Wine Beauty (2014)

Story wise, this drama is a true melo drama & suffers from the bloat. Long winded melodramatic rants & romantic switchbacks, with relationships ping-ponging around & zig zagging all over the place. It also doesn't serve up satisfying relationships, even though there are happy endings all around for the main characters.
Roy Chiu's character starts out with an over the top swagger that has him literally bouncing as he saunters around and it is neither believable or attractive. 20 episodes later he sheds that persona & THEN you see the Roy Chiu you came to see.
The second male lead has 2 faces; happy & morose. He will spend 90% of the drama looking worried & confused as his character pathetically waffles between women. The writers didn't seem to have much imagination as the second female lead ALSO is morose & prone to spacing out.
There are some tired tropes, such as:
the First love gets dibs on their first love, no matter how many years have gone by. Then there are the obligatory relationships with the ridiculous misplaced imposed duty & responsibility (to a relationship that only one person wants): with the ever supposedly "noble" sacrifices being anything but noble. People go around guilting each other into action & unilaterally making decisions for each other (just so the drama can meet it's 42 episode quota!?)
A good edit would have pared down the parts where they just talk everything to death.

I searched for over 4 years for this drama & finally found it on youtube (complete with English subs). This IS a 2014 drama & so it feels dated (I watched it in 2025). The outrageous hair styles (that change with a character's development/maturity) are sometimes distractingly outdated. Zhang Bo's tragic hair style can only have been imposed on him in order for us not to wish too hard that he would over come the second lead syndrome! The makeup artists couldn't figure out what to do with the female lead's beauty mark (mole) on her chin so they initially covered it up (& ding such a poor job of that it actually appears to be a pimple.) The mole continues to play hide & seek with the camera throughout the drama .
The secondary couple get way too much screen time & they aren't even likeable. The main couple get only 1 screen kiss in all 42 episodes (& really, it's barely a kiss at all) the ending, though happy , is bland and you feel cheated.
5 1/2 stars is being generous & is only that much because of Roy Chiu's star quality, which only shows up 1/2 way through the drama

Note: Roy Chiu does do quite a bit of singing both on camera and in the background (OST) so if that appeals to you, you may want to sit through the this mess of a drama

Wine Beauty can be found (Aug.2025) on youtube Channels

Drama Box Exclusive (all 42 Episodes)
Drama Box English -(which only has 40 episodes for some reason)

The Audio & Video quality on both are excellent. But be aware that there are a few times when the dialogue isn't subbed this is a problem whenever anything written or texted on phones is shown on screen. It's unfortunate that the subs are in white as they disappear when the back ground is sold white, [which happens surprisingly often]. The Sub writers also deserve to be virtual noodle slapped for being so bad at thier jobs that they frequently got genders mixed up and present us with words that were nonsensical. Sadly, they also disfigured English grammar to the point where you have to pause the screen so that you can figure out what the seemingly guillotined word might be. The drama is still watchable, it's just annoying at times to have to deal with bad or missing subs.

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