The Birth of a Wine Culture in South Korea

(HP) - How do you create a wine culture where none exists?

South Koreans have had a long history of a drinking culture, favoring Soju, a distilled spirit similar to vodka but very cheap. Wine was not on the table, not even in five star restaurants or hotels as recently as the 1990s.

That didn't deter Hi Sang Lee.  He is a very patient man. He wanted to share his newly found love of fine wine with friends in Korea.  Lee's wine moment happened on a ski trip with friends in Stowe, Vermont.  Up to this point Lee really wasn't a drinker.  One of his wine-loving friends opened some good French wine.  "It was like paradise," Lee says, and the wine bug bit.  He began buying wine, storing it in a friend's basement.  But he had a problem.  How to get it back home to South Korea?

So I started a wine import business," he says, to bring in the wines he likes to drink.  He named it Nara Cellar. This was in the early 1990s, and while there were a couple other wine importers in the country, Lee was the most ambitious.  Once he tasted Napa Valley wines, he knew he wanted to have them, especially the Cabernets, in his portfolio.  He started knocking on the doors of vintners, some of them the biggest names in the business.  No one would meet with him, and all turned him down, saying they didn't have enough wine to sell him and they didn't feel Korea was a significant wine market.

Mr. Lee did not give up. He found another way in, through the annual trade auction Premiere Napa Valley.  "I came to Premiere to get some attention from the winery owners," he says.  "I would bid on the wine but I also had the chance to meet the winemakers, have dinner with them.  That was the only way to meet the owners and bring their wines to Korea, so I did that for many years."