This post was written in 2006. Shop details and prices may have changed since then.
I’ve got a few bottles(!) of wine ready for this trip to Korea. Getting them ready meant digging through a mountain of info on French and Italian wines, plus wine retail listings in Japan and Korea. Along the way I got a small glimpse of the deep world of wine I hadn’t known about. (Still a long way to go..) And I also found out that the descriptions in The Drops of God are full of exaggeration..
Take Château Mont-Pérat, for example: the claim that a wine you can buy for around 3,000 yen tastes like a luxury wine that outdoes Opus One, or that Échezeaux and Vosne-Romanée are brother wines from the same vineyard, is way over the top. That’s not to say the two wines are bad. They’re great value for money, but they fall short of having the class of a truly high-end wine.. When the price differs several times over, overcoming that gap isn’t easy. That price gap exists because the supply is limited and the wine is made with that much more care. (In fact, the First Apostle in The Drops of God had only 450 bottles made that year and sells for over 70,000 yen in Japan. The Second Apostle goes for the low 10,000-yen range, but it’s sold out too and not easy to find.)
Countless factors decide how a wine tastes, and there’s no way to know how good it is without drinking it yourself. Once you can pick decent wines to some extent using Bordeaux château classifications, Burgundy domaines, vintages, Parker points, Wine Spectator scores and so on, the next step is to learn by tasting for yourself. Serving wine in the best possible condition is pretty hard. If you had loads of money you could hire a good sommelier and every problem would be solved just like that, but for a collector, money is always in short supply. CDs, books, cameras, a brief spell with audio gear, and now, as the natural next step, I’ve arrived at wine, but starting a new collection has never meant giving up the old ones. (I think I’m lucky I haven’t gone crazy for cars yet.) Still, wine collecting is worth it, because it’s that rewarding.
After checking prices, wine in Korea turned out to be way too expensive across the board. Anything over the 30,000-won range especially was not reasonable at all. How on earth are you supposed to enjoy drinking wine at those prices.. Well.. I drink my wine in Japan, so I don’t have much to complain about.. but it must be tough for people living in Korea..
But expensive wine isn’t all there is to wine. Every wine is a drink meant to be enjoyed, and you can enjoy all kinds of wine in all kinds of ways. (Although finishing a whole bottle on your own isn’t easy.) About three years ago, I think, I had an organic wine called Altiplano for 14,000 won at a wine shop called Vineyard in Cheongdam-dong, which has since gone under. I looked it up and found it’s now selling for 25,000 won. At 14,000 won I was completely happy with it. Like most cheap wines, even though it was a red it seemed to taste best slightly chilled. The aroma was light and it went down smoothly, so it paired really well with meat. A dream marriage that lifts both up, you could say.. You can’t call a wine like that bad just because it’s cheap. Fancier wines don’t go with meat because of their aromas (flowers, fruit, sometimes a strong whiff of cigar). (Not with steak, and even less with chadolbagi, thin-sliced beef brisket..) With pork galbi, even a cheap light-bodied California wine beats beer, soju or Baekseju. (Though Jinro’s table wine is absolutely unforgivable..)
I think Vineyard deserved to go under. The wine list was rich and the prices weren’t bad for that neighborhood, but their service was really poor. The cheese selection wasn’t up to much either.. People from that neighborhood would probably look for somewhere they could get premium service even if it cost more.. and anyone not from there wouldn’t want to go all that way just to be treated badly..
I’ll only be able to write about the three fantastic wines I bought this time after I’m back from Korea. One is a perfect-vintage wine from a great producer that has just reached its drinking window – I stretched a bit and paid a price with a 1.5x premium on it – and I plan to open it on this trip. The other two aren’t ready to drink yet, so I’ll keep them for now. Looks like there’ll be fun wine parties on my business trips to Korea for a while. Life feels richer.
P.S. Uploading music will be tricky for a while. From now on I can only listen to music as mp3s, so I can only upload from home..