I hunt down value wines with soul, the kind that tell stories, spark debates, and challenge your assumptions about what good and "affordable" can taste like. The deal: Hong Kong prices with free delivery in urban areas. Six-bottle minimum. Ready to explore? WhatsApp 852 66236746 or email cf.lau@dunndunn.hk -
(An AI photo)
Open a bottle of 1997 Chateau Gruaud-Larose and you open a piece of Hong Kong history. This was the year of the handover — or the hangover, depending on where you were that night. Either way, she was there, quietly doing what honest wines do: ageing with more grace than the rest of us.
She is not a wine that will impress on paper. An 88/100 from the critics, a dash where a price should be on Wine-Searcher, and a near-vanishing act from the open market — the few bottles that surface range from HKD 690 to over HKD 3,000 depending on where and how they were kept. She is not a wine you order. She is one you hunt.
In the glass, she has soft tannins, plummy depth, worn leather, and mushrooms. At 12.5% ABV — a number almost impossible to find on a label today — she carries a lightness that the modern wine world has largely forgotten how to make. A true claret in the most classical sense, understated and cedar-edged. A member of the Hong Kong Wine Society calls her quintessential claret. Some would go further still.
But here lies the injustice: Gruaud-Larose is built to last, designed for decades, not for early applause. Every score on record was almost certainly formed at the barrel, when she had barely found herself. To judge a nearly 30-year-old wine by what she tasted like in her youth is like reviewing a symphony after the first rehearsal. Those who scored her early simply caught her too soon.
And the timing matters more than the critics knew. 1997 was also the year the Merlaut family took ownership of Gruaud-Larose — a new era for the estate — and the same year a new era began for Hong Kong. No score captures that. The critics were measuring the wine against blockbuster years, not against history.
She is a birthyear bottle. Time in a bottle, as Jim Croce once sang — a moment you cannot get back, sealed under cork and quietly waiting. She bridges past and future without the weight of expectation — evoking a Hong Kong that was, an era that closed, and yet projecting forward, reminding us that what endures is not always the most powerful, but the most meaningful.
At HK$590, with the fill level taken into account, you simply cannot be wrong. Where else can you find a Second Growth Saint-Julien, at this age, at this price, asking nothing more of you than a quiet moment of reflection?
I hunt down value wines with soul, the kind that tell stories, spark debates, and challenge your assumptions about what good and "affordable" can taste like. The deal: Hong Kong prices with free delivery in urban areas. Six-bottle minimum. Ready to explore? WhatsApp 852 66236746 or email cf.lau@dunndunn.hk - Kevin K Tang
Nobody talks about Boyd-Cantenac. That, right there, is your opportunity.
This 1855 Third Growth sits quietly in Margaux, making barely 5,500 cases a year. It even appeared in the Japanese manga Drops of God — conjured as a masquerade ball, smoky and earthy — and still nobody much noticed. The 2014 vintage compounds the neglect, sandwiched between the flashier 2015 and 2016.
And yet.
Decant it, and the wine makes its own quiet case. Medium-bodied but not slight, it carries density from 45-year-old vines — spicy black fruits, coffee and meat, toasty oak giving way to fine cedary tannins on a lingering finish. At 13.5% ABV, no heat, no excess. The 2014 was above all a Cabernet year on the Left Bank — a blazing September rescuing a cool summer — and Boyd-Cantenac, Cabernet at its heart, was made for exactly this.
The tannins carry a rustic edge — pour it cold and impatient and it will disappoint. Give it air, and something more honest emerges.
Critics score it 90–92 points. The local market has quietly reached the same conclusion, pricing it at HKD 400–450. At HKD 390, you are at the sharp end of that consensus — buying a genuine Margaux Grand Cru Classé that still has real mileage ahead, for almost nothing.
Seven Things We Could Actually Do Differently
A companion piece to The Noise in the Glass
Critique without remedy is just complaint — and I am as aware of that as anyone. The problems described above are real, but most of them are tractable. None of what follows requires formal training, specialist equipment, or a change of venue. Just a little more intention before and during the evening.
1. Define the construct before you taste
Before a single glass is poured, the convener should put a question on the table: are we ranking by quality, by typicity, by value, or by personal preference? These are different questions with different answers. Leaving the question implicit does not make it go away — it just means every member answers a different one in private. Five minutes of framing at the start of the evening is worth more than any methodological refinement afterwards.
2. Separate preference from quality
Ask members to produce two rankings: one for personal preference (which wine did you most enjoy?) and one for perceived quality (which wine do you think is the best example of what it is trying to be?). The gap between the two lists is often where the most interesting conversation lives. A wine can be technically excellent and not to your taste. A wine can be immediately lovable and not especially serious. Making that distinction explicit is one of the most illuminating things a tasting can do.
3. Run a simple calibration round
Before the main flight, serve two wines that are not part of the competition — one that is clearly straightforward, one that is clearly serious. Ask members to rank just those two. This is not a test. It is an anchor: a shared reference point that gives members a common sense of where the scale begins and ends. It takes ten minutes and costs almost nothing.
4. Record descriptors alongside rankings
Ask each member to write down two or three words for each wine before assigning a rank. Not a tasting note — just a word or two: “tobacco,” “too acidic,” “reminds me of a Côtes du Rhône.” This slows the process slightly and forces members to articulate what they are actually responding to. It also makes the post-scoring discussion far richer: instead of defending a number, members can compare the words.
5. Treat the discussion as data
The qualitative discussion after scoring is currently informal. It could be slightly more structured without losing its warmth. One approach: before the reveal, ask each member to name the wine they found most surprising and the wine they found most disappointing, and briefly say why. This draws out quieter voices without putting anyone on the spot, and it produces a richer record of the evening than a ranked list alone.
6. Name the outliers
When a wine receives a very high rank from one member and a very low rank from another, that disagreement is not a problem to be averaged away — it is the most interesting data point of the evening. The convener should flag those outliers explicitly: “This wine finished fifth overall, but two people ranked it first and one person ranked it last. What is going on there?” That question almost always produces the best conversation of the night.
7. Rotate the convener role
The convener shapes everything: the topic, the sequence, the framing, the discussion. There is no rule that says one person must do it all. Within a single evening, one member can introduce the topic, another lead the post-scoring discussion, a third handle the reveal. No single voice dominates the arc of the evening, and members who have prepared a piece of it listen differently to the rest.
None of these suggestions will eliminate the noise—and I would not want them to. The point is simply to know what we are doing and why. The scores will still be imperfect. The conversation will still go sideways. Someone will still rank the best wine last. But if we understand the evening a little better, we spend it a little better. That feels like enough.
