Last week, I stood in front of the expansive wine section of the Lotte department store in Pusan and wanted to scream. My third day in South Korea and my palate was craving wine. Despite scouring the shelves, there were very few wines under US$100. Price sensitivity is of course relative to how much you have, but knowing the international market price only too well, and having a sense of their quality-to-value ratio, I could only utter one word: Ouch!
Just to give a few examples, Talbot 2007 was US$130 and Moet & Chandon non-vintage champagne was US$100. In Hong Kong, Talbot 2007 can be purchased from Altaya for HK$360 (US$46) and Moet & Chandon at Watson's Wine Cellar for HK$358 (US$46). Surely, part of what contributed to these high prices were the bevy of young, uniformed sales ladies and the beautiful glass displays that encased the overpriced wines. This is a painful switch coming from a wine duty-free city like Hong Kong to a country that administers close to a 100 per cent tax on imported wines.
During my stay in Korea, I took on the challenge of becoming a bargain wine shopper. I found much better wine prices at Home Plus, a discount retail chain that is jointly owned by Samsung and Britain's Tesco.
Here, there were wines that I had never heard of for under US$25 from Bordeaux, Chile and South Africa, among others. I found some fantastic wines at under US$20, which means their ex-cellar price was most likely about US$5 to US$8 per bottle. Department stores held sales just after Christmas and wine bargains appeared even in high-end department stores such as Shinsegae.
In Chile, 2007 was a very good year for cabernet sauvignon, so I gravitated towards the young but affordable 2007 reds from producers like Montes Alpha, Santa Rita and Concha y Toro. In recent years, mid-range Chilean reds have moved away from its telltale combination of ripe fruits married with green vegetal undertones towards a more harmonious style. The wines are generally less coarse and rough in the finish compared to three or four years ago; even wines at US$15 a bottle are fairly polished with ripe tannins.
I found a chardonnay bargain from Australia from one of the most unexpected regions - Coonawarra.
