The Wine Merchant issue 99 by The Wine Merchant magazine

THE WINE MERCHANT. An independent magazine for independent retailers

Issue 99, February 2021

Dog of the Month: Layla York Wines

Higher costs, more red tape – indies face up to price of Brexit Pre-Christmas stockpiling has shielded many from the impact, but for some the problems have already arrived

red tape, delays at ports and

certification charges for organic

wines are among the many issues testing

the patience and ingenuity of independents and suppliers as a result of Brexit.

Some indies seem relatively optimistic

that port disruptions and shipping delays

will be short-term, but there’s widespread

feeling that the impact on prices caused by

impact on cost and will wait to find out what happens on UK duty in the new

Budget [in March],” says David Farber at Connaught Cellars in London.

“Brexit doesn’t have such an impact if

you’re shipping huge volumes at a time but for smaller quantities, it has a big impact on price.

“It can be absorbed when you have

bought two pallets at a time because it’s divided across thousands of bottles.

“When we work with small artisan

winemakers and get an allocation of 40 or 60 bottles, the impact is quite huge.”

Continues page four

Harvest at te Pā © New Zealand Winegrowers

rice increases, prohibitive

the admin costs of complying with red tape will be more permanent.

Issues around HMRC’s Chief system for

logging customs codes for individual wines from EU countries were highlighted by

Daniel Lambert, of Daniel Lambert Wines, on his Twitter feed and subsequently picked up by various media.

Lambert described the impact of Brexit

as not just a car crash but “a multiple pile-

up in the fog” and predicted on-shelf price rises of between £1 and £2 a bottle.

Other operators have told The Wine

Merchant that prices will certainly rise but it’s too early to say by how much.

Many have only recently placed their first post-Christmas orders having stocked

up heavily in advance to avoid Brexit Day disruption.

Several maintain increases would not be

as steep as Lambert’s predictions.

“I think everyone is still assessing the

The first virtual New Zealand Wine Week is over, hot on the heels of news that sales in the UK off-trade were up 23% last year. Our New Zealand feature, starting on page 54, includes details of an independent promotion with thousands of pounds of stock up for grabs for retailers.

NEWS

Inside this month 4 news How Brexit is creating extra costs and shipping delays

6 comings & GOINGS Lockdown and/or redundancy provides the impetus to start a new career in the wine trade

12 ROUND TABLE Our panel of five independents discuss some of the major issues Wineries may abandon vines in 2021 because of huge unsold stocks

facing their businesses

19 TRIED & TESTED Wines with charm, wines with intrigue, wines with menace

Cape winemakers need UK support

28 JUST WILLIAMS

South African winemakers are facing

What are the UK’s best-selling

disaster as a result of an oversupply

drinks brands – and should we

issue that threatens to destablise the

care?

industry.

32 TIVOLI wines David Dodd’s Cheltenham indie is built on hard data and gut feel

57 supplier bulletin Essential updates from key suppliers to the indie trade

Industry body Vinpro says producers are

sitting on stocks of more than 640 million litres of wine – the equivalent of 65% of a

normal harvest – as a result of a domestic

sales ban that was finally lifted this month. There is not enough cellar space to

accommodate the 2021 vintage, meaning that companies are either disposing

of current inventories, or preparing to

abandon much of this year’s vintage. British Master of Wine Richard

Bampfield is urging retailers in the UK to show support and solidarity.

“We all know that a small sales increase

in the largest markets is what really makes the difference,” he says.

“A small stimulus to sales of wines

already in stock may bring forward reorders which, in turn, may encourage

producers to bottle or ship the wines that are currently taking up the tank space so badly needed for the new harvest.”

Bampfield has started a social media

hashtag, #myfavouritesouthafricanwines, to raise awareness and encourage the celebration of Cape wines.

THE WINE MERCHANT MAGAZINE

winemerchantmag.com 01323 871836 Twitter: @WineMerchantMag Editor and Publisher: Graham Holter graham@winemerchantmag.com Assistant Editor: Claire Harries claire@winemerchantmag.com Advertising: Sarah Hunnisett sarah@winemerchantmag.com Accounts: Naomi Young winemerchantinvoices@gmail.com The Wine Merchant is circulated to the owners of the UK’s 942 specialist independent wine shops. Printed in Sussex by East Print. © Graham Holter Ltd 2021 Registered in England: No 6441762 VAT 943 8771 82

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 2

BREXIT © Pixavril / stockadobe.com

“We have had notice from one big UK

importer that they expect to see a 10p per bottle rise.”

Hal Wilson at Cambridge Wine

Merchants says the rules on organics and the general extra burden of red tape and shipping lead times – compounded by a

global shortage of shipping containers –

will make it harder for indies to be nimble in buying.

“It might mean you hold more stock that

you don’t necessarily need in case there’s extra demand – or buy twice as much to keep down the costs of declaration,” he adds.

“You can’t really be nimble and react to

a really nice review, because the wine’s probably not going to arrive in time.”

Wilson says a consignment of 19,000

bottles that should have shipped in early December was still awaiting UK customs

clearance in late January, missing the boat Importers report that wine is taking longer to arrive from the EU, though delays vary

‘Producers don’t need UK hassle’ From page one

Chris Piper at Christopher Piper Wines in

Ottery St Mary has a similar take.

“We are specialists in dealing with small

estates, so we do a lot of groupage work,” he says.

“If you’re bringing in 25 cases of Puligny

from one grower and 30 Meursault from another, each consignment from each

grower will have something like €52 extra cost of documentation.

“But even our freight guys don’t know

exactly how much [the extra costs will be] yet, so the issues are yet to unravel,” says Piper. “We know there’ll be extra costs,

but whether its 30p or £1 a bottle, who knows?”

Retailers have also started to see some

price increases from UK-based suppliers. Jeff Folkins at Dalling & Co in Kings

Langley says: “We’ve seen some small increases but not big whacking ones.

“I have to say the service [through the

pandemic] has been exceptional from most of them, bending over backwards to be

helpful, with faster deliveries and smaller minimum drops. At the end of it all we’re going to remember the ones that really helped us out.”

Both Folkins, and Dafydd Morris at

Cheers Wine Merchants in Swansea, say

for the Christmas trade it was intended for. Wilson raised the case in the Commons

through his MP Darren Zeichner, shadow food and farming minister, and he urges

other indies to report similar experiences to their own MPs to provide evidence to press the government to act.

He also points out that the issue of VI-1

forms – to certify that wine has passed lab tests to confirm technical specs of

wines – has not gone away, with the stay

of execution on their introduction running out at the end of June.

“It will be another unnecessary cost or

barrier to trade,” Wilson says. “Everything that would go on a VI-1 is covered by the

European producers they buy direct from have actually offered discounts on wine

prices in an effort to maintain partnerships through the Brexit fallout.

“The winemakers are trying to be as

helpful as possible to get through the

transition,” says Morris. “They don’t want to lose the business.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 4

Dafydd Morris: wineries are offering discounts

GI or winemaking rules of the country of

“There will be price rises feeding

origin.”

through the system. There’s no doubt that

Merchants deals direct have already

we’re looking at around 50p a bottle [on

Wilson says a small number of boutique

producers with which Cambridge Wine decided that the extra red-tape burden already in place is too much.

“There are a few who will not bother,”

he says. “They’re out pruning vines at the

moment and they don’t want to come home and have to deal with a whole load of stuff that they don’t need to, because they can

sell to other markets. They don’t need the hassle.

“I’m not going to say it will be a sizeable

percentage, but if we have more red tape thrown at us … ”

ony Schendel, sales director at

Hayward Bros, thinks the Chief

issues will be trickier for importers

it is adding about €100 to a pallet of wine

and another chunk if it’s organic, so I think the retail price].”

David Farber at Connaught Cellars says

his business has put a hold on a small but important portion of its business

selling single bottles to private clients and corporate customers in the EU, because

parcels were being delivered with demands for extra customs charges.

“The taxes they get when they receive

the goods for clearance are prohibitive,” he says. “We sent two whisky glasses to

someone in Dublin and they got hit by an

£80 tax on arrival. Shipping companies will take care of the paperwork but they will

charge a fee which could increase a £50 or

£100 gift by 50%. We are losing this part of the business.”

Jeff Folkins at Dalling & Co has also

experienced this issue.

“We sell a bunch of hampers to Europe

and half of those have come back,” he

says. “If we want to send them out again, every product in the hamper has to have a country-of-origin certificate. It’s so ludicrous we’re not going to bother.”

• More Brexit reaction in our Round Table coverage (pages 12-17) and Burning Question vox pop (page 27).

CHRIS DAVIES Famille Helfrich

who operate their own bonds.

It’s extremely tough right now as we, our customers, hauliers

does the work very quickly but is very

indecipherable legislation.

“We use LCB which has these super

systems that sit on top of Chief which

expensive, so a smaller shipper wouldn’t be able to do that,” he says.

“The biggest worry from our side is that,

having seen a flourishing independent sector, you don’t want to see people struggling to find interesting wines

because small producers decide the

paperwork is too much hassle for them. “I know one who’s coming up to

retirement who’s decided it’s just not

worth changing the paperwork for a few

more years, so he’s not going to export to the UK anymore.

“The paperwork [for importers] is a pain,

but anything we’re shipping is getting here. “We’ve shipped from a little grower in

southern Rhône two days ago and it will be here [six days later], and that’s a producer that has never shipped to the UK before.

“I think it’s causing the shippers and the

bond problems but they’re talking to each other and sorting it out.

and customs agents are learning to adapt to new ways of working, coupled with a backdrop of complicated and often It’ll never be the same as it was and we need to remind ourselves that the UK is now a third country and a new set of rules apply. It’s all new, but it will get easier as the weeks pass and we all become more familiar with this new rule book.

CRAIG DURHAM Buckingham Schenk We spent much of the last four years trying to anticipate the impact of Brexit and ensuring that it would not affect our ability to supply wines to our customers. The first three and a half years proved to be a period with no clarity and this was then followed by a few months of intense escalation as the deadline approached, but we were ready. Many of our wines come from our own wineries in Europe and it was clear that they and our other family-run producers were keen to continue supplying their wines to the UK whatever the challenges. We did experience a few shipping delays in late December as the challenges of both Covid and Brexit caused significantly increased demand and the subsequent logistical bottleneck, especially from Italy, but nothing serious. Our stock levels are good, our suppliers on board and we now have time to get to grips with all effects of the Brexit deal as it slowly settles down.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 5

Warm welcome for Cheshire indie The Cheshire Wine & Cheese Co in Tarporley has made a flying start despite lockdown, torrential rain and Dry January. Mark and Mariam Roberts had intended

to launch before Christmas but due to

licensing delays opened just a couple of days shy of New Year’s Eve.

The welcome they have received from

the locals has been “insane”, according to Mark.

“Tarporley is really beautiful. There’s

about a mile-long stretch of independent boutique shops and it brings in people from far and wide,” he says.

“There’s a big community here and even

this month, with the lockdown and the

horrendous weather, we’ve been doing a good trade.

“We’ve got customers coming in who

Cheshire customers have been focusing on cheese during Dry January

Mothers help with store invention

are doing Dry January but are buying a bit

New Norwich indie Melville & Mayell

The new venture is the result of Mark’s

Ben Gibbins and Matthew Dakers who

of cheese and wishing us well and saying

opened at the end of last month.

redundancy last September.

have named the shop in honour of their

they’ll be back in February for their wine.” “It was either a case of sit and wait and

hope for a job to come up or throw caution to the wind and invest everything we had into something we’d always dreamed of doing,” he explains.

They took a holiday in October and by

the time they flew home they had a full

business plan and had obtained the lease on the shop.

They have started with about 150 lines,

which they hope to extend to 200. They are working with Les Caves de Pyrene, for the

selection of natural and biodynamic wines, and with Hallgarten & Novum.

Mark says: “Finbarr Bennett at

Hallgarten has been fundamental in getting us off the ground. His expertise and help has been second to none.”

The busines is a joint venture between

mothers.

“We’ve used our mums’ maiden names,

which made them very happy,” says

Previously an estate agent’s, the

premises was a bit of a blank canvas with “incredibly white walls” which Gibbins

admits was “quite hard to work with”. He

says: “We’ve made it a bit more cosy with

a big old rug, some soft lighting and lots of plants.”

No longer Moat Sole traders

Gibbins. “We thought it sounded more like

After 15 years at its warehouse in Moat

natives and have returned after racking up

shopping street.

and Enotria respectively, so they are very

Dodd. “The roof on the warehouse is a

an old-school wine shop.”

Both Dakers and Gibbins are Norfolk

experience in the trade working for various brands and companies including Bacardi familiar with the independent market. “We know a lot of the bars and

restaurants in town too, and we hope

to wholesale when everything opens up again,” says Gibbins. “We’re not able to

do on-trade from the shop but we have

already spoken to a number of venues we can work with to do pop-ups.”

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 6

Sole in Sandwich, Kent, Hercules Wine has moved to cosier premises on a busy “What’s going to be lovely is that we will

all be warm and dry,” says owner Sarah

nightmare – when it rains outside, it rains inside as well.”

The move to New Street will allow Dodd

and her team to “fine-tune” their range.

“The new place is a bit smaller and is laid

out over three rooms,” Dodd explains. “You wonder sometimes if when you’ve got the space, you just fill it and are you filling it

Bacchus with unnecessary things?”

Dodd reports that the wholesale side of

things has taken a hit over the last year but she remains optimistic about the business. “We’ve always had our website which has been quite strong and a lot of what we do now is home delivery, either by us in the van or via courier,” she says.

“You have to adapt – you have no choice if

you want to keep going.”

South side stories help wine sales

Made From Grapes opened in Pollokshields just before Christmas. Owners Severine Sloboda and Liam

Hanlon had been holding out for a site on the south side of Glasgow for some time.

“The trendy west end has been there for

a while,” Sloboda explains, “and we really

wanted to be in the south side with all the

independent cafés and shops. We saw this place a year ago but nothing happened until last October.”

Meanwhile the pair ran some pop-up

wine bars in a beer shop and a coffee shop. They are working with a selection of UK

suppliers as well as importing direct. “It’s a bit more difficult with the Brexit situation,” Sloboda admits.

“Some wines from Europe are getting

stuck, but we have a good range of classic wines and natural wines. We will try to

Ham and cheese role

Beware, former patrons of The Cheese & Wine Company in Hampton Village, south west London. If you were among Steve Parker’s more awkward customers, you may soon find yourself immortalised in a novel. “There was one guy who told me it was illegal not to sell Coca-Cola on licensed premises,” Parker recalls. “People used to ask me at dinner parties for stories about my customers and my wife encouraged me to write some of them down.” Parker has decided to construct the story in the third person. “I’ve created this character who, if you know me, you would recognise me in it,” he says. “There are some exaggerations but it’s the story of what I did. “I’ve created a fictional village which is located on the river Ham which empties into the Thames near ‘Ham House’. It’s a simple tale of everyday folk. “It’s not designed to be funny but the protagonist, Beresford Velvet, in running his cheese and wine shop comes across a whole load of characters. Each of the chapters deals with a really nice character and contrasts their behaviour with some of the really weird people I encountered in the years running the shop.” Parker is obliged to give first refusal to Hachette, which has already published his first title, a 300-page recipe book called British Cheese on Toast. “I published it myself in November 2019 using Kindle Direct Publishing. You’d be horrified how easy it is to do it,” Parker says. “I did it to a reasonable

adapt to our customers’ needs. So far we

have had older people wanting classics like Burgundy and Bordeaux and things they recognise, and we have customers who

want something funky and natural wines, so we need to combine the two.”

Hanlon adds: “The customers are coming

to us to hear the stories about how the

wine is made and to try something new.” Once licensing is in place and Covid

restrictions allow, the plan is to allow drinking-in and regular tastings.

Steve Parker says cheese

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 7

quality and sold about 1,500, which surprised me. “That sold really well through some shops locally and mainly Amazon. It’s also printed on demand in Poland and stuck through your letterbox the following day. How they do that, I’ve got no idea. “Then in a bizarre quirk of fate, a week before lockdown last year in March I got an email from the publishing director of one of the divisions of Hachette, Headline Home. She said I’ve got a copy of your book, I love it, we’d like to meet with you to talk about publishing. “I had a meeting at their offices in Blackfriars; she was just finishing a meeting with Raymond Blanc, so I met him and thought, I’m in good company. “They said, we’d like to publish it as a hardback. They gave me a nice large amount of money as an advance and I spent the next three months working with copy editors and illustrators to bring out the hardback last year.” Hachette has commissioned a second book, about cheese and wine pairing. A longer-term project, a book on cheddar, is “about 30% complete”, Parker reports.

Trustpilot in nosedive

Anyone taking a cursory look at the Winebuyers Trustpilot page – at least at the beginning of February – might have been impressed at the “great” 4 out of 5 rating awarded by its customers. But this apparently impressive score is rather overshadowed by recent diatribes from unhappy clients – and a flurry of county court judgements instigated by suppliers who report they haven’t been paid. “Terrible company,” “no stars” and “website should be shut down” are soundbites that summarise the opinions of recent reviewers. What is infuriating many of the suppliers in dispute with the Soho Square-based business is that orders are apparently still being accepted for wines that Winebuyers would know it no longer has access to. Founder Ben Revell’s interview in the FT under the banner My First Million is being recirculated by disgruntled expartners, to mirthless laughter.

Please don’t touch the merchandise Wine writer, educator and PR consultant Matt Day has opened a wine shop in Wanstead High Street in east London. Day took the plunge after seeing

numerous consulting contracts disappear at the start of the pandemic.

“I live nearby and had thought for seven

or eight years there was a space for an independent in Wanstead,” he says.

Daygustation Wines features a “lean”

range of wines from suppliers including Les Caves de Pyrene, Bibendum,

Enotria&Coe, OW Loeb and Ellis of

Richmond. Day is also sourcing Artéis Champagne direct.

Single bottles of each wine are

merchandised alongside QR codes which

shoppers can scan to access content about

Matt Day is an educator and wine consultant, and proud owner of a vintage milk float

wine-related work for Radio 2, Esquire

magazine, Morrisons, Aldi, the Corkscrew

wine app, Laurent-Perrier and the London Wine Academy.

Couple realise wine shop dream

them, written by Day.

Drinkworthy is set to open next month

to be brought from the cellar, where reds,

while she and her husband Michael are

Customers are requested not to touch the

wines but to ask for ones they want to buy

whites and fizz are each stored at optimum temperatures.

“It’s a Covid measure you could say, but

it’s an aesthetic one as well,” says Day.

in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside. Owner Cheryl Roberts admits that,

“complete novices”, they have been given a helping hand by family who happen to

The couple have also found support from

local independent Turton Wines – “they’ve been a bit of an inspiration for us, we love it there” – and they’re also sourcing wine from Alliance and Walker & Wodehouse.

The shop will also have a “great range” of

spirits and will incorporate a deli.

Cheryl’s retail and sales background

along with her love of wine (“it was my

first drink and it will be my last, I’m sure”) stands her in good stead for the new

venture, which she has been thinking about for some time.

“Lockdown really gave us a boost, and all “The dream was to do wine tastings and

shelf.

meet the makers so hopefully when things

“I want to keep it simple: don’t have 10

ease a little we can start to do that. We’d

Marlborough Sauvignon Blancs, just have

love to open a bar. We wouldn’t be able to

one really good one.”

do it in these premises, but we’ll be on the

The shop also has refill wines in Keykegs

lookout once we’ve got a firm footing.”

and Day has bought a vintage milk float to

The new shop is on a high street

make deliveries in the local area.

populated by a host of other independent

“Working in wine PR for 10 or 12

businesses. Cheryl says: “There’s been a

years, you have these ideas which never

huge investment and a new train station

make it through the edit, but having your

built and it’s become a bit of a commuter

own business allows you to try new and

Majestic and has a packed CV that includes

north west.

to fruition,’ she says.

perfect, so there are never any gaps on the

Day began his wine trade career with

largest independent wholesalers in the

the plans we had over the years have come

“It’s a way of the shop also looking

interesting things,” he says.

come in the form of Barton’s, one of the

Cheryl Roberts: plans boosted by lockdown

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 8

town.

“The high street is really up and coming.

It’s a lovely area with a great vibe.”

THE

Decanter’s Best Australian Wine Specialist 2018, 2019 & 2020

VINORIUM

Coming soon…

A new dedicated ecommerce website will be at your disposal

The complete agency list from the UK’s leading Australian importer - Over 40 producers and 350+ wines. Wouldn’t it be a dream as an independent wine merchant, to receive the same service you provide to your private customers where speed, communication and flexibility are imperative? The Vinorium will be offering all indies a full and long overdue ‘private customer’ service from early 2021. • No minimum order • Build mixed orders with any combination of cases or bottles • Free delivery on all orders exceeding £125.00

• Online checkout (24/7) • Next working day delivery (cut off at 2:00pm) • Automatic tracking details for your order • Automatic invoice supplied • High-resolution images, producer profiles, stories, musings, tasting notes and so much more will be at your disposal • We are happy to ship directly to your customers (with non-branded packaging). Integrity assured

Our Exclusive Producers The Standish Wine Co. Wild Duck Creek Kay Brothers Greenock Creek Elderton Wines Utopos Soumah Flowstone

Gemtree Wines Nocturne Massena JC’s Own Dr.Edge Two Hands Wines Artisans of Barossa Hoddles Creek

John’s Blend Vinden Wines Eastern Peake Glaetzer-Dixon Cobaw Ridge Hutton Vale Farm Pooley Wines Sailor Seeks Horse

Domaine Simha Purple Hands Wines Domaine Naturaliste Hobbs Vintners Mulline Coulter Wines Shadowfax Wines House of Cards

Wantirna Estate Grey Sands Ghost Rock Wines Topper’s Mountain Rymill Kerri Greens Little Reddie

www.thevinorium.co.uk enquiries@thevinorium.co.uk 01622 859161

NOT YOU AGAIN!

customers we could do without

20. Jez Funk … Dave! It is Dave, isn’t it? Oh, sorry, Simon … so, I’m doing a Zoom granular mixology class for a few friends and … rum, basically … it’s the new thing isn’t it? … all that heritage and classic cocktails but kind of new at the same time … [sings] at the Copa, Copa Cabana … yes, I think it is a beach, not a cocktail, you’re right Dave … so is it rhum agricole? … that’s the best isn’t it? … can I have a look? … it’s all right, I’m good to touch, because I’ve got a spray with me … I can give it a quick squirt before you put it back on the shelf, no problem … is this far enough back for you? … what about now? … you should put up QR codes and then I could link to their websites and have a proper look without having to get too close … my cousin’s wife’s a tech consultant … I can have a word if you like Dave … she’s coming to the Zoom class … why don’t you join us and I can e-introduce you? … well, if you change your mind I’m on Insta at … circle with an “a” in it thingy, yes … mixmaestrojezfunk … now, tequila! … Dave! Dave! … are you out the back? … Dave! …

Supplier of wine boxes and literature • 12 Bottle mailing boxes with dividers from £1.69p each • 6 Bottle mailing boxes with dividers from £0.98p each • 12 Bottle carrier boxes with dividers from £0.99p each Prices are subject to VAT • Delivery not included

01323 728338 • sales@eastprint.co.uk • www.eastprint.co.uk

ANAGRAM TIME Can you unscramble the names of these New Zealand wine brands? If so, you win the freedom of Swansea.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 9

1. Kenny’s Owl Alight 2. AA Rating 3. ET Batters Acton 4. Good Pint 5. Noodle Fart

Mark Matisovits

NEWS

Ben overturns prohibition order Blossom Street Social was banned from trading, even as an off-licence, after licensing team deemed hybrid to be a bar

en Stephenson has been an upstanding member of the

licensed trade community in

Manchester since 2008. But recently he

found himself the subject of a prohibition order which is costing him thousands of pounds a week in lost business.

The city’s licensing team, not recognising

the concept of a hybrid wine shop and bar,

banned Blossom Street Social from trading in any form until Covid restrictions are

relaxed, arguing that it contravenes the terms of the English lockdown rules.

Manchester licensing officers appeared

at the premises “without warning”,

Stephenson says, with the ban coming into

effect immediately.

The problem centred on the draught beer

that the business sells to take away. Under the terms of the latest lockdown, on-trade premises have been banned from selling alcohol on a takeaway basis, following wider concerns that this encourages

drinkers to congregate in groups outside pubs to consume their purchases.

Stephenson, who took the decision to

close his Hangingditch wine shop before

Christmas because the premises were not compatible with social distancing, says

Blossom Street Social had only been open for retail sales, with its bar area out of action to comply with lockdown.

“Licensing officers came in and said

‘you’re a bar and you shouldn’t be

operating the way that you are’,” he says.

“The legislation has not recognised there

is such a thing as the hybrid model.”

Stephenson eventually got the ruling

overturned after engaging a top licensing solicitor to argue his case.

Draught beer will only be sold on

a delivery basis while the lockdown continues.

“I lost two weekends of trade, including

payday weekend,” he says.

“We weren’t taking much money – maybe

£1,000 to £1,500 a week during the hours we were open on Friday, Saturday and

Sunday – but just enough to help to pay

suppliers and keep things going, with the help of government support.

“We’ve had a lot of beer that was going to

go out of date, along with a loss of revenue, and now solicitor’s bills that come to £750

plus VAT. Before you know it you’re talking about a loss of five to six grand or more.” Stephenson admits that recent events

have taken their toll on him. “I’m a bit

tired because like everyone else I’ve had to reinvent my business time and time again with the Covid regulations,” he says.

“I had to take the decision to close the

Ditch and that took quite a lot out of me – I

didn’t realise how much work was involved in closing down a business.

“But it was the right thing to do and

everyone got paid.

“I really can’t be doing with this type of

thing on top of everything else. And I don’t Stephenson warns that hybrid indies across England could encounter similar problems

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 10

want the licensing team in Manchester

to set a precedent that can be applied to

independents in other parts of the country.”

The Wine Merchant

INDIE ROUND TABLE Simon Evans of The Naked Grape (Hampshire and Berkshire), Abbi Moreno of Flora Fine Wines (London), Jane Taylor of Dronfield Wine World (Derbyshire), Patrick Rohde of Aitken Wines / The Wine Press (Dundee) and Paola Tich of Vindinista (London) join the first of this year's discussions

CHRISTMAS TRADING: SOME IMPRESSIVE NUMBERS Jane Taylor: We’ve had an absolutely amazing Christmas. Overall,

we were up 100%. The business was split between people queuing outside the shop to come in, and local deliveries.

Abbi Moreno: We were probably up about 50% at Christmas. We’re in Maida Vale and most of our customers are in a five-mile radius. We found that when we could open the bar we were a lot busier

because people didn’t want to go into Soho, they didn’t want to go into busy places, they wanted to stick to somewhere local so they didn’t have to get on the tube or the bus.

Because we are in London and surrounded by supermarkets,

retail is a little bit harder for us. Also, we’re not on a high street, but having said that we were 50% up on retail sales.

Simon Evans: We were 11% up in takings in December compared

to last year. I’ve got reasonably established shops so for us 11% is a big number.

Paola Tich: As a hybrid, for us December has never been good

on the drinking-in side – it just tails off as everyone just goes to parties or things in town.

We had a 29% increase in business in December. It isn’t quite

like-for-like – last year’s figures included some drinking-in as

well and this year, we had orders via our website. But it’s a good indication.

Considering some of our corporates had fallen away and we

were doing shop only, it was our best Christmas ever. But is it

sustainable? We were obviously taking advantage of people not

being able to go out to bars and restaurants. It’s not something we want to shout about because you are riding on the back of others’ misfortune, really.

It was the most exhausting Christmas we’ve had since opening

the original shop in 2013.

Patrick Rohde: We had a good December, thankfully. We are fairly unique in that we relocated during the first lockdown. We closed one shop in March/April last year and opened in a new site midAugust.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 13

INDIE ROUND TABLE

We had 20% retail growth in December; our new premises

are better so they need to perform better. I’m happy with 20%

because December is usually chunky figures anyway, so 20% of something chunky is substantial.

The real frightening figure is our web sales for December

compared to the previous year. They grew by 2,400%. It sounds crazy but it wasn’t a huge figure the previous year.

That made up for my lost wholesale business, including my own

bar, which I supply.

Jane Taylor: Our corporate gifting went through the roof. We’ve

spent a lot of time building up our customer base and it all came to

PAOLA TICH

a head with people who couldn’t have dos, so we were sending out hampers of food and wines. It’s been good.

Paola Tich: We did a lot of hampers. One of our big corporate

customers is a bank, so obviously nothing from them, but a lot of

people used us because they would normally take their customers out for dinner or lunch, and there was nothing like that going on. Our accountants were very nice to us and ordered a lot of wine and hampers.

Abbi Moreno: We didn’t have a huge amount of corporate sales but we did a lot of personal gifts. We do gift wrapping and boxes with three wines. We used to do a lot of banqueting and corporate so that has really decreased.

COPING WITH COVID: ADAPTING AND THRIVING

JANE TAYLOR

Paola Tich: We’ve stopped people coming into the shop ever since we opened the doors again. We’ve put tables in an L-shape and people haven’t been able to come in since May.

You get people moving the tables and complaining they can’t see

stuff and you think, “what planet are you on?” But most people get it and thank us for doing it and taking it seriously, which is really nice.

As a team, we wear masks in the shop. We’re not on the high

street either, but it’s pretty busy with people out and about and people like to think of a visit to the wine shop as their daily

SIMON EVANS

exercise.

Abbi Moreno: We are open reduced hours, just four hours a day

from 2pm to 6pm, and we found that was the best time for people

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 14

wanting to go out shopping.

We allow two people in the shop at once. We do food and

perishables, and we do cheese boards as a take away. Because we were a wine bar when we were allowed to be, people do like to

come in to buy a bottle of wine and have a chat, especially people who live on their own; elderly people.

E-COMMERCE: THE BEAST THAT NEEDS FEEDING

One older lady who can’t go out, we’ve been doing her

Paola Tich: Like most others we started at the end of March with

When the government announced another lockdown I think

like having an additional branch – especially in December.

shopping for her and dropping it off; I feel that we have become a community service for some of our customers.

people didn’t want to do Dry January; they want to drink wine

when they’re cooking dinner because there’s nothing else to do. I think maybe that’s helped us all a little bit.

I don’t feel that the hospitality industry has the right

representation. It brings in vast amounts of income for the

government and I don’t think we get the recognition we deserve. I think we need a minister who is dedicated to it. I mean we

were lucky with Brexit that the VI-1 form was suspended, so that’s been good for us. They’ve only suspended it until the end of June so let’s see what happens.

We are going to get a duty increase; I wouldn’t be surprised if

VAT goes up as well. Given the problems that Brexit has caused,

and coronavirus, the government is going to have to reap some of

that money back somehow. Alcohol and tobacco is the easiest way to do that, and I think that’s going to be really tough for us.

I don’t think the wine shops have suffered as much as the

restaurants. I know a lot of restaurateurs who have had to close, and they can’t see a way back, and that’s really sad.

Paola Tich: I think we’ve been lucky because we’re seen as

essential retailers. We have had some snippy comments from

other retailers on the street, who haven’t been able to open, that wine isn’t essential. I wouldn’t argue that wine is essential, but why should I not take advantage of a situation?

I think that duty will go up – I think that’s a given. But I’m

more concerned – from a wine trade point of view – of having

representation for independents on Brexit. I think we had a lot of

support from the government with the initial grant and furlough. I have a member of the team on flexi-

furlough and that’s

been really helpful.

people just crazily phoning in orders, and so we built a website

and that’s worked really well. It’s a beast that needs feeding. It’s Jane Taylor: We’ve had a website in place for 18 months which

obviously came into its own during Covid. It does suck up a lot of

input and time. We’ve always been local, but we’ve found now that we are shipping out orders all over Britain. Not massive amounts. This brings its own trials and tribulations, dealing with couriers.

Simon Evans: Website sales don’t take up a vast proportion of our turnover – it’s a small percentage and that’s on purpose.

I’ve not put every single product we sell on our website because

for us it’s just not manageable. Vintage changes, price changes,

whether they are in stock or out of stock … we’re just not set up

like that. We’re set up to deal with people who walk through the door so we are very much retail-focused.

I’ve only loaded about 100 wines on our website and they are

key products that I know I’m going to be able to get at any one

time. That works really well. If people want a bit more diversity or information, they can call us or email us.

Paola Tich: We really geared our website towards people who

knew us, who were local and who might actually pop in, rather than try and get new customers. We did get a few orders from

Liverpool and a couple from Southampton but that’s really not where we’ve aimed.

We didn’t beat ourselves up about being the cheapest, our

courier delivery certainly isn’t the cheapest, and I think that’s

quite liberating because the personality is still us as a shop rather than competing with every other website out there.

Patrick Rohde: We developed our website early on last year. It has been our salvation. I’ve got a couple of very dedicated millennials who stay on top of it and it has grown organically.

We have also found you don’t have to be too sensitive on price …

anything we put on the website would sell somewhere.

Home deliveries aren’t going to go away. We’re also delivering

nationally which comes with its own problems with minimum

pricing, couriers and logistics but we’ve plodded along fairly well and we’re growing as best we can.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 15

INDIE ROUND TABLE

Jane Taylor: Some of our suppliers have found it difficult to

BREXIT: PRICES EXPECTED TO RISE

predict. One was sharing a container with somebody else and the other person didn’t have the paperwork so he couldn’t get his

shipment out, but there aren’t massive delays. And we just say to

Simon Evans: I haven’t experienced any delays yet because I’d

our customers – it’s Brexit, it’s Covid – and we just side-sell. I’m worried about what will happen with price rises in the future.

already bought the stock I needed by the end of October last year. But I am hearing from my shipper that there are delays.

Basically you need to think if it took two weeks to get here last

time, it will take three and a half weeks this time. It’s mainly about

TRADE TASTINGS: WE WANT YOU BACK

logistics. There’s bottlenecks, lorries lined up, different issues with the ferry.

Most of the shipments I get come into Dover or Portsmouth. I’m

going to keep going because the wines are great, and customers buy them. I’m just aware that it’s going to take a bit longer.

I mainly deal with France now. I used to buy from all over

Europe but the exchange removed the margin that I was making by so there became no point in doing it.

It was great to shout about exclusivity of product, but I learnt

that actually that message, for my customers, wasn’t really that

strong. I thought it was a very strong message, but having trialled

not having that message for effectively a whole year, my customers are not bothered.

What they are bothered about is what I recommend. So

exclusivity has dropped off my list of important things. The margin is key, obviously. If it doesn’t make sense financially then I’m not going to do it.

The estates and regions I’m buying from, mainly in France, are

still performing brilliantly, so I’m still buying those wines direct.

Patrick Rohde: I bring in a little directly from Spain and Germany

and I’m resigned to the fact that there will be delays and there will be some added costs.

I’m anticipating the logistics companies, the couriers, will

increase their costs because of the added admin and the length of time it’s taking to get it across.

So costs will go up, as well as our ex-cellars duty, but we’re

probably all resigned to that fact.

Paola Tich: I import a little bit from Italy and Spain with another wine merchant. The last shipment was from Italy in November. I couldn’t get hold of certain wines in December.

There is one particular South African wine where I haven’t been

able to get hold of the supplier – it was finally booked in after a four-week delay.

People bringing wine into the UK were just buying loads and

loads and loads because of Brexit.

Patrick Rohde: Trade tastings are fantastic for my staff and for

people like me, who like wine. They are sorely missed and I would like to see them come back.

Maybe the trade tastings will come back in a smaller, more

manageable form. I gave up with the London Wine Fair over 10

years ago. Whether it’s London or Manchester, it doesn’t bother

me, it’s a lot of effort, especially if I’m bringing staff, but I prefer more accessible ones.

Paola Tich: Finding a wine at a really busy, jostling table … I’ve

discovered it’s not the way I like to choose wine. It’s a nice way to socialise with people and I do miss that aspect.

I have been to one trade tasting since March 23 and that was in

a restaurant in Borough. It was very well managed and spaced out and actually I picked two wines for Christmas from that, which I

sold a lot of. It was a really nice, gentle way of doing things, not too many wines, just enough.

I would certainly welcome a few more of those back but I

find in general, I would rather go down the route of a few more masterclasses or seminars.

Supplier portfolio tastings are very useful – it’s the generics

I struggle with and I’ve kind of dipped out of them a little bit

anyway. But being in London, a lot of my suppliers are in London and I’ve been doing outside tastings with them. We’ve all got

Coravins now, and we can meet outside. I’ve done Zoom tastings with suppliers and I’ve quite enjoyed this diversity in selecting new wines rather than having to go to a big hall, fiddle with a

booklet, fight your way to a table, fight your way to a spittoon – I don’t miss that.

Simon Evans: I miss tastings. I’m old-school by the looks of it.

I’ve been to all those tastings that Paola has described – fighting

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 16

people off to get the last little bottle of something. I actually find

those to be integral to the wine range that I’ve got in my business. I’ve been attending those tastings since I’ve been in the wine

trade I think – I don’t know how many I’ve been to but it’s a lot. I find it’s one of the number one ways that I find new products.

I’ll taste things and I’ll meet people and I’ll make connections.

Some of those little connections, those chats with suppliers, will

last years and result in hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of sales.

I’ve contacted the key suppliers and told them that I will pay

them £60 or £70 to receive new samples, because that is what

it would cost me to go to London once I’ve paid the congestion charge and petrol.

Some of them have said, “that’s very kind, thank you very much”

PATRICK ROHDE

but what most of them have said is “we’re not paying to attend

the tastings anyway”, so most of them have sent me their full list.

Anything that I want to taste then they’ll send me a dozen bottles. And those wines will turn up and I’ll taste them with my general manager and we’ll decide.

New product to my business is a really important thing so I must

find a way of sourcing new wines every year. My customers always say to me, “what’s new, what’s interesting?” And if I haven’t got an answer to that my business doesn’t move forward.

Abbi Moreno: I miss tastings so much. We’re in a sociable industry. We’re about people. The London Wine Fair for me is not a

significant tasting – for me I’m talking about the smaller tastings, whether it be Wines of Spain, Wines of Italy. It’s not just about tasting the wines, it’s about meeting people.

I’ve met more people there in my 28 years of being in the wine

ABBI MORENO

industry than I have anywhere else and some of those people I’ve known all my life. I miss that more than anything.

My wine suppliers in the UK still come and see me, we Zoom

and they ring me up, but it’s not the same as being in the same

room, feeling part of a group of people – and also standing next

It was a lot of work but it’s just keeping your finger on the pulse.

to someone tasting wine and actually comparing notes. That’s

It’s one thing to read about it but it’s not the same as going to a

Jane Taylor: I miss it terribly. I miss the social aspect of it. Like

Patrick Rohde: God, I miss the trips. I won a trip to Portugal last

invaluable and that’s what I miss more than anything.

Simon we change our range all the time and we’re always on the lookout for something new and exciting.

Meeting the people and hearing the exciting stories behind the

wine is important. We do a newsletter about twice a month and

people will make a beeline for the new arrivals, so I am missing it. The IVTT tasting with The Wine Merchant and Condor Wines

worked well for us. We bottled up the samples and sent them out to select customers to try and make them feel that they are still involved with the shop and with the tastings.

wine tasting, meeting the winemaker, meeting the suppliers.

year, which I couldn’t take, annoyingly, because it was one of the

trips where you could bring your partner, and that’s a thing of the

past – it would have been nice to have a long weekend in Portugal. It’s the single biggest perk of the job and the biggest incentive

for my staff as well, as and when we can do that. I miss the trips more than I do the trade tastings. I would say that Paola is in

London, so she probably doesn’t need to go out looking as much as I do in Scotland. I have to go looking and sometimes I despair that I have to chase down reps.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 17

Rising Stars

Billie Sampson, head of wine Katie Littlewort, head of operations Emma Chandler, head of events Unwined, London

iki Evans and Laura Ward established Unwined in Tooting in 2015 off the back of their pop-up business, A Grape Night In. Both have now moved out of London and are gradually becoming a little more hands-off day-today, something they probably couldn’t have done without first putting a rock-solid crew together. Billie Sampson, Katie Littlewort and Emma Chandler have clearly defined roles of their own, but also work successfully together as a team. “They each have a particular focus, but you just can’t separate them, they are all just as important as each other to the organisation,” explains Kiki. “Especially over the last year, they have all brought different things to the business, so we’d really like to celebrate them as a team as well as their individual achievements. “We are super lucky, we found some really amazing people and it’s taken some time to develop this team and to find people we could rely on to take the business forward. If there’s anything the last year has taught us it’s that you can never predict anything. It’s been a scary year but we’ve achieved some fantastic things.” Emma and Billie have been with the business for almost four years and Katie is just coming up to her second year in May. “There is a bit of serendipity,” says Kiki, “but we were very conscious about wanting to build our team – don’t ask me how we did it, but the work culture we wanted for everybody has hopefully helped. “They have all grown into different roles but specifically in the last year, before the corona virus started, they naturally became a bit of a management team. They assist each other in their different roles and rely on each other. We gave them the titles officially last year in recognition of how their roles had naturally developed and it gives them the opportunity to work across both sites [Tooting and Waterloo] and have a broader responsibility across the business. “Because of the pandemic they have had to work a wider spectrum and they’ve been instrumental in how we offer what our physical business does in

From left: Katie, Emma and Billie

a more virtual sense. “Our pop-up and events background gave us some insight in how we could operate and through our virtual tastings using Zoom and YouTube we can bring a little bit of our personality through the visual medium. It’s created a whole new side for our business, which is really interesting.” So what’s ahead for the team? Kiki says: “I think more and more Billie will be the main contact for the wine selection side of things and developing that. Katie will certainly be more operationally led and oversee the day-to-day across both sites. “Last year Emma completely took the events side and ran with it. I think when things get back to normal there will be even more opportunity for us with events and we hope to keep growing.”

Billie, Katie and Emma each win a bottle of Pol Roger Réserve Brut If you’d like to nominate a Rising Star, email claire@winemerchantmag.com

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 18

TRIED & TESTED

Adaras Lluvia Bianco 2019

Barndiva Zinfandel 2017

This Verdejo/Sauvignon Blanc blend from Almansa,

Barndiva started as a farm-to-table restaurant in the

two varieties entwine magically, creating flavours and

pretty loveable Zin, full of cherry and brambly flavours

Sonoma Valley which became a haunt for wine folk, and

south west of Valencia, was apparently Moreno’s

then spawned its own label. Here the team has crafted a

best-selling wine of 2020 and it’s easy to see why. The

and which glides across the palate all too easily. As a

aromas that buzz around the glass: hay, lemons and

calling card for an unfamiliar producer, and as a textbook

salty stones. A wine to jolt you into a happier mood

example of a classic Californian style, it’s a winner.

after a day reading nonsense from anti vaxxers. RRP: £10.50

RRP: £26

ABV: 13%

ABV: 14.5%

Barndiva UK (07787 137 654)

Moreno Wine Importers (020 7289 9952) morenowines.co.uk

barndiva.co.uk

Don Melchor 2018

Maçanita As Olgas Red 2017

The weather conditions at Puente Alto were “perfect”

Ask what’s in a Douro blend and don’t be surprised if

wine is flawless. But is it interesting? Fans of iconic

Carvalha and Bastardo”. Siblings Joana and António

and James Suckling gave the wine a score to match: 100 points. That’s 100 points out of 100. So the

Cabernets will each have their own penchants and

predispositions. This is one for those who gravitate towards velvety elegance and polished tannins. RRP: £98

ABV: 14.5%

Concha y Toro (01865 873713)

the answer is something like “Tourigas Nacional and Francesca, Donzelinho Tinto, Tinta Barroca, Tinta

Maçanita’s old-vine endeavours have created a lively and ink-hued delight using those ingredients, with a seam of iron and a rooty richness to it. RRP: £59

ABV: 14.5%

Swig (0208 995 7060)

cyt-uk.com

swig.co.uk

The Copper Crew Merlot 2018

Hans Family Estate Spirit of Marlborough 2015

There’s a theory that more wine could be sold to the

under-25s if it was packaged in cans. This Cambridge

New Zealand blends create a frissant of excitement,

Sam Lambson, and this juicy, uncomplicated but very

from Hans Herzog, a Swiss winemaker in Wairau, is

start-up adds credence to that suggestion: all its team are under 25. The range is blended in South Africa by

drinkable Merlot is nicely judged – and will seem even more so when picnics and festivals aren’t banned. RRP: £4.50

ABV: 13.5%

The Copper Crew (07983 955814)

around these parts anyway. Isn’t this the land of the

single varietal? This Cab Sauvignon/Cab Franc/Merlot gloriously self-confident in its balsamic leanness. Not the red we were expecting, and all the better for it. RRP: £40.50

ABV: 14.5%

Vindependents (020 3488 4548)

coppercrew.co.uk

vindependents.co.uk

LMT Masusta Garnatxa 2017

Ventopuro Single Vineyard Red Blend 2017

Luis Moya is a headstrong and uncompromising

winemaker, working to his own rules – in this case

Matetic’s Central Valley project in Chile delivers

emerges ready to announce itself to the world. Tight,

Carmenere blend. Not necessarily a wine that will

with 60-year-old vines in Navarra. Fermented

naturally, the wine spends two winters in barrel and

dusky, exotic and mouthwatering, it’s brimming with dark fruit flavours and a hint of menace. RRP: £17.95

ABV: 14.5%

Moreno Wine Importers (020 7289 9952) morenowines.co.uk

consistent quality and value for money, in this case in the form of a Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and

stop anyone dead in their tracks – more a soothing

soulmate, with ripe plum flavours and a vanilla note. RRP: £12.79

ABV: 13.5%

Vintrigue Wines (01207 521234) vintriguewines.com

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 19

’ve chosen Define Food & Wine as they are the most impressive wine outfit I’ve visited in the past year. I walked out of

there thinking, “yes – that’s exactly how to do it”.

Define Food & Wine Sandiway, Cheshire

I visited them by chance last summer. We were driving up to the Lake District from London and needed somewhere to stop for lunch as we were approaching Manchester. A quick Google search en route pointed out they have recently started serving food, and having heard good things about their wine range, I booked a table.

Matt Walls is wowed by a comprehensive wine range, unbeatable brunch and a friendly team

It was so good, we stopped there again on the way back down south. You enter the shop and it’s a fairly classic layout with wines lining the wooden shelves, well-stocked but not cluttered. Follow it round past a deli counter and the building opens up into a bright new dining area. It’s a clean, white space with well-spaced tables and a line of Enomatics on the back wall. My kids are typically picky with food but even they had plenty to choose from – they have put together an unbeatable brunch menu. The food was just as good as it sounded on paper. We had various takes on eggs Benedict and pancakes with fresh berries. Even the coffee was top notch. The evening menu looks just as good, packed with great produce and lots of wine-friendly options. A good excuse to go back. What impressed me was the consistent quality throughout the range: Alsace, Italy, Australia, sweet wines – there was no obvious weak link. But what really caught my eye was the South African selection. In particular several older vintages of Eben Sadie’s Old Vine Series. The staff are professional and welcoming, but when I started asking geeky questions about which vintages to choose, they didn’t hesitate in calling for owner Jon Campbell to advise me. I also asked him to pick out a selection of interesting, good value weekday wines and he got a feel for my tastes straight away. With cigars available as well, it’s a one-stop shop for all your weekend treats. One particular episode sticks in my mind. It was a hot, sunny day, and I was concerned about a case of wine that I’d bought elsewhere

Chairman James Tanner (left) with sales director Robert Boutflower

slowly cooking in the car outside. I mentioned it in passing and straight away they offered to place it in their cool storeroom during our visit. It always feels good to know you’re in the company of fellow wine lovers. Once you know that, you feel at liberty to really stock up. And I did! Matt Walls is a contributing editor to Decanter magazine, and his latest book, Wines of the Rhône (Infinite Ideas), is now available from bookstores and online. Define wins a bottle of La Montesa Crianza Palacios Remondo 2017, courtesy of Bancroft Wines

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 20

INTERVIEW

. T H E D R AY M A N .

The brewer’s secret ingredient: foraged flora ost people have an idea what foraging is without

“While there are a lot of edible ingredients around there are

perhaps fully understanding what the process

also things you need to avoid, so you have to be very confident in

involves. Scouring the landscape for ingredients

identifying – and the best way to do that is to get lots of books

growing number of specialists.

adds.

has become quite the thing in gin and it’s also making its mark in beer, where Somerset’s Yonder Brewing is among a small but

and study and then take that out into the field.” It also involves “lots of record keeping and pins in maps”, he

Stuart Winstone founded the brewery with Jasper Tupman in

“Sea buckthorn was something I was lucky enough to stumble

2018, bringing to a commercial scale a passion cultivated when

on when I was foraging for rock samphire for a previous beer. I

picking wild culinary mushrooms with his dad as a child.

made a mental note and came back for it another time. It gives

“I was fascinated with fungi from an early age,” says Winstone, “just because it seemed so alien. It didn’t fit into plant or animal

you a bit of time to think about flavours and how you’re going to use it.”

categories. “I started to read a lot more about the science, such as the way the mushrooms you buy in the supermarket are very closely related to micro-fungi such as yeast. That got me into breadmaking and sourdough and then into making beer.” There’s a lot more to foraging for commercial ingredients than just taking a basket along on a countryside walk. One of Yonder’s newest creations, the saison-style Flying Wonder, needed several kilograms of sea buckthorn from the coast around Weston-super-Mare to make a single batch of 1,000 litres.

Sea buckthorn, aka the baked bean plant

“It’s a challenge to scale up because you’re picking ingredients that are limited to certain areas,” he says. “There’s a lot of research involved. You need to understand what you’re picking, how you can use it and where you can get it before you start.

instone also taps into networks of professional foragers who supply top-end restaurants and are fiercely secretive about their foraging locations.

Though in vogue, foraging is nothing new, he says. “Historically, there would have been a lot of foraged herbs

used in beer before hops came over from Europe.” Yonder favours local producers and suppliers for hops and barley for beers such as its Sub Culture pale ale and Acapella lager, saving the foraged elements for small-batch one-offs, in which it’s used elderflower, dandelion and burdock. It’s also brewed with woodruff – used in wheat beer in some parts of Germany – and meadowsweet, traditional in mead production, always starting with a clear idea of where the beer is going. Flying Wonder is a saison-style beer

“You need to get a little bit creative with some of them,” he says. “But we’re not making it up as we go along.”

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 21

CA R D I F F ' S ZERO HEROES

The Bradford on Avon shop was previously known aspacks Ruby Red Wine Cellars The tasting fit neatly through with samples From left: co-owners Alex Griem, letterboxes, Dominic Doherty and Robstaying Cooper fresh for “at least a year”

Chilled & Tannin’s owners want to neutralise all the carbon their business creates. They’re doing that in a variety of ways, from using an electric van and biodegradable wrap to sending out (non edible) bee bombs with orders

ardiff wine merchant Chilled & Tannin has

announced its aim to become one of the UK’s first carbon net zero vintners.

Co-owner Alex Griem admits that “the idea of being

carbon negative is almost so overwhelming for most

people that they don’t want to look at it.” But he explains that small changes are easily made and can make a big difference.

“We’re trying to embrace different things that push our

business in the right direction,” says Griem. “From the

outset we had our electric van, but it only has an effective range of the Severn Crossing and back, so we also have to use a courier service. We use UPS and there is an option

where, for every shipment, it gives you the price to offset the carbon.”

The team is also mindful when it comes to packaging,

re-purposing cardboard boxes, eschewing the “dolphin-

killing Sellotape” for eco-tape and sourcing biodegradable bubble wrap.

The addition of bee bombs or chilli growing kits to

deliveries is also a friendly and eye-catching gesture, an initiative that hasn’t been entirely without incident.

“A few people ate the bee bombs thinking they were

truffles, which kind of negated the environmental benefits,” says Griem.

As well as switching to a green energy supplier, Chilled

& Tannin has swapped Google for Ecosia, a search engine with an environmental focus. “For every 48 searches you do, they use the ad revenue and click commissions to plant trees,” explains Griem.

“In the last week alone my business partner Rob has

planted 11 trees around the world. All the team are

using it now. We’ve also added an eco cart to the website. It works out the carbon footprint of the wines in your

basket and offers you the option to offset that at checkout. “It works out at approximately 30p for a case of six

wines. Not only can our customers benefit from their

carbon neutral delivery, but for a few extra pence they can offset the carbon generated by their production too. It’s entirely voluntary – we’re not putting a gun to anyone’s

head but a lot of people are buying into that idea, and us as a business.”

ost of the wines on Chilled & Tannin’s list

are low-intervention organic, biodynamic or vegan friendly, from small family producers.

“Fundamentally we like drinking wine and we like

finding new wines,” says Griem.

“There are wines that you tried 10 years ago and you

try the new vintage and they are now 14.5% or 15% and it’s quite difficult to enjoy them. Even in the Languedoc they are having problems with the effects of global warming.

“A lot of the wine-growing regions are in real danger.

The amount of water that they have had to pump into

California for example – it’s crazy and I think we’ve all got to take a bit of responsibility.

“We feel that when we open a bottle of wine we

shouldn’t be wondering what its carbon footprint was

or worrying what’s in it. We don’t want to dwell on the

miserable stuff that’s happening in the world. We’d rather do something that just makes us jump out of bed.”

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 23

ight ideas r b

19: Host online Q&As Bob McDonald Salut, Manchester

In a nutshell …

Have you had to invest in any special

Using social media, invite questions on

equipment?

all things wine related, gather up the

“No, we’re just filming on an iPhone and

engaged, reminding them you’re open for

When your bar reopens, will you

best ones and address them in a series of

posting it on Twitter and Instagram.”

online videos. It keeps existing customers

business, and attracts potential customers

continue to focus on these kinds of

Tell us more.

drink-in and Manchester has been

too.

initiatives?

“More than ever, you have to find new

under much stricter restrictions since

“Normally about 75% of our sales are

ways of reaching the customers,” says

the summer anyway so we were kind of

Bob. “Pre-Covid we had already decided to

treading water.

focus on e-commerce and the shop side of

“Having to shut the bar, we’ve got rid of

the business and our brand new website

went live in November. I found the hardest thing about being online is getting your

personality across, so we have categories like Box Set Bingeing, Date Night and

all the tables and chairs but that’s made Bob: “We’re keeping videos short and sweet”

Lockdown Survival Kit. So this idea is about

range of our customer base. We have a lot

time at the moment to watch this kind of

I will probably take the opportunity to

interacting with people and having a bit

of fun. I think everyone has got a bit more thing.”

What sort of questions have been asked so far? “How long can I store a bottle of port once

it’s open? Why are sparkling reds not more popular? Should you chill orange wine?

If you put a spoon in a bottle of sparkling wine, does it stop it going flat?

“I think those questions reflect the broad

of hipsters wanting natural wines and cool labels, so with the sparkling reds question mention pet nats.

“Someone did ask a pretty open-ended

question, which I may have to serialise:

what makes a wine bad? That’s a good one! “We’re keeping the videos short and

sweet – about 90 seconds. There’s only so much information you can put across in

that time and we want people to be able

to relate to it. I don’t want to start talking about TCA and that kind of stuff.”

room for more retail display, so we’ve picked up new customers who didn’t

realise we were a shop. Moving forward

when the bar reopens it’ll be interesting to see how much of the retail we can hold on

to and how that drinking-in and retail split will play out.

“We’re in the business district, so

historically we’ve done really well with after-work drinkers and commuters so

without really realising it we’ve not been

very good at tapping into the people from the city centre. This project, along with

the website, means we’re reaching new audiences. You’ve got to try new things

and, with stuff like this, what have you got

to lose? People who aren’t adapting are just dead in the water.”

Bob wins a WBC gift box containing some premium drinks and a box of chocolates. Tell us about a bright idea that’s worked for you and you too could win a prize. Email claire@winemerchantmag.com

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 24

BITS & BOBS

Favourite Things

A bookkeeper helped herself to more

uncertainty, as some merchants and

than £800,000 from a wine shop in

auction houses report strong demand

Nottingham during a fraud lasting 12

from collectors.

years. Patricia Mann, 73, of Pilot Drive,

Hucknall, was sent to prison for 45 months when she appeared before Nottingham Crown Court.

Tim’s Wines, Somerset Favourite wine on my list

I have recently started stocking Babylonstoren wines from the Roos family and their wines are wonderful. My ultimate favourite is Babel: a blend of Shiraz, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Malbec and Pinotage and it is so smooth and velvety with deep red berry and dark chocolate on the palate.

Favourite wine and food match

Every time I eat out, I finish my meal with a glass of Château Partarrieu Sauternes and the most chocolatey dessert they have, or just a few chocolate truffles – heavenly! The depth and smoothness of the truffles pair superbly with the flavours of peach, pear, mango, honey and ginger of this Semillon/Sauvignon Blanc blend.

Judge Julie Warburton, who told the

pensioner she will serve half her sentence and the remainder on licence, said: “I

cannot conceive any other reason why you committed this offence, other than greed.” Terry Rockley, managing director and

owner of Vintage Wines, based in Derby

Road, which imports and sells wines, said after the hearing: “I think the whole staff

feel shocked and betrayed by what she did.” Nottinghamshire Live, January 28 © Silver-John / stockadobe.com

Tim Pearce

7% versus 2019.

Against a backdrop of uncertainty, “the

wine market has held its nerve,” said

Miles Davis, head of professional portfolio management at Wine Owners. “Even

Bordeaux prices feel like they are firming up.”

Davis also highlighted Champagne as an

area attracting more investors. Decanter, January 27

New boutique wine estate in Sussex launched the first wines from their 45acre estate. Julie Bretland and Mark Collins are the

founders of Artelium, a new boutique wine estate in Sussex.

Artelium has vineyards across the South

Downs, with its headquarters at a vineyard in Streat, between Ditchling and Plumpton, as well as a larger vineyard in Madehurst,

Favourite wine trade person

Favourite wine shop

and Italy 100 – both up by between 6% and

their jobs to follow their passion have

As a family we have travelled extensively in Europe stopping off at many vineyards. My favourite place is Spain and the sherry houses in Jerez.

When we settled in Somerset we frequented Sante in Wells with David Schroeder at the helm. His quirky small shop combined with his huge knowledge gave me the idea to semi-retire into the wine trade. Hang gliding was a really close second!

Many Liv-ex indices showed modest

gains in 2020, led by the Champagne 50

A husband-and-wife team who quit

Favourite wine trip

Tim Hawtin, previously of FMV and BB&R but now ensconced in Richmond Wine Agencies. His assistance in setting up my wine selection when we first opened was invaluable.

Magpie

Bookkeeper cheats wine shop of £800k

near Arundel.

Julie and Mark have created a space

“Even Bordeaux prices are firming up”

Wine doing fine in uncertain market Recent figures suggest fine wine market prices have been stable over the past year, despite wider economic

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 26

where visitors will be able to enjoy

artworks as well as wine in a stunning natural setting, once coronavirus restrictions are lifted.

The pair started out by purchasing

grapes from other growers across the

south east but they now have 85,000 vines of their own to prune, and harvested their first grapes last summer. The Argus, January 23

Burgundy hurled at the boys in blue

THE BURNING QUESTION

Will Brexit lead to higher prices and reduced choice for wine drinkers?

�

I’m on the board of Vindependents and from what Jess [Hutchinson] has been saying about the additional paperwork and administration, I don’t see how prices can’t go up. The additional costs have to be covered somehow. We do have direct relationships with producers too and I’ve put off buying from them until things settle, which isn’t ideal. I know things are taking a bit longer than normal to come through so I am hanging fire. You wonder whether producers will just think it’s not worth it.

A gang of wine thieves turned to the closest thing at hand when they discovered French gendarmes in hot pursuit of their van. The burglars, who were making off with

an estimated €350,000 worth of grand cru

”

Burgundy wines, began hurling their loot at officers as they sped down the motorway

Kate Goodman H Champagne winner H Reserve Wines, Manchester

at high speed.

They finally abandoned their vehicle

�

after smashing into a road toll barrier 22

There were always going to be ripples in leaving the EU. Yes there will be some paperwork but that will smoothed out in time. We already do paperwork for the rest of the world. There have been one or two minor problems but they have become more amplified over social media. I did have a problem with some large hampers that got stuck at Felixstowe but I’m not complaining because it was all about PPE priorities.

miles north of the city of Lyon.

The thieves had targeted the luxury

Relais Château hotel, the Domaine de

Rymska Saint-Jean-de-Trézy, 30km from Beaune, in Burgundy.

The Guardian, January 6

”

Anthony Borges The Wine Centre, Great Horkesley

• Virgin Wines is working with advisers on an AIM listing that could take place as early

�

as the first quarter of this year. City sources

In the short term yes, in the long term, no. Big decisions like Brexit aren’t made for the shortterm gain. People describe us as a small country but we’re a fantastic marketplace and, at the end of the day, trade will always find its way. There will be disruption at first but just like I will always find a way to get to my customers, the vineyards will find a way to get to the customers at the price the customer wants to spend. I think anyone who believes in the free market has to believe that.

said the flotation could value Virgin Wines at somewhere in the region of £100m. Sky News, January 28

Canned wine has Coulthard backing

”

Gerard Richardson Richardsons, Whitehaven

A canned wine brand established by a Lincolnshire entrepreneur has smashed its £400,000 crowdfunding target. Scawby-born Mark Wollard attracted

£350,000 in private investment ahead of its public launch on Seeders on January 25 to fund the global expansion of Hun.

The company has so far raised £447,277

through 108 investors with 39 days of the campaign still to run.

Among the backers are the chief

executive of Waitrose, James Bailey, and former British Formula 1 driver David Coulthard.

�

The selection will be reduced slightly because every single line of wine that comes into the country needs to have documentation. If you’re doing a mass import of Prosecco, you only need one document. But if you do layered importing on pallets of more artisan wines, with each layer being a different wine, you need documentation for each wine, so it’s going to kill the selection from the small importers who offer that variety. As for pricing – the big shipments of stuff may still be all right, but I know that freight costs coming into the UK have significantly increased.

”

Ralph Smith, Ralph’s Wine Cellar, Twickenham

Champagne Gosset The oldest wine house in Champagne: Äy 1584

Insider Media, January 25

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 27

JUST WILLIAMS

What normal people are drinking David Williams finds himself all at sea when questioned about the best selling wines in the UK market. You may not want to drink ‘spreadsheet wines’ any more than you want to watch the Kardashians, but professional curiosity can help put things into a useful context

fter not dropping a point in

rounds on American states,

British prime ministers and

aquatic mammals, I was feeling pretty good about myself during a recent online quiz with friends.

I felt even better when the friend in

charge of the next round said the questions would all be about booze.

The good feeling threatened to turn into

something like smugness once he’d asked how many of the UK’s top five bestselling beer brands we could name. Easy. I got

four out of five, missing only San Miguel at

number five (when did that get so big?) but guessing each of Stella, Budweiser, Foster’s and Carling, if not in the right order.

I did even better when the topic moved

on to spirits, correctly identifying Smirnoff as number one, and also including The

Famous Grouse, Gordon’s and Jack Daniel’s (a quartet that must have been in or about

the top five for decades), while missing out only on Glen’s vodka.

But that was as good as things would get. “How many of the UK’s top five best

selling wine brands can you name?”

my friend asked next. And here a chill

descended on this so-called professional

wine writer as the realisation dawned that

I had absolutely no idea what was going on in the world of big-brand wine.

Was Jacob’s Creek still doing the

brands are. In a sector that has been the subject of many a business school essay about how wine is defined by market

fragmentation and the lack of monolithic,

sector-defining, must-stock brands, these

brands seem to be doing a pretty good job of grabbing market share.

Landing or Kumala anymore? I had no

Hardys), I realised I was totally out of

dominance enjoyed by Coca-Cola in its

numbers? Blossom Hill? Gallo? Is there

even such a thing as E&J Gallo or Oxford

idea. Even before my shameful score was revealed (one point out of five; thanks

touch with a Top Five that reads Hardys,

Barefoot, Yellow Tail, Casillero del Diablo and McGuigan.

Chastened, the next day I took a closer

look at the Nielsen figures, in The Grocer’s

end-of-year article on the biggest off-trade food and drink brands for 2020 where my friend had sourced his information.

I was taken aback by just how big these

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 28

ardys alone has 4.5% of the

£6.5bn total GB off-trade wine market, while, between them,

the top five have around 17.5%. That

may not approach the levels of market

home market (the corporation’s various Coke products have a combined share

of 44% of the United States’ soft drink

market, according to statista.com). But, in

the supermarkets at least, it’s not quite the fractured, confusing market it’s sometimes made out to be.

The second thing that struck me was

that this dominance appears to be growing.

Some big-brand wines excel – others were made with Excel

As a whole, off-trade wine was in growth

of 12.4% by value and 8.8% by volume in 2020, a jump that is not at all surprising

given the lockdowned realities of the year. What is surprising – to me at least – is

the massive growth shared by four of the top five: as The Grocer article points out,

Barefoot, Yellow Tail, Casillero del Diablo and McGuigan collectively added some

£182.9m in off-trade sales last year, with Barefoot, Yellow Tail and Casillero all

growing at more than 30% year on year. What’s more, almost every brand in the Top 50 was in growth.

Should I be ashamed of myself about not

having shown a bit more curiosity about what the rump of British wine drinkers

have been pouring this year? Well maybe a bit: in the same spirit that I finally

watched an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians before Christmas, and have leafed through the likes of the Da Vinci

Code and Fifty Shades of Grey, it’s good to get a bit of context.

But context is all it is. I mean, how many

of the Top 5 – or Top 50, for that matter

– brands do you stock in your stores? Not many, I’d guess. And there’s a reason for

that. I have no problem with its existence, but the world of supermarket – or, more accurately, mass market or big brand –

wine is a parallel universe with a largely tangential relationship with the kind of wine that gets me excited.

It’s not a question of snobbery. I’m not

in the business of sneering at people’s

tastes in drinks. For the millions of wine

drinkers who are after a mildly diverting,

unchallenging glass of something vaguely

fruity at the end of a stressful day, branded wines do the job just fine, hitting a taste

profile at just the right angle, and at just the right price.

Some big brands may even do more than

that: Casillero has long cornered the “only

safe choice in the corner shop” market; and I’ve had plenty of good wines from various parts of the upper end of the Hardys and

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 29

McGuigan stables.

Still, once you’ve tasted what wine can

do when it’s not produced by spreadsheet it’s very had to go back.

It’s harder still to drum up much

enthusiasm beyond those occasional

moments when a corporate supplier is just launching a brand and has decided on a

strategy of over-delivering on quality as a means of getting early distribution (with

corner-cutting arriving at a later date once the brand is entrenched).

In general, the wines that really hold

the attention and lift the spirits are never

going to find a place in a Top 50 sales chart. That’s because they’re overwhelmingly (if

not exclusively) made by smaller producers who start from a very different position

to their corporate peers: first making the

best, most expressive, evocative wine they can, and then finding the right customers

for it, rather than letting the focus-grouped consumer or a distribution plan set the agenda.

WINEMAKER. ADVENTURER. HUSTLER. ROSÉ WRANGLER. He’s been called all these things. So who exactly is Charles Bieler, and what are his wines all about?

I Feature sponsored by Vintrigue Wines. For more information, visit www.vintriguewines.com or call 01207 521234

n a career of numerous epithets, the first earned by winemaker Charles Bieler was hustler. Charles’ merchant banker dad started making wine in Provence in 1992 after selling a Lancashire pet food business. “He decided Provence was a more beautiful place than Blackburn, certainly with a bit more sunshine,” says Charles. Six years later, Charles was recruited to lead a north American sales drive. “The wines were charming but he had a lot of trouble getting them out into the world.” Charles – born in Henley-on-Thames but raised mainly in the US and Canada –

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 30

bought a 1965 black convertible Cadillac, painted it pink and hit the road. “The goal was to get out there and hustle.” It was the start of a wine career that’s led to him becoming an acclaimed maker of what he calls “edgy and traditional” wines in France and the US. He has continued that early association with Provence to make his own wine in Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence, which has earned him the tag of the rosé wrangler. “I’m OK with that,” he says during a Zoom tasting, hosted by The Wine Merchant, of a quartet of his wines that are all available through Vintrigue, the independents division of Lanchester Wines. After his father’s Château Routas estate was sold in 2005 there was a chance to “reset and think: if our goal in Provence is strictly to make high-tone, savoury rosé, what’s the best place to do it?” Aix-en-Provence offered high altitude vineyards with cooler evenings and later ripening which promised wines with depth and personality. “I think about rosé as a three-way tugof-war between the red fruit character, the savoury elements and the acidity,” he says. “I don’t want any one side to win out. “I want enough of the herbal floral component to challenge the red fruit, and you need the acidity to hold it all together.”

AIX MARKS THE SPOT

The Bieler Pere & Fils 2019 Sabine rosé (£13.99) included in the tasting has the familiar Grenache and Syrah supported by Cinsault, Cabernet Sauvignon and Rolle. “I’ve always liked the herbal, spicy note that Cabernet brings,” says Charles. “Rolle adds a floral, almost apricoty aromatic and mid-palate density. “For me, the difference between great rosé and mediocre rosé is not the power of the aromatics, it’s the density of the midpalate, the transition from the fruit up front to the acidity at the end, a sort of creamy bridge.” Though the wine is fashionably pale in colour, flavour expression is his goal. “We really don’t think about colour,” he says. “I know a lot of producers obsess about it but to achieve that lighter and lighter colour you’re probably picking a little earlier than you would if flavour was your goal.”

As a self-professed “rosé evangelist”, Charles’ fascination with the style led him to make pink wine in the US, through a collaboration with Charles Smith, creator of acclaimed wines such as Band of Roses rosé and Kung Fu Girl Riesling.

GONE WITH THE WIND

The pair’s 2017 Charles & Charles Riesling (£14.50) was the second wine featured in the Zoom tasting. It’s a single vineyard wine from Art Den Hoed Vineyard in Washington State’s Yakima Valley, to the east of the Cascade Mountains, a desert region famous as prime American hop-growing territory. “The vineyard is a very windy spot, and because of that it takes forever for the grapes to ripen. That means there’s a lot of flavour development before the sugars and the acids come round. “It’s a bit more tropical than is typical for eastern Washington while at the same time having loads of acidity. “We irrigate which means we can control when we feed the vines, and by holding back we can encourage that petrolly element, which is something we love.” As climate change increasingly takes its toll further south in California, Washington may get its chance to shine in future, says Charles. “Washington has been a bit insular and just trying to be better than their neighbours rather than competing with the rest of the world, but the potential is there,” he adds.

The Cabernet is blended with anything between 20% and 40% Syrah, depending on the vintage. “The Syrah is fermented whole-clustered with the stems because we like inviting the spice and texture that brings. “We’re big fans of extended maceration, leaving it on the skins for an additional couple of weeks to build structure and a silky depth. “We make them reductively, without much oxygen, so there’s a scorched earth quality. It’s a descriptor I like that speaks to an earthy and mineral character. “It’s a wine that picks up speed once it’s opened; it’s not a wine where you pull the cork and that’s all it will ever be. It will lift and evolve in quite a positive and dramatic way as you drink through the bottle.”

THIEVES LIKE US

The fourth wine in the tasting was Three Thieves 2019 (£12.50), a Californian Pinot Noir made in collaboration with renowned winemaker Joel Gott and Roger

SCORCHED EARTH POLICY

Participants in the tasting also had the opportunity to taste the 2017 vintage of Charles & Charles Post No 35 Cabernet blend (£15.99), named after an old American Legion building in the state that Charles Smith bought and turned into a conceptual art piece. “It’s the reds that bring home what’s different in Washington, which is texture,” says Charles. “California makes great wines with fruit very easily because there’s abundant sunshine but, when it comes to texture, Washington’s latitude and extended sunlight give a Bordeaux level of development. That’s really something for retailers to key in on.”

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 31

Scommegna with fruit from the Circle K Ranch vineyard that sits on the edge of the San Francisco Bay in Central Valley. “The moderating influence of the delta means the nights and mornings are quite cool but give way to quite hot days,” says Charles. “That gives good ripening potential and reasonable crop sizes but maintains freshness and acidity, which is important for Pinot Noir. “We want to have a rich unctuous element but ultimately be representative of Pinot which is medium-bodied; spice and cherry cola. “We’re doing subtle adjustments everywhere we’re working, to slow down ripening, peeling back oak use and picking earlier to find more purity across the board. “If we’re not telling a really honest story about the place, the grape and the people involved, we don’t deserve to be on the shelf.” All wines listed are available through www.vintriguewines.com

MERCHANT PROFILE

The data day life of David Dodd Coming from an analytical background means the Tivoli Wines owner takes a remarkably methodical approach to business. It’s a policy that has reaped dividends over the past four years – but he admits that sales forecasts for even the first quarter of 2021 are essentially guesswork

David Dodd, Cheltenham, January 2021

avid Dodd knew he wanted to be an independent wine merchant.

The only question was where he

would plant his flag.

He approached the problem with

characteristic logic. This is a man who once earned his money by identifying locations for the likes of HSBC and Sainsbury’s.

So he built a database that covered the

whole of the UK, analysing thousands of neighbourhoods in granular detail.

He and his accountant wife Helen settled

on Cheltenham, where Kai and Caroline

Horstmann were selling their Tivoli Wines business.

Quickly adapting to the hybrid model,

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 32

Dodd invested in four Enomatics and

created an upstairs lounge area called the Wine Library. Obviously that’s not been

contributing to profits since Covid hit, but

Dodd is philosophical and playing the long game.

“Even though we had a 60% sales

increase last year, that only just about

TIVOLI WINES

covered the loss of the Wine Library,” he

have no interest in tiny margins.

important”.

online?

this year?

so we operate more at 30% with all of the

admits. But “it’s on the upper floor and it’s not costing me extra rent, so that’s really

How do you think business will pan out A couple of suppliers have suggested price rises of around 25p to 45p per bottle –

that seems to be the norm. That’s pretty

considerable if you think about it but it’s not a complete shock to us.

I’m on a mission this year to really try

and drive up our margins without passing it on to the customer, so we’re looking at

every part of the business. We’re changing how we buy, how we act – whether

we buy in bulk, trying to open lines of

communication with other independents to see if we can buy together.

Little things like bulk-buying boxes –

online has gone crazy at the moment, so

why don’t we bulk-buy boxes and split it between three or four merchants to try

and get the price down a little bit? With

all the price increases it’s getting harder

to operate at a 35% margin or a lot less if you’re online.

I expect this year to be more challenging

than last year. For the on-trade the first two quarters are going to be the most difficult they’ve ever experienced but if you can

hang in there, quarters three and four will be the best ever – especially if you can get any semblance of summer trade. What

implication that has for off-trade I’m not

too sure, but it’s going to go up and down all year.

Do you sell to the on-trade? No, we absolutely refuse to do it. I

remember sitting down with Helen,

and when we sketched out the margins and what you’d need she said: “why

would anyone do it?” Maybe one or two customers, who I’m personally friendly

with, I’ll help out but outside of that we

What margins are you working to We tend to keep it in line with the shop,

however you tend to get more incentives discounts that get added.

It depends on what they purchase but

you could drop down to 17% or 18%. If

they’re ordering a case of six £10 wines

with free delivery, then you can make very little.

Around Christmas we had a lot of

one-bottle orders and delivery can be an arguing point – lots of customers don’t

want to pay delivery. We set our delivery

at about £8.99 but we lower the threshold

for free delivery to £30 if it’s local because

we’re not paying APC. We reduced it to £50 if it was national. One of the key things I’m looking at this year is how we can squeeze more margin out of online.

How have your online sales changed over the last 12 months? We probably increased online sales sixfold last year, so 600% increase off of a relatively low base.

A lot of that was local or regional. About

40% were customers from Cheltenham who didn’t want to leave the house, but

we made more margin that way through delivering ourselves.

We proactively targeted local and

regional. The local side were customers

who had previously come into the shop but were staying at home for obvious reasons, so we delivered to them.

The wins for us were regional, and by

regional I mean people in surrounding

towns and villages who very rarely come into Cheltenham but have heard of us

through other means and want to support a local retailer rather than a national one. That was all new custom for us, so we

proactively targeted them through social

media. We tried to personalise as much as

possible, we dropped sweets into the boxes … our core aim was to build relationships with these customers.

We also saw an increase in national

customers, but the low-hanging fruit is

in local and regional and I think you can satisfy that demand at low cost without

investing in pay-per-click or search engine optimisation.

The first year we launched a website,

we went into that quite heavily and spent

about £600 per month to get to the top of the Google listings and got zero return. I

remember we used Louis Roederer Brut

Premier Champagne as a test and invested quite heavily on price.

We were pretty much the cheapest

online and made sure we got to page one

of Google, and we had over 700 clicks and not one transaction. That taught us that

we weren’t doing it right and we decided to pull back and let everything grow

more organically, until we could upskill ourselves.

What’s the next move with the website? If you want to make a splash online,

you need to have a specialism: really Continues page 34

‘I’m on a mission this year to really try and drive up our margins without passing it on to the customer’ THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 33

MERCHANT PROFILE

From page 33

carve yourself out a niche. You can’t be a

itself off by the end of this year and I’ve got

wines that they wouldn’t necessarily have

much higher return on the hybrid on-trade

Do you think most hybrid indies will

four to five years in this property, which

I hope will be highly profitable, so I get a

bought off the shelf downstairs.

side than I would for online.

stick with that model?

the ones who can find something slightly

performing before March?

down to have a glass of wine. I don’t know

our specialism would be. Subscription

in a wine bar location. Effectively we are

generalist online because you roughly have the same price as everybody.

I think those who do it really well are

How had the Wine Library been

different. For us, if we do want to go down

It didn’t hit the levels we wanted it to but

is the future of online, so then we’d

on a parade which is off the beaten track so

that route, it would be working out what have to think about how we’d develop a subscription package that’s slightly different.

Part of me thinks if you gave me

£100,000 to invest in an element of our business, I wouldn’t get the maximum

return if I invested it online. I still think retail and wine experiences and events offer the highest return.

Indies have built so much of their recent success on the “experiential” part of their offer and many seem to have successfully replicated it online. We talk frequently about that. How do you build a relationship when you have no

voice? You can do it via newsletters, but

we’ve thought about other initiatives too.

If we go down the subscription route, do

we start looking at virtual tastings as a way to get people to join in, say, once a month?

we knew it was high risk because we’re not there’s not much complementary evening entertainment around us.

Just before we closed it in March we

were fully booked with private parties. It

took us two years to get there but we had

a really strong January, February and early March in 2020, so it is frustrating that

we’ll probably have to go back to square

one. But we’re looking forward to getting

it back open because we know the concept works.

‘This model really works for us but it’s built through wine experiences’ If I was doing this again, there are many

What’s the added element so you can set

things I’d change about the Wine Library.

don’t have the answers at the moment.

and charcuterie plates, but we made no

yourself apart from the nationals? There

are three or four things we could do, but I Once you start trying to focus your

money online nationally it can get very expensive very quickly.

Would the Wine Library be a better candidate for investment? The Wine Library generates a gross profit of 65% to 70% and I don’t need to invest

in extra resources for it – I use the existing shop resource. The Wine Library will pay

You absolutely have to do food. We had a

food partner that would supply the cheese money on it.

I can definitely say that we see a halo

effect from the Enomatics of between 8% and 12% of the people upstairs who then come downstairs and buy a bottle. So we are generating GP from the machines.

Some of the suppliers donate bottles to

put in the machines so it doesn’t cost me

to fill them and we are making profit from that and we’re getting customers to try

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 34

There are a lot of customers who are

prepared to go into a wine shop and sit

if there are as many customers who are prepared to go into a wine bar and buy

wine to take away, so how you lay out your venue is really important.

I’m really fascinated by multiple use

of space – why can’t you be a wine shop

in the day and a fully-fledged restaurant in the evening? I know there are a lot of these urban breweries now. We have a

local one called Deya and they turn their brewery into a wine bar on a Friday and

Saturday and put food vans outside and it’s incredibly successful. It’s in my head to do something like that to target the younger sector of the market in this setting.

You had an ambition to get into wine retailing and you took a forensic approach to it. After all of that, what made you settle on Cheltenham? I created the data set that looked at

demand and I identified Cheltenham as having a high-demand location.

At the time there was Tivoli Wines and

a Majestic in the market. There are more competitors now who have come in. The

space at Tivoli really interested me. Tivoli only used about 30% of their available space to sell wine.

I had a number in my head when I

bought the business of £650,000 [sales], and that’s what I thought the optimum

would be for a wine shop in this location.

Last year we exceeded that by far, so I feel quite satisfied that we got to that level.

Cheltenham and the surrounding areas

are already engaged in wine but you

also have quite a young consumer base.

Gloucestershire University is just based

TIVOLI WINES

tasting or a portfolio tasting. That tends

to attract people who already have some knowledge of the subject.

We wanted to create a format that would

target people aged 25 to 40 and get them

into wine, so we came up with what we call our wine festivals. We divide the shop and

the Wine Library into three separate areas,

and we have three different presenters and

each presenter only has five minutes to talk through up to eight wines each, so it’s very

fast moving. You’re on your feet and there’s music in the background.

We have about 50 customers split into

The Wine Library will pay for itself by the end of this year, Dodd believes

three groups then we move them round

the shop and upstairs every 30 minutes. Because it’s small groups they are more inclined to talk to us and to talk to each other and to ask questions.

You have to be quite concise and not

get into the details and you literally pass

them a new wine every five minutes. That’s probably where we’ve had our greatest success. They were selling out three

months in advance and tickets were £25

to £30, and we were showing between 15

and 25 wines priced at retail between £10 and £30.

Since I bought the business in 2016,

we’ve doubled our sales, we’ve increased 45% in footfall, we’ve increased 5% in

margin, and probably the average basket Dodd has been keen to utilise more sales space than the previous owners

about five minutes’ walk away.

The first one we did when we opened was

no kids] in the surrounding area and

two and a half hours about Malbec. Within

We have a high proportion of SINKS and

DINKS [single income no kids, dual income that’s where we want to go for the wine experience side. Everything for us runs

through wine experiences – that’s been the growth.

Before we got to the Covid era, what sort of things were you doing?

spend has gone up by £9. So this model

really works for us but it’s built through wine experiences.

How have you adapted tastings online?

in a meeting room and a guy came in and

We didn’t want to send out full bottles, so

20 minutes you could see the customers’

work. For our Christmas tasting where

just talked to 20 different customers for

eyes dropping and instantly I realised we

needed to change the format, so we trialled about three different types of events.

So for those people already engaged in

wine as a subject we had producer events and they would come in and do a vertical

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 35

we decant into smaller medicine bottles, which we also have to sterilise. It’s hard

we showed 30 wines, we had to fill 1,500 bottles.

We’d like to roll it out to a wider

geographical area. I was having a

Continues page 36

MERCHANT PROFILE

From page 35

conversation with another merchant

recently and we talked about going down the canning route, or maybe sachets.

How many suppliers do you work with? I’m up to about 20 now. I might order from some suppliers monthly and I might order from some quarterly – it depends on the success of individual lines in the shop. To go from my quarterly list to my

monthly list we need to have fast-moving lines and that means we have to have

wines coming in that are excellent value

and sell for between £10 to £14. Once we

get customers on to those it will trigger an order every month.

We tried to get a load of new-wave South

African wines in because we were really interested but it just didn’t work for us

because our customer base wasn’t quite

right for it. We focused on natural wines

about two years ago, but I think it was a bit early and that didn’t really work for us.

Last year we took the range up from 450

to 750 and we’ll probably go to about 800 this year. I’m happy with the range – we need to tinker with it a little.

One of the negatives of last year is that

our average bottle price dropped from £16 to £13. A little bit of that was because we expanded our entry-level range, but we

were led by customers. That’s what they wanted – that’s what we delivered.

Which styles or regions are doing well? 55% of the shop is Italy and France. Spain has been an interesting one – it’s really

jumped up for us in the last year. That’s

probably been driven by our own interest. Everyone in the shop loves Spanish wine, especially Galicia. That’s our key region.

We’re really passionate about the English

trade and we expanded the range. I think at its highest last year we had about 70

‘I’ve identified my top 40 wines and said to suppliers I want a discount, but I’ll buy a pallet of a line in one go’ different lines mixed between sparkling

The database has about 800 people on it

and still. That’s a rapidly growing area. We

and it represents 38% of our transactions

We sold a lot of cases of Woodchester rosé

we identified the customers who weren’t

do sell cases of English wine. A lot of it is

local – Woodchester does really well for us. in the summer.

We sell mixed cases of English online.

It’s an area of experimentation for a lot of customers. When I first bought the

and 46% of spend. I’ve got customers who are worth about £14,000 a year to me so

ordering online and who weren’t coming into the shop and emailed them.

How do people earn loyalty points?

business, we would probably get one

Roughly we give a point for every pound

a week asking about our English selection.

double points. Once you hit 250 points you

person every three months asking about

English wine. Now we get about 15 people How are you sourcing stuff right now? I’m a huge fan of tastings. I will travel all

over the country to go to tastings, I love it and it’s one of the highlights of my year. I

love trying new wines and I love speaking

to winemakers. Not having had them in the last year is a challenge – it’s not quite the

same virtually, but we have to get over that fact. As soon as we can do it safely, we will return. We miss it.

I don’t like wastage so I’ve said to our

suppliers I’d rather you come in once a

quarter, bring in 20 wines and spend three hours with us because we see the benefit

of what they can tell us about the wines – they tell us the stories.

When we get some sample bottles we get

some customers to try the wines as well.

I’ve said from year one that I want to set up a customer buying group so they would try

you spend. Some weekends it will be

double points and for some wines it will be get £10 off your next transaction.

Once you hit 500 points you get a ticket

to one of our events. 750 points gets you

another £10 off and with 1,000 points you

get a £100 voucher for the Wine Library. It

works pretty well as it means they try new wines, and the money comes back to us.

It’s really expanded the more challenging

ranges from eastern and central Europe

because we put loads of them in the Wine Library.

We put in one Sauvignon Blanc, one rosé,

one Malbec and the rest are really exciting wines and it genuinely works.

We bought the Enomatics outright – we

took the plunge. The Wine Library took

about £70,000 in total and it was all self-

funded. And we’re going to have six years of high growth in the Wine Library. Tell us more about the team.

the wine blind and tell me what they think

We’ve got Tina who’s been working in the

How does your database work?

now me. She’s part of the community and

of it and what they’d pay for it, and that really gives us some insights.

We set up a loyalty database two years ago and it’s so important to me.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 36

shop for 20 years – through Threshers, Wine Rack, the previous owners and people come in just to speak to her.

I probably have managed 200 people

throughout my career and I’ve never met

TIVOLI WINES

anyone with her energy. You could put

better processes.

say there is a 50% chance that we’ll open

hard all day and she’s a real asset to the

not the average student – he loves £50

wine hotel, somewhere to have residential

three 18-year-olds next to her and she’d wipe the floor with them. She works business. She’s nuts as well.

Calum is our creative, artistic person,

with a fantastic palate and he’s pretty

much our lead wine buyer. I lean on him

quite a bit because he has such a passion

for the subject. He’s the opposite of Tina – you’re not going to see him any time soon breaking out in a sweat on the shop floor, but he’s the person who makes sure we

have the best wines on the shelf. He comes up with an awful lot of ideas and runs the digital and marketing side of things. We’ve just taken on Calum’s wife,

Chelsea, so we’re now a two-family

business, and she supports Calum on the digital side by looking after the website

and the data maintenance. She is highly

organised and identified where we needed

Last year because the shop was so

busy we brought in a student, Seb. He’s Chardonnays. He’s perfect as we get all

his wages back as he spends it all on wine. He’s really confident and he wants to get involved in tastings and you can just see him growing in the next few years.

We’ll probably get another full-timer this

year.

The most important person to the

business is someone who never comes

into the shop and that’s Helen. I don’t have to think about the numbers. She sorts

everything out and it takes the pressure off me.

Can you imagine opening another shop? The original plan was to open three. Last year we kiboshed it and said because of

Brexit it just wasn’t the right time. I would

another one.

I have a dream that I’d like to create a

wine courses. You’d need a lot of money to do it, but it is kind of the direction I’d like to steer the business.

What else might the future hold for you? Majestic is going to get stronger. I’m

convinced of that because they’ve got the right person in charge now, so I’d like to see us independents working together where possible.

I’d love to buy in direct, but I don’t

have the expertise. I’d love to work with

another independent on that. And I would be interested in speaking to them about sharing warehouse or storage space.

I’ve quadrupled my spend with some

suppliers. I’ve identified my top 40 wines

and I’ve said I want a discount, but I’ll buy a pallet from you of a single line in one go.

I’m just trying a slightly different approach. How does the idea of running a wine shop compare with the reality? I love it. What I was doing before was so

much more financially rewarding, but this is a great industry to be in.

We’re on a rollercoaster. I spent 20 years

forecasting sales for the largest businesses

in the world and I was pretty good at it, but my wife said to me last month, “what are

you forecasting for the first three months

for sales for Tivoli Wines?” and I have got absolutely no idea.

We’re in a very strong position but I’m

just unsure which direction we’ll go in. I’m very risk averse – I like to sit on a lot of data before I make a decision.

We made a decent profit last year, we

gave the team a 15% bonus at Christmas

and the rest we will re-invest. I paid myself The shop was a Threshers and Wine Rack branch before becoming an independent

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 37

less than I paid my staff last year. I just

want the business to grow, and that’s our approach.

RIBERA DEL DUERO

Tim Atkin MW is your guide to a region that is shaking off its "big and oaky" image with wines that have a character all of their own – complex, balanced and textural, from a variety of terroirs that could rival Burgundy. For the past four years his Ribera Top 100 has charted the progress of this fascinating and evolving part of the Spanish wine landscape.

Sponsored feature

remember about Ribera del Duero. The

(Tempranillo) with other varieties, be

harvest on November 7? Somewhere that

were grown here in Roman times, but

despite the long-standing fame of Vega

as a range of terroirs that is arguably as

ingers on buzzers. Here’s your starter for 10, as the University Challenge

catchphrase would have it. Which

European wine region finished its 2016

makes late harvest sweet wines perhaps, optimistically hanging on for a belated botrytis infection? Or an experimental

vineyard beside a Norwegian fjord? Both

are plausible answers, but the place I have in mind is Ribera del Duero.

In a world where climate change has

made late autumn harvests as rare as

first is that, in many ways, it’s a young

region and is still a work in progress. Vines Sicilia, founded back in the 1860s, the

Denominación de Origen was not created until 1982. The area under vine in Ribera del Duero is still expanding – from 6,460 hectares in the early 1980s to 23,353 hectares today.

Ribera del Duero is highly unusual. Look

dates may be moving forward, especially

Taste a top wine from the late 1980s and

humility in a Dominic Cummings blogpost, at a list of the last 10 vintages and four of them finished in November. The starting

in hotter vintages like 2019 and 2015, but this is still a comparatively marginal place to grow grapes. Even an early ripening

variety such as Tempranillo (or Tinto Fino, as it’s known locally) makes producers

wait in the cooler parts of Ribera. Because of its altitude, the region can experience

very cold springs and damaging frosts as

late as June, so the vines take a while to get going. No wonder it has one of the shortest growing seasons in the world.

I mention these things to make a simple

point: Ribera del Duero is unique, a place that needs to be considered and enjoyed on its own terms. This is a region that’s

marked by significant diurnal variation,

a region that picks late to achieve tannin ripeness. Paradoxically, it makes wines with high alcohol levels (14%+ is the

norm) and correspondingly high pHs that

still retain acidity. “At higher pHs,” explains Peter Sisseck of Dominio de Pingus, “you have more texture.”

There are other important things to

he second thing is a question of

style. The “big and oaky” template

that many people, I think wrongly,

associate with the region is not historic. it is often surprisingly fresh and lightly wooded. The rich, powerful template

they Cabernet Sauvignon, Garnacha Tinta, Malbec, Merlot or Albillo Mayor, as well

complex as Burgundy’s. One day, I hope, people will talk about the difference

between wines from, say, La Aguilera,

La Horra, Fuentelcésped, Quintana del

Onésimo and San Estéban de Gormaz the

way they do about those from ChambolleMusigny, Gevrey-Chambertin, Pommard,

Volnay and Vosne-Romanée. While it is true that some of the best Riberas are pan-

regional cuvées – think Aalto, Alión, Ausàs and Garmón – the overwhelming majority are village or site-specific wines. Place is much more important than winemaking these days.

the US market, and reached its high point

to work even harder to make balanced

This year, it was all done by Zoom and

arrived in the late 1990s, largely to please more than a decade ago. Global warming has complicated the picture – you have

wines these days – but the best Riberas today are way more elegant. These are

often produced from vineyards at altitudes (900 metres+) that were once considered marginal and, in some cases, downright foolhardy.

The third thing I’d like to highlight is

diversity and I mean this in several ways.

Ribera’s soils are extremely heterogeneous – Vega Sicilia alone has 19 of them in its

vineyards in the so-called Golden Mile. It

also enjoys a range of aspects and altitudes spanning both sides of the river that

gives the region its name. And lastly, it

increasingly applies to the region’s wines. Diversity here comes from a number

of sources – blends of Tinto Fino

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 39

’m lucky to have spent the last four years

visiting the region to research my annual Ribera Top 100 (the most recent edition

has just been published on timatkin.com). tasted in London, but I was still able to

deepen my knowledge of the region by talking to its best winemakers.

I’m increasingly struck by what an

exciting place it is, a place that confounds

the image it has on some markets. Sure, the top wines are made to age and have good underlying structure – no one ever levels

this criticism at Bordeaux, by the way – but they have finesse as well as flavour. Still in

its youth as a wine region, Ribera del Duero continues to evolve for the better. Go there, pandemic permitting, to see for yourself. • A group of independent merchants give their verdicts on Ribera wines overleaf.

INDEPENDENT VERDICTS

Bastien Martinole, Fine Wines Direct COMENGE BODEGAS Y VIÑEDO JACOBUS 2014

Using indigenous yeasts plot by plot is something that I really respect and believe is the best way to truly express a wine’s unique provenance. Super fresh and fruity nose, red fruits, and sweet liquorice, moving

John Townend, House of Townend

BODEGA TIERRA ARANDA TA ROSADO EDICIÓN ESPECIAL 2019

to light notes of balsamic, soya sauce and

I really liked this. Some expressive

meaty aromas. The mouthfeel is superb

VALDEMONJAS EL PRIMER BESO 2019 (Indigo Wines)

raspberry and cherry notes on the nose

with elegant umami being the backbone.

Purple, vibrant, black fruits dominate the

which suggested it might be just a bit too

Fruits, spices, leather and light oak blend

bouquet with a touch of fresh tobacco.

confected but ultimately, it showed really

harmoniously. The tannins are just right,

The palate is elegant, forward and

good balance: the fruit was sufficiently

rich enough to give the wine plenty of

approachable, with crunchy fresh fruits, a

toned down for some charming minerality

ageing potential, but smooth enough to

little hedgerow and soft tannins binding

to sneak through.

make this wine enjoyable now. A modern, polished wine, showing the excellent quality

well.

potential of the Ribera del Duero region. BODEGAS ANTIDOTO 2019 (H2Vin) Deep purple in colour, the nose is

BODEGAS Y VIÑEDOS VALTRAVIESO 2018 (Hayward Bros)

concentrated with berry aromas and a hint

Complex nose showing lots of layers of fruits,

of vanilla. I like the mouthfeel: rich, round

spices, and other flavours with underlying

and chocolatey, with vanilla, caramel,

creamy ripe red fruit characters. Oak is

soft and smooth tannins and a little spice

very well integrated on the nose with hint

providing the edge. A crowd-pleasing, stylish

of dried herbs and burnt paper. The mouth

wine.

is pleasant with young but polished tannins balanced by a decent acidity. Very good value for money.

MELIDA PARPADOS 2018 Dark ruby, the bouquet is overt and

strong. Crunchy black fruits, sweet cassis and soft tannins, the palate is round and approachable with a fine balancing freshness.

Chris Connolly, Connolly’s

Simon Richards, Amps Wines

BODEGAS MALACUERA CRIANZA 2016

Fun presentation. Fruit, oak and spice on the

ABADÍA DE ACÓN RESERVA 2014 (Tanners)

nose. Good standard – a wee bit of maturity

Everyone liked this. Expressive nose. Very

softens it. A good £15 wine.

MONTEBACO SEMELE 2018 (Champagnes & Chateaux)

polished. Great mouthfeel – blackberry

Of all the wines tasted, this was my

compote, liquorice, hints of chocolate, © José Berdón

favourite. Earthy with some dark, spicy

Kenneth Vannan, Villeneuve Wines

structured tannins. Long length and a

notes coming through. Not showy but silky,

balanced finish. Noticeable acidity, so would

polished and all very well knit with some

be interesting to age, decant and have with

impressive length on the finish.

food. Good balance with a rustic edge.

BODEGAS LÓPEZ CRISTÓBAL 2015 (Raeburn Fine Wines)

PÁRAMOS DE LEGARIS 2016 (Codorníu UK)

Generous; rich, plummy and satisfying.

Opened up in the glass to creamy dark and

Highly polished, supple tannins and full of

soft red berry fruit. Hints of cocoa, with

dark, brambly fruit.

sweet ripe tannins and well integrated oak.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 40

Feature produced in association with

2021 COMPETITION NOW OPEN FOR ENTRIES REWARDING THE MOST INTERESTING WINES IN THE INDEPENDENT TRADE ALL JUDGES ARE INDEPENDENT MERCHANTS VISIT WINERMERCHANTTOP100.COM OR EMAIL CLAIRE@WINEMERCHANTMAG.COM

am on Holiday!

weeding” and subdivided the working ones

Rather: I am on some kind of

into several bags*. After years of moaning about how I’m not watching The Crown

enforced rest from bottle wrapping

and people with big trainers asking me

because it’s gross propaganda I’m baw

if I’ve got “any of that Orange Wine” and

deep in it. Actually I would say I’m more

from trying to micromanage a team who are definitely more capable than I am of running a booze shop. I have muted the

work WhatsApp. Mostly. I have stopped

checking the figures. Mostly. I have stopped checking the email. Mostly. Well, I did after I saw that the team had placed a spirits

order with Chartreuse in it. Because who doesn’t need Chartreuse in January?

(Witness: time moves forward in this

universe and I am writing this in January

– in what was at this point here, now, this now here moment… what is this here

than baw deep, I’m up to my oxters in royal

4. HOLIDAY! Phoebe Weller of Valhalla’s Goat in Glasgow has taken some time off, which means more opportunities for yoga, macramé, research into supermarket wine, and of course midnight feasts.

now this now here moment: January.

more *cough* restorative *cough* yoga

good at looking thoughtful

credulity, spouting guff for a couple of days,

are checking out some live

one has listened to me, at least with any

weeks, whatever – I am on Holiday! – in the last 10 months whenever I’ve tried to take several days off in a row something bad

has happened. Like that time I left work

for an hour and the roof caved in. Like that time I cycled to Falkirk and got the ‘vid.

, like the rest of the UK, am on some kind of January Holiday! lockdown. The “Norms” are moping about,

zombielike, Christmas holidays never quite ending, everyone just in a state of kinda doing work but there’s nothing really

needing done but I better sit in front of

my computer in case they’re watching me.

But then actually I’ve long wondered what people do in offices and think probably

that they don’t do much and pretend to do tap-tap-tap computer stuff and get really

even am I? [Ask me about the time I met Prince William and he said he was Gary

Glitter. Please ask me, not even my parents believe this story and it’s TRUE.]

’m on Holiday! This is my day:

wake, pint of warm lemony water and vowing that I’m not having a

bottle of wine tonight, do first batch of

more challenging sequences and opting

than is ever necessary.)

And you know – have I told you? – no

called The Secret History of Balmoral. Who

yoga usually failing to complete any of the

Forgive me, I’ve been reading a customer recommended book on Zen and doing

protocol. Last night I put on a programme

and confused, but mostly

when people aren’t looking

instead for child’s pose, put dress on

over yoga clothes, look out at glorious

sunshine, procrastinate about going out, go out, skite about on three inches of compacted ice, tut at the joggers breathing too much, tut

stream in an owl’s nest like

at the people with dogs,

the rest of us.

get marooned on a patch

Anyway Holiday! dear god

of tarmac with no way

it’s rubbish. God everything’s

forward except on my hands

rubbish, isn’t it, have you noticed?

and knees, crawl home. Don’t

Did you maybe notice at the

check Instagram don’t check

here then, then there moment of January

the whatever when I

wrote this? What day is this?

Is it Thursday? Do I get my applause back? It’s rubbish rubbish rubbish.

I’ve not, as the saying goes, got fit or learned a new language in my mini-

lockdown, no no no. I bought some string

with a view to learning macramé and did a good noose bit but then got confused as to

what a loop was and have been meaning to look it up on the YouTube but haven’t got round to it. I did a really boss job at “pen

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 42

Instagram don’t check… sit on

Instagram scrolling Shitty Wine Memes until the sun goes down

which is at 3.55 right now. More yoga,

mostly Savasana. Explore supermarket wine.

eader, can I let you into a secret? I cannot keep a bottle. I cannot

cellar, I cannot buy and keep aside.

This means that I buy as much as I can before my holiday (Holiday!) from the

shop but only as much as I can carry on my

bike, about eight

Morrisons’ frozen

bottles, which is a

section. There is no

fair bit but IT WAS

greater Morrisons than

HOGMANAY. And I

Morrisons Anniesland,

can’t go back into

well worth a trip. What

the shop because

I like to do is cook

that will undo all my

onions then cook

good cord-cutting zen

cumin seeds and

yoga mindfulness and

turmeric and ground

I’m attempting to be

a multifaceted human

coriander and then

add the mince and then frozen

who doesn’t need the shop to define

peas. What a trip! Recently I wrapped this

and sneery and think about work which

sausage “sausage roll” in an “oven”, which

myself. Ditto other people’s beautiful

shops which right now make me panicky

is specifically what I’m not doing. I’m not thinking about work, I’m not thinking

about work, I’m not, I’m not. Oh I’m on the work Facebook and see that the woman I berated about not wearing a mask in the final throes of 2020 has made a “formal” complaint. Holiday!

When I have a hob (as I do here on

Holiday!) I like to fry things. I am an

advocate of always cooking your onions for around an hour before adding other

ingredients. This is why this month I have renamed this “column” Phoebe’s Amazing Midnight Feasts, as my partner jokes I

cannot plate up before 10. Hahahaha. In

addition to onions I like to fry Morrisons Cook From Frozen lamb mince. This

store cupboard

Kat Stead

in the crusty end of some ready-rolled

puff pastry and baked the whole rolled

I also have when not in the shop. I find this matches adequately with Morrisons The Best South African Cinsault (£6.95).

n an effort not to buy any food until we have finished all the food we

bought before everyone decided

not to Christmas after all, leaving just the two of us arguing next to the fire, I have

come up with some particularly disgusting combinations. Only yesterday I created a

belter: stuffed green pepper (three weeks past BB) with chestnuts and meatballs (yellow label from Waitrose, fancy).

Not only did the rotten pepper impart

and imbue the dish with, somehow,

teenage regret but the mismatch, texturally, of the meatball and chestnut layers was

lessened not one whit by Aldi’s Crémant

de Jura (£8.95). Neither was it saved by

this was just picked off and eaten like a

delicious lactic scab.

to work tomorrow and back to normality.

HOORAY.

* I am actually quite proud of this one, made of March 2020 where I fell in love with

5cl gin 2.5cl St George or other raspberry liqueur Prosecco rosé 1 tablespoon lemon juice Lemon zest

a heavy-handed cheese layer – rather

So that’s it, another holiday over, back

essential dates back to the first lockdown

The French 75 is the classic cocktail that most people have never heard of, combining gin and Champagne with equal weights of sugar syrup and lemon juice. This 2021 take celebrates both the arrival of pink Prosecco and gin’s continuing success story, replacing the syrup with a smidge of raspberry liqueur as the sweetener to synchronise eyes and palate. Pinkster or Foxdenton’s raspberry gin would give an extra fruit dimension, a punchier version of the Raspberry Fizz cocktail.

the holiday really, maybe things are not so bad after all.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 43

Put the gin, liqueur and lemon juice into a shaker filled with ice and shake. Strain into a Champagne flute. Top with pink Prosecco. Give it a little stir and decorate with a strip of lemon zest.

Marlborough highlights

ineyard Productions is an

intriguing and fleet-footed

business, which allows Liam

Steevenson MW to indulge his passion for winemaking anywhere in the world.

He could produce wine of any style, with

any grape variety, wherever he liked. Yet there’s something about Marlborough

Sauvignon Blanc that has utterly captivated him.

Steevenson’s roots are in the

independent trade, but he also spent a

number of years as a buyer for Waitrose.

“New Zealand is a pretty easy place to fall in love with quickly,” he says. “I did love

going there but at that time I really didn’t

enjoy buying New Zealand wines. I found it quite a frustrating category.”

Why? “There seemed to be so few stories

told, so little narrative. I felt that the

independent consumer wasn’t engaging with Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc – it felt like a supermarket product. And

sommeliers were really staying away from it.”

Steevenson’s solution to the problem,

once Vineyard Productions was

established, was to launch Fincher & Co. Not all of the wines in the Fincher range are Sauvignons, but it’s by far the most important variety in the line-up.

“I knew a guy called Ben Glover who’s a

really talented winemaker, the guy behind the early days of Wither Hills and then

The Ned, and then he did Mud House with Accolade – a lot of big-brand stuff.

“He also has a family business called

Zephyr, and I’ve always loved those wines.

Ben and I spent a bit of time together about four years ago and had lots of chats over

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 44

How Fincher & Co helps wine lovers explore hidden depths in New Zealand’s best known region, and grape variety

lots of beers about Marlborough having

a lot of stories to tell that weren’t getting told.

“We talked about being a bit braver with

the winemaking. The idea with Fincher

from the beginning was to create a range that told people about sub-regional

Marlborough and its three valleys: Wairau, Awatere and Kekerengu.

“All of them have different climates

that I thought could be shown in wine.

And within those valleys we would either start telling single-vineyard stories or

interesting winemaking stories and bring them out in small-batch cuvees.

“New Zealand consistently produces

good Riesling and Pinot Gris and

Gewurztraminer and all kinds of other

varietals. But I still think that Sauvignon Blanc is their grape.”

Fincher & Co Awatere Valley Sauvignon Blanc

Fincher & Co The Dividing Line Sauvignon Blanc

Awatere is cooler than Wairau, being closer to the sea. “When you pick Sauvignon Blanc off the bunch it tastes exactly like the finished wine,” Steevenson says. “When you go to the Awatere you get an incredible salt content from the sea air and the skins of the grapes are much thicker than in the Wairau. You get a much more herbal, green, pithy quality to Awatere Sauvignon Blanc. “It’s a single vineyard site: we take half the fruit and Astrolabe take the other half. “Ben likes to go drier than most winemakers – he doesn’t want too much sweetness left. There is a slightly European sense to the wine. It’s quite elegant and a little bit more Loire-like. You get the more nettley notes on the nose instead of the tropical notes.”

This hand-picked Sauvignon from the Alice Mills Vineyard in Rapaura represents the next level up in the Fincher & Co range, and Steevenson is happy to have produced a wine that isn’t necessarily a crowd pleaser. “I’ve always liked white Bordeaux in style,” he says. “I’ve always liked skin contact and stuff that sits on its lees for quite a long time. I like old oak. So I wanted to make a wine that’s interesting and different in Marlborough but I really wanted to tell the Sauvignon Blanc story as well.” He adds: “This is picked as early as we can: it came in at 12.5%. Ben picks just the westerly rows, the coolest rows in the vineyard, and it then gets fermented in barrel. “We call it The Dividing Line because I always like this idea of people liking and not liking it. The best things in life, like good art and good music … if everyone likes them they’re like an Athena poster. We wanted a wine to be a bit divisive. We even put it under cork. “It’s fermented in old barrels so they’re not giving any particular oak character to the wine, but the wine sits on its lees for quite a long time and doesn’t get stirred that regularly. I think that gives it some complexity. And because the ferment is allowed to take its own course and is not particularly temperature controlled, you end up with a slightly warmer ferment. “Some of those light esters and aromatics disappear and instead you get more winey, more vinous characteristics – more petrolly and interesting and different.” Indies who took part in a Zoom tasting were far from divided in their opinion. Marc Hough of Cork of the North says: “I’ve sold absolute bucketloads of this and I’ve not met anybody yet who doesn’t like it. I’m finding everybody’s absolutely adoring this wine.” Emily Silva of The Oxford Wine Company adds: “I think if I was going to show this wine

Fincher & Co Wairau Valley Sauvignon Blanc The Wairau is a bigger vineyard area than Awatere, with much less ocean influence. “You naturally get a softer, rounder and more fruity style of wine out of the Wairau and less of the salty, dry mineral note that you get in the Awatere,” says Steevenson. “Ben’s tried to make a wine that’s fermented really dry with no particular sweetness there and the acidity feels like it’s part of the wine.” The wine is made in exactly the same way as its Awatere sibling, in large stainless steel tanks. “It’s not the most exciting winemaking to watch, but it works,” says Steevenson. “It’s incredibly cold – it’s all about maintaining the fruit quality when you get the wine in. That’s the trick. With Sauvignon Blanc it’s all those delicate, lovely esters that make the wine interesting.”

at a tasting, I would be really tempted not to introduce it as a Marlborough Sauvignon, just to see what people said about it, because I think there is there is a sense of avoiding those kinds of slightly residual sugary, really whack-you-in-the-face-with-apassion-fruit type of Sauvignons.” Matt Monk of The Whalley Wine Shop agrees. “Like Emily I have a group of customers that would absolutely lap this up because it’s slightly different and it gives them something more to talk about,” he says. “Over the last year people have been much more adventurous in their price points and their styles of wines that they want to get to know.”

Fincher & Co The Show of Hands Pinot Noir The Fincher team has crafted a Pinot that’s ready to enjoy immediately. The fruit in the current release comes from Mount Edward (“a funky little place between Queenstown and Cromwell”) but will be sourced from Marlborough for future vintages. “It’s all about light, bright fresh wines; the vineyards are maintained with a kind of poise for lightness and delicacy that I really like,” says Steevenson. “Central Otago is obviously the most amazing place to spend any time but I kind of got a bit bored of the overly silky, overly plush Pinots that came out for a long time. I really like the move to lightness and brightness and freshness. “I do like this redness that you get from New Zealand Pinot. I’ve always liked Martinborough Pinot Noir and stylistically I’ve always had my eye on that kind of style: fruity, earthy and a bit spicy as opposed to juicy, dark, heavy and complex.” Steevenson adds: “I want to drink it with cold meats and I want to drink it this year. I’m not saying it won’t be fine in five years … but I really don’t see the point.”

Feature sponsored by Vineyard Productions For more information about Fincher & Co wines, visit vineyard-productions.com or call 0117 915 4555

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 45

Five reasons New Zealand is

New Zealand took a fast track to the top with the novelty and purity of its fruit-driven wines. But in the 2020s, diversity, consistency and maturity are increasingly the watchwords in a country that remains a top draw for independent merchants, says David Williams

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 46

STILL a must-have for indies The diversification of Sauvignon It’s impossible to talk about New Zealand without mentioning Sauvignon Blanc.

Not that some people wouldn’t like to try. There’s a divisiveness about the variety

even among fans of the country’s wines, with some finding its success just a bit too all-encompassing, dismissing the

wave of so-so, me-too versions that fill

the UK’s supermarket shelves as so much undifferentiated, formulaic commercial product.

Some 62% of the country’s total

plantings aren’t easily brushed aside,

however, and the reality is that, for such

a successful brand, the base quality level

of Kiwi or Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc

has stayed remarkably high. Sure there are bottles where the simple tricks of mass-

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 47

market commercial white winemaking

are in full effect. But when you compare

it to the rest of the list of really big-selling white wine styles in the UK of the past 30

years – from the last days of Liebfraumilch, through branded oak-chip Australian and

Californian Chardonnay and watery Pinot Grigio to the cream soda-powered rise of Continues page 48

NEW ZEALAND WINE

corporate consistency – but small players rising

From page 47

Prosecco – NZ Sauvignon has managed to retain its credibility remarkably well.

In the independent sector, there’s a natural

available at more premium prices.

these are the people who make the most

and understandable affinity for small

More than that, it’s also managed to

producers. And, more often than not,

develop and expand the stylistic range

interesting wines with the most interesting

Winemaking techniques such as extended

stories behind them.

skin contact, wild yeast and whole-bunch – even putting oysters in the tank in one

admittedly small-production cuvée –

plus different vessels such as concrete, oak, acacia, clay and steel are all being

employed, and the terroir differences both within Marlborough and its valleys and

around the country’s other regions are all being explored in much greater detail.

The result is a Sauvignon scene that is

far more diverse than the hard-to-shift

gooseberry stereotype allows, featuring such complex, serious and adventurous – not to mention individual – wines as

Framingham’s F-Series Sauvignon Blanc, Dog Point Section 94, Greywacke Wild and Elephant Hill Sea Sauvignon.

Pinot Noir’s maturity

Running hand in hand with the

improvement in Sauvignon Blanc over the past 20 years has been the increasing excellence of the

country’s Pinot Noir, which now takes up just shy of 15% of the New Zealand vineyard and counting.

And make no mistake, we are

very far beyond the early years of Kiwi Pinot now. The initial

surprise factor of the first few

vintages from very young vines – all that seductive, if simple,

but recognisably Pinot fruit – is still available at pretty decent

prices, and, like the Sauvignon,

delivered at a consistent quality level that

rarely dips below drinkable (no mean feat

when we’re talking, in supermarket terms, about sub-£10 prices in some cases).

But it’s at the higher price points where

New Zealand Pinot is really excelling today, with wines that are reaping the benefit of

vine age, better clonal diversity and less rigid winemaking regimens. With some

of the country’s best sites now featuring vines of 20 years old or more, the

fruit is better balanced, and producers are much more comfortable with

harvesting earlier. Meanwhile, in the

winery, they are less likely to acidify, rely less on the palate-ballast of new oak, and are much more sensitive with extraction.

There’s also a much greater

understanding of the different sites across the country,

from Marlborough’s fragrant prettiness to Central Otago’s

lush wildness via Canterbury’s finely structured elegance,

although, for now, it’s producer name – Kusuda, Rippon, Felton

Road, Bell Hill, Ata Rangi etc etc

etc – that remains the clearest

indicator of style.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 48

But you can have all the great small

producers in the world and still not find a

receptive audience if the bigger producers – those responsible for most consumers’

experience of a given country’s wines and

for shaping its image – aren’t up to scratch. New Zealand is lucky, then, that its best-

known and biggest-selling ambassadors in the UK – Brancott Estate, Villa Maria, Yealands – are easily among the most

interesting in the big branded world – and that there’s no equivalent of Blossom Hill or Yellowtail to lower the overall tone.

Valley, Saint Clair, Hunter’s, Craggy Range, Seresin among many others serving the independent sector with consistent,

trustworthy quality that consumers are

comfortable with – before they move on to the burgeoning scene of small producers

emerging in a country that has doubled its number of registered wineries to 718 in the past 20 years.

green thinking New Zealand’s reputation as one of the

world’s greener countries and economies

has not always been matched by reality. Its carbon footprint grew rapidly in the late

20th and early 21st century (+22% from 1990 to 2008), and the rapid expansion

of the country’s dairy industry has led to

wide-scale pollution of its waterways and

threats to biodiversity.

New Zealand has become closely

maintaining the country’s clean and

of excitement? Is there a Kiwi

But the New Zealand wine industry

does at least seem to be serious about

green image – and in treating the issue as something more serious than just a marketing matter.

The first wine industry to come up with

a nationwide sustainability programme in 1995, the country has some claim to

being among the most sustainable in the world, making good progress on a set of

industry-wide targets that include being

carbon neutral and zero waste to landfill by 2050. It has 95% of its vineyard area independently audited and certified as

sustainable, and 10% of vineyards certified as organic or biodynamic.

bringing out the experimental Like a kind of upmarket version of Chile,

associated with reliability, but has that come at the expense

equivalent of the Swartland or Santa Barbara avant garde? Well there’s certainly no

lack of experimentation.

I’ve been impressed by such

modern wine bar-friendly wines as

Hunter’s Offshoot Pet Nat, Pyramid Valley’s Orange blend and the various creatively

funky cuvees made by the Vandal collective of off-duty Marlborough winemakers. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s varietal

palette continues to expand, with

successful versions of Albariño (Leftfield; Stanley Estate) and Petit Manseng

(Forrest; Churton) joining the established and rapidly improving quality of its

Chardonnay, Syrah, Riesling and Alsace varieties.

It’s also well-served by its mid-sized

names, with the likes of Tinpot Hut, Esk

Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 49

THE WINEMAKER FILES //

Tamra Kelly-Washington Kelly Washington Wines Kelly Washington started out as a bit of a dream that Si and I had, to finally have our own wine label whereby we had full carte blanche over the wines, after working many years around the world with quite different wine styles and company philosophies. We probably didn’t realise how all-consuming it would be. But, like many start-ups in life, we jumped in head first and have learned a great deal along the way. I now refer to it as our passion project! Our goal is to be organic with our entire range in the next year. All of our whites are certified organic, it is our Pinot Noir that is not, but we have a plan for this.

I have had quite a long love affair with Sauvignon Blanc. There is nothing that can beat a chilled glass of classicallymade Sauvignon Blanc on a sunny deck. Often Simon and I enjoy the more textural, subdued styles, such as our Kelly Washington – these styles are so versatile and can transcend many moods and occasions. This summer we have found ourselves craving a classic Marlborough Sauvignon. And this is it. You know it, you know what you can expect, and you crave it. It’s that saline acidity, that wholly refreshing cleansing mouthfeel that dances across your palate. Delicious. Blends are brilliant. Even though we make single-varietal, single-site and even single-plot wines predominantly, these are always the sum of different barrels,

amphorae, eggs … you name it! Each vessel will express itself so individually, when made the way we make our wines – native yeasts, different quantities of lees in each, different substrates etc. The mind – and palate! – boggles. I do make quite a fun, traditional blend – a Semillon/Sauvignon. I blend the fruit in the vineyard and coferment and age. So, I really have to gauge what the wine will be like before it is made. New Zealand wine is so dynamic and exciting right now. It may be that Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir are taking a leading role, certainly in terms of export, but there are so many other brilliant, more esoteric styles to be discovered. Wonderful Rieslings, Chardonnays, Pinot Blancs, and other white varietals such as Arneis – and also the Methodes are of excellent quality. Also, within the Sauvignon category, there is so much length and breadth of style and many different terroirs to discover. In terms of red wines, the plot thickens. Wonderful Pinot Noirs produced all the way down in Central Otago, up through Marlborough and Nelson, and also up to Martinborough in the North Island. Sensational Syrahs, Cabernets, Malbecs in the North, from Hawke’s Bay all the way up to Waiheke island. Extremely diverse and exciting. Three things I most enjoy about my job: Magic, using my palate, creation. Three things I least enjoy about my job: Bad weather, cash flow, commuting.

Tamra is one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed winemakers, whose experience in Italy as well as Seresin Estate laid the foundations for Kelly Washington Wines, which she runs with husband Simon. Her wines come from Marlborough, Central Otago and Hawke’s Bay. Kelly Washington wines are imported into the UK by Jeroboams 020 7288 8888 www.jeroboams.co.uk sales@jeroboams.co.uk

I think coming into our fifth vintage, it’s a good time to stop and reflect. We really want to home in even more on wonderful organic plots within the regions where we make wine. We are also concentrating on producing an organic Pinot Noir from Gibbston.

I feel incredibly blessed to have my husband by my side, in both life and in business. We both have a very strong, deep shared passion for wine, and this is central to how we live our lives in many aspects.

Kelly Washington Semillon/ Sauvignon Blanc

Kelly Washington Sauvignon Blanc

Kelly Washington Cabernet Franc

RRP: £22.95

RRP: £19.95

RRP: £27.95

A very esoteric style from New Zealand – there's hardly any made in our style that gives Semillon the leading role (Semillon 65%, Sauvignon 35%). It's fermented and aged in a concrete egg, and has wonderful length, texture and acidity.

A Marlborough Sauvignon presenting itself in quite a different way – hand-picked, whole bunch pressed, native yeast, loads of lees contact, fermented in old oak barrels. It has a lovely softness to it. Perhaps stylistically more old world than new world.

100% Cabernet Franc from Hawke's Bay. The wine is very much Loire in style. It's juicy, and predominantly aged in old oak barrels. A very pretty and elegant wine.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 51

THE WINEMAKER FILES //

Chris Seifried, Seifried Estate I’ve got two sisters, Heidi and Anna, who are also involved in the family business. We are very true to our roots in that we do what we need to do, everybody is involved. We all have titles but it’s all very loose and it seems to work reasonably well.

The people who work with us really become part of the family. We get to know their kids, we go to their place on a Friday night and have a barbecue wherever they might be. I enjoy those interactions with other people in the wine trade too; there is real banter among wine producers, which I think is for the common good of the industry – to grow, to learn, to get another perspective. It is quite a small wine industry, and quite a young one, so we are always sharing information. I went to university in Australia and worked in a number of wineries overseas, but I always had in my heart to come back to New Zealand. In 1995, when I started university, mum and dad built the new winery. The original winery was a real mish-mash. They didn’t have a lot of money and they weren’t sure how big the business would be, so each year they were planting more grapes and the winery was built on to every couple of years. I always wanted to come home. I always enjoyed being in the winery and the vineyard. I’m a very hands-on person and I enjoy tractors and machinery and seeing how things work. When I was in my latter years of high school I would rather be in

the vineyard and the winery than studying. We’re very lucky that as a business we have our own vineyards. We have our own winery and bottling line. So as a family business we are very much about the quality of the wine. The vines are getting older and Heidi, with her analytical background, is spending more time in the vineyard understanding the soil science, the nutrients.

We’re part of New Zealand’s sustainable wine growing initiative. We try to minimise the spraying. With chemicals comes the tractor, so there’s diesel, there’s environmental impact, there’s soil compaction. We’ve got 600 sheep running around in the vineyard and they do a magic job leaf-plucking. They provide great fertiliser. They eat the leaves and we get good wind flow through the canopy and lots of sunlight, so it reduces the amount of chemicals we have to use on the vines. I think with Sauvignon Blanc we are making better decisions in the vineyard and using riper fruit. The style is richer, less grassy more tropical fruit flavour. It’s more zingy, lovely and refreshing but at the same time it’s not green and hard. We’re continuing to evolve that style. It’s tricky to move the style without turning the dial too much. It will be interesting to see how global warming will affect the grapes. When I was about 10, the harvest date would be

Austrian-born Hermann Seifried and his New Zealand wife Agnes started their wine business in Nelson, on South Island, in 1973. Today their world-famous business includes 10 vineyards and a modern winery, and is run by their children Chris, Heidi and Anna. Seifried Estate is imported into the UK by Fells 01442 870900 www.fells.co.uk

April 10 to May 10. Only 30 years later we are harvesting from March 10 until April 5.

Nelson is a slightly cooler region than Marlborough. We don’t get the hot, hot days and we get slightly more rain and a lot of vigour in the vines. We have to work a bit harder in the vineyard to shift the canopy and it’s a more challenging environment to grow grapes. I don’t want to say the style of wine we make is better than Marlborough – but it’s very, very good wine.

Seifried Nelson Sauvignon Blanc 2020

Seifried Nelson Grüner Veltliner 2019

Aotea by Seifried Pinot Noir 2018

RRP: £14.99 The wine we’re most proud of at the moment. A rich, bright style with lots of tropical fruit flavours – nectarine, guava and passion fruit – but at the same time we’ve got a limey, zingy twist on the finish. Very fresh and fruity and a typical Nelson-style Sauvignon Blanc. The 2020 has won three gold medals already.

RRP: £14.99 We’re thrilled finally to be able to grow this variety from my dad's homeland. We’re fermenting it in stainless steel, a cool fermentation, and we’re trying to retain the characters of peach, pear and nectarine but with firm acidity. We’re not making a lot of it – it’s still niche for us.

RRP: £23.99 2018 was quite a good growing season with lovely ripe fruit. This was hand-plunged on the stems. We used a range of new oak and one and two-year-old barrels for 12 months. It’s drinking well now and it’s quite brambly, rich, sweet fruit. It will continue to age well for a number of years.

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 52

NEW ZEALAND INDIE PROMO

New Zealand offering and show the country’s diversity,” says Chris Stroud, New Zealand Winegrowers market manager for Europe. “New Zealand Sauvignon has taken the world by storm. There’s nothing that tastes like it and it is the number one variety in the UK. There’s an opportunity to really explore the

New Zealand Winegrowers is relaunching the Independent

diversity of it. There are oaked styles, wild ferment styles,

Retail Promotion which was due to take place in April and

barrel fermented examples, there are sub regional styles ... and

May last year as Covid-19 struck and will now run this spring.

every one of them offers something different.

The promotion will be extended so retailers can run their

“People may come in knowing about New Zealand

campaign any time throughout April, May and June. Sadly,

Sauvignon Blanc but an independent can showcase different

due to the current situation, it is not possible to offer a trip to

styles and take people on a journey.

New Zealand, as in previous years. The 2021 New Zealand

“Independents can also showcase varieties like Chardonnay,

Winegrowers Promotion will offer participating retailers

Pinot Gris, Syrah and the different Pinot Noirs that are

the chance to win one of three prizes of £1,000 value to

available. These are things you wouldn’t necessarily get in

be redeemed for NZ wine of their choice for their store. In

mainstream shops and it’s an opportunity for independents to

addition, New Zealand Winegrowers will offer consumers the

forge a real point of difference and show the depth that New

chance to win £100 of NZ wine from their local independent.

Zealand can offer.”

The campaign strapline – How About a Glass of Right

Stroud is also keen to encourage indies to focus on some of

Here – aims to bring a slice of New Zealand to this market

the personalities behind the wines, and to look at innovations

showcasing the stunning beauty of the country and linking it

including organic and biodynamic viticulture as well as New

with its fabulous wines.

Zealand’s world-leading programme into reduced alcohol

New Zealand Winegrowers will also offer online tasting training for participating retailers and their staff to provide them with extra knowledge and enthusiasm for New Zealand wines.

wines. New Zealand Winegrowers can assist with digital imagery and information, and limited POS.

To be in to win, participating retailers need to run a standout New Zealand promotion with the simple aim to showcase

Feature sponsored by New

New Zealand’s diversity for at least two weeks during April,

Zealand Winegrowers. For

May and June 2021. The promotion can be run in-store, online

more information and to

or as a combination of the two.

“Our objective is to encourage independents to look at their

chris.stroud@nzwine.com.

ROUSSILLON WINE

The Roussillon is a region that sometimes struggles to assert its identity. In his new book, Richard Mark James shows that it’s a place where Grenache, in all its forms, really excels

hile avoiding rehashing all

those been-said-a-hundredtimes-before clichés about

how vast the south of France’s wine regions were/are, the book focuses

exclusively on a small and unique part of it

usually still gets stuck in with the whole of

Noir, blanc or gris: G is at home in the wi

accounts for just 7.5% of that overall

family of grape varieties in three different

heritage could be lost for ever at the

(about 20,000 hectares in 2019) and below

port-style vins doux naturels (VDN), but it

cousins Grenache Blanc and Grenache

called the Roussillon.

All of that “biggest vineyard in France

and the world” hyperbole is simply not accurate in this case but the Roussillon

the Languedoc and greater region beyond, whether it liked it or not. The Roussillon

“region”, as the French understand it (now called Occitanie), in terms of vineyards

2% of total French wine production. This is one of many good reasons why it should be treated as a distinct entity in its own right, even if historically and stylistically it does form part of the French Mediterranean South.

There seems to be a minor buzz about

the Grenache variety whether from the south of France, the better-established

southern Rhône valley regions, north east Spain or South Australia.

Best known as a red or “black” variety,

Grenache Noir in French, in fact it’s a

shades. There’s a strong heritage of old-

vine Grenache in the Roussillon for making has become the region’s defining grape for red (and rosé) wines, giving them power (sometimes an unfashionably elevated

alcohol level) and lush spicy fruit, although not necessarily such a deep colour or firm tannins.

here were 6,000 hectares of

Grenache in 2016, falling from over 7,000 hectares 10 years

earlier; if it continued to diminish while not being replaced sufficiently, that

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 54

expense of newer arrivals such as Syrah.

The same can be said for its white variety

Gris that have also experienced more

removal than planting. There were 1,300 and 1,000 hectares of each respectively

(2016) representing a drop of 30% since 2005, although this decrease would

correspond to reduced demand for certain

VDN wines which these two varieties were traditionally complementary to (with Macabeu).

However, with more

interest in dry white wines in the Roussillon in recent years and a dwindling

Indication Géographique Protegée (IGP)

which is, after all, the sexy Maury and

make a pure expressive varietal style (red,

weren’t a little bolder with a cap of 80%

Côtes Catalanes or Vin de France caters

for 100% Grenache for those wishing to

white and rosé) or a statement-making red Grenache that deliberately doesn’t fit the control-freakish appellation regulations.

A new CRV village subzone bearing the

Maury name was a long time in the making, and finally Maury Sec AOP (“dry” Maury) was launched from the 2011 vintage for

red wines sourced from the same zone as

for Maury VDN fortified reds.

Grenache ld south supply of suitable vine-stock, growers in certain areas have been keen to replant more Grenache Blanc and Gris such as coastal vineyards in Collioure.

Grenache Blanc lends richness aroma

and body while Grenache Gris is more

exotic, floral and zestier, although both

successfully make either aromatic unoaked or full-bodied barrel-fermented white

wines, as well as gris being useful for rosé thanks to its pink-tinged skin.

The Appellation d’Origine Protegée

(AOP) regions of Côtes du Roussillon and

Côtes du Roussillon Villages (CRV) permit up to 70% Grenache Noir for red wines (and for rosé for the former), and up to

90% for Collioure red and rosé. Whereas

t made absolute sense, given this

whole area is home to some of the Roussillon’s most inspirational

full-on red wines, which until then took the Côtes du Roussillon Villages or IGP rank depending on the wine. The AOP

catchment extends either side and south

of Maury in the far north of the Roussillon totalling a relatively small area of 270 hectares (2019), where the terrain is

suitably wild with hillside vineyards on black schist and marl surrounded by scrubland.

Common sense prevailed over the

guidelines for authorised grapes: Grenache Noir must be “the principal variety” with Carignan, Mourvèdre, Syrah or Lladoner

Pelut as “complementary”. There still has to be a minimum of two grapes, though, with Grenache quantified at 60% to 80% of the blend.

Roussillon grape.

But you have to wonder why they

on the Grenache content – after all, most

Maury VDN is made from 100% Grenache Noir – to grant those who can handle this variety’s qualities the freedom to create pure knockout wines. Nothing against Syrah or Mourvèdre, but it would give

winemakers carte blanche to craft really distinctive reds that taste different from

many in the Languedoc or Roussillon: rich

spicy Mediterranean reds with a hilly twist! Ten years on, Maury sec appears to have

panned out well in practice with many

winemakers experimenting then finding the style they think fits the name best.

What it has done is provided growers

with the context to select their best blocks of Grenache and use the appellation as a way of producing expressive single-site

reds, which previously would have been labelled as either CRV or IGP.

In any case, there are no doubt those

who’ll continue to make “old style” dry

Maury reds (often 100% Grenache) under

the Côtes Catalanes banner, as they always have done, never caring about appellation rules. But, like top Collioure reds, these

wines can be expensive, the downside of

trying to make money from the Roussillon’s generally speaking low-yielding and

economically unforgiving vine-lands.

Maury has a certain proven track record

which should be an advantage on the

marketing front. And the same original

mistake made with CRV was avoided where winegrowers were forced to include a

specific amount of Syrah in their wine,

even if there was little tradition of it being

planted in this area. The Maury sec “terms & conditions” do stipulate the winemaker has to include at least 60% Grenache,

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 55

The Roussillon – ‘French Catalonia’, Wild Wine Country by Richard Mark James is available from Amazon as a paperback or Kindle edition

BAGS

RPET BAG FOR LIFE Oversolve rPET is created by recycling previously used plastics, including bottles. The resulting

FAIRTRADE & GOTS ORGANIC CANVAS TOTE BAG Bidbi Made from premium quality heavyweight cotton canvas, this tote bag is available in in different earthy tones, ready for printing if required. www.bidbi.co.uk

material is surprisingly soft and yet perfectly suited for making robust bags. www.oversolve.co.uk

CARRY ME HOME

BOTTLE BAG WITH REMOVABLE DIVIDERS WBC Durable and stylish jute bags, strong enough to transport six bottles of Champagne. Contact direct for prices and branding options. www.wbc.co.uk

Bags of ethical credentials

KRAFT BOTTLE BAG WITH TWISTED PAPER HANDLES Transpack

POTATO STARCH CARRIER BAGS Oversolve Can’t quite say goodbye to the plastic bag?

KRAFT CARD BOTTLE CARRIERS WBC

Keeping it old school doesn’t mean

Try this instead. 100% home compostable

Available in a range of sizes, these flat

compromising on the environmental

in garden green bins, it’s claimed. and the

packed, pop-up crates are easy to store

message. 100% recyclable and

water-based inks ensure it is truly eco-

and comfortably traditional. There’s

biodegradable, these bags are a classic.

friendly.

plenty of space for branding too.

www.transpack.co.uk

www.oversolve.co.uk

www.wbc.co.uk

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 56

SUPPLIER BULLETIN

LOUIS LATOUR AGENCIES 12-14 Denman Street London W1D 7HJ

0207 409 7276 enquiries@louislatour.co.uk www.louislatour.co.uk

Join us for our Alternative Annual Tasting from 23rd- 25th February 2021 In light of risks from Covid-19 we’ve decided to take our annual tasting online this year, but don’t fear – we’ve lined up plenty of educational and tasting experiences for you. Our webinars on Wednesday 23rd February

• How to Build a Wine List where we speak with a panel of buyers from different sectors of the on-trade

• Highlights from the Louis Latour Agencies portfolio with Oz Clarke One-to-one tastings on the 24th & 25th February

We can’t meet in person so join us for a personal online wine tasting. After making your appointment, you will be asked to select the wines from our event list and a sample pack will be posted to you in advance.

Some lesser known Pinot Noirs highlights from the event list Des Lyres de Pinot Noir and Irancy from Simonnet-Febvre are two staff

favourites. The first comes from Simonnet’s Auxois domaine and the second includes includes 5% César, France’s oldest cultivated grape variety.

Bellevue Pinot Noir, Les Pierres Dorées Pinot Noir and Fixin are three new or nearly

new Pinots from Louis Latour from the Var, Beaujolais and Burgundy respectively. Each is a vibrant example and represent great value for money.

For more info please contact your account manager or Emma.Alsos@louislatour.co.uk

hatch mansfield New Bank House 1 Brockenhurst Road Ascot Berkshire SL5 9DL 01344 871800 info@hatch.co.uk

A Taste of Hatch ... Determined not to be beaten by the prospect of no live trade tastings for a little while longer we have hatched our own sampling service. A pick ‘n’ mix including all things new for the spring along with some old favourites, you can make your own tasting selection box of up to six indie exclusive wines free of charge.

A Taste of Hatch at a time convenient to you

www.hatchmansfield.com @hatchmansfield

For more info or to register scan the QR code or visit hatchmansfield.com/atasteofhatch

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 57

SUPPLIER BULLETIN

C&C wines 109 Blundell Street London N7 9BN 020 3261 0927 help@carsoncarnevalewines.com www.carsoncarnevalewines.com

@CandC_Wines @carsoncarnevalewines

BERKMANN wine cellars 10-12 Brewery Road London N7 9NH 020 7609 4711 indies@berkmann.co.uk www.berkmann.co.uk @berkmannwine @berkmann_wine

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 58

liberty wines 020 7720 5350 order@libertywines.co.uk www.libertywines.co.uk

@liberty_wines

Domaine Rolly Gassmann joins Liberty Wines

by David Gleave MW

Born in 1967 when the Rolly and Gassmann winemaking families were joined by marriage and run today by second generation Pierre Gassmann, this domaine has built a reputation for uniquely long-lived and textured Alsace wines.

The family is renowned for their remarkable collection of vintages, ageing and storing

around 1.5 million bottles in their impressive new winery (locally nicknamed

‘The Cathedral’) until they are ready to drink. Pierre not only encourages

noble rot and harvests late to achieve high sugar levels and concentrated fruit expression, but also employs a long wild-yeast fermentation and

extended time on lees for all his cuvées. Their resulting richness needs time to harmonise, so Pierre releases his wines later than most.

The domaine has 10 hectares in Bergheim and 40 hectares in Rorschwihr,

which lies on a fault line and boasts all 21 known variations of limestone

soil. The vineyards are divided into 70 different plots, all farmed according to organic and biodynamic principles. The standout lieux-dits include

Kappelweg de Rorschwihr, which lies on ancient blue-grey marl limestone

and produces a powerful Riesling with racy acidity, and Brandhurst de Bergheim, which sits on Jurassic marl limestone and gives a generous and superbly fresh Pinot Gris.

From the vibrant Sylvaner Réserve Millésime and strikingly restrained Gewurztraminer

through to the opulent Oberer Weingarten de Rorschwihr Vendanges Tardives, we can recommend giving these intriguing wines a try!

richmond wine agencies The Links, Popham Close Hanworth Middlesex TW13 6JE 020 8744 5550 info@richmondwineagencies.com

@richmondwineag1

Familia Schroeder, Patagonia, rebrands its popular Select range We have just received stock of the new Saurus Select Malbec 2019.

“Intense purple colour with ruby hints. Complex nose. Ripe red fruit aromas of cherry, plums and currants are combined with spicy notes. The barrel ageing bring some vanilla and mocha scents. “A pleasant mouthfeel with elegance and sweet soft tannins.” – Leonardo Puppato, Winemaker

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 59

SUPPLIER BULLETIN

walker & Wodehouse 109a Regents Park Road London NW1 8UR 0207 449 1665 orders@walkerwodehousewines.com www.walkerwodehousewines.com

@WalkerWodehouse

New to the portfolio: Balfour Wines Set in 400 acres of Kentish countryside on the Hush Heath Estate, the Balfour winery was launched by Richard and Leslie Balfour-Lynn, who planted their first vines here in 2002. The winery remains family-run to this day, and stands testament to the

power and potential of quality English winemaking, producing some of the best wines seen on these shores in recent years.

Balfour’s range has expanded quickly to encompass a full and diverse range of still

and traditional method sparkling wines. Particularly of renown is their traditional method sparkling rose, which won a Gold at the International Wine Challenge for their first vintage back in 2008.

For more information about Balfour or to taste the wines, please contact your Account Manager.

buckingham schenk Unit 5, The E Centre Easthampstead Road Bracknell RG12 1NF 01753 521336

ERLAND SWITZ ITALY FRANCE AL SPAIN

gne

Champa

INA ARGENT Fabre gas • Bode LIA s AUSTRA Adams Wine y • Sorb • Vineyards E Family CHIL és Silva • Garc Rocas • Las FRANCE Auriol aines • Dom ler • Haul • ITALY

ine ti e Cant ua Vigne Wineries n • Pasq nk Italia • Sche Tomasella te • Tenu AND ZEAL NEW Wines Ferry • Rock vineyards family • te Pā AL PORTUG enor • Porm

doro one ola Luna • Amic da Agric • Azien Menzione ilde di ne • Brun li del Baro ceto • Casa llo di Quer • Caste enti • Gerg to • Il Casa Auer rei • Kelle tta o Zana • Marc

20 22

28 30

30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46

u SPAIN arri ga Otaz lia Chav • Bode gas Fami iedro • Bode gas Murv • Bode Alto lo • Casa Monseran llo de • Casti UniÓ rs • Celle LAND SWITZER Vins ux • Bado Viborne aien la eiss • Dom e Edelw • La Suiss

GNE CHAMPA Launois et • Bonn

48 50 54

PORTUG

ITALY della Luna • Bacio Schenk Italia i, • Rivan

58 60 64

CHILE

68 70 72 74 76 78

82 84 86

: denotes

@buckinghamschenk

Schenk wineries

INA

ARGENT

& brands

EZIA ALTO ADIGE s FRIULI-VEN Winerie Italian Schenk Auer VENICE TOD MILAN LAN VENE Kellerei ato NEW ZEA Il Cas Pasqua e Amicon PIEDMONT TUSCANY ABRUZZO one del Bar Casali ROME rceto di Que Castello a Agricol Azienda ro SARDINIA Lunado

Marco

Zanatta

PUGLIA

AND

AUCKL

SICILY D

NORTH

ISLAN

ti Gergen

NGTON

te Pā

family

s vineyard

WELLI

BOROUGH

MARL

TCHUR

CHRIS

SOUTH

2021 WINE LIST

Rock

Ferry

Wines

ISLAN

CENTRAL

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 60

Tomasel

LIA

AUSTRA

94 96

NEW Z

@BuckSchenk

Tenute

ing win

Sparkl

EALAN

info@buckingham-schenk.co.uk www.buckingham-schenk.co.uk

wine

ITALY

Still

ODUCER

OUR PR

OTAGO 57

mentzendorff The Woolyard 52 Bermondsey Street London SE1 3UD 020 7840 3600 info@mentzendorff.co.uk

Established in 1815, Fonseca is regarded as one of the most stylistically consistent of the class Vintage Port houses. Its Ports have been made by five generations of the Guimaraens family since its foundation and Fonseca is the only Port house with four 100 Point scoring wines. Fonseca cellars its aged tawnies in the Douro rather than in Vila Nova de Gaia; the considerable difference in heat and humidity lends Fonseca’s tawny ports a very distinctive “baked” richness reminiscent of butterscotch. Guimaraens Vintage Ports are made in years when the wines are more supple and early maturing. They are approachable, ready to drink earlier and for their quality and rarity offer exceptional value.

www.mentzendorff.co.uk

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT YOUR MENTZENDORFF ACCOUNT MANAGER

MALUX HUNGARIAN WINE 020 7164 6925 sales@hungarianwineandspirits.com www.hungarianwineandspirits.com @maluxhungarianwine_spirits Exclusive Specialist in Exciting quality wines for Indies

Rare & Indigenous grapes + some of the best International varieties from Hungary

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 61

Passionate family-run producers + the ancient Archabbey. Wines with stories + character

Sustainable farming. Low Intervention. Award winners + unheard of gems

For Wow Wines + great customer service contact Audrey

SUPPLIER BULLETIN

AWIN BARRATT SIEGEL WINE AGENCIES 28 Recreation Ground Road Stamford Lincolnshire PE9 1EW 01780 755810

#SpectacularSouthAfrica

orders@abs.wine www.abs.wine

@ABSWines

Famille Helfrich Wines

NOZECO RANGE

Less calories

No alcohol

Vegan friendly

Dedicated on-trade and indies division

1, rue Division Leclerc, 67290 Petersbach, France cdavies@lgcf.fr 07789 008540 @FamilleHelfrich

NOZECO is a Premium Sparkling 0% abv wine. On average 4 times fewer calories than wine. Vegan friendly!

20cl

75cl

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 62

Fells Fells House, Station Road Kings Langley WD4 8LH 01442 870 900 info@fells.co.uk www.fells.co.uk @FellsWine je_fells

Celebrating Fairtrade Wines

Ever since Miguel Torres established his winery in Chile, the company has committed itself to a long-term collaboration with local growers. Torres firmly believe that producing the highest quality grapes is best achieved by respecting every step of the growing process, including the provision of dignified conditions for its farmers. As a result, Miguel Torres is now the largest Fair Trade winery in Chile, making their Santa Digna collection the ideal choice for Fairtrade Fortnight 2021.

top selection 23 Cellini Street London SW8 2LF www.topselection.co.uk info@topselection.co.uk Contact: Alastair Moss Telephone: 020 3958 0744

@topselectionwines

@tswine

THE WINE MERCHANT february 2021 63