As a college student, Powell Yang would sometimes buy Wine Spectator magazine and then buy the wines with high scores.
Back in the 1990s, it was easier for students to get their hands on the good stuff: his local drug store, Long’s, actually stocked Screaming Eagle 1992. For $50.
“Each individual store could cater to their own audience. So that particular store had a really amazing wine selection,” he says.
But although he remembers seeing the wine there, he wasn’t enough of a wine geek at the time to buy it. That wine now sells for around $22,000, but Yang says it would have been wasted on him, as he didn’t really know very much at the time.
Today, however, he’s not just knowledgeable about fine wines — he’s a major importer in Taiwan.
A winding path to Taiwan
Yang says that after college he worked for a time for Anheuser-Busch, the beer company. A headhunter contacted him and said there was a job going in Napa Valley, and was he interested? It turned out to be Diageo, which in 2002 had a wine division.
“During my time in Napa, I worked with wineries, for big global companies and for wine.com,” he says. Later he worked for Spectrum Wine Auctions, and then headed to Hong Kong in 2013.
The market had soared in 2008 after the Hong Kong government dropped duty on wine — but then came clampdowns on both corruption and business loans, leading the wine market to peak around 2011. By 2013, the environment had become a lot tougher, and Yang moved to Taiwan in 2014.
In 2017, he and his partners launched an import, retail and wholesale business specialising in older, rare wines from France and California.
“I was born in Taiwan — we immigrated to the US as a family in 1987,” he says.
Today, about 50-60% of his business is private clients, with the other 30-40% being represented by restaurants and fine wine stores.
But Taiwan was, and is, a much smaller market than Hong Kong. “Taiwan is just small. It has 23 million people and the wine drinking population is probably 1% of that.”
A snapshot of the Taiwanese market
Wine is not yet a major part of the culture. Taiwan had a government-controlled monopoly for 80 years, and only allowed foreign alcohol into the country in 1987. The monopoly was abolished in 2002 after Taiwan joined the World Trade Organisation.
Yang says the Taiwanese typically drink wine for social purposes. “They do it because their friends are doing it and it’s more or less a hip or cool thing to do,” he says. “And it’s healthier than drinking whiskey. So people don’t necessarily drink it because they understand it or want to learn more about it.”
Yet they’re also signing up for wine education in droves, though Yang says it’s often because they’re looking for people to drink wine with, rather than seeking an in-depth understanding of the category.
At the high end of town, people still prefer French wines, particularly Burgundy. But while red wines remain the most popular wines throughout the rest of the market, white wines are gaining. According to Cellar Asia, white wines had reached 10% of the market by 2020, with sales of sparkling also growing.
Steven Raidis from Raidis Estate in Australia’s Coonawarra region agrees. “Surprisingly, we have found the most success with our white wines versus what we were told about the market before entering
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