The Wine Bar

I rarely drink in Korea. I don't like Korean traditional alcohol much (except on occasion). I'm not much of a beer drinker. And wine is hard to come by here. When I lived in Daejeon, I had found a wine bar that I really liked close by, but I hadn't found one yet in Busan. I heard tale of a bar called "Go Goo Ma" (the name of Korean sweet potatoes, which are differnt from the American kind) a month or so ago, but I never found out where it was.

Luckily, I had promised some students a night out, and (knowing that I like wine) they offered to take me to the wine bar. The students that took me were my graduate students. One is an English PhD candidate named Jawng Ae. Another is her husband, Sang Yawl, a post-doctorate researcher. And the third is Oh, a colleage of Sang Yawl's. It was Oh's last night with the class because he had recently finished his masters, got a job, and would no longer have time to take the class.

We had planned this outing about a month ago. The students knew I was heading to the US and that that day would be the last chance to take me out before the new year. They also knew it would be Oh's last night with the rest of us, so it was also kind of a send off for him.

Gogooma was underground, dark, and quite modern. The walls were lined with bottles. We settled into a table in the middle of the room and were greeted by a nicely dressed Korean man. He was the owner, and quite personable. He brought out the menu. Normally, I would have been surprised by the prices, but I had already had this experience at my wine bar in Daejeon. There wasn't a single bottle of wine less than $50, and there were plenty of bottles well into the triple digits. Now, some of the wine warranted the high price: it was good wine. But some of the other wines on the list could be easily purchased for $10 or $15 in the US. I did my best to steer clear of those wines and picked a nice Italian pinot grigio for us to try.

Jawng Ae drank less than half a glass of wine. "Just the smell of wine makes me drunk," she told me and laughed. She certainly was a little giggly after half a glass, so I believed her.

Oh, who ended up paying of the bottle, didn't drink much either. He said he didn't care for the taste and would just as soon drink soju, Korean traditional alcohol that tastes more like rubbing alcohol than the kind of thing you want to put in your body.

So that just left Sang Yawl and myself. We easily polished it off after some conversation, some laughing, and some jokes made by Sang Yawl at Oh's expense.

It was a good night, and it reminded me how much I actually do like a good bottle of wine on occasion. I'll certainly be back.

R