In the famed Chateau Lafite-Rothschild wine cellar in Bordeaux, three university students from Hong Kong raised their glasses and took a sip.
Good as the vintage was, they never expected it would earn them the runners-up spot in an international student's wine-tasting contest, opened to Asia for the first time this year.
Fergus Chau King-fung, Holly Lau Man-shan and Alex Yau Ka-siu, all from the Chinese University's Faculty of Law, ended up bringing home two bottles of Lafite worth more than HK$20,000 as their prize in the 20 Sur Vin contest.
They competed against teams from Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard universities in the elimination rounds at the vineyard that produces one of the world's most expensive wines - and were just one point behind first-placed Harvard.
After taking multiple-choice questions, contestants taste wines to rank the year of production and describe characteristics such as fruitiness, acidity and alcohol level.
'We knew little about wine till four months ago when we started to prepare for the competition,' said Lau.
The students said they had long been interested in wine tasting but lacked any opportunity to pursue it because there was no wine society at their university - or indeed any other university in Hong Kong. Chau said: 'It was important that we knew how to taste wine in formal occasions and present ourselves.'