Hong Kong has killed its wine and beer taxes. That's going to cost the city government about $72 million a year. Bad move? Not if you're trying to turn your town into a global wine-trading hub. Right now the two biggest centres for wine auctions are London and New York. But as much as a quarter of the $200 million to $400 million of wine sold at international auctions is bought by Hong Kong residents. And in London, about 40 per cent of the $1.2 billion of annual sales by fine-wine merchants is to residents of Hong Kong, Macau and China. (Asia is generally going wine crazy — about $7 billion a year is spent on table wine in Asia excluding Japan.) It's estimated that as much as $642 million of vintage wine could be sold yearly in Hong Kong, based on how much city residents buy internationally. read more