Roger Lim
Meeting Roger Lim — An Eighty-Year Journey This afternoon at the NTUC grocer, among shelves of bottles and bright labels, I met a man who quietly carried eighty years of history in his body. His name was Roger Lim. At first, what caught my attention was not the wine he was selling but the label itself. The bottle looked almost like a modern photographic advertisement—bright, playful, and very unlike the restrained elegance one expects from classical wines of Bordeaux or Burgundy. This particular wine was flavoured, even mixed with chocolate notes, something quite different from the pure and austere wines I usually enjoy. Two bottles cost about seventy dollars. But the wine was not what stayed with me. Roger did. When he told me he was eighty years old, I looked at him again carefully. He was standing the entire day promoting bottles, speaking to customers, explaining the flavours, lifting cartons and arranging shelves. Eighty. Yet he stood there with the alertness of a much younger man...