Stellar flavours can be found in Spanish Albarino, Portuguese Douro Tinto, and New Zealand Pinots, according to Jukes

British wine consultant Matthew Jukes is a well-travelled man. A firm believer that you can only really understand the wines of a region if you know that region yourself, he spends a great deal of time in Portugal, Burgundy, Australia and New Zealand – all areas that produce wines for which he has a real passion – and he now breaks his journeys between UK and Australasia several times a year in Hong Kong. 

In 2005 Jukes founded Quintessentially Wine, in the UK, and in late 2007 he extended its services to Hong Kong. Although the company was established in partnership with the Quintessentially group – an upmarket services provider organised along the lines of a private club which specialises in making a range of exclusive and generally expensive experiences available to its members – it stands apart from the parent organisation in two important respects.

One of these is that you don’t have to be a Quintessentially member to sign up for Quintessentially Wine. The other is that Matthew Jukes is particularly interested in value for money wines.

The night before we met to talk about the venture I had attended a dinner at Crown Wine Cellars, hosted by Jukes, at which he introduced a lively group of wine enthusiasts to a dozen wines which members could order priced at between HK$175 and HK$498 per bottle, many of them quite exceptionally good, and particularly appealing in these times of tightened belts.

“Hopefully last night’s labels and flavours proved that you can get a hell of a lot of excitement for not a massive amount of money. That’s always been my mantra anyway. It’s not as though I’ve changed to suit the times.

We’re not recession proof – no one’s recession proof – but the sort of wines you saw last night at up to HK$500 – it’s not that much money,” says Jukes.

I particularly enjoyed the NV Ayala, Brut Majeur, “Extra Age” champagne which Jukes has arranged to have matured in the bottle for an extra nine months after the usual 22. It is surprising how much vintage character a non-vintage champagne with enough structure can acquire with just a little more cellar age.

Other star performers included a fine Spanish Albarino – Jukes sees that as an important up and coming grape – and the 2004 Poeira, Jorge Moreira, Douro Tinto from Portugal – a magnificent red for a very reasonable HK$395.

“We find plenty of classics for people,” says Jukes. “If they want the seriously flash wines, we know how to get hold of them, and we buy them from the right place. That’s a given. On the other hand, it’s the weird and wonderful wines from awesome vineyards made in small quantities that I get very excited about.”

Although a good deal younger than most of the other well-respected British wine pundits, Jukes already has more than two decades in the wine business behind him. He went into it straight from university, where he had studied physics.
“I started off retailing for a few years, then sold to the trade – which was a horrible job, flogging pretty poor champagne to restaurants, and in the course of doing that I went into the Bibendum restaurant in the Michelin building in London and said, ‘Guys, this champagne is brilliant, you’ve got to buy it, it’s cheaper than the one you list and it’s nicer,’ and they said, ‘Sod the champagne, we’d rather have you as a buyer.’ That was April 1990 and I still do that job today.”

One thing led to another. In 1999 Jukes was talking about wine in the Bibendum Oyster Bar and was overheard by a producer from the BBC who asked him to take a voice test. He did, and was offered a radio show talking about wine.
That led to a TV show appearance, then a series on Channel 4, and a book which was serialised in the Daily Mail. Then the Mail offered him their wine writer’s slot, which he still occupies. He is now one of the wine trade’s most recognisable British faces, a bestselling author with The Wine List, and he estimates that he tastes around 40,000 wines per year.

“I’m a buyer, principally, which runs very much in line with my Quintessentially responsibility. Journalism is half my wine life, but I still do all the jobs I did before, and that’s why my connections with the trade are so good,” Jukes explains.

The Hong Kong operation, he says, is going well. There are plans to establish Quintessentially Wine in other markets, but for the moment it is confined to the UK and Hong Kong.

“In Hong Kong the venture is [just over] one year old, and we came here first very simply because this market is so thirsty and enthusiastic, and lovely people come along to the functions. We have a very eclectic group of people from all age ranges, boys and girls pretty much 50/50, and not ‘first growth only’ people. People that are keen, often foodies, often travel a lot, and want to have just that extra bit of knowledge. It’s quite refreshing. Despite the fact that some of the people are retired they have quite a modern approach to wine drinking,” Jukes reflects.

Although Hong Kong wine lovers traditionally have a special fondness for Bordeaux, Jukes is keen to encourage an interest in Burgundy, and also in New World Pinot Noir wines. He has, he says, a special passion for the grape.
“I love Pinot. I’m a Pinot freak. I like the people in Burgundy, I like the food, I like the region. It’s complicated. It’s not two-dimensional, like Bordeaux where it’s just chateau and vintage. It’s three-dimensional. Each village has 20 or 30 people making wine. For Bordeaux, because it’s a two dimensional appeal, you can say ‘82s, I love them’ or ‘I love Chateau Latour’. You can make these blanket statements and be right.

“In Burgundy, you have to know a hell of a lot more to talk with any authority about it. If you want to know about it, you’ve got to go there and you’ve got to spend some time there. You have to bang on doors.”

He has extended that willingness to bang on doors to the southern hemisphere – one reason he was happy to commit to regular visits to Hong Kong in his Quintessentially capacity.

“Being a Pinot freak I ran the Mornington Peninsula Seminar two years ago and I moderated the World Pinot Conference in Wellington. I’ve written the first ever classification of New Zealand Pinot Noir as well, which is pretty foolish, because some people probably won’t think their wine is as high up the ladder as it should be. Australia is exciting too – Mornington and Yarra and Tasmania – but the top growers in New Zealand are doing extremely good things.”

Jukes intends to see to it that more lesser known good value wines from all those regions and more are available to Quintessentially Wine’s growing membership – already in the hundreds – in Hong Kong. Membership costs HK$4,000 and details are available on the website www.quintessentiallywine.com