ALTRUISTICALLY YOURS

GERRIE LIM meets a former Wall Street banker who is spreading the news around Asia about artisanal and family-run vineyards

HIS NAME – RAIFORD C COCKFIELD III – is somewhat patrician and his roots are African-American and Creole-European, but he simply asks to be called Rai (pronounced “Ray”). He once ruled a comfortable roost on Wall Street until a certain infamous day – when his employer, Lehman Brothers, collapsed and triggered the finance-industry meltdown, also prompting Cockfield to change his own life.

The eventual result was Altruistic Boutique Wines, so named because Cockfield works with charities, notably the Hong Kong Cancer Fund, the SPCA and the Women’s Foundation. “Either I donate wine to their events or I arrange their events or hold auctions for them,” he explains. “It’s, to me, part of living a balanced life.”

He’s now regarded as a leading curator of North American boutique wines from the states of California, Oregon and Washington, which he also distributes in Hong Kong, China and Singapore. On an early May evening, before hosting a tasting event at the Miele Private Dining Room, he explains the compulsions that now dictate his life. His wines serve as vehicles to achieve his mission of educating people and sharing research in order to cultivate a “total palate experience.”

Local wine-lovers may know Altruistic Boutique Wines from its hosting of the gala dinner at last year’s first US Boutique Wine Festival. The company’s current portfolio comprises 280 wines from 70 vineyards, including the critically lauded Delectus Winery from Napa Valley and Kunin Estate from Santa Barbara. Cockfield, however, has his work cut out as he now ventures into mainland China and competes against a stubborn mindset embracing first-growth Bordeaux and little else. Yet this young man of 32 years, who brims with entrepreneurial zest, seems unfazed by the challenges as he waxes lyrical about his ongoing passion.

How did a former Wall Street banker get mixed up in the wine business?
I started this company a year and a half ago. But it really all began with my love for wine, 10 years ago back in college, when I started collecting wine and really educated myself. At that time, I was working at a start-up firm while I was in college – a tech company doing Internet sports recruiting. We folded it in 2001 and I went to Wall Street. But I continued my love of wine. While I was in New York, basically, if you’d broken into my apartment, the only thing worth stealing was the wine fridge.

What were you collecting back then?
I probably spent, I would say, a third of my salary on wine. Back while I was in college, it was mostly table wines from Italy and the United States. So I got to know those really well and towards the end of college I started my very basic French wine education. When I got to Lehman Brothers, I was around a lot of finance people and went to dinners and so I really broke into the French and the higherend Italian. That’s when I really, really started to fall totally in love with wine. This was in 2002 through to 2005. When I went to business school at Stanford, I knew there were only two things in my life that I really wanted to do – real estate and wine.

And how did wine win?
Well, I had to decide where to go to do those two things and a friend of mine had moved out from New York in 2003 to Hong Kong, so in 2004 I went out to Asia to visit him. I fell in love with Hong Kong and Tokyo, and kind of said, “I think I could live here.” I went back to the States and back to business school knowing full well I was going to find a way to get back out to Asia. I studied Japanese and Mandarin and only focused on finding jobs in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. At the time, I didn’t see where I could really do wine. I was looking at wine funds at that point, but that meant moving to Napa or Sonoma or Santa Barbara. So I went to Lehman Brothers and I did a real-estate private equity fund there and figured I could do that for maybe five years before I did something with wine.

And then fate intervened through Lehman Brothers?
Yes, they sped up the process! Thanks to what happened at Lehman Brothers, I didn’t quite make it to five years. [And] I was having such great conversations about wine. It was just an idea. In the beginning, I had a partner and we used to talk about it, and I said I wanted to focus on building out to China. We focused on only the boutiquewine experience, so it was almost high-end concierge, meaning people could literally call and talk to us about wine. It was just myself and my partner and people around Hong Kong like [Masters of Wine] Debra Meiburg and Jeannie Cho Lee, who we would bring into events because we specialised in highend corporate events, which is still one of my specialities. I work with a few partners like Miele, high-end partners with high-end products. But now what I’m focussing on is what I call the “total experience.”

What does that mean?
Well, through our website [altruisticwines.com] and continuing through our events at the US Boutique Wine Festival, I want to create a platform where everybody can educate themselves comfortably while learning as much as they can about wine. It’s the easiest format for them. We bring in small-label, exclusive wines and I focus on distribution here. Otherwise the platform is about the total wine enjoyment experience, for which I’m launching online applications and websites. For instance, one of them is like a Facebook site, where I’m taking the intimidation away, and wanting people to be really comfortable and to be able to express themselves and share their experiences with others without the pressure of being told, “How can you like wines from the US? They’re too new and too fruit-forward.” It’s more about sharing an honest experience – if you’ve been to a winery and you really enjoyed it, we provide simple organisational tools to show pictures and to show your notes and the wine links are active, so if you click through, you’ll come to a wine page with all the basic information you need, followed by professional notes as well.

But you’re also selling perception. And that perception is coloured by the fact that you’re competing with the more famous American names, the Robert Mondavis and the Screaming Eagles and the Stag’s Leaps.
Yes. But that’s where “boutique” is great. I love those wines you mentioned, but I also love Sine Qua Non because cult wines help and the explanation is actually quite simple. From the same small production that these wines are done, my boutique wines are done in exactly the same manner, by equally experienced people. And here is the value. They aren’t as famous yet, so you’re going to get the same quality at a more approachable price. You can go online and search and access it at other places, but you’re not going to get my specialised, exclusive experience, and I’m doing it in a manner that’s hopefully very comfortable.

Do you believe you’re spreading the gospel of American wine, as an evangelist?
I think that would be too strong, with my understanding of the term “evangelist.” I do like the term “teacher.” What I’m offering is this: for those people who want a wine experience at a certain level, I can provide that. Or I can point them in the right direction to have it. I think what I’m trying to do is to change the approach from “I want to tell you what’s good” to “I want to create multiple environments where you can pick up as much or as little information as possible.” And I will at least make sure that information is solid. If I can do that, I’ll feel like I’ve achieved something. To me, this is a passion. I’m going to China with this.

Will you do it any differently in mainland China?
In Hong Kong, I’m doing everything from small tastings to wine festivals that feature 50 vineyards and serve 1,000 people in four days. Some of my tastings in China will be more casual and educational. Comfort is so important, because I’ve had people in China say to me, “It’s not that I don’t want to learn, it’s that I don’t want to sit down with somebody who’s going to talk at me.”