Access a world of luxury, lifestyle and glamour with Luxe Club and Privé, two ultra-exclusive wine clubs by premium wine merchant Sarment.

Imagine you are in France and you want to gift a good friend or an esteemed client a case of extremely rare vintage wine, but he is holidaying on a yacht somewhere off the coast of Italy. You call up a company and it sends a boat out to sea, locates him in the middle of the Adriatic Sea and hands him the wine.

That company is Sarment Group. And this is one of the personalised services offered to clients of Privé, a by-invite-only, ultra-exclusive membership for the world’s elite. Only 100 high-net-worth individuals have access to this club globally, with invitations extended to former government officials, celebrities and other VVIPs.

For the rest of us, there is Luxe Club: a $1,890-a-year membership offering a suite of luxury lifestyle privileges, with wine at the epicentre of it all.

“We want to offer people who aren’t multimillionaires the opportunity to enjoy the same lifestyle and have that sense of belonging to an exclusive club, in which they are recognised in the right places and meet the right people who also want to enjoy the finer things in life,” says Quentin Chiarugi, managing director of Sarment.

Central to Luxe Club are regular networking events that are often in collaboration with highend brands in fashion, design and lifestyle. Sarment organises five to six of these events each month.

One recent collaboration was the launch of a high-end furniture collection by an Italian designer, who was specially flown into town for the event. Sarment provided the wine for the evening: The first glass was a 1958 vintage, followed by one from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. At the end of the night, Sarment’s head of wine shared with the guests about how they had just enjoyed a 50-year retrospective of wine, parallel to the design concept of the furniture.

This is a perfect illustration of Luxe Club’s mission: to bring together creativity and attention to detail to elevate one’s lifestyle experience. Members can learn something new or leave with an interesting story to regale their friends with afterwards.

Luxury is often found in the little things, and Luxe Club emphasises on the finer details that will wow its members. At selected partner restaurants around the region, for instance, members get exclusive access to “confidential wine lists” that feature rare vintages and wines from the private cellar of the winemaker.

“We are working with 250 restaurants in the region. If you go to a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hong Kong, for example, you may not know them, but as a Sarment member, they know you. The chef will come and say ‘hello’, and offer you a glass of champagne. This is one of the privileges of being a member. It’s not about getting discounts in the restaurant. It’s about face — how you are welcomed and entertained in the restaurant,” says Chiarugi, who holds a Master of Wine and hails from the Rhône wine region in Southern France.

Luxe Club also grants its members access to privileges in other luxury segments, such as bespoke tailors and yacht charter. When it is launched in September, members can tap the full suite of privileges via an app, which will also provide restaurant recommendations across the Asian cities the club is present in: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and, by September, Kuala Lumpur. There are also plans to open offices in Tokyo, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and, possibly, South Korea and the Philippines.

Of cellars and sommeliers
The story of Sarment began in the home of Bertrand Faure Beaulieu, the company’s founder and CEO. The Swiss had a big cellar that needed tidying up, so he called a friend who was a head sommelier and asked for his help to organise his wine collection. After that personal project was completed, Beaulieu realised the potential demand for the services of a personal sommelier among the ultra-rich.

In 2007, he established Sarment in London as a members- only sommelier service, where wine collectors in the UK and Hong Kong could call upon experts to source and store their wines.

“Clients would pay a retainer and Sarment would send a sommelier to sort out their wines, advise them on the right wine to drink, what not to drink, what to keep, which to send for auction and also select wines for purchase on their behalf,” Chiarugi says.

The company later expanded to include a wine distribution business, and Beaulieu moved to Shanghai to expand the business in the booming Asian economies in 2011. The Singapore office was opened in 2014 by Chiarugi, who oversees the Southeast Asian markets.

In March, Sarment scored a major coup when it attracted the attention of Paulo Bulgari, chairman of Bulgari Group. He invested in the company and now sits on the board as honorary chairman alongside Beaulieu. With Bulgari’s experience in building his luxury empire that has since been sold to LVMH, the partnership will help Sarment make more inroads into the world of high luxury and access the inner circles of some of the most famous people.

Wines that tell a story
At Sarment, every bottle of wine has to tell a story. “They have to have a character beyond what’s inside the bottle. It’s also about who built the brands and what story they have to tell,” says Chiarugi of Sarment’s selection criteria in choosing brands for its portfolio.

Most of the wineries Sarment works with are smaller, family- owned establishments that produce 50,000 to 100,000 bottles a year, often organic or biodynamic in approach.

All the brands under Sarment are curated by a team of seven professional sommeliers who are based in Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Beaune, the wine capital of Burgundy in France. The sommeliers have stellar credentials, with the majority having worked in Michelin-starred and celebrity chef restaurants. Every year, they visit vineyards around the world to search for exceptional wines that encompass the whole taste spectrum to appeal to different palates. Through Sarment’s rigorous selection process, the best in winemaking are chosen, with some of the most exceptional terroirs featured in the Sarment stable.

As much of Sarment’s distribution business is in China, the conversation with Chiarugi naturally flows towards the topic of Chinese wine and the often-negative connotation associated with “made in China” labels. Chiarugi is quick to share how he has witnessed the improvements in production quality over the years. He is also very impressed with the standards of some of the Chinese wineries these days. More and more sommeliers from China, he says, are rising to the standards of elite sommeliers of the world. He believes that soon, China will be represented in wine lists around the world as a country category.

Moving forward, he reveals that Sarment will be acquiring its first Chinese brand for distribution in 2017, which is produced by a luxury group that has created a beautiful winery in China.

Jamie Nonis enjoys writing about luxury lifestyle, business and holistic wellness.

This article appeared in the Options of Issue 733 (June 20) of The Edge Singapore.