Buy Wine Online
It took me a long while to warm up to the idea of buying online—eBay just wasn’t my thing—but ever since I discovered the brilliance and convenience of online groceries and e-books earlier this year, I’ve wondered why it took me so darn long to see the light.
As a recent convert, it’s been especially exciting to discover all sorts of F&B ventures setting up in cyberspace (see last week’s mention of online cupcake sellers if you missed it last week).
Alcohol vendors are also heading into the frontier. In fact, I found out about greater China’s largest wine retailer, yesmywine.com, last month when I attended their grand opening dinner at the China Club. Yesmywine.com boasts a membership of 3.6 million (that’s like half of Hong Kong’ s population) and, since its launch in Hong Kong earlier this year, it’s been trying to establish itself as a major player in our duty-free wine market.
Their website is in Chinese at the moment, but I’ve been told there’s an English version in progress that’s set to launch this month. Yesmywine.com carries bottles from all over the world (including from China—which is the first such Hong Kong retailer I know of that does so), and you can get wines from as cheap as around $60 all the way up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. (I personally can’t imagine drinking a bottle worth the size of a down payment on a small Hong Kong home. It must taste like money.)
Yesmywine.com also specializes in Bordeaux Grand Crus if Old World fine wines are more your thing (although that’s a pretty mature market already). They host regular wine tasting events, too, so be sure to check their site for the latest updates.