In February we sat down with Derek Li for episode #106. At the time he was an Advanced Sommelier and a Master Sommelier candidate, someone who had stepped away from full-time restaurant work to bury himself in study and blind tasting. He described it as intense, demanding, and deeply consuming. He was not exaggerating.

This month he passed. Derek Li is now a Master Sommelier, and the first one born and raised in Hong Kong.

Everyone at Wine Makers Show sends him our congratulations. We are genuinely delighted, and a little bit proud to have caught him mid-climb.

What actually happened

The Court of Master Sommeliers held its Master Sommelier Diploma examination at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, and announced on 17 August that two candidates had passed: Derek Li and Julien Boulard MW. It is reported to be the first time the Court has staged its Master Sommelier exam in the city, which makes the result doubly significant for Asia.

Boulard’s result is remarkable in its own right. Born in Alsace, based in China since 2003, he earned his Master of Wine in 2019, and with this pass he becomes one of only six people alive holding both MW and MS. Six. In the whole world.

As for the exam itself, the numbers explain why this is news. Fewer than 300 people have earned the Master Sommelier title since the first examination was held in London in 1969. Three sections, theory, blind tasting and practical service, and you need at least 75% in each. Most people who attempt it do not pass. Many who eventually do have failed a section, sometimes more than once, before they get there.

Why this one matters to us

Titles are not really our thing. We have spent years arguing that wine does not need more gatekeeping, and a site built on “wine without snobbery” is not about to start treating a diploma as a personality.

But Derek is exactly the reason the exception is worth making, because his story is the opposite of the one people imagine when they hear “Master Sommelier.”

He did not come up through fine dining or an academic route. He started in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s loud, crowded nightlife district, selling drinks to people out for a good time. He was not a wine expert. He was someone who liked alcohol, liked people, and liked making guests happy. Everything after that was built one WSET level and one exam at a time, on top of a job on the floor.

The thing he said in our interview that stayed with me is his rule for young sommeliers: never sell what you do not like. Everything on his list, down to the cheapest glass pour, is something he has tasted and actually enjoyed. That is not a rule you learn in a textbook. That is a rule you learn from serving real people who can tell when you are pretending.

He also stepped away from restaurant work to teach, and he is blunt about what teaching is for. Not facts to memorise, but information properly digested. Taste the wines instead of reading about them. Travel to the regions if you can. Build memories, not flashcards. That is a genuinely anti-snobbery philosophy coming from someone who has now cleared the most snob-adjacent exam in the business, and we love that.

Hong Kong is quietly having a moment

This lands in a very good week for the city. We published episode #119 with Cyrus Ho, hotel sommelier at the Island Shangri-La, on the same day the Court announced its results.

Look at the pattern. The exam came to Hong Kong rather than Hong Kong flying to it. A locally born, locally trained sommelier passed it. Asia is no longer importing its wine expertise, it is producing it, and the people doing that work came up through hotel floors and nightlife bars rather than through inherited cellars.

That is a much better story than any medal count.

Congratulations, Derek

He passed his first Court certificates back in 2014. More than a decade of exams later, working, teaching and studying at the same time, he has gone from Lan Kwai Fong to Master Sommelier. If you want to hear what that grind actually sounds like from the inside, go and listen to our conversation with him. He was mid-preparation when we recorded it, and knowing how it ends makes it a much better listen.

From all of us at Wine Makers Show: congratulations, and enjoy the glass you have very much earned.