#109 - Linden Wilkie: Founder of The Fine Wine Experience and Club Bâtard

- Hi, Linden. - Hi, and what are you doing? - Good, thank you. How are you? - I'm very good, thanks. Thanks for coming in. - No, no worries. It's a little bit tired of the events. - It's the life of a wine person. It's a lifetime as well as daytime. - Yeah, we take you at 9 a.m. for an interview. So we are drinking coffee instead of wine. - It works at this time of the day. - Yeah, thank you very much for taking this time. Thank you very much for welcoming us in Krabata. - Very welcome. Which is one of the most wonderful plays for wine, I guess, in Hong Kong. I guess the people can see that behind us. We'll talk about this place, about this adventure, about your wine journey. But first, can you introduce yourself? - I'm Linden Wilkie. I'm a co-founder of the five wine experience, wine merchant business in Hong Kong. And one of the founders of Krabata, which we are today. - Nice. So let's talk about this wine journey. Fine wine experience is one of the great merchants here in Hong Kong. But what did you do before Fine wine experience? How did you get into wine? - So my wine journey began at university. In the first week when you joined all the clubs and societies and everything's very exciting. I joined Fencing, which lasted two weeks. And I joined the wine club. And we did some wine tasting. I was taught wine tasting and I loved it. I just absolutely loved it. So I got very involved during my student years and started to organize wine tastings while I was at university. - What university? - University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. So I'm from New Zealand. And so that was my introduction. We had a seller, so we could taste older wine. So I was very interested in that. We could work with local wine makers as well and taste their wines and have them come and speak to us. So that led the fire, really. And then I got a proper corporate job after university but would keep attending a lot of wine tastings. By the time I turned 30, which is a while ago now, I realized it's wine was really what I needed to be doing a full time. And to continue that journey of really learning, the passion was really driven by curiosity, right? I moved to London, I didn't have BA and then set up my own business called the Fine Wine Experience. So the first version of the Fine Wine Experience was in London. It was focused on a lot of wine tastings, a lot of vertical tastings, rare wines. So I was very curious. Didn't have the money to try all the great wines, but I figured if I could create a program of events, hosting the wine tastings, others would pay for it and then I get my wine education. - It's funny because I'm thinking about exact thinking at the moment. (laughing) - Good idea. - Get someone else to pay for your wine education. This is the ticket, yeah. So I did that for quite a few years and then moved to Hong Kong in 2010 and was continuing doing that but it was a challenging environment at that time. Ironically because Hong Kong was booming already in wine, after Henry Tang removed the taxes in 2008. And so it was a very competitive environment. The Fine Wine Experience 2.0 came along. I made friends with Mike Wu, passionate wine collector who was working in finance and he said, let's create a wine business, wine import merchant business. We'll bolt onto the front of that, the Fine Wine Experience that existed but create a new business. So he and I set that up in 2013. I've been growing it since then. - All right, so I have plenty of questions on this journey. The first one about this university tasting club. - Yes. - Were you already passionate about wine and were you used to tasting or did you arrive like knowing almost nothing about it? - I can be very intimidating. - Yeah, I arrived knowing almost nothing about it. I mean, I tasted some wines, those interesting wines, those very interesting food. I had this great teacher on the very first tasting I went to, a chap called David Weir. He called it Wine 101. And of course, when you're a first-year student, lots of papers that you take are called 101. And he just had seven different wines, seven different grape varieties laid out. And we tasted them one by one. And he was speaking and I was tasting and somehow each wine made sense. And I can say, okay, that's a seven-year blog. That's a shardonnay. That's a Merlot, that's a cabinet, that's a sure-as. And I thought, oh, I love this. I love this. There's a language in the glass. There's a language in what he's saying but there's a language in the glass. This makes sense. And then through other tastings, I could see the influence of the dimension of time. Like you have one wine and then a vintage that's five years older. Comparing side by side. I think from that moment on, I've always loved at least two wines. It's a great excuse to have more than one but if you can compare two wines, then you understand a bit more about both of them. - 100%. - Otherwise, you're comparing a wine to the abstract, to information. That's actually very hard to do. But all of us intuitively can compare two things. And so yeah, and I think after that, I realized that, okay, you need to read a lot of books. You ultimately need to travel to wine regions. But seeking out mentors is also a key part of the journey. In London, I was very fortunate. People like Michael Broadbent, who was my inspiration actually. When I was in New Zealand, I had his vintage wine book. I used to read his tasting notes, like chapters in the novel. Tonight I'm gonna read about the 1953s. So in my head, I had this sort of imagination of what these wines might be like. But no experience. But in London, he was very kind. He would attend some of my tasting and help to chew her. Anthony Hanson, who had written a book on Burgundy, who treated my Burgundy tasting. So, and we still work with Anthony actually. He's a consultant for us in Burgundy. So mentors were the key. I would say to anyone getting into wine, yes, read, form your tasting groups, but find someone who can help you on the journey. - Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I completely agree, as well, on the fact of discovering different wines at the same time, for me, it's been a. The first time I did that was a bit intimidating. You know, you arrive, you know, not that much. Six, seven, seven, seven, four of you were well displayed. But actually, when you taste, it's in that woman that you can really forge your palettes and understand the differences between these wines. So, and traveling to the wine regions is like. - Yes, definitely a master. - I think some of the intimidation that people feel in wine comes from the fact that maybe you have some expert speaking and you feel like, oh, they're saying that it should taste like this or you should find this or that, and you don't quite. And then you think, oh, you know, am I not cut out for this or do I not understand? Actually, I think it's more the other way around. I would rather people, once you have the wine in front of you, you can be guided to understanding things. But in the end, there's a very personal experience, right? A very personal relationship between what's in the glass and how you feel about it. I always have voting in my wine events to try and recent her things back on the people participating rather than the person leading. And so that people can focus on their own pleasure. You know, in the end, what do you vote for is the right answer. - Yeah, I have an amazing memory of that in the. - The Chateau Lagange. So we were having dinner there. And you know, they were just doing a blind taste of wine and we were ranking them, but not knowing what it was. Obviously, Chateau Lagange won this time, but it was so fun to just rank wine and taste with it that we didn't recognize. So after this first job, you arrive in London, you start this fine wine experience, 1.0. - Yes, how does that work? So you do great tastings. So for that, I guess you need to recruit clients. You need to recruit the guys who will attend the tastings. And you also need to find the bottles. And so you said that you wanted to focus on niche tastings or very high-end bottles. So some things that are not easy to find. How do you manage to do these two parts of the business? - I put a lot of time into it. I researched a lot. You know, I loved the geeky side of it all. Talking to specialists in wine, learning about the vindages, but learning about what to look for, how to buy, how to source. I put a lot of time into that. So if I wanted to do an event, the process of creating the event might start more than a year before. the event because I was very focused on trying to get just the right bottles to tell the story of the of the of the estate and to make the event attractive enough that people would come in and join and in the end that that took time you know but after a while you get a little snowball effect that that word gets out and people recommend other people to come and join. It was a full tank drop for you. Yes and then I did a little bit of let's say light trading you know I would buy a little bit more than I needed and sell bottles to people who were attending the events but it was a it was a very small very small enterprise yeah but it gave me a really great education in wine. I tasted everything pretty much that I that I wanted to because London is also a great city for trade tastings for for every other merchant tastings so I attended a lot of things so I would say in a way that those those were you know I lived not an ost not an ostentatious life except for the wine but it was a lean operation but I you know got to drink a lot of great wine so I consider in a way those years my long apprenticeship in in fine wine and so then 2000 then you decide to move to Hong Kong and you decide that because you just love the vibe you want more send and the UK and you're right we like we've like a backpack and and we're like I'm gonna set out a business here or what what's in your mind in yeah I'm at the tank let's see so 2010 or 2009 we'll remember there was a global financial crisis and this hits UK London pretty hard and and just at the same time you know 2008 Henry Tang here had lifted the taxes on wine which is a remarkable thing to have done and it created a boom here in Hong Kong and he wanted to create Hong Kong as a hub for why not just for Hong Kong but for the region to to to help develop a really professional industry and it succeeded and I wanted to be part of that I had known Hong Kong a bit before because I was actually an exchange student here in my last year of high school so I had a feeling for the city love the city and but yes a very simple business plan to to try to replicate what I was doing in London but in Hong Kong and that didn't quite succeed I did some events but what was happening at that time all the auction houses all the big merchants were also moving into town and they had lots of wine to sell so they provided a lot of events free or very discounted to to to exactly the same people that I wanted to pay to attend my events so it struggled but over that period of time I made a lot of contacts here and the key one was Mike Wu that was in the end the right person at the right time perhaps for both of us and so we were able to create this second I had a wine dinner like wine dinners so I met a lot of people that wine dinners and so yeah so we would attend different dinners together and we became friends and he had been doing well in finance but he had the bug for wine really bad you know he really wanted to be in wine it's something I recognized and so we started together just working at one desk together in 2013 and it was importing wines and selling wines here importing ones no place like that it was like I guess it was not in your mind you've been to have a tasting place or club or something it was down down down the line so initially it was a very lean operation we had no shop and what we did was we we started to acquire all the right right kind of wines so if you would search on wine list wine searcher we would be a stockest and so that attracted a lot of clients because we would buy we had quite a good portfolio of wines ready to drink and that attracted the clients to allow to start trading at the same time immediately we made a start on the agency portfolio trying to to get domains to work directly with us so we built a portfolio focused on Burgundy we work with over 40 domains now in Burgundy also the Mosul we have seven domains there and and more lately champagne and some other places too but we knew that ultimately if if you're only buying and selling the wines that everyone's looking for then you're going to compete on very tight margins you'll attract the clients but your margins will be very tight and clans may be captive like they can buy from you if you have stock in a good price but they would get another one exactly so hard to develop the relationship although having had the stock we continue to do a lot of wine events so we had a lot of connection actually with the with the clients through the wine dinners that we put on but building up the agency portfolio that takes time you know we've had some agencies that we've wanted and it's been years of conversation to get to the point where where they'll work with us so that's a more robust business we have some some barrier to entry when you have a direct relationship with the domain and so we didn't start with a shop but having created this relationship with clients we needed our own space so our first shop was 800 square feet something like that very very tiny but it was and dominated by a tasting table see that you know so I'm sorry no no no no no no I think a tasting table but from that we then we then opened the larger space in Sangpun actually was 10 times the size of the first shop because I had all sorts of ideas about events space and a wine lounge and Mike and I wanted the place not just to be a shop but to be a place to to enjoy for customers and that's when enters our other partner Randy C successful restaurant in Hong Kong who we knew socially and through his bistro de vin and and some other restaurants and it was and he said you know you guys should put a restaurant right in this shop and we we in the end we did it and having done it we thought that was that looks like the obvious thing we would have planned to do it at the start but it was it wasn't we that was his idea and then we thought what do you do about wine prices if you're in a wine shop and you can see the price but you're dining and you see a different typical price you you don't feel good about that and in the end we said why don't we just list all of the wines to drink at the retail price so you know 60 70 percent lower than most restaurant winelists that restaurant was called Bhattar and right from the beginning it was booked out you know we took reservations the first Monday of the month and then for one month later and it was full so that was the transitional the genesis for where we are today in Bhattar and and this so so this restaurant was in in Saint-Pon so the just not that far from here actually like 30 minutes working yeah but then you had this opportunity in the in the building how did that work for opening Bhattar after what because it like this place is absolutely massive like a shop of 4000 square foot is already big but I don't know how many square foot right here but it's we're 18,000 square feet yeah so so Bhattar inside the fine wine experience in Saint-Pon provided the proof of concept really that there was a that and particularly I think coming out of the pandemic there's an increasing focus on very good value and we were providing we were providing that so that restaurant continued to be very busy even as the restaurant sector in Hong Kong was beginning to suffer so actually it was Mike and Randy had the idea to create Club Bhattar and so the idea was to take what we had learnt and but move it into central so we're right in the heart of central here to combine a great location we we searched and searched because we knew we needed an iconic location and the pet a building to in the end once we knew it was possible we kind of locked locked on this one needed to be a beautiful design we got Joyce Wang Studio to design the club We knew we had to have great food and service so we We closed the Batar restaurant that we created and moved it into the club. Another restaurant, which was a favorite of ours for Cantonese food, Hopse. We asked them to close that to move into the club and we created this all day dining concept here. So three floors, three different chefs, teams, one on each floor, and linked by this wine cellar where we're speaking today. So three floor wine cellar so you can traverse the club inside the cellar, offering an enormous selection of fine wines, wines of all types for all occasions, and critically still at the retail price. But that whole package is a membership model. So the people who have access to the club to come in and dine here are the members. But we had the clients already from Batar and the fine wine experience and from Hopse. We were able to get about half of the membership before we opened the club, which is pretty encouraging when you're going to arrive. So in fact, we opened the doors here in September 2024 and by Christmas, the club was full. Membership was full. So which was a great release. And we're really grateful for the support that we received here for that. It's great. So the concept is that you pay your early membership to be in the club and then you have access to all the spaces for breakfast, having a coffee, having a dinner, even buying bottles, I guess. Yes. So you pay a joining fee. At the moment, we have a wait list. We encourage people who are interested to get in touch with us. But you pay a joining fee and then you pay a monthly fee. But just as an example of how that. So the monthly fee is $1,500 Hong Kong dollars, around, let's say, $200 US dollars. Here, a bottle of Dom Perignon is about that price a little bit lower. But anywhere around here, it's more than double that price. So I say if you drink one bottle of Dom Perignon per month, you're already even on your membership fee. And then every bottle after that, you're saving a lot of money. And this is a big girls matter. I'm actually saving money. I'm saving money by shopping more, right? You called it girls' mass. I'll say nothing on that. And then, okay, so the obvious use for the club is dinner, wine dinners, or even lunch. But actually, as you see, people are here for breakfast, come in for a quick coffee. They've got meetings and central. They need to meet somebody or they need 20 minutes by themselves with their laptop. They can come here. They can come in for cocktail, have a meeting before dinner. They can come after dinner, somewhere else, and drink some wine. And we have a great whiskey bar here as well, called OBE. So whiskey lovers have a great time there. And even non-wisky lovers, because we do classes for our members to learn about whiskey. So that completes the package here at Club Butter. And we talk about the membership. And the fact that if you drink one butter of Dom Perignon, you're basically saving money. But what's amazing about this model is that people are actually, when the people are dying here, they're actually not afraid of opening bottles and going into the set-iron and having good things. And I guess for the wine makers, it's always something that they have, especially for people making fine wine, is that sometimes you know they sell their bottles out of the estate at a certain price. And then they travel the world and they see this bottle at like 10 times or 20 times the price that they sold it. And they're like, most of them don't like it because they want their bottle to be drinked, they want it to be drinked. And I guess it's the case here that wine is made to be shared and to be in the glass. And it's something that you do here. Absolutely. You know, it's nice to see a fancy bottle on display. Or I suppose for some domains, it's nice to know that their wine is listed in a lot of famous restaurants. But in the end, the wine is for pleasure and it needs to be opened. And that's our focus here and the focus of the members. They enjoy the wine. Yeah, it's nice to see all the wines on the rack. But in the evening you come here and you see a lot of these bottles are open and people are enjoying the wine. They they are wine lovers, but they also smart people. They don't want to pay the wrong price for the wine. And here they have the confidence. It's the right price. So they open the bottle. They might open another one. And so you're the wines, the wines get drunk. And then wine producers come here. They see that. And in fact, we also work, we work with some other merchants, not just Fajemun experience here at Club Attar. But we also have a special program called Domain Seller Direct. So some wineries that we don't work with necessarily to sell and distribute the wine in Hong Kong. Give us older ventures directly from this seller to put on the list here. And those wines have to be drunk here. But we also offer those at the retail price. So that gives some members a confidence and a chance to try wines. It means that the estate making the wine knows that that bottle is going to be opened. And that the person opening it is going to get a very fair price. It's not just going to sit on a list as a trophy at some inflated price. Plus for this estate, it's like even if they work with other importers and distributors, it's a good way to, I guess, enter the market, making consumers discover this bottle. Then they can sell younger ventures to a larger amount of places. Yes, it's also good for them. Yeah. So this is the experience of club batat, you live in Hong Kong? So I lived here for 12 years. And at the end of the pandemic, I moved to France. Okay. Well, I think two things. One, we wanted to maintain relationships in the wine growing regions. And to continue to have our eyes on new things to bring to the club, which we've been able to do. But also we all learned how to do Zoom during during the pandemic. So my day starts quite early in France. I'm on Zoom every day with some of the team here. And you're still living France? I live in France. Oh, well, I'm in Paris and in Burgundy in in bone. Yeah, worse than a worse place. And then I'm here quite often in Hong Kong. And we have a business in mainland China as well. So I just came back from Shanghai yesterday. Okay. So this is what I was going to ask you is that you have so fine one experience club batat. Do you have any other projects elsewhere? Maybe replicating displays or like spin off of displays? So fine one experience. We have a shop in Shanghai and we have an import and distribution business there too. We've been there for quite a few years now. But we've just opened a shop in Shanghai in Qing-An. Which is great. On the club batat side, yes. We have quite a few ions in the fire. Quite a few projects that we're working on. We're anxious to to get the next thing open and announced. But I don't have anything specific to share on that now. But just to say yes, we're quite actively working on on new projects. For club batat. So I'm very excited about that. Yeah. I guess it's a lot of pressure because when you do some like when you have the first one right, then you need the next one to be at the level and yes, I need a lot of investments. And you're only as good as your last project. So we have to get those things right. But we knew that we had to get those elements right here. And we've learned things from operating the club. And so we're working on applying that elsewhere. Nice. We'll do an episode two in a few years. I love for it. I look forward to it. So we talked about the fact that wines are made to be drunk and are opened here. But one of the, and you mentioned a little bit the like economic landscape of Hong Kong changing in the in the FNB. Can you tell us a bit more about the consumer profiles that you have and maybe the change that you have witnessed in Hong Kong over the last 10 years. So you mentioned COVID. And I guess like the, yeah, I guess the consumer profile is changing. I've been in Hong Kong just for one year. But I hear people talking about that and being like, yeah, you know, before COVID, it was more, more expressive in terms of FNB. And now it's a bit on the expressive is a good to hear. Yeah, like people just tell me what is for everywhere. It was pretty wild. There was a, there was a boom period leading up to the, to the past. pandemic period and wine prices were rising, interesting wine was rising, but maybe it was a little too hot. But yeah, that was a great time, a great time in wine. But each cycle teaches something new and develop something and what I see is the wine culture in Hong Kong deepening, becoming more established, more sophisticated, more complex. I think that's a good thing, that takes time. Actually, the cycles, economic cycles can help. You have to refocus a bit. I guess for you, it's okay because you're selling a precise wine, you're not doing a mass market wine. The fact that the market is getting more educated and more specific is good for you because then you have older references and the events in the place, maybe it's other for people who were doing like table wine, so it just wines for steady consumption. I'm sure in the fast-moving consumer good end where as we know storage costs are high in Hong Kong. One of the other great things that Henry Tang and others did back in 2008 was they recognized that the industry has to work to a high standard to develop a good reputation. There was created the Hong Kong HK QAA accreditation. So actually logistics and storage in Hong Kong are at a very high standard. Two levels, wine and fine wine. We do all of ours at the fine wine level. But the quality is good, but there's no cheap land in Hong Kong. So in the end, storage is expensive. If you are dealing with wines that you need to turn over fast, or storage will eat up your margin, then that's tough. If there's a downturn and you're paying storage costs. Our, I guess, centre of gravity is a little higher in the fine wine space, so the storage is still significant, but less of an issue. I think quite tough if there was a downturn affecting your business here. But there are a lot of good players in the Hong Kong market. It's great. I love seeing what others are doing, I love being part of that. No, I'm confident for the wine market in Hong Kong. I think we just have to keep adapting to new trends, to new interests from younger generation. I mean, here in the club, you asked about profile. I mean, it's quite broad. So actually, we sell a lot of traditional things, as you might expect, we have a lot of mature Bordeaux. That does very well. It's not the trendy thing in the wine market, but honestly, Bordeaux offers amazing wines at great prices. You can drink mature ventures, so we always keep a very good stock. So the younger Bordeaux, that market is quite tough, I think, but this is just amazing supply of older ventures that offer really good value, really good experience. So that actually sells very well here. Burgundy is very strong. That's probably more than half of what we do. And then again, in Burgundy, you have a mix of quite traditional producers, but also new styles, new things that appeal to a younger demographic. And maybe new places, also, maybe the grand fruit, premier cru, were your focus at some points, but you can witness some new places kind of emerging. That's exactly right. So I think in two senses. One, the sort of map gets extended. People now interested to drink Cisar, Marcelle, or a bit further south Aussie du Ré, San Roma villages that they might not have known even five years ago, but the prices of the really fancy villages and the fancy so high that someone wanting to drink at a reasonable price, and I count myself amongst those are looking more broadly. But the quality of those wines being made today is often much higher than it used to be. So that rising tide has actually helped those villages. The prices there have risen to a level where they can do all of the same hand harvesting, sorting, qualitative process. So it's made those wines better, but at a reasonable price. And then the other side is, young wine makers in Burgundy live there part-time. They can't afford to buy land in these very expensive plots. So places they'd go to Coat, Coat de Bout, or over in the Zura, for example, or down in Bozile, they find a bit of land at a much more reasonable price, and they can bring those wines to market. So I think that's very interesting. I'm very hopeful on that side actually. I think those very top vineyards and domains, yes, they will remain quite expensive, but there's a broadening of what's going on in Burgundy. You can find great wine at a good price. We love to see that as well, and Oat Coat is a very interesting drink. Yeah, very interesting. You're drinking those as well. Started testing a few things. We had Laurent Delonet on the podcast, and he's one of the biggest advocated things on the Oat Coat. We had the opportunity to discuss that with him. Yeah, for him, it's the next revolution of Burgundy. Yeah, great wine's being made there. I love it. And even Bozile, for example, in one podcast, we had a Tibaudi Géberre, and you know, he's doing with Vomassona, they are doing Domaine de Jean-Pouss in Bozile. So it's basically incubators for wine makers. And like the wines are, honestly, there are some cheap wines. Yes, 15 US, I think, 20 US, the bottle. And it's actually very good, and the story is amazing. Yeah, it's like the type of things that you can start to see in Bozile, of people trying to express something and making precise stuff like price, that is nothing to compare with other burgundy, even like Margon, for example. Yes, things in Margon's super cheap. The super cheap and great. It's amazing. You can find a great producer, and you can drink the, let's say, the crude basic for a very good price, but you can drink single vineyards for not a lot more, like still really affordable. I think Bozile is really exciting. Bozile is, yeah, Bozile is really something amazing. Yeah, so now you live in France. What comparison do you have between the wine markets in Hong Kong and the wine in France? For me, it's super interesting to see that way, because I had the other way around, like immigrating to Hong Kong, but you're immigrating to to France, spending more time. Yes. How do you see the wine market? So maybe Bozile is different, but actually in Paris, when you spend time there, how do you see this wine place? I think you have your traditional bistro, these kind of places, and you still go to places, and it'll say flurry, but it won't say anything else, the vintage or the maker or anything. And I think so there's on one level, not quite that engagement with wine in the way that we would hear, where we wouldn't do that. I guess because of the long tradition of just listing wines by places, but then you have some quite exciting places in Paris that are really passionate about the wine side and very interesting to visit. There's a big natural wine scene in Paris, obviously, it's sort of the spearhead thought for that. So you go to, especially over in the 11th on that side, you know, I live on the other side, but I, but everywhere I like to try it's on the other side. And then you, you know, they'll have all natural wine lists. And so there's one place that I love going to, where I really hardly recognize anything on the list, but the sommelier knows me and I say, okay, let's go. This is my mood. Just just bring me a bottle of wine and then tell me about it. So on that level, I quite like being in Novis. I suppose that goes back to curiosity. I just love to learn. So I go there and that's where I experiment. I have a very nice address for you. It's, so it's not a French wine, but it's the only place where I discovered something like that. So they have one Michelin style restaurant and they have another restaurant. So they have two other restaurants that are not Michelin, but really like amazing level. And so the Michelin is called Shabour. And then in the same street, they have Shana and Teques. I would send you the address. They are great. It was like super close to where I live. And so they have wines from all around the Mediterranean So like I tested things from Armenia I think was about it. - Yeah. - And when you're curious about wine, like you know you have Ciarian wines, lead wine, Lebanese wines, and it's just like new horizons and new things. So it's really geek, but it's amazing to see. - No, I love that. And isn't it nice to go somewhere where. - You're not laughing at it? - Yeah. Actually, when I see those kind of wine lists where I don't recognize anything, coming back to your earlier question about intimidation, that's where I think, oh, you know, I'm sitting, I don't know anything. Don't know where to start, you know, but it's fun. And you just experiment and see. And I suppose that's, that would be one of my tips. Everywhere I go where there's a sommelier who's passionate, if I had a preconception about what I want to order, I set that aside and have a conversation with a sommelier and say, okay, teach me something new. I want to try something. And sometimes it doesn't quite hit what I really like, but sometimes it really does and I discover something new. And that's what I enjoy. And coming back to your question about the difference, I think, there's just a concentration here in Hong Kong of great wine activity, so, and a real energy. And, okay, we have a lot, a bias maybe towards French wine in our business, but, you know, in burgundy, you mostly drink burgundy, but some champagne and some rone. In Paris, you drink the regions of France, but it's mostly France. You're not really drinking lots of Italian wine or German wine, but here in Hong Kong, because we don't make wine, it's a little bit more diverse, more like UK, for example, where there's a lot of variety, so I quite enjoy that here. Yeah, it's something that I didn't realize before coming here. Is that actually in France, I only, I was almost on your drinking French wine. Yeah, and since I'm here, I'm just like, you know, I've been, I don't know, like, Mozel Riesling and then the other day, I'm not Australian wine. It's great. It's just, I've access to everything. Thank you very much, Linda. It was an amazing conversation. A really nice time discovering just story, talking about how you build fine wine experience and the club battle. I guess for the people listening or watching this podcast, unfortunately, you won't be able to come here to the club, unless you find someone who has a membership in the club battle, so try to find someone like that before coming to Hong Kong. Or you can come and buy wines from the seller. So we run the seller also as a branch of fine wine experience. So you can come and visit. I would be happy to give you a tour of the club and you can buy wine to take away. Okay. I mean, so you can still come to the club and buy wines. So it's a good experience. Thank you very much for that. And then I have three last questions. The first one is, do you have a book recommendation for me? I was just given and thank you Edward Perry-Nay from Shatou Moulin-Avol gave me a copy of Natasha Hughes, MW's new book, The Wines of Bojolais. So I'm very excited to read that. It's a region that I really love. It's a region I think people should dive into. So I haven't finished it yet, but I would recommend people read that because it's a region really to discover. We'll try to find a copy because it's definitely an interesting place and I would love to learn more. Do you have a recent wine that you tasted recently and that was amazing, a good memory you want to share? Yes. It was a lovely spring day recently and we were making some just slightly spicy Thai food at home and I opened a 2020 Philly Shaffer, Caracquat Himalorai Kabinette, which is a wine from an amazing family with a small domain, very hard working, passionate wine makers, on an incredible slope that looks like a wall. When you come into that village, the Vignade looks like a wall behind the village, it's so steep. And Kabinette is a very light style of recent fruity. So you have a little bit of residual sugar, but it's not a sweet wine. It's more like eating a juicy ripe peach, seven and a half percent alcohol. So for lunch, it was light, it was delicious and refreshing. So 2020 Philly Shaffer, Caracquat Himalorai Kabinette, I absolutely love these wines, so we'll say, "Well, no, Tidet will be one of them, one next lunch." Thanks, and finally, who is the next person actually interview? If you haven't, you have to go and see my friends, Jake Innsburg and Mandy Chan, at Innsburg and Chan, a great wine merchant in Hong Kong and a lovely couple. I think you'd really enjoy talking to them. Amazing, count on us. We are in Hong Kong, so that's perfect. Linden, it was an amazing conversation. I hope that you guys love this conversation as well. If you are still here, it means that you liked it, so don't forget to share this episode, subscribe to the channel, like it, send it around to two person who needs to buy wine at Club Batar, let's say, or at five minutes, please, or five minutes, please. Thanks a lot, guys. See you soon. Bye-bye. Thanks, Linden. Thank you so much. Thank you. Nice. Perfect. Thanks so much.