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| The wine list at Amuse-Bouche - impressive but wait until you see what the punters bring in their brown paper bags |
Where in the world are most of the rarest and greatest bottles of wine drunk? A fusty gentleman’s club in London? The private room in a culinary temple in Paris or the high rollers table at the Bellagio in Las Vegas? Well they are certainly the right habitats to observe oenophilic excess in one shape or another, but are mere also-rans compared to the most likely candidate. It is a modest French restaurant called Amuse Bouche on the twenty-second floor of a nondescript building in Wan Chai, formerly the Red Light district of Hong Kong.
The other interesting fact is that the vast majority of these consumed bottles costing thousands of dollars, are not on the restaurant’s excellent wine list but are BYO (bring your own), which has made Hong Kong the world capital for this practice. The BYO movement began somewhere in the backstreets of Melbourne in the Sixties, when restaurants without full liquor licenses allowed customers to bring their own modest bottles.
Hong Kong is in another sphere as customers sometimes bring half a dozen priceless rarities from their own cellars and pay a corkage fee. To understand how this came to pass, you have to go back to 2008, when, in a bid to corner the Asian market, Hong Kong abolished all taxes and duties on wine imports. It has been a stunning success – imports quadrupled and now stand at just over US$1Billion annually, with the majority from famous French vineyards. Since 2010, Hong Kong supplanted New York as the leading place for fine wine auctions on the planet. A side benefit of the obsession with wine in Hong Kong is that restaurants have to be competitive in their pricing or people will refuse to purchase from them. This is no passing phase as the average age of wine drinkers has come down by 10 or 15 years, so many restaurants have serious patrons who are still in their twenties.
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| A bottle enjoyed at Amuse Bouche |
Kent Wong has a different approach. “We prefer to charge per person rather than per bottle, so if customers want to bring along great bottles, we prepare an entire dinner for them and charge HK$1300 ($170) per person – I have to survive.” The predominantly Chinese clientele may like the obvious famous wines, but that doesn’t bother Kent Wong. “My customers are not show offs – they just love great wine. Sometimes if collectors think they have a fake bottle, they bring it here and they ask me to taste it and compare to the same bottle on our list as I only buy from impeccable suppliers. This year, I have tasted three obvious fakes.”
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| One of Ambers whites |
The BYO approach is so pervasive that only three restaurants refuses to allow it – L’Atelier de Robuchon at the Mandarin Landmark Hotel plus Pierre Gagnaire and Joel Robuchon. No such restrictions apply at their other hotel restaurant Amber, the most acclaimed restaurant in Hong Kong. Chef Richard Ekkebus says “We are a very wine friendly restaurant - 60% of our wine sales are above HK$6,000 ($775).”
They also allow one bottle free if another similar bottle is purchased, but they only allow a maximum of four bottles per party. “In the past we had people walking in with 20 bottles – it created anarchy in the restaurant because of the glassware, so regular customers didn’t receive adequate service.”
(Since my visit to Hong Kong in November, things have changed at Amber too – from this month (March 2016) they have abolished BYO entirely in an effort to maintain profitability and offer a wider range from their own list, which is pretty comprehensive).
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| From Amber to Red |
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| Amber - game on |
The most influential wine person in Hong Kong is Paulo Pong, who heads Altaya Wines and also owns numerous restaurants. “Wine took off way before the tax drop – Hong Kong people are very smart – they realised very early on that bringing your own wine to a restaurant is much more economic and interesting than ordering off the wine list. Some restaurant charge as much as five times, others less than double or even a fixed rate. Wine has been part of the drinking culture here for 30 years plus, though in the Eighties it was mainly about Cognac. In Hong Kong, hotel dining has always been more important than dining in stand-alone restaurants. For individual restaurants, they didn’t really have a wine culture, forget about then even having wine glasses. My father was keen on wine and would often take interesting bottles to restaurants that didn’t have any depth in their lists, so I learnt about the BYO thing as a teenager.”
Paulo is so passionate about fine wine that even when a student at M.I.T. in Cambridge, he not only brought along the wine, but also his own glassware in a special carrying case. He is sanguine about the all-pervasive nature of BYO culture in Hong Kong. “Even the top restaurants in Hong Kong can’t match the depth of some of the big collectors here. Sommeliers hate it, but the other senior managers understand they have to be a lot more accommodating with it.” Paulo Pong believes that more fine wine is opened in Hong Kong every night than anywhere else in the world. As a result of this prodigious consumption, it is also common practice to decorate restaurants with empty bottles of Domaine Romanée-Conti or rarities from legendary wine makers like Henri Jayer or Christian Moueix. Paulo Pong may own several Michelin starred restaurants, but he concedes that Kent Wong has seen more extraordinary bottles than anyone else. “He probably sees mature Domaine Romanée-Conti or famous Bordeaux such as Chateau Pétrus, Lafite or Latour, opened every night.”
Linden Wilkie, who co-owns the Fine Wine Experience, holds extraordinary dinners and tastings of great wines, often at Amuse Bouche: “The way we work is tell them the wines we will bring in advance, and they work out a menu. Sometimes we fine-tune it over an email exchange, but usually its just right. The price is fixed and includes the food, corkage and service in one fixed overall price. It’s a price I’ve always thought fair value, and the wine service is fantastic. I prefer that holistic per person price approach.”
But it is not just the very high end that attracts Linden and other oenophiles.
“I think the other luxury for wine lovers in Hong Kong, are the no frills zero décor, low key service regional Chinese restaurants. They might have some okay wine glasses and an ice bucket, but you might just as easily bring some wine glasses with you and even your own wine opener. You’ll be left to your own devices, do your own wine service, but there’s often no corkage to pay, or a very nominal rate if there is. These sorts of places often have great food, and with the right wines, make for a lovely casual sort of wine evening. It doesn’t have to be all ‘French' and formal each and every time we want to gather to drink wine.”
However, his most memorable event recently was a private dinner, which sums up its attraction to wine lovers.
“I wanted to drink my last bottle of 1934 Chateau Cheval Blanc. It is my favourite Cheval - fragrant, complete, ethereal. Neal Martin gave it 100 points in the Wine Advocate and I agree with him. A friend also brought a magnum of 1934 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, and we had a number of other great bottles.
On top of this, it turned out I knew some people at three other tables - pretty much the whole place. There was Henry (the sommelier) offering glasses of wine from and between tables, so a glass of the delicious original disgorgement 1966 Dom Perignon came my way. It might all sound a bit spoiled and debauched. It is. But the nice thing is that at Amuse Bouche, there’s no pretense about wine, just deep enthusiasm and enjoyment of it.”
A shorter version of this story first appeared in NEWSWEEK
http://europe.newsweek.com/hong-kong-byob-fine-dining-wine-424635?rm=eu
http://europe.newsweek.com/hong-kong-byob-fine-dining-wine-424635?rm=eu