Peeping thru the blinds

The Times Square shopping mall features an exterior-facing glass elevator that can get from the ground floor to the top in something like 10 seconds. This means that factoring in for stops and off-peak hours, approximately 10,000 assholes can stare into my bedroom window every day.

This afternoon, I decide to cross the street and take the elevator. Not to participate in group voyeurism – I’m saving that for my trip to Japan – but to go and find out what it was that Chinese people were drinking.  At Watson’s Wine Cellars, as in many places in Hong Kong, a Chinese person (who speaks with a non-trivial accent) goes out of his way to greet me in English. This is not good for Operation Get Cantonese Good Enough to Tell Grandma I’m Not Signing Up for eHarmony.hk.

It takes me two seconds to decide that I’m not going to buy anything, as I scan through the prices of various Bordeaux. (The math is convenient: The Great Britain Pound is worth about 12x the Hong Kong Dollar, and there are 12 bottles of wine in a case. So by looking at the Hong Kong price per bottle, I can immediately benchmark it to the GBP case price that I trade in.)

Deciding against a sheepish “Just browsing,” I ask for red Meursault – a wine that I couldn’t find in a year of living in France – and get left alone. The clerk seems content to get back to smiling on the phone. And I am content to discover that on the rack of Mouton-Rothschild, an empty space accompanies the price label for the 1996. (I have a secret evil plan for trading the 1996 that I’ll reveal once I either bank it or it blows up in my face.)

“So, which Bordeaux sell well?” I finally ask the clerk, after mentally deliberating on the proper Cantonese grammatical sequence of the sentence.

“Lynch-Bages,” he says confidently, along with two others.

I wonder if there’s some kind of secret society and a global conspiracy to push Lynch-Bages. Prices have gone up, and everyone, from wholesalers to merchants to wine bars have been trying to get me to invest/trade/drink it. Everyone also seems to have cases upon cases of supply.

I turn back to the glass case, just past the Mouton and above the Latour. There’s a single bottle of Lafite in the entire store, and it’s 2001, one of the least desired vintages.

“That’s it?” I ask.

“Yes, we can’t quite ever hang on to them.”

That’s quite a thing to say about a wine that’s US $1500 a bottle and already quadrupled in cost, almost linearly from two years ago.