Inside Asia's Most Exclusive Wine Club | Hong Kong’s Club Bâtard

Millions of dollars of wine, a door that only opens after it scans your face, and a cellar most collectors will never get inside. This is Club Batard in Hong Kong.

Three restaurants stacked across three floors, all connected by a single cellar holding close to 10,000 bottles. Club Batard Co-Founder Linden Wilkie gave me the full tour, floor by floor.

Linden has spent decades at the center of Hong Kong's fine wine world, long enough to watch the city become the wine capital of Asia after the wine tax was scrapped in 2008. He has hosted dinners built entirely around 19th century Bordeaux and Burgundy, poured verticals of Chateau Latour going back to 1894, and built Club Batard around one simple idea: members drink the greatest wines on earth at retail price, in a working cellar they can walk through and browse themselves.

We covered it all: the DRC corner and the bottles on every collector's bucket list, a 15 litre Pichon Baron opened and finished by the glass, why zero tax changed the way Hong Kong drinks forever, the new Burgundy growers worth following, Chinese wine grown at 2500 metres in the clouds above Shangri-La, how to spot a fake in a world after Rudy, the German Riesling he calls a cousin of Burgundy, and the grower champagne revolution he says is quietly changing everything. Then he told me about Club Batard's next chapter opening in Shanghai.

If you love fine wine, collect Burgundy, or just want to see what a 10,000 bottle cellar in the heart of Asia actually looks like, you're going to enjoy this one.