Jeannie Cho Lee
One of only a few Masters of Wine in Asia, Jeannie Cho Lee can tell you the difference between a New World cab sauv and a Bordeaux without even looking at the bottle. She’s also the best-selling author of two award-winning books on the enjoyment of wine in Asia. She tells Adele Wong how she stays smart and sober while tasting hundreds of wines a day.
I started out as a journalist. My interest in wine went way back to when I was an exchange student from Smith College at Oxford University in the 80s. I got hooked
on wine but never really thought of it as a career.
When I arrived in Hong Kong in the beginning of 1994, I was working in various newspaper and editorial positions. Besides the full-time job, I started writing wine articles on the side. And that really just evolved into a career.
There is a much larger variety and selection of wines in Hong Kong now [compared
to two decades ago]. The number of retail shops was really just a handful, and the selections at Wellcome and ParknShop were really quite awful.
The general public just wasn’t exposed to it. There were so few places where you could actually enjoy wine. You would have to go to a five-star restaurant. There were very few standalone restaurants that had a good wine list. How could you expect people to have a basic understanding when it just wasn’t around? The market was quite niche at the time.
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