4 Not everyone falls in love at first taste

Gho and Lim, who started in the wine industry in the ‘conventional’ sense, cited their first encounters with minimal intervention wines around 2011. Gho was working in Shanghai, while Lim’s then-company exposed him to Lucy Margaux wines, which he found “weird but exciting”. Over time, they found that they enjoyed the flavours and drinkability of this style of wine, and by 2015 were in serious thoughts about its viability in Singapore. They opened Wine RVLT in Killiney Road in September 2016 (before moving to the current location in Carpenter Street), making it Singapore’s first natural wine bar.

The latest entrant in that market is Le Bon Funk (lebonfunk.com), which started in May. Yeomans, a Canadian native who most recently spent a few years in Southwest France, observes, “Many people come in having had not so great experiences and are so pleased to see that natural wines are not all just funky for the sake of it but beautiful wines made with a low interventionist mentality.” It takes a few wines to get the ball rolling, but those who are receptive to the taste have been growing. “What has impressed me the most, is how many people have come in asking for big heavy reds and then taste a fresher red and later keep coming back in search of that freshness that a lot of natural wines offer. People are discovering that you can have the funk or not when it comes to natural wines, they just need to be led in the direction they prefer,” she adds.