Hong Kong gets its own 'Sunday Times Wine Club'

The owner of the Sunday Times Wine Club will launch a sister wine club with Hong Kong’s English-language newspaper, The South China Morning Post.

Direct Wines will launch the club – under the Laithwaites name – on 19 September.

Chief executive Simon McMurtrie told decanter.com, ‘We are expecting a big bang response rather than a slow burn.

‘South China Morning Post is the leading English-language newspaper and the Laithwaites brand is launching with lots of advertising.’

Direct Wines launched its operation in Hong Kong earlier this year with an offer to local HSBC bank customers. The company said it had received double the number of orders expected and ran out of stock.

The move follows the abolition of the 40% tax on wine last year. McMurtrie added, ‘If Hong Kong proves to be successful, we have plans for China.’

The mail-order club will offer mixed cases with French wines expected to represent up to 50% of the range.

Direct Wines also launched a wine club with German national newspaper Die Welt in June this year and the Wall Street Journal in September 2008. It also has partnerships with three of Australia’s leading dailies.

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Written by Rebecca Gibb

Rebecca Gibb MW is a wine journalist and editor who has also founded Bamboozled games, ‘the world’s first wine and spirit puzzle makers’. Having spent six years living in New Zealand, she has recently returned to her native north-east England. While in New Zealand, she became a Master of Wine, graduating top of her class and winning the Madame Bollinger medal for excellence in tasting. A former winner of both the UK’s young wine writer of the year and the Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer, her first book The Wines of New Zealand was published in 2018. She also runs wine events and has her own consultancy business The Drinks Project. She was a judge at the 2019 Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA).