Room for improvement

Most indies are generally happy with their suppliers. But inevitably there are some frustrations …

“It seems to have been forgotten that we took the sought-after wines on and sold them during lockdown. We’ve not been allocated any stock now as ontrade takes precedence, it seems.”

West London merchant

“It seems some suppliers are being guided to prioritise the on-trade. I am told this is because producers want to see their wines on prestigious restaurant lists. This reduces availability for the independent sector.”

Shane Slater, Sheldon’s Wine Cellars, Shipston-on-Stour

“The vast majority of reps apply zero intelligence or preparation for meetings and very few take time to understand our business.”

Cheshire merchant

“The same old story: the same two or three are excellent, the rest missing in action. If you haven’t visited a client 50 metres from a tube station in a year, what value are you giving your employer?”

Alex Roberts & Wayne Blomfield, Park Vintners, west London

“Suppliers should stop blaming LCB for issues. Own the relationship and work better with them and if you aren’t happy, find another way.”

South London merchant

“Suddenly we are getting emails saying ‘please check all deliveries from LCB, as we won’t be responsible for missing wine’. Somebody at our storage unit will sign off a shrink-wrapped pallet – nobody is going to stand and wait while somebody else unwraps this and checks inside every box.”

Sussex merchant

“Most suppliers are excellent, friendly and try to help. To be honest there is no point in working with someone you don’t get on with. It all depends on the account managers, but luckily in my area they are pretty good.”

Bruce Evans, Grape & Grain, Crediton

“I’m generally happy with my suppliers. However, Moët Hennessy were unable to supply stocks of Champagne and premium wines because of shortages, they said, yet allocations of these same products appeared miraculously elsewhere, including in the Majestic up the road! I feel very let down, not least because they clearly didn’t care one way or the other.”

Anthony Borges, The Wine Centre, Great Horkesley

“We have mostly moved away from suppliers that are not indie-focused. It is frustrating to see wines on our shelves selling in multiples or online at much lower prices. Some of the supplier portfolios are also beginning to stagnate, which is making us look elsewhere to continually offer our customers different wines.”

Nottinghamshire merchant

“We generally have a policy of avoiding suppliers who have on-trade clients. It inevitably becomes an issue if you pursue wholesale, and frankly there are enough off-trade specialists out there.”

Stefan Botfield, The Wine Cellar, Woburn

“Most suppliers are a real pleasure to work with. With those that are a bit trickier, it’s usually down to communication. With some suppliers, we don’t really hear from our reps, orders go into a black hole and we hear nothing back until the delivery arrives with half the order missing and no explanation given. But I must stress, most are great.”

Liam Plowman, Wild & Lees, south London

“We picked up a few large corporate orders in the run-up to Christmas. We had to order more stock, and the numbers were large. Some of the smaller guys were really generous and worked with us. Some of the bigger suppliers wanted us to remain at our credit limit (some to the penny) despite many years of trading with them. It meant we had to pay large amounts upfront to get the stock in, and this put a real stress on our cash flow. It made it more difficult for us to push on as a business and if we continue to grow we will only work with the ones who will help us to do that.”

Mark Stephenson, Grape & Grain, Morpeth

“Good, proactive reps get listings - in particular those with rolling promotions. Reps who don’t see us often enough to understand our business often miss the mark pitching products. The worst visit is an obvious box-ticking visit. Just make it a phone call and save us all some time.”

Nathaniel Carpentier, Dalling & Co, Kings Langley

Instagram is the platform of choice but online tastings are in decline

Independents are engaging more enthusiastically with digital activity, according to our survey. But the way in which they’re doing so continues to evolve.

Almost three quarters of indies now have an e-commerce website, a figure that’s unchanged since last year. As we report elsewhere, 8.5% of indies’ revenue now comes from online sales. But around 30% of respondents say most of these sales are mainly to local people, up from 24% a year ago.

Almost all indies – in fact 99.5% of them – use social media in one form or another. Instagram is the clear platform of choice, with almost 81% of merchants regularly posting, compared to 76% last year. Facebook saw its share fall by a couple of percentage points this year, while Twitter sinks from 34% to 21%.

Our chart below hasn’t changed significantly since last time, except in one respect. The proportion of indies who run online tastings has fallen from 23% to just 12% – no big surprise given that Covid restrictions are over and real-life events are back on the agenda.

The proportion of indies who sell wine from an Enomatic or similar device holds steady at 12%. We recorded levels of 15% and 16% back in 2015 and 2016, but 12% has been a typical result in recent times.

Draught wine, long tipped as a growth area for indies, shows no immediate sign of building on its early momentum, with figures remarkably similar to last time.

Twenty-eight per cent of indies sell food for consumption on the premises, unchanged from last year’s survey, while there has been a modest uplift in the number of independents running some sort of education programme.

Do you sell wine for consumption on the premises?

Back in 2014, around a quarter of independents sold wine for on-premise consumption. It’s now nearer half, and had Covid not disrupted momentum, it’s entirely possible that by now most indies would be hybrids. That’s certainly where things were heading before the first lockdown.

Our survey found that just under 5% of indies will “definitely” start offering on-premise drinking in the coming year, with 9% saying they’re still weighing up such a move.

Just over 2% of those already operating as hybrid bars and shops are considering retrenching into pure retailing. But none say this is a definite plan.