Jakarta's first wine cellar keeps visitors' spirits high

Jakarta's first wine cellar keeps visitors' spirits high

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): "Here with a loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A
Flask of Wine, a book of Verse and Thou Beside me singing in the
Wilderness, And Wilderness is Paradise now ...," wrote Omar
Khayyam, a Persian astronomer and poet in the 12th century. And
it has taken almost 800 years to finally open that flask here and
turn Jakarta into the kind of paradise talked about by the poet.

For most of the guests who visited the city's first wine
cellar that opened on Jan. 21, amid the tinkling of a thousand
and one glasses and the twinkling of double that many eyes, it is
a dream come true.

Some of the crowd of fashion designers, models, management
experts and diplomats said they had to wait for almost half their
life to realize their dream.

TL Lie, one of the four owners of The Wine Cellar, learned to
love the drink from his uncle, who is Dutch. "He has a collection
of over 3,000 bottles at his home in Holland. I learned
everything about wine from him," says Lie, who studied civil
engineering in the Netherlands. When he returned home in 1986, he
found that his life felt parched without wine.

Soon he met John M. Read, one of the most ardent lovers of
wine who is seldom seen around town without a glass in his hand.
John came to Indonesia to work for Mobil Oil in the early 1980s
without realizing how "dry" this city was. Soon connoisseurs like
Read and Lie became part of the Jakarta Wines and Spirits Circle
that has a membership of 200 people today.

With decades spent in tasting wine, Read is the consultant-in-
chief to The Wine Cellar. His collection of books on wine numbers
nearly 250, some of which are opened to the appropriate page and
displayed at the Cellar.

Read is also the person to seek out if one has discovered wine
recently and is still unsure about what to do with a bottle in
hand. He gives lessons in wine culture and appreciation, from its
history to its proper consumption.

"The only hazard of having a love like this one is to make
sure that one never makes the mistake of getting drunk," he
warns. Adding that the right wine sipped with the right food can
rarely be the cause of tipsy behavior.

"We meet regularly to dine, and to wine and to talk about our
favorite flavored bottle," explains Harry Darsono, the flamboyant
fashion designer and musician who played the piano all night long
at the inaugural. Looking like a freshly plucked rose in a pink
outfit, Deby Susanti Vinski, president director of Perfect Model,
the international agency and career center, came to the
overcrowded Cellar to give moral support to her numerous friends
from the Circle.

On the same evening, BS Kubheka, the ambassador of South
Africa, decided to give French wine a try for a change. "But when
I serve wine at home it is always from my country," he confided
to The Jakarta Post.

Tucked away underground in the lower lobby of the Kempinski
Hotel on Jl. Sudirman, The Wine Cellar is considered by
connoisseurs to be a virtual treasure house of wine from around
the world. Out of some 20 countries producing wine in the world
today, ten are represented here from, among others, France, Italy
and Australia.

Pretty Priyanti Djoehana, the marketing coordinator for the
promotion board of French Food and Beverages, is quite pleased at
the variety of French wines stocked at the cellar. "Although the
number of people who crave wine remains very small in Jakarta, it
is still important to have a place in the city where one is able
to pick up a good wine without paying through one's nose," she
said.

Till recently it was just possible to juggle around with about
20 different labels. Now the choice is almost between 175
different varieties. As wine culture spreads around the city,
more and more people are tempted to snuggle up to the daughter of
grapes. Nanny Widjaja, who is a sleeping partner at the Cellar,
held her first glass of wine just two years ago.

As the owner of a steel contracting company, she has come to
look forward to her daily glass of red wine at the end of each
exhausting day. She does not feel good that Muslims should not
drink wine. She quotes experts who believe that a moderate amount
of wine is even good for the health.

According to researchers in Denmark, people who drink wine
consider themselves healthier. The study was based on findings
that to believe oneself to be healthy leads to a reduced chance
of dying from heart disease. It is also found that mortality is
lower among wine drinkers than among drinkers of beer and
spirits.

Scientists at the Human Institute in the University of Milan
feel that a glass and a half of wine a day could help improve the
little gray cells and stop the progression of brain disorders. A
chemical produced by wine may help a brain enzyme to function by
up to seven fold.

Wine has been wedded to man for more than 4000 years say
ancient texts. The Egyptians refer to the use of grapes for wine-
making as far back as 2500 BC. The Greeks and the Romans drank
wine and following the voyage of Columbus the grape culture was
transported from the old world of Europe to the new worlds of
Mexico, South Africa, South America, Australia and California.
And now it is the turn of people here to please themselves even
if drinking wine may sometimes not make them very pleasing to
others.