About Me

I have been studying wine academically for over 10 years now. During that time, I have come to be one of a handful of WSET Diploma holders in Korea and Hong Kong, where I have made home for nearly a decade. In fact, I never thought that I would be so deeply immersed in this particular field for so long. This was rather uncharacteristic of me as my curiosity, more often that I would like to admit, has sent me down countless different fields and paths that I rarely expect.

One of my earlier passions were my love for plays and theater, quickly followed by (and in no particular order) I fell in love with art and practically lived inside galleries and auction houses, fell in love with history and poured over history books day and night. And at one point, I fell in love with the stars in the sky and spent my nights studying the myriad planets and stars. When I am fascinated by a subject, I would dive headlong into it, searching for all kinds of materials, even to the point of physical exhaustion, but I had a habit of losing interest as soon as I thought I had (at least in my mind) conquered the subject. Usually, my interest would fade away as quickly as it flamed up, leaving but the ashy remains to mark my passion of late.

But I stayed in the the field of wine for over 10 years, which still amazes me till this day. There were, inevitably, brief periods of lackluster interest and passion, but without exception, I returned. Each time with, let’s say, tears of retribution. I would return with promises of greater love and faith. Wine, that accepted me so generously, gradually shaped my life. It gave me new perspectives and wisdom, and expanded the horizons of time and space of my life.

At first, it was taste. With an exceptionally sensitive sense of smell, wine was an intuitively satisfying pleasure. The whole world seemed to be in the bottle of wine I held in my hands. How the liquor made from grapes could contain all the colorful fruits of the world, the smell of dozens of flowers and grasses I couldn't even name, the taste and aroma of earth and stones, sea and forest. Sometimes tasting wine seemed to give me reassurance of my existence and gave me a sense of superiority and accomplishment. I found pleasure in the process of discerning flavors in detail, and the desire to taste wine more fully and completely led me to pursue the Diploma course.

If the previous story was about flavors and senses, next one is about the horizontal axis of wine. ‘Our lives have always been shaped by the land we live on.’ says Tim Marshall, author of The Power of Geography. Anyone who has studied wine in depth will agree. Wine has always been shaped by the land in which it is made. The Land lies in the core of any philosophy of wine. I like to refer to it as the horizontal axis, because it gives us a new experience, an expansion of dimension. We taste countries, regions, and vineyards we've never been to. A glass of wine transports us to the vineyard and reminds us of the terrain, soil, and climate of the vineyard, what the summer and autumn were like in the year the wine was made, whether it was dry or rainy, whether it was scorching hot or cool, and even to what was in the soil where the roots of the grapes were planted.

Then my curiosity shifted to so-called vertical axis of wine. In the autumn of 2018, after passing my Diploma, I was binge reading Yuval Harari's books. While reading his masterpiece the Sapiens, I suddenly became curious about the history and the presence of wine in human civilization. At the time, I think I was simply thinking about the invention and evolution of wine. However, as I followed along the tracks of my curiosity, holding on to the solid vertical axis of human civilization and struggling to go back in time, a completely different dimension of the world unfolded in front of me. My interest and research culminated in the book Grapes to Wine, which was published in May 2022 in Korea.

The horizontal and vertical axes of wine, and the feast of flavors and aromas have now merged and expanded and are woven into my interest in travel and culture. Having lived in Hong Kong for nearly a decade, the largest wine hub and gastronomic center of Asia, interest in food and its culture has become an integral part of what defines me. And I have been traveling around the world with keen interest in gastronomic, cultural, and historical perspectives. I yearn to share my cultural and historical insights and experiences through wine with any and every audience I can reach over the world.

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. Even before my wine career, I've been writing as a business consultant, an auctioneer in an art auction house, and later as an editor for a magazine. As a wine expert, I started writing articles and columns for wine and dining magazines. Most notably I published my first book in Korea, ‘From Grapes to Wine’, which intertwines the history of wine and art. I continue to write for blogs, magazines, and working on my own books.

Writer / Author