Bottle Shock: Leona de Pasquale, wine & tea educator, director & buyer, Camellia and Vine

I didn’t drink any alcohol when I grew up, just tea. In that generation it was the culture in Taiwan – ‘nice girls don’t drink alcohol’. Even when I was working in luxury hotels, I didn’t drink, it just wasn’t part of my DNA. Working for Sopexa, I was doing all sorts of wine and food projects, but I was there because of my media relations skills, not wine knowledge. I learned about wine, although in my first few months I didn’t actually enjoy it. But I liked the story behind [wine], and when we were doing a thing about French regional wine with French food, and taking it around Taiwan, one of them was Alsace. We had Alsatian food too and the wines were Riesling, Pinot Gris and there was a Gewürztraminer. That wine, when it was poured into the glass – I was in my early 20s – was the first wine where I felt I could smell not just alcohol. I could actually smell something I was familiar with – lychees, which we have a lot of in Taiwan. That was the moment I started to relate to wine and began to find it fascinating. I realised it’s not just ‘all alcohol’.