Top mixologist Wallace Lau looks forward to a life behind bars

As a pre-schooler Wallace Lau Wai-yip was already displaying the instincts of a mixologist. "Even before primary school, every time I'd go to yum cha with my parents I would mix the different sauces together and drink it," he says.

He also started collecting bartending books in secondary school although he claims he didn't know what gin and vodka were at the time. That didn't stop him from committing as many cocktail recipes to memory as he could, a practice that continues to this day. It's a practice that's just helped win a bartending competition.

Still, his career as a bartender was hardly assured. Lau went to university to study engineering and then worked in that field.

But even while working he couldn't shake the bartending bug, and studied cocktail making in his spare time."I thought work was boring and I wanted to do something to make me happy in my life," he says. When he hit 25, after two years of being an engineer, he decided to make a change. It was no easy task: "I had no experience, and 25 is not young in this industry."

First he worked at the Blue Lemon in Tin Hau, a low- key bar and cafe where he learned the basics, as well as how to make the kind of cocktails - gin and tonics, midori sours - that appealed to the local clientele.

After that, he took a job at the nightclub Play in Central. "I'd never worked in a nightclub; it was busy, crazy and loud, a totally different story," he says. Lau quickly got a handle on it: "You learn to get organised, work it fast, and handle all kinds of different people. It was a good experience."

Exhausted from long nights at Play, Lau decided to move sideways into the booming wine industry, accepting a friend's invitation to go into wine sales. He learned about serving wine, how to taste it and serve it with food.