Features
Portfolio Highlight: Artisan Cellars, Singapore
How Malaysian-born Aman Khan and German-born Moritz Deyle built one of Southeast Asia's most respected portfolio, starting from Singapore. On the conviction they held on to before anyone else believed in it; and the people who helped them carry it.
1 August 2026
Producers represented by Artisan Cellars. (Photo Credit: Artisan Cellars)
“You look after the people working for you or you don't deserve to keep them,” Aman Khan states without any reservation, the way someone does when they have thought through something rather than paying surface value.
As the owner of Artisan Cellars, Aman protects his people even if it costs him more. He pours expensive bottles for his own team and not only for clients. "We're only as strong as our weakest link," he tells his team.
Moritz Deyle, General Manager of Artisan Cellars, says that “it simply felt right” from his very first conversation with Aman. “We shared a similar philosophy about wine, and I knew it was a place where I could continue learning while helping build something special,” Moritz shares.
Malaysian-born Aman launched Artisan Cellars in Singapore in 2008, because “Singapore doesn't make you guess at the rules”. On hindsight, as Aman puts it bluntly, “Not a year you'd pick on purpose for launching a wine business”. The 2005 vintage hype sent prices climbing everywhere, before the 2008 financial crash landed on top of it.
Aman’s journey with wine started in the “New Zealand commercial aisle”, with a bottle of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc. But all roads lead to Burgundy, with Aman confessing, “I used to roll my eyes at that until it happened to me exactly like they warn you.”
The list was Burgundy-heavy from day one, because that was what Aman loved and what everyone he drank with loved. "Lovely reason to start a business," he says now, "terrible one to build a wine list on."
Back then, the company was green enough to be paying agents who'd already taken their cut before the wine reached Singapore. Four staff, a shop in Palais Renaissance in Singapore’s prominent Orchard Road, but a list “that was overpriced and unloved”. The first month, they sold to almost nobody.
Instead of retreating, Aman went directly to source and cut out the middlemen. The first stop was, interestingly, Austria; with Huber, Weninger and Tement. Although, he quickly learnt that wines he genuinely liked and being able to sell them are unrelated skills.
Then, in Aman’s words, “the dice rolled our way”, with Champagne and Burgundy almost simultaneously. The company championed grower Champagne at a time when most of the market could name Selosse and Larmandier. They secured the likes of Ulysse Collin, Etienne Calsac and Benoit Lahaye early, when it was still possible to knock on a cellar door and be let in. Within two years, Comte Liger-Belair, Sylvain Cathiard, Fourrier and Pascal Marchand followed. Relationships that, a decade and more later, are mostly still standing.
Moritz's route to the same building came from further away. German-born, his fascination with wine started as a boy trailing his father through old wine cellars, drawn to “the smell, the atmosphere and the feeling of stepping into another time”. These old cellars almost felt “mystical” to him as a child, and that was where his fascination with wine began.
A false start in Law taught Moritz only what he didn't want, before a nine-month internship at a winery started it all for him. He could have based himself anywhere serious wine moves through, but he chose Singapore, and Artisan Cellars specifically.
It is hard to imagine Domaine Bizot now as a wine that lacks demand, but the Artisan Cellars team spent years being all but begged onto tables before Asian demand caught up to Aman's conviction. Dry Sherry, Aman says, is "still, cruelly, a hard sell," but Artisan Cellars keeps pushing it anyway.
“Running a wine business is a constant balancing act between passion and commercial reality,” Moritz shares.
