Queena Wong on Founding Curious Vines for Women in Wine

Wine is a curious thing. Depending on where in the world we were raised, we might come to it through family meals, or find it later as a social rite, a stepping stone into adulthood. To fall for it properly, though – to immerse in the world of wine in all its history and storytelling, its science and its fantasy – takes another order of curiosity. Queena Wong came to it in that fuller sense later in life, and the manner of her arrival shaped everything she went on to build.

She found wine through someone who took the time to show her its foundations, a master sommelier and friend who taught her the trade the old way, through smell and taste and the patience of buying in cases and letting time work on the bottle. Wine was a third career, reached by way of a decade in the City and then a long break to raise her children, and when she joined the London fine-wine club, 67 Pall Mall, she noticed something almost at once. “Women drank fine wine. They would happily hug a glass of Grand Cru Burgundy or a Salon. But they didn’t collect. They didn’t buy the case.”

The reasons, she came to see, ran a long way back, “to the drawing-room days when men talked business over claret while women went to the garden with a glass of sherry,” and they were still present in the room she was sitting in. London is the oldest wine-collecting city in the world, with the oldest trade, and that lineage carries a deep heritage alongside a way of doing business she felt had been slow to adapt.

What Wong did with the observation is where her story turns. Curious Vines began, in her words, as a network for “the women who weren’t there.” In its first incarnation, in the mid-2010s, it went into finance, law and tech firms to find professionally accomplished women who were curious about wine, and gave them spaces to ask the questions they wouldn’t ask in a mixed group.

When the Covid pandemic brought a halt to social activity, the pause proved useful. Four years of events had filled her database with four hundred women, and yet fewer than five had gone on to build real relationships with wine merchants. “The events created moments,” she says on her reflections back then, “and the sales side of the industry was not following through.”

So she turned the work around. Coming out of the last lockdown, she pointed Curious Vines at the industry itself, and in 2023 ran the UK Women in Wine Survey, which returned 726 respondents and the data to make the case in terms the trade understood. The commercial logic follows close behind: women are one of the largest consumer groups in the world, and the structures the wine trade has long relied on do not reach them.

What the platform does now follows from that finding. Curious Vines brings merchants, houses and educators into the room, so the connections it once only sparked have somewhere to go, and it uses the authority of the survey to press the trade to meet a consumer it has long talked past. The organisation also runs a diversity bursary for the WSET Diploma in Wines and works with partners across other lines of difference.

Turning to champagne

Wong makes that case from inside the world she is working to open. Today she is a Dame Chevalier de l’Ordre des Coteaux de Champagne and one of very few female fine-wine collectors in the UK, and that standing lends weight when the conversation turns to champagne – the subject that brought us together while researching our book The Life Champagne.

We are interested to know how she views the landscape that has been evolving greatly in recent decades. Many see the grower movement as the catalyst of some of this push towards more sustainable practices and a focus on terroir. Wong is generous and clear-eyed at once. “The grower champagne movement has been great. It’s given people another way in, another route to engage with champagne, particularly people who had pushed back against the grandes marques.”

She is not about to dismiss the great houses, though. “We mustn’t pooh-pooh the grandes marques,” she says, with a light laugh. “These are brands people know. Like buying a car from a manufacturer you are familiar with, that familiarity makes it easy to engage with.” The historical houses offer consistency and availability where grower champagne, charming as it is, can vanish once you have found a bottle you love, she notes.

Wong is keen, too, that the big houses get credit for work they rarely advertise. “Many of the grandes marques are also transforming their vineyards, and their relationships with their growers,” she says, citing Roederer, and the regenerative farming she has seen first-hand at Perrier-Jouët, as well as change underway at Veuve Clicquot – all of which we had also noted on our travels. “They don’t always message about it, but the work is happening.”

We both observe that many will begin appreciating champagne through the grower producers, drawn by the natural wine bar scene, which is tapping into younger consumers. These are more casual settings that are inclusive and welcoming; they pair champagne with food in a more natural way, that is to say without shouting about it too loudly. Younger generations are more accustomed to appreciating hospitality in a less formal setting, and they are keen to know the full story – it’s a generation raised to ask for transparency, and the grower movement on the whole is geared towards this. Many, as Wong has seen through her work, will then start to see the bigger picture, and find the door to bigger brands and their more nuanced vintages. Many, in time, will walk the more aspirational path she walked herself. “And then they will discover that there is space in the world of champagne for everybody.”

On the fashionable term natural champagne she is briskly unconvinced. Champagne, she points out, is “probably the hardest sector to taste, because it has had the most done to it: two fermentations, all that lees ageing.” For her, the honest position is plain. “By definition there is no such thing as a natural champagne, in a really honest way,” she says, allowing the case for low intervention, for skipping sulphur, for the work being done in the vineyard, while holding that none of it makes the wine natural.

Our conversation has run for hours, and we notice the time only because of another engagement, so absorbing is Wong’s enthusiasm and curiosity for her subject, wine. The “vine” in Curious Vines, she tells me as we begin to wrap up, is a growth word. “It evokes something green, it has evolution in it. You water it, it grows. You fertilise it, it grows even more.” Beyond a point, she adds, every drinker has to decide which way to let their vines grow.

“When an artist paints a picture, they start with something, an idea, but then it shifts. They change what they do in the picture.” A wine journey works the same way, she suggests: you begin to navigate by feel. “We become vines ourselves. We go to where we feel warmth, sunshine and nourishment.”

The Life Champagne is published this summer.