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How it all began!

Hong Kong turned me into a Wine addict!

It’s 2015. I had been living in Hong Kong for 2 years, trying to find my feet with various jobs from cooking at an English-style Fish ‘n’ Chip shop to growing and caring for gourmet fish at a fish farm. I had been jobless for a couple of months, after deciding I had different ideas to fish farming than the shareholders, when I bumped into this German guy who was opening a wine shop in the town I lived in, Sai Kung.

At first, I honestly thought this guy was crazy, firstly because he didn’t speak Cantonese and secondly because he was competing with the big consortium wine shops of Hong Kong. However, I was surprisingly offered a part-time job even though I mentioned I knew nothing about wine other than the different colours, plus I’m pretty sure I mentioned I didn’t really drink it either!

As I think you can all guess, that very quickly changed!

At first it was just bossman, Andy (the German guy), teaching me about the wines by just going through each and every wine in the store. Since he probably won’t ever read this, I remember laughing silently as he spoke from behind me. It sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger was telling me about Provence Rosés and Sauvignon Blancs. However, as I did more shifts and met more of the team members I became enveloped by this overwhelming passion for wine everyone had.

After about a month I was infected by this passion and love for all things wine. My knowledge was still abysmal, but I had a hunger for it and with the team that I worked with who rarely laughed at me (except at my mispronunciations of Cantonese and Mandarin) and were always eager to help me learn, I quickly became one of the full-time A-team. Perhaps the key to my learning was learning by drinking. We used to make sure we tasted every sample bottle we opened for weekends and so most of my knowledge was from experience whilst being guided by teammates like Areca who were studying wines via WSET.

Thoughts of doing it in Devon.

I honestly loved working for Winerack. The team, especially Ricky and Areca, really made me feel like family, and my bosses Andy and Marrian really looked after me and gave me opportunities such as visiting the world’s biggest wine fair, Prowein, which helped me develop my knowledge and passion for wine to what it is today. All my fondest memories of my 5 years in Hong Kong began with Winerack.

However, it was whilst I was visiting Prowein that the idea of bringing this passion back home to Devon started. As I walked through looking for potential new wines for Winerack I met so many producers/winemakers with incredible wines that I felt deserved to be shown to more people, not just in Hong Kong but also in Devon. Perhaps it was what was missing from Devon, I thought, and that’s why I had met so few people, if any, who had the same passion for wine as the Winerack team.

Devon, as with most of UK is dominated by supermarket wines but with that lack of knowledge most people will buy one style of wine and stay with it, or perhaps they venture once and not like it and so won’t do it again. However, I thought if I could bring the Winerack ethos of “Wine is for everyone and we aren’t just selling wine, we’re also selling our passion” then perhaps I could help Devon drink better and introduce the much wider world of wine than a supermarket can.

Other than the business idea side I also massively missed home. As much as I felt like I had a new family in Winerack, Hong Kong life just felt too hectic for me and I also felt I stood out a lot with my too-western-to-be-a-local-but-too-Asian-to-be-a-westerner personality.

So with a heavy heart I said goodbye to Hong Kong and Winerack in 2017.

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