Ep. 1092 Queena Wong | Uncorked

Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. This episode has been brought to you by the wine to wine business forum twenty twenty two. This year will mark the ninth edition of the forum to be held on November 2022 in Verona, Italy. This year will be an exclusively in person edition. The main theme of the event will be all round wine communication. Tickets are on sale now. So for more information, please visit us at winetowine.net. Hello, everybody. My name is Polly Hammond, and you are listening to Uncorked, the Italian wine podcast series about all things marketing and communication. Join me each week for candid conversations with experts from within and beyond the wine world as we explore what it takes to build a profitable business in today's constantly shifting environment. Today, we're joined by collector, founder, and mentor, Queena Wong. Leveraging over fifteen years of experience navigating the challenges of the consumer wine scene as a collector, Queena is now helping to build a new world of wine. With her organization, Curious Vines, she dedicates her time as a champion of fellow women in The UK wine industry, connecting like minded people and building a community to celebrate and encourage its members. Let's get into it. Alina, welcome. You are one of these superstars whose name has kept coming up on my radar time and time again over the past few years. I'm so glad to have you here. Hello, Polly. Fantastic to be, on this podcast with you. Yeah. I mean, my my profile is, has been raising, I think I'm just I do so much work at a real low grassroots level, and I think, over the years, there's just been some people who've been impacted positively, with my involvement with them either from, you know, hospitality, wine size, sommeliers, or even women within the trade, or even the noises I make about women in the collecting sphere of wine as a myself. I'm a fine wine collector. So I guess because I have several hats and I'm not concentrated in one area, I think it's taken a few years for me to sort of have that profile raised because it's just very much just very low key and a lot of hand holding and and just being sort of a woman who loves wine from every aspect. Wow. Okay. So I I wanna talk about that. I wanna talk about curious fines. I wanna talk about collecting. But, as we were saying just before we hit record, I did not realize that you're an Aussie. I know. Will you still like me? Oh, I love it. Of course. Because that's what happens. We go out into the world, you know, and and we're siblings. It's only when we, you know, when we are, at home that there is any kind of rivalry. So growing up in Oz, I mean, I guess what I wanna know is how'd you end up a wine collector? How'd you end up falling in love with wine? Because that seems like such a sort of as as you know from working in it, what an odd weird thing to fall in love with. I know. I'm just very lucky. I mean, as an Australian, when I was growing up there, I left there when I was 25, and the wine back the year I'm 51, Polly. I'm quite open with my age. I'm 48. Yeah. High five. Well done. You're just amazing. But, I just I, when I left Australia, it was an an era of Australian winemaking where everything was extremely robust and, you know, there was oak chips within the Chardonnay, everything was, very fruit forward and ripe and, you know, not anything of, that when at the time, I didn't find enjoyable. And then I moved to London. It was, you know, I was meant to come here for three years and, stayed clearly for a lot longer. And it took me a little while to get my head around old world wine, and then I had this amazing sommelier who I met, I had a staycation, I met at a restaurant, and he was an Australian sommelier in London, still lives here, still a really great friend of mine, and he just made the wine fun. I must have been 26, 27 years old, and, just that whole, like, sommelier with the the formal service and the arm behind the back, and it was I think it was the fun was because he actually had a broken arm. He'd fallen off his motorbike. And, I had no idea about fine dining service being such an uncouth Australian. And he put his arm behind his back to pull the first glass of champagne, and I just laughed thinking he was trying to hide his arm, which was an ex cast. And actually, I didn't realize that was part of the real formality of service was one arm behind the back and pouring pouring the bottle of champagne from the other hand. And I just laughed at him and said, I can still see your arm, mate. Like, you know, like, why are you trying to hide it? As, youth and ignorance, it all kind of boiled into quite a fun service, and he just laughed himself and just said, we're gonna have a really fun time. Damn it. I I have to jump in and say even that story, fun and youth, not two words that we equate to wine in a in a fine wine way and definitely not two words that we associate with collecting wine. No. And, you know, but after that, it took from that point, it still took a very long time to go to get to where I got to, where I started to find cases and got the confidence to put more money behind wine that, you know, you weren't even trying to buy from the case. And, you know, that that particular gentleman, he ended up leaving the floor. You know, the smelly smillery work is very tough on families time wise and the hours, but also tough on the body. He ended up moving into, setting up a business, into a merchant business. And, he said, come with me. Like, you know, I'll teach you about wine. And I was like, no. I'm quite happy buying my from the supermarket, you you know, from the shelves. And he just said, no. No. No. No. No. Your your palate's far too good for this. Like, we're gonna I'm gonna teach you. So come early to the first tasting, and I'll tell you how to I'll tell you about wine. And it was that hand holding. So I I turned up, like, fifteen, twenty minutes before kind of the official start time of the tasting, and he would take me through wine and he would give me the approach to wine that was, you know, there was no judgment. And he just gave me a way to approach the wine in smelling. And it's just the most daunting thing when you've never done it because you're actually for most people, when they come into wine, they go, what do you smell? And you say, I smell wine. You know that we Yeah. It's it's a real skill, and it's we people don't realize that, it takes training. It's like going to the gym with your muscles. It takes smelling takes training to get to get the fragrances out of wine that, you know, people are looking for and to then actually verbalize it is even the next task after that. But he took me through it and he handheld me, and I was buying two bottles of this and two bottles of that. And I was looking back, the most painful client from very little money I was spending. And but because I was a friend, he was, you know, he was teaching me, and doing it as a friend as well. And then but, you know, he did win out in the end because after a couple of years, he said you need to, like, you need to start looking at more expensive wine and maybe just storing it, buying a case and storing it. And I said, well, why do you want it why would I wanna buy, you know, a dozen bottles or six bottles and not drink it? And he said, because a beautiful thing happens to wine when you age it. And so he was the one that really encouraged me into it, and there was a lot of you know, I started at a price point of £15 a bottle. And then, you know, over time as I started to see what wine did as it aged, you know, the price point then increased, and then it was, you know, £20, £25 a bottle, £30 a bottle. And it was that real hand holding, like, from a learning from a friend almost, but he was part of the trade. Without that, I would I don't know whether I would actually have been inspired to to collect wine the way now. You know, the amount of money I spend on wine and forego the shoes