23 minute read
round table report
Tower Summit 2022
Continuing our coverage of the autumn round-table discussion with a selected group of independent merchants, which began in our October edition, the discussion turns to Christmas sales, and how to make money from online wine sales.
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The Tower Summit is organised in association with Hatch Mansfield.
Graham Holter, The Wine Merchant
Are you running Christmas fairs for your customers? What role will suppliers play?
Nish Patel, Shenfield Wine Co
We’re doing fairs twice a year, one in May and one in November.
We relaunched them this year. I was a bit nervous but we pretty much sold out. We had about 75 customers come. The ticket price is £20 and they get to taste about 100 wines. We are going to add another 20 spaces.
From suppliers, I need their time, and for them to rock up with samples. We do serious trade out of it and to be fair most of our suppliers are very supportive.
Robin Eadon, Dulwich Vintners
I’m not doing one, mainly because I haven’t got round to putting one in place. We have difficulty in finding a space to do it and, where we are, there isn’t really anywhere that’s suitable. If we could find a suitable venue, like Nish, we’d ask for the suppliers’ time and some stock.
Sam Howard, HarperWells, Norwich
We’ve got 160 booked in. We launched ours in September to our mailing-list customers, then we went live on Facebook. We charge £20 a ticket. We generally buy a six-pack of everything on show and then, depending on the relationship with the agency, have some samples on top of that.
Conor Nolan, The Secret Cellar, Kent
We’re doing two winemaker dinners as we find them really successful. We charge £85 and guests get a four-course meal, with wines paired, and they get to meet and greet the winemaker. It’s really good value. For us it’s great local PR. We bring a caterer in for the food.
Graham Holter, The Wine Merchant
Going back to fairs, would you rather have the suppliers in attendance, or just more samples?
Mitch Swift, The Bottleneck, Broadstairs
I’m on a smaller scale, so I wouldn’t need the reps talking to my customers about wine for me. I can do that. On a bigger scale I can see why it would be quite beneficial to have their time.
Nish Patel, Shenfield Wine Co
Certainly at our tastings, with around 70 people, and 12 tables, it’s impossible to manage without a knowledgeable person behind each table.
When we relaunched them after Covid, to keep people more comfortable we split the evening in two and did two sittings for 40. The feedback from customers was great; they loved it because they said they could actually spend time with the person who was pouring the wine and get more information about the product. So we’ve stuck to that format.
James Manson, Hatch Mansfield
I was there, standing in for a colleague, and it was great – it was a really good tasting because it felt like we could really give people a snapshot of what the wine was about.
Graham Holter, The Wine Merchant
Has anyone got figures in their head about what Christmas means financially?
Nish Patel, Shenfield Wine Co
Christmas Eve is the biggest day of the year. The first 24 days of December is nearly 20% of our entire turnover.
Conor Nolan, The Secret Cellar, Kent
Ironically, Christmas Eve for us, it’s like everyone goes to sleep. By midday, they’ve done what they’ve needed to do and they are where they need to be. At Tunbridge Wells and Wadhurst, we close at 2pm on Christmas Eve. Our demographic is older.
Mitch Swift, The Bottleneck, Broadstairs
Last year I stayed open until 10pm on Christmas Eve and it was busy. People were
The meaning of Christmas
The festive countdown has begun. So how are our independent panelists preparing?
From left: Nish Patel, Sam Howard, James Manson and Freddie Cobb
coming in, because no matter how much they plan, everyone forgets something.
Robin Eadon, Dulwich Vintners
We did a 12-hour day on the day before Christmas Eve and then we do a nine-to-six on Christmas Eve. Last year we did record trade on that reduced-hours day. I think there was still some uncertainty as to what was going to happen with lockdown.
Freddie Cobb, Vagabond Wines
It’s on a Sunday this year, so you’ve now got to factor everything into that weekend before – that will be your big weekend. And are people going back to work for four days before New Year’s Eve?
Graham Holter, The Wine Merchant
Champagne supplies were a big problem for a lot of indies last Christmas. Are we expecting something similar this year?
Conor Nolan, The Secret Cellar, Kent
It’s still a problem. LVMH are a nightmare.
Mitch Swift, The Bottleneck, Broadstairs
The biggest frustration I’ve found with Champagne over the past 12 months is that we have customers who only want a certain Champagne, and it’s out of stock so they go elsewhere because they won’t change: that’s what they like. I can’t get it, so they go elsewhere. You just lose that customer.
Conor Nolan, The Secret Cellar, Kent
We had one guy who would only drink Ruinart. We flipped him on to [Taittinger] Comtes de Champagne and that’s all he buys now. But you get other people and you just can’t get the stuff they want. It’s all LVMH.
Mitch Swift, The Bottleneck, Broadstairs
I’ve got a big shelf of about 50 different Champagnes, but we cut down massively. But, as a positive we now stock other sparkling wine so it has broadened my offering, and I’ve been able to educate my customers on how broad that category is. I went through loads of top-end English sparkling and that did so well and people have stuck with it. Gusbourne did really well for us. However, the one thing with English wine is the margins. So I’ve broadened the range, but actually I’m making a bit less money.
More Tower Summit coverage overleaf
Is online retailing worth the aggravation?
Our panelists discuss the best way to make money from e-commerce, and whether the effort justifies the sometimes meagre rewards for indies
Mitch Swift, The Bottleneck, Broadstairs
I’m really keen to understand how online sales have changed for everybody here since Covid and how much reward versus investment everyone thinks they actually get from online sales.
Freddie Cobb, Vagabond Wines
We didn’t really have an online presence before Covid hit, so overnight it was stressful, taking bottle shots of all those different SKUs. But it kept us going and the thing that was really big for us during that time, rather than bottle sales, was doing tastings at home. We were sending out taster bottles.
One of our stores during lockdown became a mini bottling line, so much so that we launched our own subscription service off the back of it. Customers sign up for £20 and get taster bottles and every month we tailor-make it. One of the first things people switched off was the subscription and we’ve seen a massive pull-back from online sales. I’d say it’s less than 5% of our total sales. We found packing and delivery hard; we were uncompetitive with our rates. We charge an £8.99 flat rate and we are making a loss. That was and still is a big question mark.
Robin Eadon, Dulwich Vintners
We saw a huge increase as soon as lockdown hit. It went from 5% to 60%70% of our orders that were coming in through the website and our website couldn’t cope. It was built a while ago, so we are looking to change, but it’s a massive outlay for not a huge amount of reward.
We adapted it as far as we possibly could in-house, as one of our guys does code a little bit, but it really pushed the limits so we need a complete overhaul really. But we have found that those people ordering online were just doing so because they were sat at home. Now we have 10 or 15 local people that order online.
We’ve looked at Deliveroo, but they charge so much.
Mitch Swift, The Bottleneck, Broadstairs
I have a friend who works in a shop and they have Deliveroo set up with the most basic stuff listed that people can just click and buy. If it’s £11.50 in the shop it will be nearer £20 on Deliveroo.
Nish Patel, Shenfield Wine Co
People are lazy. It is mind-boggling. So a £10 bottle of wine is coming out at £16 and on top of that they have to pay a delivery charge. Is it worth doing? I suppose so. All you’re doing is picking it up off the shelf and putting it in a bag.
In lockdown we put up a landing page and did click and collect. For the reasons Freddie gave, packaging and delivery, it’s hard to be competitive. We are a small neighbourhood bottle shop and, to a degree, if you go online you can find these
From left: Mitch Swift, Robin Eadon and Conor Nolan
products anywhere and I’m going to get undercut. So I was thinking: do I set it up under a different name?
So Mary who lives across the road, she’d go online and see The Shenfield Wine Company and think well, it’s cheaper to buy it on there than it is to walk across the road, so you’d have to do it under a different name.
You could make a 10% or 15% margin on it but it would be sales far away from Shenfield that you never otherwise would have had. That would make more sense to
me.
Conor Nolan, The Secret Cellar, Kent
We are reducing the number of SKUs based on Google Analytics that tells us which places people visit the most. We are using that data to rebuild our site and we’ll strip out a load of products that don’t need to sit there. We’ll introduce ApplePay and bring it into the 21st century.
During Covid, The Secret Cellar did phenomenal business, especially at Wadhurst because they did a lot of local deliveries and we kept some of those customers as walk-ins.
The rest of the online business is just completely random. You cannot compete on price, it’s just the range of products that you have or producers that you work with that no one else has.
We have corporate business with the Wooden Winebox Company for gifting. We have a team of people who come in to do it and the amount of cardboard we get through is criminal. Generally online you cannot compete with The Wine Society.
Mitch Swift, The Bottleneck, Broadstairs
How long does it take to get that investment back, bearing in mind that it contributes less than 5% of your sales?
Conor Nolan, The Secret Cellar, Kent
We’ll get our investment back before Christmas. It’s not that expensive because all you are doing is rebuilding the back end and dropping new content in, and standardising the content, so all the pictures look the same. We’re not coming from a standing start.
It’s not a huge amount of money but it is labour intensive. Once you’ve got it done, all the bells and whistles and you have Stripe and Apple Pay and everything else, that’s when it all becomes much easier.
Sam Howard, HarperWells, Norwich
Don’t compete with the big guys – don’t try and be an online wine shop.
We spent £30k in 2006 with a local company to build us a website and it did the job. We spent a lot of time writing wine information because that’s what we were told Google was looking for, so we had information about grape varieties. It got older and older and older until it wasn’t fit for purpose. It wouldn’t be sized for phones.
It was 1% revenue for us as well. We took it down and went with a WordPress site and with all the plug-ins and Stripe and everything else. You can be up and running instantly with a one or two-page site.
What we’ve done is use it for ticket sales. So if I do private client mailshots, an email goes out and it’s used to process orders. Nearly 100% of ticket sales go through it and that is managing guest lists and capturing data. It’s off-the-shelf stuff.
Yes, Stripe is expensive versus our terminal in the shop, so it’s a costly way of processing a card transaction, but not when you’ve got all the GDPR boxes ticked and you’re building and adding to your mailing list.
Tower Summit 2022
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
Why we must resist the porridge Nazis
The wine trade needs to be wary of following the sanctimonious habits of those who lecture cashstrapped consumers about their food choices, says David Williams. Is drinking white Zinfandel really such a crime?
One of the more irritating features of the various economic crises that have beset the UK over the past 15 years has been the regular appearance of what I’ve taken to calling the porridge Nazis. Bred exclusively in the more affluent parts of society, with particularly thriving colonies on the Tory back benches, the Mumsnet message board and in ex-military survivalist Reddit threads, the porridge Nazis like nothing better than to scold the poorest in society about their unhealthy and uneconomical food practices.
All it takes to bring them and then their mealy-mouthed views out into the open of radio phone-ins and viral tweets or by the work coffee machine, is for someone to state the obvious about how difficult it is to feed a family on the budget afforded by low-wage jobs or universal credit.
But what really gets the porridge Nazis going is hearing about low-income parents who have the temerity to blow whatever funds they can muster on the short-term, momentary mood-lift that comes from high-calorie, low-nutrition foods that are high in sugar and fat.
They simply can’t resist the urge to lecture, to offer passive-aggressive and unsought advice that always – always – centres on porridge, and how you can feed a family of 10 for 1p a head for a month if you are prepared to quit the Coco Pops and pizza and buy a big bag of oats from Lidl.
My sheer revulsion at the sanctimonious – not to mention out-of-touch, cruel, and punitive – porridge Nazi worldview means I often have to check myself whenever I find myself touching on the subject of sugar in wine, and specifically cheap wine. If I’m being completely honest, my first reaction on tasting a line-up of purportedly dry sub-£10 red wines that are tricked up with anything from 6g to 30g of residual sugar is to wonder who the hell drinks this stuff. What sort of baby needs that much sugar in their dry wine? It’s the same reaction I have when I see a grown adult add more than two spoons of sugar to their tea: these are not serious people, I think. What trauma or neglect explains this very obvious case of arrested development? A moment or two’s reflection along the lines of “am I the bad guy?” soon draws me back from adopting a full porridge Nazi-style position. I have to remind myself that wine communicators, whether they’re working as merchants, sommeliers or writers, are here to tell people what they might like, not what they should like. If people, as the old wine trade phrase has it, think dry, but buy sweet, what, really, is the problem?
Still, I can’t pretend it doesn’t bother me that, judged on the recent glut of autumn tastings, so many producers, suppliers and retailers seem to think the only way to make a palatable cheap wine is to plump it up with sugar. Time and again, I would come to the end of a flight of sub-£10 wines and notice the insidious build-up of sweetness lingering like the saccharine aftertaste of a Diet Coke. “Is this strictly necessary?” I would find myself wondering. What sins – of lack of fruit and concentration, of roughness of tannin and shrillness of acidity – is the sugar trying to hide? Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we tried to make wine that didn’t require these sticky stabilisers?
It’s not that I don’t like sugar in wine. Quite the opposite. There are times when I love sugar in wine. The key, as we all know, is balance. But it saddens me that, at a time when many supposedly dry wines have
I can’t pretend it doesn’t bother me that so many producers seem to think the only way to make a palatable cheap wine is to plump it up with sugar
Why we must resist the porridge Nazis
been getting sweeter, specialist producers of unashamedly, proudly sweet wines have been flirting with extinction and bankruptcy.
Indeed, it’s an irony so bitter that no amount of sugary Zinfandel could disguise it, that the industrial gloopy sugary mess that is Gallo Apothic is thriving (it’s currently the bestselling Californian premium red, ie over £7 rrp, in the UK), at the same time that many producers in Sauternes are wondering whether the process of making their classically golden sweet wines makes economic sense at all
anymore.
But that’s enough sugar-ranting. I know I need to live and let live. I don’t want to become a Nobly Rotten Fascist or a Trockenbeerenautocrat. And really, when it comes to sugar in wine, what I want is something essentially democratic: transparent wine labelling on sweetness.
By transparent, I don’t mean a sweetness scale. I don’t want a winemaker’s or a retailer’s subjective assessment of how sweet the wine “feels”, from 1 to 9 or “dry to very sweet”. What I want is the precise level of residual sugar measured in grams per litre – an objective system that treats consumers as adults, and, without judgement or condescension or smoke or mirrors, lets them, and them alone, decide exactly how sweet they want their wine to be.
In search of a fizzy drink that doesn’t have the insidious saccahrine aftertaste of a budget supermarket wine
THE WINEMAKER FILES // Nicolò D’Afflitto
I caught the winemaking virus in Chianti
Classico. I grew up in the Chianti Classico area, my family owns a small property there, so I grew up in the vineyards. Then I spent four years in Bordeaux studying wine, and after that I worked for a year in California. Finally, I came back to Italy and very soon I started working for Frescobaldi, at CastelGiocondo, our estate in Montalcino, in 1991.
From 1991 to 2013 I visited no less than 20 different properties in Chianti
Classico with Lamberto and Vittorio Frescobaldi. Frescobaldi was very strong in the Rùfina area, with Nipozzano, Pomino, Rèmole; we bought something in Maremma, Ammiraglia; we had Ornellaia, Friuli, but we had a big hole in the middle with Chianti Classico.
In that time I visited Tenuta Perano
twice. We had to put on wigs and beards, because if they’d seen us, they would have doubled the price the day after. Sometimes, I’d visit, and two hours afterwards my friends in Chianti Classico would say, “Nicolò, we know you’re going to buy.” And I would say, “No! No! I’m just visiting!”
Frescobaldi bought Perano in 2013, in
part because it’s in Chianti Classico, but mostly because it’s a beautiful place. It is in a very special position, 500m above sea level. And the vineyards are made in a very special, unique way: they are an amphitheatre, open to the south west, with very white soil. And Gaiole is the earth of Chianti Classico. We simply could not do any better.
When you are at the top of the Perano
vineyards, it’s 27°C; in the middle it will be 30°C or 35°C, with a lot of light. It’s a very curious situation where you have three amphitheatres. On the first one, the biggest, I do the Chianti Classico; on another one, where I have a little Merlot as well, I do the Riserva. On the third amphitheatre I also have three terraces, which were created in the 16th century because the slope was too steep, and on these we make our Rialzi Gran Selezione.
You will never find an important
Sangiovese very close to the coast. My experience with Sangiovese is that when it is planted at very low altitude, it is very over-jammy and over-mature. It’s very rich at the beginning of its life, but it’s not really able to age for very long. They have beautiful Cabernet and Merlot, but not Sangiovese. At the same time, if Sangiovese is planted too high, it is getting very lean and elegant but without tannins.
With Perano I had a new image
of Sangiovese. The altitude brings brightness, acidity, beautiful perfume, while the amphitheatre is giving the tannin and the maturation. So I have two kinds of Sangiovese in the same glass: the vineyard is very high altitude but it’s very hot.
Made entirely from Sangiovese grown in the Rialzi vineyard which rises above the rest of Perano in three natural steps. A Gran Selezione whose bold, elegant character is the result of the perfect combination of the soil type, altitude and unique microclimate of the vineyard.
Director of winemaking Frescobaldi
Cabernet or Merlot are very similar wherever they’re planted: it’s not easy to distinguish a Cabernet from Tuscany or Sicily or California. But Sangiovese is very easy. It’s a very open variety. You can tell if it’s in clay (it’s tannic); if it’s lean, it’s from sandy soils. I’m a winemaker with
Tenuta Perano is located in the heart of Chianti Classico in Gaiole. The vineyards are located 500m above sea level, well above the altitude common for red grapes, especially Sangiovese, in natural amphitheatre that captures the light and warmth of the sun.
Nicolò D’Afflitto has been working at Frescobaldi for more than 30 years and is currently the company’s head winemaker.
Wines are imported by Enotria&Coe
a big group with a lot of denominations. And all the denominations in Tuscany are Sangiovese: Chianti, Chianti Rufina, Montalcino, Montepulciano … all of them have not less than 80% Sangiovese. With another variety, the risk would be to make wines that are very similar. But I’m so lucky to have Sangiovese.
Tenuta Perano Chianti Classico Riserva
Aged in oak barrels for 24 months, the Riserva boasts wonderful spiced notes, including liquorice and clove, accompanied by roasted aromas that developed when ageing. On the palate, it has a lovely acidalcohol balance and noticeable yet velvety-smooth tannins.
Tenuta Perano Chianti Classico
Aged for 12 months in stainless steel and barrique, the sumptuous elegance of Tenuta Perano Chianti Classico is accentuated by its exquisite freshness. This beautifully balanced and delicate wine is full of flavour and has enveloping tannins.
DUNCAN MCLEAN
Northabout Locked up and fined for smuggled gin, but my ancestor was no criminal
Christmas 1875 was a memorable one for our family business, though not for entirely positive reasons. The Orkney Herald of December 22 sets the scene:
“On Saturday last the town was thrown into an unusual state of excitement by the report that a seizure had been made of several casks of contraband liquor, and some of those suspected of being engaged in the smuggling of it lodged in the lock-up. Early on Saturday morning, Officers of the Inland Revenue at Kirkwall succeeded in effecting a seizure of a considerable quantity of contraband gin – consisting of five casks, containing altogether 160 gallons. One was found on the premises occupied by Mr Kirkness, merchant, Broad Street.”
The “lock-up” was located, embarrassingly, in Kirkwall tollbooth, 20 yards from the shop’s front door. The accused were remanded to reappear for trial at a later date, in Kirkness’s case, March 1876. The Herald again:
“The small and not very convenient Courthouse was well filled when the Justices took their seats, and during the whole day was crowded to suffocation – the audience being literally wedged together. Outside the day was extremely cold, and snow lay thick upon the ground, but inside the Courtroom it was midsummer heat, or more. Many who were fortunate enough to secure good positions remained during the whole day, the perspiration coursing down their cheeks, and without refreshment other than the excitement of the proceedings.”
Excitement there was, as the prosecution outlined how a certain Captain Askam of Hull bought nine barrels of gin in Holland and sailed north to Orkney, where he landed at the dark of midnight. Whatever secrecy was achieved by the hour was lost as the barrels were rolled down the street, and into the stables of the Castle Hotel. No wonder the excise officers were able to pounce – though strange they could only find five casks. Could the others have made their way out the back door of the stables and into the adjoining yard of my illustrious ancestor? The truth is lost to history. But 100 years later we did find some dried-out barrel staves in the loft above the shop.
Trial transcripts show a peculiarly jovial, even jokey, atmosphere in court. The imposition of a £900 fine doesn’t seem to have dented Kirkness’s spirits (pun intended) despite being equivalent to £115,000 now. And strangely, both the prosecution and the sheriff argued for a lower fine than the law allowed, meaning he ended up having to pay just £125. Family legend has it that this penalty was more than covered by soaring sales … of gin.
Kirkness didn’t think he’d been caught smuggling. It was only 20 years since Orkney became integrated with the rest of modern Britain as steamships from Leith and trains to Thurso appeared. Until then, we were cut off from mainland markets, leaving us relatively poor but also largely ignored, meaning we could get on with our age-old ways of making a living. If we wanted beer, we brewed it. If we wanted wood, we sent a boat across to Bergen. If we wanted gin, we found a skipper heading for Rotterdam.
James Kirkness wasn’t a smuggler, he was a businessman. The prosecution saw it that way, as did the good folk of Kirkwall. It’s a shame that Customs & Excise took a different view.
Broad Street circa 1860
The tolbooth and courtroom where James Kirkness was locked up and then put on trial
Family legend has it that the £125 penalty handed down to James Kirkness was more than covered by soaring sales of gin
Reggio Emilia Duncan McLean is proprietor of Kirkness & Gorie, Kirkwall
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