Li Nanxing, Vicki Zhao are helping each other out with their respective careers

​What are the chances of Chinese actress Vicki Zhao and Singapore actor Li Nanxing being mentioned in the same breath?

As it turns out, the chances are pretty darned high, as Nanxing told us about his friendship with the actress while sipping wine at Grand Cru, a wine concierge that recently opened its doors at The Fullerton Hotel Singapore.

“We were introduced by mutual friends. I remember the celebratory dinners we had in China, where alcohol flowed freely all day,” he chuckled. “I’m not a great wine connoisseur. In fact, there are only three things that I can tell you about wine: whether it tastes good to me, if it gives me a headache the next day, and that adds up to whether or not I like it.”

Based on this very layman method of deciding on which wine is his cup of poison, Nanxing recalls being struck with how good Vicki’s wine is.

The actress has a sprawling vineyard, Château Monlot, St-Emilion Grand Cru located in Bordeaux. She bought it for an estimated price of between 4 to 5 million euos (S$6.17 to S$7.71 million) back in 2011, and has since started exporting wines all over the world.

“What I found strange was that it’s not available in Singapore! That’s why I recommended it to Grand Cru, and she’ll be personally here to launch her wine in September,” Nanxing beamed.

As we watched the 54-year-old swirl his wine rather expertly in his glass, we wondered out loud: Does he pop open a bottle every once in a while at home?

“That seems like a very lonely thing to do,” he quipped. “I have quite a lot of alcohol at home, including the baijiu that the Chinese love. It’s a lot stronger than regular alcohol, but at the same time, being gifted with baijiu is an honour, so it’s not a present that you can refuse.”