Bangkok’s wine craze has reached the pages of The New York Times, with the venerable Grey Lady doing a travel story story on the many places around town to sip crushed grapes.
Some of the places mentioned include Mellow and diVino in Thonglor, No Idea on Soi 22, and Sip in Ekkamai.
So does this mean that maybe wine has jumped the shark now? And we won’t have to see places with names like Wine I Love You anymore? We hope so.
From the story:
Five years ago, the likes of Sip — low-key establishments offering a diverse selection of well-priced wines by the glass and the bottle — were all but absent from Bangkok’s night-life landscape. Onerous import tariffs limited consumption in Thailand to a small coterie of well-heeled expatriates and residents with a penchant for pricey labels and a tolerance for restaurant markups of 300 percent or more. Now higher levels of education, increased travel abroad and higher incomes are giving rise to a new crop of Thai oenophiles.
“Younger Thais have some money, and they want to drink something different in bars and restaurants,” said Keiichi Miyashita, a Bangkok wine importer and distributor who has been in the business for a decade.
As a result, in the last three years, a rash of wine bars and restaurants have opened in Bangkok that feature more than just name-brand labels and sell wines at less than stratospheric prices. The upshot for wine lovers is that imbibing in the Thai capital has never been more accessible or more interesting.
