Crisis breeds wine club: the story of Mulia Wine Club

The Mulia wine club was born with the help of an unlikely midwife, the Asian economic crisis. In the course of the crisis, a group of 16 Chinese-Indonesian businessmen suddenly found themselves having unusually plentiful amounts of time to uncork the bottles of wines in their collection.

Idleness brought them together more often in their favorite hangout, Hotel Mulia Senayan, to kill time, eat, drink, and explore future businesses. Their get-together quickly became regular and led to the birth of a private wine club named after their favorite hangout on Feb. 10, 2000.

Incumbent chairman Ronny Wongkar said the club's founding fathers were mostly wine collectors who have been drinking together since 1999. Back then they wined and dined like friends normally do: in an informal potluck fashion without any rules. They just brought wines they wanted to share and ordered the food they liked.

Now that they have been grouped together in a club, things have become more organized. A chairman is elected for a period of three years to draw up the club's program. A secretary who doubles as treasurer (Sendra Kurniawan) is appointed. So is an official in charge of logistics/ pairing between wine and food (Andi Sajito).

The first chairman was Anwar Djohansjah, a property tycoon. And the incumbent chairman, the president of a Singapore-based international logistics company, Roycelindo Pte Ltd, took over from Hartadi Ongko Subroto from the Gunung Sewu/ Dharmala Group.

Under Ronny's chairmanship, each member is required to pay in advance a wine contribution of Rp 10 million per annum and is supposed to attend 10 monthly local gatherings and one overseas outing once per year. There is only one "resting" month in which the club has no activity. Every time the club organizes a wine-and-dine event in a restaurant, members have to pay for the food in a pro-rata fashion.

So members who are inactive will not only miss out on the wines served in the gatherings they skip but also forfeit the annual wine contribution they have paid in advance. Usually they dine together in the first week of the month with one white wine, four red wines and sometimes one dessert wine.

A new member will be admitted only when invited twice by an old member and accepted by all the other members. Everything to do with the club has to be approved by all the members, including the interview I had with Ronny which resulted in this article. A guest who is invited by a member to attend the club's wine dinner must pay for his share of the wines and the food he enjoyed.

Now the club has 30 members but each gathering is typically attended by 20. The youngest is Harianto Ng, a car dealer in his early forties and the oldest is Ludi Harimulya, 83, a Liebherr wine cellar agent who still drinks wine. Seven members now no longer drink wine for health reasons but Ronny sees to it that they retain their membership.

"A member is always a member," Ronny concludes.