Kenn CHING

Wine Educator Kenn has been involved in the wine industry for the past 16 years. Initially as a WSET certified trainer before embarking on other international institutions like Society of Wine Educators (for its Certified Specialist of Wine Program, the Wine Scholar Guild (Formerly French Wine Scholar, for its French Wine Scholar Program and Mastery in Rhone Region), even obtaining a National recognized qualification in Training and Assessment, making him one of the few Wine Educators in Singapore to be able to design and assess candidates in the National Skills Examinations. Since graduating from the AWAC 34 in 2014, he is actively involved in the judging with the International Wine Challenge held in London every year since 2015. And in 2016, he has been invited by InterRhone as one of its 9 Inter-Rhone Wine Educators to promote and be able to certify participants in this unique wine region. This year, he has been invited to judge at the China’s most authoritative wine competition, the G100 Super Wine Awards 2018, and also been on board Asia’s no.1 winery, Hatten Wines as an advisor.

As a Wine Educator with a huge passion to promote and share more wine knowledge, Kenn has travelled vastly across continents to major wine regions of the world. Coupled with his background as a wine merchant, makes his knowledge in the world of wines to be immensely different to many other educators. On the ground training with a harvest in Australia makes him understand the in-depth process of viticulture and winemaking. To him, it is important that academic knowledge is translated into practical learning so that it can better relates to reality, and not just excel as an academic. Hence, the exposure to different aspects of the industry is an essential part of his observations and learning whenever he travels to the various wine regions. He is also involved with private collectors as a purveyor of fine wines, actively advising them on the market conditions, wine auctions and investment needs.

Kenn has been involved in various aspect of the Wine Education and Consultancy business from designing and construction of a wine cellar, managing wine portfolios for private client, to customizing CRM programs for corporate clients, based on needs and budgets. Wines being subjective, he believes in customization to wine service in order to fulfill different needs of every client. This unique-ness can be in the form of Wine Tasting events, to Wine Tours and Wine Education program. With high expectations for himself and his team, he strongly believes that being passionate and professional in what makes Wine & Co Consultancy different from other wine schools. In Singapore, the WSET delivery standards is amongst the highest with the best passing rate well above the global average and with the most number of graduates in the country. He is the Wine Educator for Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) Asia-Pacific Head Office situated in Singapore, training all management and executives from 2014-2016. During the professional certified courses, there are representatives from China(Shanghai), Japan, South Korea, India and Singapore office in attendance.

As part of his corporate social responsibilities, he is active in providing an insight and training in basic wine etiquette to all graduating students from Shenzhen University. This would provide them with some background and hopefully help in integrating themselves into the working society in the near future.

Kenn is also actively leading wine harvesting tours to major wine regions (From France, Spain, Italy to Australia, NZ and Chile) as part of the active learning, applying the classroom knowledge to real life applications. Showing these students harvesting process to winemaking so that they can better understand and appreciate the hard work behind every bottle of wine. His vision that wines are learnt not only from books but seeing is believing is what drives him to make these trips amidst his busy schedules.

With his leadership and motto of “We are what we are because of what we do best!”, we can expect more exciting times ahead for Wine and Co Academy!