67 Pall Mall opens a Shanghai wine club in a 1925 mansion
The London private members' club takes over a century-old French Concession villa in December, with more than 5,000 wines and a cellar of Chinese labels.
67 Pall Mall, the private wine club founded in London in 2015, opens its first mainland China outpost in December, inside a century-old mansion in Shanghai's former French Concession, with a list running past 5,000 wines.
The club takes over the Grand Mansion at 7 Donghu Road in Xuhui District, a French Renaissance-style villa built in 1925 by British financier Raymond Joseph. The building has hosted the Nixon–Zhou Enlai talks and the 2001 APEC China summit, and turned 100 last year before its conversion, alongside the Donghu Hotel, into a wine venue.
The space covers 1,330 square metres across 15 rooms, among them a grand salon, a sunroom, a wine library and a spirits bar, with capacity for more than 200 guests. The wine list runs past 5,000 bottles from more than 40 countries, with roughly 1,000 available by the glass.
A members' club built on one address ages better than one built on a logo.
Alongside that sits a separate cellar of more than 1,000 Chinese wine labels, drawn from Ningxia, Xinjiang and Yunnan, regions the club is betting Chinese members will want to taste alongside Bordeaux and Burgundy rather than instead of them.
Annual membership runs 38,000 RMB before opening, rising to 50,000 RMB plus a joining fee once the doors open, and is capped at 1,500 members, with preferential rates for wine professionals and members under 30.
Chef Ang Song Kang runs the kitchen. His previous restaurant in Singapore held a Michelin star for seven years before he relocated it to Xiamen. The menu mixes Chinese regional cooking with Asia-Pacific influences and keeps a few London staples, including the wagyu burger and sausage roll.
Shanghai's wine market turns selective
Shanghai's wine trade has grown more selective since the pandemic years, with buyers favouring smaller, members-only rooms over the large hotel cellars that once dominated the city's fine-wine scene. A club built around one historic address, rather than a chain format, fits that shift, and gives the Gil-style old-guard European wine trade a foothold alongside newer domestic labels, much as Moutai's own push into lifestyle venues has done for Chinese spirits abroad.
Betting on cities beyond Europe
67 Pall Mall opened in London in 2015 and has since added Verbier and Singapore. Shanghai is its first mainland China site, with Bordeaux, Beaune and Melbourne in the pipeline, part of a stated goal of ten locations within three years. Whether a London-rooted club can hold 1,500 paying members in a market still working through a post-Covid wine slowdown, one already reshaping how China sources premium ingredients, from farmed caviar to fine wine, is the test December's opening sets up.
