RTHK 4: Portraits of Guitar Legends (Repeat) 不可不聽的結他大師, by Clarence Mak.
I am not a music major, and I make no claim to be. What follows comes from somewhere quieter than that — from years of competing in the Yamaha Guitar Festivals, of playing a Tatay from Valencia, and of once exchanging that guitar with Clarence Mak, receiving back a different voice from the same wood and strings. Clarence went on to study formally in Spain, build a career in electronic music, and teach at APA, where my son later studied conducting. None of us knew, at any point, how those threads connected. I find that rather beautiful. It is from that web of quiet coincidences that I write.
What I offer here is not instruction. It is a reflection — from someone who has lived alongside this music long enough to have a few things worth saying.
There is a stage built for you. Segovia built it, Bream and Williams walked it. A great tradition does two things: it inspires, and — if you are not careful — it calcifies. The question worth asking, at any given moment, is which of those two things is happening. Segovia’s way became the only way for a generation, and something was lost in that narrowing. The tonal beauty he drew from his Ramírez and Hauser — colours that luthiers themselves had not known were possible — did not pass automatically to those who followed. It had to be earned, note by note, stroke by stroke, in the same spirit of humility and persistence that made him extraordinary in the first place. Apoyando and tirando are not historical obligations. They are living tools. The difference between them is felt not in the fingers but in the ears — and if you cannot hear it, you are not yet there. Yet there.
The hardest discipline in music — as in wine tasting, as in conducting — is not being seduced by your own responses. The moment you begin performing appreciation rather than truly listening, something closes. I have seen it in both worlds: the person who has decided what they think and repeats it ever after with great fluency. They are not without charm. But they are not growing. The guitar is larger than any single vision of it — larger than Segovia’s, even. The instrument that once sat in cafés has carried Bach, Villa-Lobos, and everything in between. That entire range belongs to you — not just the neo-romantic corner that Segovia preferred.
When you pick up a great instrument — a Ramírez, a Hauser, a Fleta, a Romanillos, a Smallman — there is a moment before the first note when the wood is already speaking. Your technique is the conversation that follows. It is worth pausing to listen before you begin.
The stage is there. It has always been there. What you bring to it is entirely your own.
Hashimoto Honoka vs Wang Manyu — 2026 ITTF World Cup, Macao, Women’s Singles Quarter-Final, April 4, 2026
I have played table tennis since my school days, competed at the team level, and spent decades watching the game at every tier from club halls to world championships. In those school years, I would skip lunch without a second thought, trading the canteen for the table tennis room to squeeze in another hour of practice. Summer terms made it easier — early release meant I could eat after school, which left the whole of lunchtime free for drills, footwork, and the relentless repetition that turns instinct into technique. I know what a well-disguised chop feels like when it lands on your side of the table — that sudden lurch of miscalculation, the ball dying on your racket when you expected it to fly. I know the discipline it takes to stay short, to stay patient, to resist the urge to attack when every instinct is screaming otherwise. So when I say that Honoka Hashimoto’s performance in this quarter-final was something special, I say it not as a casual observer, but as someone who has lived inside the geometry of this game.
There are matches you watch for the fireworks, and matches you watch to learn something. Much like a great wine that reveals itself slowly — layer by layer, sip by sip — this quarter-final demanded patience. Wang Manyu, world No. 2, eventually prevailed 4-2 (8-11, 11-8, 13-11, 8-11, 11-5, 11-9). But the scoreline only tells half the story.
Hashimoto came in as a heavy underdog — she had never beaten Wang — yet she brought exactly the weapon that makes her one of the most fascinating players in the world: a defensive chopper’s chess-like mind, and the patience to use it.
The heart of her game — and the heart of this match — was rubber-side switching. On one side of her bat, a DHS Hurricane 3 National: an inverted rubber that grips the ball and returns topspin. On the other, a short-pipped DO Knuckle: a surface that disrupts spin entirely, spitting the ball back flat, dead, and awkward. By flipping between the two mid-rally, Hashimoto constantly changed the language of each exchange — one ball heavy with chop, the next a spinless block that died on Wang’s racket. Watch the video closely: every time she turns her wrist, she is rewriting the rally.
This is not passive defence. It is absolute mayhem, deliberately engineered. Wang Manyu’s game is built on explosive, split-second timing — feed her the same ball twice and she will destroy it. But feed her uncertainty — heavy, then dead, then floating — and even at world level, her coordination begins to break down. Her returns drift high. That is the trap. The moment the ball sits up, Hashimoto is on it: a blunt, flat, no-spin attack, always. Not a loop, not a brush — a punching drive that gives Wang nothing to read and no time to reset. Spin confusion creates the high ball. The high ball invites the attack. It is a sequence, a system, executed with cold precision. A seasoned wine taster knows this disorientation well: you think you have identified the grape, the vintage — and then a finish arrives that upends everything. Hashimoto’s switching produced exactly that sensation for Wang, game after game — not by outpowering her, but by making her body lie to her.
Wang’s answer was her forehand — a thunderous loop she can generate from almost any position. When she found that groove and drove deep to Hashimoto’s backhand corner, the switching game became harder to sustain. Wang was shrewd enough to keep going back there, and it turned the tide.
Yet Hashimoto never stopped competing. Six games against a player who had beaten her every time before. She made Wang work for every single point — and proved that rubber-side switching, executed with discipline and nerve, can unsettle even the world’s best.
Watching this, I heard my old coach, Mr TH Ho, in my ear: " Keep it short, keep it low, make him come to you. “If the ball drifts high, spin it back hard with angle. High enough — smash!” He had drilled that strategy into me for a reason. My opponent was one of the best player from St. Louis School, Hong Kong — a formidable topspin attacker who could punish anything loose. I was playing with a Butterfly racket, Tempest on one side for the heavy underspin chops, Attack rubber on the other to punish anything that sat up.
It was the deciding match of the competition. Win or lose on this strategy, Mr Ho had decided — we commit. We kept the ball low, tight, and patient. It worked. We won.
And beyond the victory, that match gave me something I had not expected — the feeling of being truly embraced by a team and a coach who believed in me. My teammates were no ordinary schoolboys. One was Professor Yip Sau Leung, who would go on to become one of Hong Kong’s most prominent economists, famously unafraid to speak hard truths about the city’s financial future. The other was Leung Siu Pun, a natural entrepreneur whose instincts for opportunity were already visible long before the business world knew his name. We were very different people, bound together at that table by Mr Ho’s strategy and something harder to define. It was the first time I felt that kind of belonging, and I have carried it ever since.
Same philosophy. The biggest stage in the world. Hashimoto did not win — but she reminded everyone watching that patience, craft, and spin never go out of fashion.
Hashimoto is not the most powerful player on tour. She may not be the fastest or the strongest on the right-hand side. But she is one of the smartest, and on days like this, in matches like this, that counts for a very great deal. Like a fine Burgundy standing quietly beside a bold Napa Cabernet, she may lack the raw muscle — but she offers something rarer: complexity, nuance, and an aftertaste that lingers long after the match is over.
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
(AI photo, rescaling The Gold Rose, Gruaud Larose.)
Let me be direct. These are the vintages the wine world quietly sets aside — absent from glossy lists, ignored at auction. The off years. The ones nobody talks about: 1994, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017.
The argument against them writes itself. Gruaud Larose is a Super Second — a Deuxième Grand Cru Classé of Saint-Julien. If you are going to open one, surely it should be the 2009, the 2010, the legendary 1982. Why settle for less?
Because these bottles are in my cellar, getting no younger. And I refuse to accept that a Super Second, even in a difficult year, is not worth your attention.
The Estate
Gruaud Larose is, by nature, an uneven performer. Brilliant decades followed by quiet ones. That inconsistency is precisely what keeps prices honest — a backhanded gift to the patient buyer. The terroir has resources that do not always show up in critical scores.
The Vintages
1994, 86 pts. Toasty, oak-laced nose, intact fruit core, lighter palate. Three decades in — open it now, decant well, drink with something substantial.
2011, 90 pts. Cassis, blackberries, anise, spice. Fresh acidity, ripe tannins. Classic and clean. Two hours in a decanter — drink now.
2013, 89 pts. Light, red-fruited, early-drinking. Conditions broke lesser estates — Gruaud Larose survived. Do not overthink it. Just open it.
2014, 92 pts. Classic structure, red and stewed fruit, tobacco and cedar. Described as “a vintage of natural restraint and nobility.” The sleeper of the group.
2015, 92 pts. Not an off-vintage — widely recognised as excellent, yet overshadowed by the 2016 and priced below its quality. Blackcurrant, red cherry, tea leaf, pencil, leather. Presence and energy described as “simply irresistible.” Drinking well now.
2017, 92 pts. Bright and fresh, soft tannins, red berries over black fruit. Black truffle on the nose. The frost year produced something worth drinking — best after 2028.
The Case for All of Them
The score is low — 86, 89, 90 — because the vintage was difficult. Not because Gruaud Larose stopped caring. The winemaking, the terroir, the standards of a Super Second — all remained in place. What you are buying is the same estate’s best effort in a harder year. The low score tells you the year was imperfect. It does not tell you the wine is wrong.
A difficult vintage at a serious estate is not the same as a mediocre wine from a mediocre producer. Gruaud Larose does not cut corners when the weather turns. It selects harder, produces less. The result is a leaner wine — not a lesser one.
Gruaud Larose is a meaty, structured, tobacco-and-dark-fruit wine that demands food and patience. These vintages are lighter, earlier-drinking expressions of that character — at prices that let you experience a genuine Super Second without the premium.
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And consider this. Six vintages, mostly off years, spread across three decades. Open them in an evening, and you have a mini vertical of Gruaud Larose — not the polished, parade-ready bottles, but the estate in its working clothes. That is, arguably, a more honest education in what Gruaud Larose actually is than any single great vintage could offer. You learn the baseline. You learn the DNA. The fruit style, tobacco, the structure, the Saint-Julien bones — present in every year, regardless of the score on the label.
So I will drink them. You should too — before the window closes on the ones past their peak, and before the world wakes up to the ones still quietly improving.
Gruaud Larose, even in its quieter moments, is not without value. Anyone who says otherwise has not been paying attention.
