LIQUID INVESTMENTS
MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Hong Kong falls for SA’s wine — now to encourage the romance
Over the past seven or eight years, Hong Kong has become the world’s largest wine auction market. Annual turnovers in the special administrative region exceed the total of London and New York combined. This is largely the result of the prescience of the region’s authorities, who scrapped all duties on wine over a two-year period about eight years ago to make Hong Kong a tax-free wine trade zone. Without the former British colony’s appetite for luxury, and without its access to the market of the mainland, the move would simply have seen an uncompensated loss to the fiscus. However, the sheer scale of the business, which comes with state-certified, temperature-controlled warehousing and has seen an increase in mainland visitors arriving to access their duty-free stocks (there are still punitive wine tariffs elsewhere in China), has created a self-sustaining boom.To make the evening more interesting, the first part was conducted as a blind tasting in which a series of paired wines came...
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