MERCHANT PROFILE
Matt Thompson, Wentworth, August 2021
Let there be light For 30 years, Lightfoot Wines was adored for its defiantly old-school approach and its mysterious dark corners. Under new ownership, the tiny South Yorkshire shop is a much brighter place and has been modernised just enough to keep the locals onside. Business has boomed, as Nigel Huddleston discovered on a recent visit
A
sk most outsiders what they
associate with South Yorkshire and they’d put its industrial
heritage in coal and steel near the top
of the list. The lush green farmland that
lies east of the M1 between Barnsley and Rotherham is less feted, but it’s here on the main street through the village of
Wentworth that you’ll find Lightfoot Wines, a tiny, traditional wine merchant in an old stone building, next to the village pub and across the road from the general store.
Once a butchers, the site has been a wine
shop for 35 years, most of those in the
guise of Lightfoot Wines, the name given
THE WINE MERCHANT september 2021 32
to it by former owner Derek Lightfoot who retired four years ago.
That’s when it was bought by well-
known local businessman Sir Dave
Richards, whose interests also included a company importing wine to the UK to be consolidated for onward export.
The Lightfoot building is part of the
Fitzwilliam Estate that owns much of the village and specifies the shade of green
that its door and window frames have to be painted. Half a mile up the road is the
tourist hotspot of Wentworth Woodhouse, reputed to be the largest-fronted house in Europe.
