V I N E E X P E C TAT I O N S
My wine princess Vicki Zhao excels as an actress and director, but how does she fare as a winemaker after buying four Bordeaux châteaux? June Lee gets face time with the Chinese celebrity at the official launch of Château Monlot in Singapore.
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ordeaux has always attracted investors, from royalty to businessmen to celebrities. That Chinese wine lovers are now counted among them isn’t news anymore, but back in 2011 when bonafide film star Vicki Zhao Wei made her first winery purchase, tongues wagged and pundits fretted. Decanter reported that she may have paid between €4 and €5 million for the midrange, attractive St. Emillon Grand Cru château with eight hectares of vineyards. In winemaking, changes take a long time to implement, and eight years of diligent improvements have passed by at Château Monlot. It’s also taken a while for her wines to reach Singapore. Zhao has chosen Grand Cru, a wine concierge and bar in The Fullerton Hotel Singapore as her exclusive retailer, thanks to a series of coincidences that took place after she cast Singaporean actor Li Nanxing in her latest web drama, Everyone Wants To Meet You. Li enjoyed Château Monlot so much while drinking with Zhao in China that he encouraged her to make it available in Singapore. In Mandarin, Zhao quips, “Singapore has lots of the best things in the world including red wines. So I feel that it should also have our wines.”
A flavour profiler While Zhao name-drops her love of Petrus, Pavie and Ausone, her savvy business instincts brought her to Château Monlot, a fiveminute drive away from Petrus. Merlot was and continues to be her favourite grape for its powerful taste profile, though she concedes that there are increasing fans of Burgundy in China. “Every winery is different and offer their own wines that are unique in terms of characteristics and flavours,” she explains. “I am a huge fan of red wines, and at that point I was searching for a winery that best suits
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my palate.” Her sincerity won over retired Petrus winemaker JeanClaude Berrouet, who now consults for various wineries including Monlot. At the day-to-day helm is head winemaker Jean de Cournuaud, whose family has been making wine since 1769, before the French Revolution.
