Liquid Assets

HOWARD BILTON, millionaire tax lawyer, art lover and philanthropist, talks to gerrie lim about his pet project in Portugal

HOWARD BILTON EXEMPLIFIES a truism of sorts, perhaps an object lesson in the risky yet romantic world of boutique wine. When you’re a millionaire philanthropist, you can be forgiven for indulging in gallows humour. For he chose to call his wine Howard’s Folly, and it hasn’t yet proved an expensive mistake.

Hong Kong-based Bilton, a dapper Yorkshireman (and unabashed Leeds United football fan), is well known as the intrepid tax lawyer who founded the Sovereign Group and its subsidiary, the non-profit Sovereign Art Foundation, of which he remains the titular chairman. He fatefully hatched the plan for Howard’s Folly in 2002 with Australian winemaker David Baverstock, and the two of them are still running it almost 10 years later.

“The idea arose a little earlier than 2002 but we didn’t actually get round to making wine until 2005,” Bilton remembers, sitting in his Kinwick Centre office on Hollywood Road. The name was inspired by the cult wine Lake’s Folly (launched in 1963 in Australia’s Hunter Valley). Howard’s Folly has its main vineyard operations in the Alentejo region of Portugal, just east of Lisbon. “A most interesting choice,” Bilton believes, “because it has very different grape varietals and there’s a lot of scope for improvement. Rather than riding a wave, it would mean creating one.”

It was, as wine legends tend to be, a thrilling saga of serendipity meeting commerce. Baverstock had been living in Portugal for 25 years and was famous for making the acclaimed Herdade do Esporão wines; he was Portugal’s Winemaker of the Year in 1999, the first non-Portuguese ever to win. “I met him at the Ritz-Carlton in Lisbon on a Sunday,” Bilton recalls, “and rang somebody in Hong Kong on the Monday and said, ‘I think we’re on to something. I met this guy David Baverstock and he makes this wine Esporão, which I’ve actually tried, and it’s fantastic.’

“And this person said, ‘Funnily enough, while you’ve been away, there was a fullpage article in the South China Morning Post about David Baverstock and Esporão wines, just yesterday.’ And I said, ‘Well, this is meant to be.’ ”

In his own tasting notes for the current release, the 2007 Howard’s Folly, Baverstock says, “Cooler vintage conditions and a longer period in bottle have contributed to a more refined and elegant wine with red fruits and spice on the nose and a harmonious, balanced palate.” Alentejo reds are characterised by their lusciously fragrant bouquet, matching the mouthfeel of soft, silky tannins. This particular wine – a blend of 60 percent Syrah, 30 percent Alicante Bouschet and 10 percent Touriga Nacional – is the result of six months ageing in a combination of new and used French and American oak, with a further 12 months in the bottle before release. Only 50,000 bottles were made, of which some 800 are still available in Hong Kong.

“It started as a hobby, but it’s designed to make money,” Bilton notes of his decidedly artisanal venture. There is, he discloses, a higher-end Reserva version that hasn’t been issued yet, and a new white wine, an aromatic Alvarinho (akin to the better-known Albariño, from the Galicia region of Spain), newly arrived in Hong Kong this month. “Only 10,000 bottles of that one, simply because I love Alvarinho,” he says. “I am making money per vintage – a very small amount, I must add – so we’re making an accounting profit as each vintage goes by, but certainly the process of me writing cheques hasn’t stopped.

“I’d like to be receiving cheques rather than writing them, but we haven’t got to that stage. The reason I’m still putting in money is we’ve still got the 2008 vintage, and we’re holding stocks from that year onwards. We didn’t make wine in 2009 because we didn’t think it was good enough. We just bottled the 2010s this past September and are now paying for the 2011. That’s the problem with the wine industry, as anyone who’s in it will tell you. It’s quite a lot of years tied up in liquid assets, and you’re constantly having to renew your capital equipment, your barrels and tanks and all that.”

But one aspect of this whole endeavour pleases him greatly. Each of his wine labels carries a reproduction of a work by an artist he admires. Shimmer by Angela Eames, a finalist of the 2007 Sovereign European Art Prize, appears on the 2007 Howard’s Folly. The 2007 Reserva is decorated with a tennis-ball-imprinted abstract painting by Martina Navratilova, and the 2008 Reserva will bear a unique black-and-gold label featuring, by Beijing-based artist Xu Bing, a Chinese pictograph that cleverly resembles “Howard’s Folly.” The 2010 Alvarinho features a colourful work by Australia-based, Thai-born painter Bundit Puangthong, a 2008 Sovereign Art Prize finalist.

“The idea of putting an artwork on the label and changing it every year wasn’t new – Mouton Rothschild is the most famous example, and Leeuwin Estate does it with their Arts Series,” Bilton admits. “But I have two great passions: art and wine. And combining both, to the advantage of both, seemed like a great idea. It also gives the artist a boost, because it gets their name out there – on the back label, we make reference to who the artist is. It took some time to develop that idea. Initially, we were going to go with a sort of very plain label with nothing very much on it, and then I had this idea and we stuck with it.”

So how much direct input does he exert on the winemaking process? “Very little,” he discloses, “because I always think it’s better to leave it to the experts. David is a genius winemaker and I am deliberately hands-off, like: ‘David, if you think that’s all right, let’s just do it.’ We’re partners in the business but I run the sales side. I get involved in devising the labels and trying to find new markets, and running and supervising and cajoling and bullying our various distributors into doing a little bit more than they otherwise would.

“You get out of it what you put in. When you’re a small brand, you really have to keep on top of them. If you let them get on with it without interference, my experience is nothing will happen. This is big enough to be a commercially sensible operation but small enough to be manageable. Making more than 50,000 bottles would, in our case, not really be sensible – it can only be done if you make an extremely high-priced wine.”

Ambition tempered with moderation is what one might expect from a tax lawyer who has written papers on such stirring stuff as how Hong Kong residents can avoid overseas estate duties after death, to cite one of his more famous missives. “Sovereign is a reasonably well-established and lucrative business, and Howard’s Folly is a new start-up operation by comparison,” he says, “so I would say it’s going to keep me behind this desk – writing tax opinions and advising people on their tax affairs – rather longer than otherwise. I have to pay for this operation somehow.”

He shrugs in mock resignation. “But I don’t think we’ll ever make a wine for its investment potential. My wines are made for drinking. They’re designed to give current pleasure.”