#111 - Fongyee Walker: Mainland China's First Resident Master of Wine

Perfect. Hi, Fongi. Hi, lovely to meet you and one. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for taking this time. I know we've had you've had some long days before before this discussions because you've been judging wines here for the last or what three days, four days, four days, four or more fourth day. Yes. And your fourth days of tasting so so time goes quickly. So it's the perfect time for me to ask the hardest question possible. So we've discussed about plenty of things about Chinese wines, about your career, about wine education in China as well. But first, can you introduce yourself? Okay. Well, my name is Fongi Walker and I'm based in Beijing, China, although I'm not Chinese, but I have been living there for about 20 years now. I was the first master of wine actually to be living in China, mainland China. And that's been a really exciting part of my career, which is generally as someone who educates about wine. I always say, I do not make it. You know, I feel a bit, I do not grow grapes. I do not do the hard work of fermentation. I do not even sell it. All I do is tell people about it in gossip and talk, which is a very enjoyable job. But we do that from a company that I founded with my husband in Beijing, called Dragon Phoenix Wine Consulting. And we from beginnings of about 20 years ago, we now have wine students all over China. So it's lovely. Lots of wine babies, as you could say. That's a wonderful journey. So you're not from China. You were born in the UK, right? I get more complicated. I was born in Malaysia. Okay. My mother is originally from mainland China. My father is English and I grew up in a lot of places, but generally I regard like Canada, UK, Hong Kong, all places that I'm very comfortable with. And you were always interested in wine. So if you were born in Malaysia, I guess wine was not that present. Oh goodness. No. Yeah. So we left Malaysia quite soon. I think due to my father's love for wine now. Actually, we always grew up with wine in the house because although my mother was from the mainland, she went over to England very early, the early 60s. And so she got used to drinking wine because you know, everyone drank sherry and more to all those. And she really enjoyed it. And so I grew up with a mother who cooked Chinese food, but we always had wine on the table. So it's quite unusual. I think that's what a background. And I think also the interesting thing is I loved food and I wasn't that much into wine. I loved the idea of it. But I didn't actually start to get serious about studying wine until I was at university. And my boyfriend now has been said, we have a blind tasting team. And I said, that is really weird. I said, who locks himself in the room and tastes wine and talks about it. But he persuaded me and I loved it. I loved it. I never realized that there were all these different baritals in all these different countries that make amazingly different and absorbing wines. So how was it at a university, this blind tasting team? Because I guess if you know not that much about wine, like blind tasting is really, I guess something for the niche guys or you know, like you need to be in, I love blind tasting wines because then I try to find. I'm like trying to guess, but it could be something else and everything. But if you don't know anything about wine and you're blind taste, it can be very intimidating or it can be sometimes disappointing because you're like, oh, yeah, I mean, I they were so rude to me. So though my husband finally convinced me to go and it was basically about eight white guys sitting in a small room in Cambridge, being really snorted to me about wine. I remember because I didn't, I hadn't heard of, um, um, Sauvignon Blanc. And there was a salsa and I said, well, this is a really high acid, weird, you know, and they were like, oh, don't you know that Sauvignon Blanc is Sauvignon grape? And I said, no, and they're really rude and snottie, but I never get intimidated by that because you shouldn't be intimidated by not knowing something because we can always learn it. I think you should be intimidated if you have the wrong mindset. I think you can be intimidated or treated badly if you have the wrong attitude. But I would never let lack of knowledge intimidate one because one can always improve a lack of knowledge. And so when they said that to me, I said, all right, yeah, I'm going to show you I'm going to look up Sauvignon Blanc, I'm going to find out about it. And I'm going to become a master of wine. So no, I didn't quite start at that level, but it was really enjoyable because by the second year I became the team captain. Because after they said that to me, I never let someone try and push me down for a lack of knowing about something. So my first reaction was right. Yeah, I don't know this. They're completely right. But that doesn't mean I'm a bad person or a stupid person. It just means I haven't read the right books or check the right materials. And that's easily remedied. You just open a book and that's the mirror to the world. And then you just start from there. Yeah, becoming a master of wine is kind of a revenge on the very sweet repent, although very expensive and very difficult. Yeah. But it's always something the like I teach you versus knowledge. You know, you can teach someone who was the good attitude. Like knowledge is not a problem. Yeah. But someone with the wrong attitude, you can do anything about it and you just let this person go. Yeah. I mean, if you let, if you take aboard the criticism of something that's not your fault, that's just something that you've never come across. You know, how you can't internalize that because it just means you haven't opened that book. And you can't be criticized for that. You know, it's just something you don't know about. And if the trouble is how do you react to that? You can either open your eyes and go, there's so much of this wonderful world that I don't know about that I need to know more about. You know, or you can say, oh, I'm going to let them like oppress me and oh, whoa is me and they're so horrible to me. And I never thought to react that way to me. The world is a continually learning experience. It's a bit crazy, but I always love it if I learn a new thing every day. I agree. And I, I enjoy so much being a beginner in something that's, oh, yeah, that's so. And you realize, you know, completely nothing about it. Yeah, it's really fun. So, so you become the captain, the, the, for the second year, can you? So I have a few friends who did like blind testing competition and everything, but it's, I'm not sure the audience knows how it works. Can you give us a bit more detail about what it's like to be a university team of blind tasting? How to drink for your university. Yeah. So it is, I think it's a very, very strange thing to do. And I think it's telling that we don't do it for food. We only do it for wine. Which I always regard as a bit strange because after all, food is much more part of our everyday life. But for wine, it is a strange competition where you put the people into the room. You have dead silence. You have a little scoreboard to fill out. You're not raking wine. You're not saying this is a gold. This is an outstanding wine. You're just saying, what are the points of this wine that lead me to deduce that is from this region? It is from this variety. It is this year. And then it all gets collected, Martin. And then you either happen enormously nice time winning or you have to go back and study more. And did you win the Juina? Did you win a lot? Yes. Actually, what happened is after that very bad first session where people were quite rude about what I didn't know about wine. I said to my husband, I said, this is the trouble with this kind of thing. It's so off putting and it's so arrogant and it's confusing ignorance, not knowing something, just being unaware with being stupid or unable. And I said, I pay you. We have a lot of good tasers out there who are intimidated just because they don't know about it. So I said, why don't we go together and we spent the summer writing a handbook of all the varieties of the world, like the famous ones and what they generally tasted like little tips on how to find what these wines were. And so when it came to the next year where I had become captain, because I'd scored the highest mark in the competition. We did say to everyone zero knowledge needed, we will provide a guide. To all of the grapes, we just invite everyone and it was fantastic because it went from this somewhat small, clinky group. Yeah. And suddenly we had, we had this one wonderful Indian boy who was Sikh from Canada. He had never tasted one in his life. But I said, come on. Just, you know, he came with his sister and they attended and he just got the bug and he was a member of the team, university team, within three months of having his first sip of wine. And that to me is so meaningful. And you must find the same pleasure a few years later when starting to educate people in China about wine. I guess you have kind of the same thing like culturally interested people because they drink tea, they have this mindset of having the ingredients that matter. But a culture of wine that must have been kind of lacking 20 years ago. Oh yes. And so like trying to do this first step and opening the wines to the people. Yeah, I think it's something that I have really enjoyed. I love teaching wine everywhere in the world. But I really, really enjoy in China because I grew up in a cross-cultural family. And for me, it's such an important part of mixing Western and Chinese culture and letting people understand the broader world because I think as humans, we all develop a better relationship with other humans, the more we understand of each other's cultures, of each other's ways of looking at things. And so for me, anything that increases cross-cultural communication is something that works as a force to create a more harmonious relationship between people. Because people only hate each other when there's fear and mistrust and not understanding what they mean by their cultures. And wine is a very small part of that very insignificant, but it's really fun to talk about, you know, why did wine become so important in Italy and France and these countries? How did they view it? How can you view it? How can you, as a Chinese person, bring it into your life because you're going to treat it a slightly different way? So it's just kind of fun to talk about things like that. Did you go to China after university or did you say that? Yes, I did. Yeah, when I was, yeah, we're already my soulfine. I've not been introduced. I got to Cambridge through my PhD, which is where I got introduced to the whole wine tasting thing. But before that, I had done a masters in classical Chinese and Bachelor, so you end up going to university in China, you know, for your year abroad. I did actually drink wine, Chinese wine, wasn't very good, but we were students. We had no standards whatsoever. Plus, was a bit of time ago, I guess. Yeah, that was in the 1990s. So that was a long time ago. But it was great. It was great. And to see how far China's come, particularly from the 90s, is absolutely awe-inspiring and incredible. So how did you get into going for master of wine? Like, were you working in the wine industry? Were you writing about wine already? I think I was completely insane. I think that's one of the, yeah. But like you're career. So you end up, find your end, Cambridge with your PhD. You go back to it. No, I didn't. I did six years at Cambridge. I got a master of philosophy in Emphel, and I was writing or supposed to be writing my PhD. I got terribly distracted because I was doing a lot of teaching of classical Chinese translation. And I realized that I wasn't going to make a good professor because actually I don't like sticking the library all by myself. I tend to want to go out to the tea room and gossip and share stuff with people. And when you're the only student who's doing ancient Chinese literature, you don't have much of a chance to go out and gossip with anybody. Whereas I loved teaching undergraduates and encouraging them and hoping that they would surpass me and like opening their eyes to how lovely classical Chinese poetry is. So I was getting more and more immeshed into teaching and realized that actually I'm a much better teacher than researcher. And when we were, my husband finishes PhD, he was given a job opportunity in mainland China at a very good university and I said, take it. And actually, when I first moved to China with my husband, I ended up teaching English. Which I love. I mean, it's a lovely little student. It was really fun. And then while I was doing that, I thought, well, why don't I start teaching wine? You know, everyone wants to learn about wine. Everyone, no one knows about wine. So why don't I start this as a company and see how far I get? So still around. Yes, guess it worked. Went a long way. Yeah. So you start this company. It was already in Beijing. Yeah. Okay. So you start this company and it's like you just opened those of your life. Yeah. It was crazy. The first time we opened a class, it took us, I would say, eight weeks to find four students. Like, I was just minimal and I kind of thought, what are we doing? But it's gotten easier and easier and more and more people want to learn about wine. So it opens doors to them that I think a lot of people don't have the chance to discover by themselves. So you started this wine education journey in the like late 90s? Sorry. No, it was in 2007 actually. So 20 years ago, I guess, by next year. And it was, it was very difficult because of course, in the West, wine education is very much targeted a lot towards people in the industry. People who need to know more about wine to sell it. Whereas in my experience in China, we have had less students who are in industry. We have far more students who are actually just interested in wine. They would take our class like you would take a yoga class or a baking class or a tea appreciation class. So they do it to widen the scope of their lives. Which is super different because when you see the like standard way of tasting, the standard way of approaching a region knowing that it's a great buy to this climate thing. It's very structured and kind of one way thing. Whereas if you want to more like widen your own reason, you tend to want to do like different tastings. I guess of the same thing, but in different places in the world, different vintage is like you're more here to open your mind than for anything else. Yeah, it did the case of that. And sometimes I get very frustrated teaching courses which have the rigid tasting systems and stuff. Because I'm just like, the most important thing is what joy does it bring to you. Not whether it has high acid or not. I said, actually, that's irrelevant. I said, tasting is all about understanding how the wine enters your mouth. What it feels like to you. What it brings to you in your heart, especially if you're not in the trade. If you're not in the trade, you have no need to describe a wine as medium-bodied with high but refreshing acidity. You know, nobody eats tons like that. It's like, oh, that's a smashing really good piece of bubbly wine. You know, or whatever. I didn't write that in my tasting exam, but yeah. So like, you've been doing education, wine education in China for almost 20 years. I guess the profile of the people following this wine education, also the maybe the beginner's level must have definitely changed over the years, the last 20 years. Oh my god, hugely. The first wine course we taught, actually, no one had drunk a seven-year-old blow. And it was even hard to buy one in China. And now, especially our higher-level students, they sometimes bring wine that astonishes me. We're like, how did you know about this? How did you get to know in their list? Like, oh, you know, I'm a little bit free-dain, little bit of friends recommended. I'm like, wow, it's incredible. We do not have many students now who turn up having never tasted a somnium blonde or a shardonnay or a cabernet. Those people are much, they don't exist anymore. It's a reason, so I don't know if it's the same in mainland China, but in Hong Kong, what I've been the most impressed about is this level of knowledge from the people I meet. And you know, I guess it's because from France, we are a bit like arrogant about our knowledge on wine. You know, we were like, yeah, we're French, of course, we know wine. But it's not that common. But like people don't really take one, some people take wine education in France, but it's not common. And actually in Hong Kong, a lot of people I meet have really serious credentials in wine and they're like really into it. They often taste, they have like really, and they taste wine from all around the world. And so they have a knowledge about wine that's absolutely crazy to me. And it always makes my students surprised. I said, They said, "Oh, well, to study one of them." and I should go to France and I said, "That's a place you don't wanna go." I said, "You don't wanna go to Italy, you don't wanna go to France, you don't wanna go to Spain." Because I said, "If you go to those countries "that study wine, you only study the wine "really of that country." And even you only study the wine of that region. I mean, how many people do you know in Burgundy who have drunk Bordeaux? - Yeah. - Not that much. (laughs) - I mean, how many people do you know in Bordeaux who drink Burgundy? You know, it's sad. Like you go to Piemonte in Italy and nobody has drunk Sicilian wine. So I said, "The trouble if you go to these places "which have this very proud cultural history of wine "is tied into identity, not knowledge." And I said, "But you're in China, "so you're getting exposed to a far wider range of wines "and of far wider range of varieties." So I said, "Don't expect to go to France "and stop someone on the street "and they will know the difference between Pino Noir "and Cabernet-Front." I said, "If you said to them, "She know and Burgoyne, "then they'll understand it maybe." But they don't need to study it. And I said, "I always say to my students, "it's kind of like tea." I said, "If I were to ask you what your favorite tea is, "so you could answer long-ging or you could answer Tia Guan Yin. "But if I started to ask you, "well, what production area did you like it from? "Do you think that high altitude influences?" And most people would start to go, "And then you're like, but how did you learn about tea? "How did you learn that?" And most of it's like, "Oh, it's what my mom and dad drank." I said, "That's the same position that wine is." And generally, if you're from the south of China, you will drink from the east coast of China. You will be very familiar with the long jings, right? And the bilotrons sort of teas. But if you live in Yunnan, you'll be more familiar with the poor styles, right? You live up in Beijing. You probably drink chrissansimum tea most of the time. And I said, "This is the same way that people in France "will drink different wine according to where they're from." And it's not because they're studied it. It's because that's what people of the area drink. Yeah, it's tradition. I said, "It's a completely different way "of looking at something." So the profile of your students changed over these 20 years, but the profile of Chinese wines completely changed. Completely changed. I mean, the first time I judged the Chinese wine competition was 2006. Here in. No, that was in Shandong. Okay. And they gave us three white wines and they were all completely faulty. And I said, "But these wines have problems." They said, "Judget." Sorry. And I said, "But. " And they said, "Judget." And it was just awful. And I mean, it was just not high quality. And then we've seen over the years, I mean, I think for me, the driving force behind the quality rise in Chinese wine has definitely people, has been the wineries open by people who do it for passion. They're not doing it particularly for money. They're usually rich from another background, but they're doing it to create the best wine in the world. And I think that's really important. And I think that is directly correlated with the rise of the quality, average quality of wine in China. Yeah, and on our side, we've been just once in Chinese wine yards yet, but it was in Shandong as well. Our first time tasting Chinese wines in the vineyard was in Yantai actually. And we actually had amazing time there. Like the wines are really good. Yeah, they're lovely wines. So you can see that they are still trying to search for proper identity of the place. Absolutely. But the wines are super good. So like not faulty actually. So it's, it was an amazing experience to it. And you also see that with, we have a much better, a new generation of wine makers who are much more sensitive to the grapes who perhaps grew up with more great wine or interesting wine around them. They have a wider tasting ability because one of the problems with Chinese wine is a lot of the first generation due to the way Bordeaux was viewed. They were always trained by the University in Bordeaux. And it was like you had to go there. But is that the right place to go if you're a Chinese wine maker, if you're a Chinese great grower? Actually the climate in Bordeaux, the situation, the soil is so different. I made a speech very early on, and I think 2010 or something in Ning Cha. And I said, I don't know why you're all looking to an area that's moderate climate, maritime, whose chief problems are wet, wet. - You're mid-Japan. - Yeah. And I said, you're in Ning Cha. You're a super high altitude. - You're middle of the land. - You're in the middle of the land. You're nowhere near the ocean. I said, why aren't you going to Argentina? And learning about wine from them. Because actually their wines pH, their wines taste, their wines growing conditions are much more similar to yours. But it didn't occur to them because, so I think what's happened now is that Chinese wines and wine makers, wineries and wine makers have realized they don't need to copy. That they can actually try and discover what is the best wine, because I passionately believe and so a lot of wine experts would not agree with me. But I don't think that climate and soil are to do with quality. I think climate and soil determine what style of wine you can make. You know, I wouldn't plant Pinot Noir in Bordeaux. And you could, you could plant it in Chateau La Fete or Patrouse, but it won't be very, very nice. And there's an example. So how can you say that Patrouse has a great soil? It doesn't, it has a good, the greatest soil for its style. And if you planted German trees like a reasling vine there, it would not be very nice, right? So it doesn't mean there's something about Patrouse that makes it the greatest vineyard in the world. It's not. It's the greatest vineyard. It can be considered a great vineyard for the grapes it chooses to plant and the wines it makes. So for me, climate and soil are just, you have to find the right style of wine. Quality comes from people. Nothing to do with climate soil, the surroundings. If you put enough heart into it, you can make great wine. And for me, I always tell my students, actually the so-called, terois, the soil and the climate of South France, of areas like Tejas de la Zac, La Clap. I mean, La Clap. Yeah, La Clap is really nice. I mean, you look at that, La Clap, and you go, oh my God, that's something special. Yeah. And actually, if you look at their heat, their climate cycle, their conditions for growing Cabernet are much better than Bordeaux. Most of the South of France is much better for growing grapes. Why is it not because it's poor area? You know, it's always been traditionally farmers who are struggling to live. If you're struggling to live, who can afford to buy oak barrels? Who can afford to invite critics? Who can be aristocrats and sink money into stuff? Great wine for me comes from money. And that's another reason Chinese wine has improved, because China has a lot more money now. And so our problem in China isn't quality. We have the people, we have the ambition, we have the will, and we have the investment to make great wine. The question is, what kind of great wine do we make? How do we express and find the styles that should come from the Chinese climate? The Chinese soil. And that's going to take a lot of time in experimentation. Today we had a great Sauvignon Blanc. It was fantastic. It was on par with the world's great Sauvignon Blancs. But there's almost none of that in China, because nobody plants it. Because nobody experiments with that. That's our problem. Who's to know 50 years from now, some of the world's greatest Sauvignon Blancs make him from China? So perhaps that's a style that we need to consider. So for me, style and quality come from completely different facets. I mean, you know, I mean South of France wine in the 1960s. And now you've got people like Master Domas Gazette. You've got, you know, Chateau Hospitalet, you know, you, which are making world class wines. It's not like the soil changed or the climate changed, the people changed. So, I think in China, that's what we've got to aim for. Plus, it's a sort of question of time because when you start a vineyard, I guess your first one to make wine, taste, improve, change things, but you can only know if the grape is adapted if the people are the good people after a few years or after a few generations. So, I guess it's something we've really felt this quest for identity, for quality. But I think it comes after a few years of doing kind of bordeaux style or… but we can see that it's disappearing in the last tasting we've done is disappearing. Yeah, I mean, I personally, going back to comparing a lot of Chinese growing areas to Argentina, I'd love to see Malbec. Because that's a grape that seems to express extremely well in desert like or that sort of dry, high altitude conditions. I mean, there's so many things that we have yet… I mean, sparkling wine. We've tasted some amazing sparkling Chinese. There you go. Yeah. Who's to say that, you know, it couldn't be one of the future areas that makes great sparkling wine? Bricks my heart to say it, but yeah, I love this. Why does it break your heart? Because champagne is not far from wine. Oh, I don't think champagne has to be scared of anyone from the time being. I don't think… You know, the English make a lot of noise about their sparkling wine. No, I'm not worried. I don't think the champagne was our sort of, you know, lying, waking their beds. And also, the other thing not to worry about China is China has very small production of wine. And even though the vineyard area is big, you know, 80 to 90% of vineyards are for eating or raisins. They're not for making wine, which is very different because if you look at France, I think it runs at 99.5% of the vineyards. For the wine. Or all for wine, you know? I always make a joke when I teach my students that. I said, "It's because, you know, the French don't do as much fruit as Chinese, but it actually economically makes sense too, because, you know, you think about Chinese culture. In the West, if you ever told anyone that you would buy a kilogram of grapes for 15 euros, yeah, it makes sense. Most people in Europe would be like, "What?" But you can… But in China, in Japan, in Hong Kong, you go to the city supers or the Japanese department's door, and you can buy a melon for a hundred dollars. Yeah, true. Because it's important. Yes, yeah. And in China, giving that gift of really high-end Chinese table grapes is a sign of respect. So in a way, I don't see the area of wine grapes increasing because a good farmer can actually make a very good living out of making beautiful table grapes. Which is not the case in Europe. Less the case in Europe. No, I would give up. You know, no one in the West pays those prices for fruit. Yeah, it would better ferment it and make one. That says something. So you talked about this subnum long. We are currently at Winmachau for the Win Chinese wine awards. Yeah. So you've been basically tasting wine in the disliked few days. Can you tell us a bit more what it's like to be a judge in such a competition and in other words? Well, first of all, I'm going to be, don't have a white teeth. It is exhausting. Many of my friends, oh, I think, oh, you have such a great job. You just go off and you taste wine. I'm like, by the time you're on your 100th wine or you know, your 80th wine of the day and you've done big flights of big Cabernet, you don't feel so good. But it's been a wonderful, wonderful few days of judging here at Win because we've had such variety in the wines. I think the variety of wines is growing and it's really fun to come across flights of wines that you never even knew China was making or things that astonished you or excite you. And I have to say that doing a wine competition in Win Palace is very easy because the service is amazing. Like, I've done wine competitions in small hats in the middle of a village in Australia, where there's not even enough heating and one competition my husband ended up having to wash the glasses. But here you certainly get very and it's very nice because then you don't have to worry about stuff. So all of the flights are set out beautifully. All of the numbers are on the glasses. The computer system works really, really well. So I think that this kind of competition gets very good results because the judges can concentrate on nothing but judging the wine. You know, they don't have, you know, even I've done one competitions that are, it's very difficult to survive daily. Even now you're like, there's nowhere to watch, you know, you can't get your clothes washed, you're like living out of the suitcase in this very cold motel in the middle of nowhere. But here it makes it very easy to stay focused and to do the job very clearly, which has been very enjoyable. And so how does that work? So basically you have like, I don't know, 15, 20 glasses of wine in front of you. Yeah, depending on how many, you might just have one glass of wine. If it's a rare type of wine or not a common one. So you can have anything from one glass to sort of 12 glasses and then you're just like writes, I don't know, like nine out of 10 next. Oh no, you have to write notes, you have to write, you know, this wine. I mean, try not to be too rude. Most of the time you go, you know, this wine has a little bit aggressive tannins. The acid is not well balanced. Or you say, this is a beautiful harmonious wine. And you need to score it out of 100 on the 100 point system. So you have different criteria as far as? Yeah. So bronze would be 85 to 89. A silver would be 90 to 94. And a gold is 95 and above. And you do it in silence in your group. Okay. The groups are usually four people or five people, depending on the competition. This one is four. And then when everyone's finished entering it on the system, then the panel leader can look at everyone's scores. You can see everyone else's scores. And then you come to a conclusion and you discuss. Okay. Because some people, you know, especially judges are not very well experienced. They tend to use their personal, I really like this wine. And you're like, yeah, you like it. But is it a good wine? Is it good expression? What it should be? I love McDonald's ice cream. Is that a good ice cream? The machine is always broken for that. But man, you know, I love a good Oreo McFlurry. You know, so I said, you got to be careful of that. And that's why it's always good to judge in groups because it tends to cancel out, you know, the extreme views and the panel chair, the person who leads it. It should be someone with a good enough experience and a good enough personality to be able to bring everyone together. So you're not tasting wine once. You're tasting it again when you talk about the wine. And so at the end of this panel, like after discussing, you must arrive to a conclusion together. Like, yeah. Okay. We never like it when there's a wine. I mean, of course there's always someone who goes, I can't believe it. But if there's only one of them and the rest of the group has said, no, we believe that this is that level, they have to accept it. Because I think it's also arrogance if you act like that because nobody's perfect. Yeah, nobody stays just better than that. Exactly. You know, everyone is human. Everyone makes mistakes. And the thing I like about this system is that because you're doing it as a discussion. So our job as co-chairs is to go between groups. So we can say, Oh, in that group, they had a similar wine. And I think the quality was comparable to yours. And so I'll let you know, you know, that that group gave it a gold medal. So maybe you should look at that wine for that kind of quality. So you have this different stable, so four to five percent by table. And then you all taste the same wines between the table and then you do the same job again. Yeah. But the level of a level above with just different co-chairs or no, no, no, no. The co-chairs walk around. We walk around and we float around and we have a glass and we get cold over. Please, please, we're having an argument over this. And then you come in and you're like, "Oh yeah, I think I think." And you look at their comments. you go, "Oh, I think Tim's right here. I don't know about you, Susan. I think maybe you got tricked a bit by the sugar or something like that." Yeah, so generally people who are co-chairs or chairs are people like Andrew Kiyard, who's. And he's got so many years of experience. There's a big sense of. You know, it's just beautiful tasting with him, you know, because he brings so much experience to the table. So experience is important in this kind of thing. I guess 100%. I think we are kind of close to the end of this interview to stick to Timing, but it was an amazing conversation we had together. I think we learned a lot of things about the evolution of the consumers in China, evolution also of the vaniards of China. It's China. Just wait another three years, everything will change. But you know, I heard an interview recently, and Xi Jinping was talking about China as an elephant. And if you're blind and you touch an elephant, everyone has a different reality, like someone might touch a leg and think it's a column. Someone might touch the belly and think it's a wall. I think it's kind of the same. It's very nice. It's exactly the same. You need to experience it and go to the vaniard. I hope we'll have the opportunity to go there. No, it's more than three. You have to go climbing the mountains in Shangri-La. Yeah, definitely something we can do, like going to the United and stuff would be amazing. I have three last questions, the first one is, do you have a book recommendation for me? That is a very difficult question for me because I do our books. But what I like best about books about wine is the ones that bring culture together with wine. Because I study wine not because I want to, you know, because wine is everything. Wine is science. It is art. It is culture. It's everything that makes us human. So I really love books that bring together human culture with wine. So I love things like Hugh Johnson's story of wine. You know, because wine is all about the story. There's another one I was thinking of, which is beautiful, which is a book on wine and war. And it's the stories of the Second World War and the First World War. And I mean, these are wonderful stories. I prefer those kind of books to the more technical because from me, wine is part of being human. Yeah. Next question, do you have a recent tasting that you loved and a wine that you would basically recommend? Yeah, that for me is almost impossible to answer. Just a recent one, like one you had last week. Because it's, oh, to me, it's always like asking what your favourite food is. I think if you can say what your favourite food is, you lack imagination because it so much depends on the atmosphere and the side. Some things that have stood out in Chinese wine is recently, I tasted with my students. I ordered it for class is we had the recent release of the higher level sparkling wine from the Shandong project in Ningshan. You know, which normal, we started off its life by producing very entry level wines and now they're trying to really up their game. And I was so pleased with it. I just thought, you know, this is delicious. My students are going, man, this is not almost like champagne. Sorry. But they were like, and I just saw how wonderful that they're doing this. You know, I wouldn't say it was, it tasted like a top champagne. But the whole fact that they're trying to do this really moved me. I thought it was a great idea. We'll try to have a look if we can find it. Yeah, it's called it. It's wild. Yeah. And finally, my last question is, who is the next person I should interview? Goodness me. There are so many people, but I am aware that you're based in Hong Kong. So in order to actually, actually, no, I'm going to make you fly somewhere. There is a very, very fascinating woman, a chandel Miss Chun, who runs a winery called 10-Sai in Xinjiang. I admire her so much. Yeah, make your fly. Make your fly about as far as you can go. But it is a Xinjiang is incredible. It is, if you have not seen Xinjiang, you have not experienced life. It is the most magnificent mind blowing place in China for me. I also love Xinjiang because as someone who's caught between East and West, I look like I'm at home there. I am not normally regarded as native anywhere. But what I love about Xinjiang is that for me, Xinjiang is a hard place. It is a place of extremes of deserts and it's a hard culture. Because you got to be tough to survive there. And she is a woman who just set out to make a winery, 10-Sai, that encapsulated her dreams for this small corner of Xinjiang. And she is fascinating because she is the tiger mom of wine. And I think she's such a figure. You know, one minute I'm half terrified and the other half I want to hug her. And you can go there, get some cooking lessons by her chefs. I learned how to make the local bread, very good, bit of rose lamb. And talk with her because I think she brings as a strong woman involved in wine. I think she really shows what you can do when you have a will and you can turn a desert into one of the best places to make high quality wine in Xinjiang. We definitely love to go there and it would be amazing to spend a time there. We tasted a few wines from Xinjiang and this is definitely the type of place that produces amazing things. And the food is really fun. Really fun and failed. Come to go there. Fungi, thank you very much for taking the time. It was an amazing moment with you. I hope we are going to have the opportunity to do an episode two in a few years. Hopefully without a purple tongue. The worst thing about being interviewed after a wine competition is that your entire mouth is stained. Never mind. It's honorable. Thank you very much for this. If you like this interview, don't forget to share it. Share it to people who need to discover Chinese wines. Like it. Share it around you. Fungi, thanks again. Thank you. That was obviously. Cheers. Nice. Thank you. Try to stick to timing.