In Venus Veritas

gerrie lim meets a trio of women blazing a trail for their gender in Hong Kong’s hitherto male-dominated world of wine and spirits

THERE’S AN ANECDOTE doing the rounds that seems apocryphal but actually happened, and arguably reflects an underlying sexism within the wine business. A certain male sommelier at a certain Michelin-starred restaurant in Hong Kong was confronted with a bottle sent back by a female customer. The wine, she said, was “corked” (meaning it emitted a nasty odour because of a tainted cork) and was therefore not drinkable.

To her amazement, this French sommelier refused her refusal. “He didn’t say this out loud, but he certainly behaved as though I was a ‘typical ignorant Asian woman,’ ” she recalls. “He said, ‘This is how the wine is supposed to taste’ and refused to even smell it to check for himself if there was indeed cork taint in the wine or not.”

The outcome of this exchange might have been very different indeed, had he known who she was: none other than wine author and educator Jeannie Cho Lee MW (that’s Master of Wine, to all you would-be surly sommeliers). This story was made public on a local wine blog (with the consent of the venerated Cho Lee herself) and occurred in 2009 – a time when the visibility of women in the Hong Kong wine industry wasn’t as high as it is today.

Now there are young women such as Yvonne Cheung, at age 29 the chef sommelier at Café Gray Deluxe (at The Upper House, Pacific Place) since October 2010. Of Shanghainese parentage and raised in Thousand Oaks, California, Cheung graduated from UCLA in anthropology and East Asian studies, and then trained at the Culinary Institute of America in New York where, in 2007, she won the prestigious Kopf Wine Scholarship. However, it was one particular year, when she attended the Chinese University of Hong Kong at age 19, that inspired her current station.

“I’d always wanted to come back to Asia, mainly because I feel a great deal of pride in my Chinese heritage,” Cheung says. “I would like to be part of this culture because I feel like it’s inherently part of me, and Hong Kong is such an exciting city.” Female sommeliers are still rare here, let alone one like Cheung who also plans the wine programme for the entire Upper House hotel, and she’s faced her share of quizzical looks despite her extensive knowledge and eclectic taste; her personal favourites, she reveals, include Pinot Noir (primarily Burgundy), Riesling (from Alsace, Germany and Austria) and “some funky things like the lesser-known European whites – Malvasia, Assyrtiko and Ribolla – and Chenin Blanc from the Loire Valley.”

“Yes, there are moments when I surprise people, but I’ve rarely encountered negative response,” she adds. “Sometimes it’s been about being perceived as young, and also being Asian and female. Some people know I’m Chinese but they don’t realise I’m Western-raised and did my sommelier training in New York and Napa Valley. I feel it when I go to tastings where I notice it’s just me and 14 men. But I guess it’s exciting to be in the minority, and I’m also relieved and happy to know this is changing.”

That’s a sentiment shared by Charlene Dawes, owner of Tastings Wine Bar on Wellington Street and the newer Angel’s Share whisky bar on Hollywood Road. Dawes, 32, remembers opening Tastings three years ago to a small chorus of muffled chortles – “because I was an Asian and a younger person. And with my whisky bar, a lot of people assume it must have been opened by a man. And a lot of people don’t know what Angel’s Share means, so they think the person who owns it is called Angel.” (The “angel’s share” is the small fraction of wine or whisky that evaporates when left to mature in an oak barrel.)

Has she fielded flirtatious male attention at the bar? “Yes, I have had men come up and ask me, ‘Are you Angel?’ I get that quite often, but nothing more scandalous.” Dawes, born and bred in Hong Kong, graduated in international studies and management from Pepperdine University in Malibu, California and now observes a growing clientele of similarly overseas-educated Asian women; even at Angel’s Share, she says, some 40 percent of her regulars are women and several are even like her, expressing a distinct preference for smoky whiskies.

“People want to talk to someone who knows their wine or their spirits,” she says. “But it’s not like I’m a feminist with an agenda, wanting to do something because I’m a woman. I think a lot of us don’t do that – female winemakers, for instance, they just love what they do.”

Across the water in Mongkok, Ann Lau has made a speciality of selling wine to women. Her shop, JJ Wine Cellar at Sino Centre on Nathan Road, issued in July 2011 its own private-label wine called Jacob & Joelle (named after Lau’s two children), a 2007 Central Valley California Cabernet Sauvignon that won a Gold Prize at this year’s Restaurant and Bar show, in the House Wines category. She’d commissioned a California winemaker to create it expressly as a “simple wine for women to enjoy with Chinese food, as opposed to say a French wine with all that oak and complexity.” Only 2,400 bottles were made, some still available in seven Hong Kong restaurants.

Lau, 35, says her interest in wine dates to her student days at York University in Toronto. Previously a Société Générale investment banker, she started her shop in September 2010. “When men come into my shop, they usually assume that I don’t know wine,” she says. “I can tell from their attitude. But they change that view after talking to me. When women come in, I notice they usually say they don’t know much and ask me to recommend. I often suggest according to food pairings, especially for women who need something to tell their families when they’re asked about dinner. In this way, I’m acknowledging her, rather than telling her.”

Lau actually enjoys the fact that she isn’t based in Central. “I live in Tsim Sha Tsui and I find that here in Kowloon, a lot of young people of legal drinking age want to know more and find that it’s a very good way to form a friendship with somebody over a bottle of wine. It’s good for social bonding. There’s this impression that Central is where the high-class people with taste are, but even there you’ll find people who think you must be so elegant and so rich to drink wine.

“Drinking wine is very personal, but it should be something you can learn,” she insists, “like the way Chinese people drink tea, you know. It’s a culture. I know someone in Sheung Wan who has a wine shop and she told me she doesn’t like wine, she’s not a drinker. It sounded like she was in it because it was a family business. But if you don’t like something or if you’re not passionate about it, why are you doing it?”

Meanwhile, back in Central, Dawes notes that more women like her are carving out their niche: “In the past, wine sales were done by men and now you see women doing it, because our organisational skills and selling skills and interpersonal skills are different. I also see more women asking for wine in restaurants, so it’s not purely a man’s thing now.”

Cheung concurs, with a guarded optimism and a knowing wink. “The most important thing to me is building a connection with people – sharing not only experiences but an interplay of knowledge, and just basically making wine approachable,” she concludes. “Food and beverage can be kind of a dark and twisted industry in many ways, but it kind of sucks you in and you start to love it, if it’s right for you.”