the wine side and very interesting to visit. There's a big natural wine scene in Paris, obviously. It's sort of the spearhead for that. So, you know, especially over in the 11th on that side, you know, I live on the other side, but everywhere I like to try is on the other side. And then, you know, they'll have... all natural wine lists so there's one place that i that i love going to where i really hardly recognize anything on the list but the sommelier knows me and i say okay let's go uh this is my mood just just bring me a bottle of wine and then tell me about it and so so on that level i quite like being a novice i suppose that goes back to curiosity i just just love to learn so so i go there and that's where I experiment.

• Speaker #1

  I have a... I have a very nice address for you. So it's not a French wine, but it's the only place where I discovered something like that. So they have one Michelin-star restaurant and they have another restaurant. So they have two other restaurants that are not Michelin, but really like amazing level. And so the Michelin is called Chabour. And then in the same street, they have Chana and Tekes. I will send you the address. They are great. It was like super close to where I live. and so they have wines from all around the Mediterranean Sea. So like I tasted things from... Armenia, I think, or Azerbaijan. And when you're curious about wine, you have Syrian wines, Libyan wines, Lebanese wines, and it's just like new horizons and new things. So it's really geek, but it's amazing to discover. No, I love that.

• Speaker #0

  And isn't it nice to go somewhere where...

• Speaker #1

  You know nothing.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. Actually, when I see those kind of wine lists where I don't recognize anything... Coming back to your earlier question about intimidation, that's where I think, oh, you know, I'm sitting, I don't know anything. I don't know where to start, you know, but it's fun. And you just experiment. And I suppose that would be one of my tips. Everywhere I go where there's a sommelier who's passionate, if I had a preconception about what I want to order, I set that aside and have a conversation with a sommelier and say, okay, teach me something new. I want to try something. And sometimes it doesn't quite hit what I really like, but sometimes it really does, and I discover something new. And that's what I enjoy. And coming back to your question about the difference, I think there's just a concentration here in Hong Kong of great wine activity and a real energy. And, okay, we have a lot. a bias maybe towards French wine in our business. But, you know, in Burgundy, you mostly drink Burgundy, but some Champagne and some Rhone. In Paris, you drink the regions of France, but it's mostly France. You're not really drinking lots of Italian wine or German wine. But here in Hong Kong, because we don't make wine, it's a little bit more diverse. More like UK, for example, where there's a lot of variety. So I quite enjoy that here.

• Speaker #1

  It's something that I didn't realize before coming here. Actually, in France, I was almost only drinking French wine. And since I'm here, I'm just having, I don't know, like a Moselle Riesling and then the other day an Australian wine. It's great, isn't it? I have access to everything. Thank you very much, Lyndon. It was an amazing conversation. I had a really nice time discovering your story, talking about how you build a fine wine experience in the Club Bata. I guess for the people listening or watching this podcast, unfortunately, you won't be able to come here to have dinner unless you find someone who has a membership at Club Bata. So try to find someone like that before coming to Hong Kong.

• Speaker #0

  You can come and buy wines from the cellar. So we run the cellar also as a branch of Fine Wine Experience. So you can come and visit. We'd be happy to give you a tour of the club, and you can buy wine to take away.

• Speaker #1

  Okay, so you can still come to the club and buy wine. So it's a good experience. Thank you very much for that. And then I have three last questions. The first one is, do you have a book recommendation for me?

• Speaker #0

  I was just given, and thank you, Edouard Perrinet from Chateau Moulin Avant, gave me a copy of Natasha Hughes, MW's new book, The Wines of Beaujolais. So I'm very excited to read that. It's a region that I really love. region I think people should dive into. So I haven't finished it yet, but I would recommend people read that because it's a region really to discover.

• Speaker #1

  We'll try to find a copy because it's definitely an interesting place and I would love to learn more. Do you have a recent wine that you tasted recently and that was amazing, a good memory you want to share?

• Speaker #0

  Yes. It was a lovely warm spring day recently, and we were making some just slightly spicy Thai food at home. And I opened a 2020 Philly Schaefer Krache Himmelreich Kabinett, which is a wine from an amazing family with a small domain, very hardworking, passionate winemakers on an incredible slope that looks like a wall. When you come into that village, the vineyard looks like a wall behind the village. It's so steep. and cabinet is a very light style of, of Riesling fruity. So you have a little bit of residual sugar, but it's not a sweet wine. You know, it's more like eating a juicy ripe peach, um, seven and a half percent alcohol. So for lunch, it was light. It was delicious and refreshing. so 2020 Willi Schaefer, Graka Himmreich, cabinet Riesling.

• Speaker #1

  I absolutely love this wine. So it's well noted. It will be one of our next lunch. Thanks. And finally, who is the next person I should interview?

• Speaker #0

  If you haven't, you have to go and see my friends, Jay Ginsberg and Mandy Chan at Ginsberg and Chan, a great wine merchant in Hong Kong and a lovely couple. I think you'd really enjoy talking to them.

• Speaker #1

  Amazing. Count on us. We are in Hong Kong, so that's perfect. Thank you very much for that, Lyndon. It was an amazing conversation. I hope that you guys loved this conversation as well. If you are still here, it means that you liked it. So don't forget to share this episode, subscribe to the channel, like it, send it around to two persons who need to buy wine at Club Bataar, let's say. And find my experience. Thanks a lot, guys. See you soon. Bye-bye. Thanks, Lyndon. Thank you so much.

• Speaker #0

  Thank you.

• Speaker #1

  Thanks. Perfect.

• Speaker #0

  Thanks so much.