Seriously, retail wine stores are a rip-off. The scrapped wine tax is all good and well, but high retail rents have forced out smaller wine companies with their interesting wines, leaving mega conglomerates with mass-market wines at marked-up prices.
We almost never buy from a physical wine store if we can help it—unless we’ve run out of wine and need to show up to dinner with a bottle in 20 minutes. And we don’t recall ever bringing home a wine bought from a store we’ve been delighted by.
Of course, if you have the money you can always pick up a Chateau Lascombes or a nice Gaja or some fancy wine at Jason’s Marketplace, but what’s the fun in that?
Even if you don’t care for wine that much, there’s nothing like unearthing a great find for HKD$100, delivered to your doorstep. Here are our five favorites:
This place never disappoints. With irresistible eDMs featuring a constant stream of bin-end sales, warehouse clearance, and award-winning picks, Cellarmaster is the perfect place for finding that HKD$50 bottle of juicy Argentinean red for your home-cooked meal or the under-HKD$300 fine Chianti for that special dinner. For the wine-challenged, this is the best place to be reasonably assured that you are not shelling out money for vinegar passed off as wine, no matter how cheap it is.
Laithwaites, a historic and well-known name from the UK, has garnered a loyal following in Hong Kong with their monthly wine subscriptions, with cases organised by themes such as Rhone or Gold Medal Bordeaux or new world wines. Ordering a mixed case of wine delivered to your home at regular intervals is ideal for those who find selecting wine tedious or are too busy to remember to stock up at home. Most of Laithwaites’ wines are direct from wineries and exclusive to the merchant, making their selection one-of-a-kind.
Probably the biggest online wine retailer in Hong Kong, Slurp.asia is like walking into a mega liquor store that carries everything from organic wine to vodka to serving accessories. With a great selection at competitive prices and next day delivery, Slurp.asia even offers an “online sommelier” for your matching needs.
For the connoisseur, Wine View is a gem. With a long, long wine list that focuses mainly on mature vintages of popular wines or a soon-to-be-discovered wines that promises to be the next big thing, Wine View sends out lovely eDMs with lengthy introductions on faraway wineries, expounding on the merits of their soils or oak barrels.
Trending with young local drinkers, Naku produces wine under their own label from Bordeaux and California with bottles designed in fantastic themes—from pop art to Hong Kong culture to sports—and also stocks other classic wines for online order. Soon, the company is working on you being able to design your own wine label or even wine bottle on their website to deliver to your home and impress friends or families with a one-of-a-kind artistic bottle.
Photo: Wojtek Szkutnik, Flickr
