London calling

The Wine Merchant has secured bursaries for 30 independent wine merchants, covering travel and ticket expenses for this year’s show at Olympia. There are plenty of reasons why it promises to be worth the journey

Why would an independent wine merchant go to the London Wine Fair? That’s a question many indiess have asked themselves in recent years, as they think through the most valuable ways to make use of their most precious resource: time.

Any answer in these pages will inevitably begin with a reminder of The Wine Merchant’s activity at Olympia in May, which includes an exclusive deal with the London Wine Fair to offer 30 bursaries for independent merchants.

Wine Merchant readers can apply for a bursary that includes a free three-day entry ticket worth £49 for the applicant and free entry tickets for two further guests, plus up to £100 in travel expenses. To get one of the first-come, first-served awards you just need to apply the code TWMBURSARY at the checkout on londonwinefair.com.

The Wine Merchant team will be out in force on Tuesday, May 16, with our stand located on the main, ground floor of the event right next to the popular collection of specialist importers that is the Esoterica zone.

The stand will be the home for the big reveal of this year’s Wine Merchant Top 100 winners, including the competition’s crème de la crème, the trophy winners, samples of which will be available for visitors to taste.

Tuesday was the logical day for The Wine Merchant to make the most of Olympia, since the fair organisers have given it the unofficial designation of “Independents’ Day”. Editor Graham Holter will be giving a presentation about the UK’s independent wine market in the Industry Briefing Theatre at 10.30am.

The Wine Merchant is also one of the media partners at the annual Wine Buyers’ Awards, sponsoring both the Large Independent Merchant Wine Buyer (for businesses above £750,000 turnover) and Small Independent Merchant Wine Buyer (businesses below £750,000 turnover) awards.

The shortlist this year features Chris Goldman (Hennings Wine), Phil Innes (Loki Wine), Kasia Konys-Pieszko (Dunell’s) and Nicolas Rezzouk (Reserve Wines) battling for the Large Independent prize and Liz Coombes (The Artisan Wine & Spirit Co) and Peter Wood (St Andrews Wine Company) competing for the Small Independent category.

The winners, alongside those from the on-trade and multiple retail categories, will be announced at a ceremony on the Centre Stage starting at 1pm on Tuesday, May 16.

Other Independents’ Day attractions picked out by London Wine Fair director Hannah Tovey include masterclass tastings by Wines of Roussillon and Wines of Greece. But Tovey is keen to remind visitors that, while the Tuesday will be of particular interest to independents, there are plenty of attractions throughout the fair’s three-day duration.

Tovey’s highlights include new exhibitors such as a Catalonia pavilion and IGP Mediterranée, plus AC Languedoc’s largest presence in years. She also picks out Entoria&Coe’s premium producer masterclasses, with 12 sessions featuring some “genuinely high-end” producers; a new pavilion, Distill, dedicated to non-wine products, with “a really broad mix of exhibitors from the UK, Japan, and Ukraine” among others; and “a real explosion in mindful drinking” with 30 no and low-alcohol brands exhibiting as part of a collaboration with Club Soda.

According to Tovey the key pillar of the show is, as ever, “trading: helping customers find suppliers and vice versa”. But the event has two other main themes.

The first is sustainability, with sessions “covering everything from bottle weight to alternative packaging to viticultural practices and logistics, to enable people to collaborate and achieve a better outcome for the industry,” Tovey says.

The fair has teamed up with sustainability audit firm DNV, which is “bringing some of its services onsite to help show people how they are to achieve these audits – and how to move to carbon zero or zero plus”. There will also be sustainability talks and seminars from the Sustainable Wine Roundtable

Tasting remains at the heart of the fair, but the show also prides itself on the many educational opportunities it offers and The Porto Protocol. “We’re asking all these partners to collaborate, to work together to support the industry and move forward collectively,” Tovey says, adding that the fair itself has become much more sustainable. It is now reusing materials for stand and feature builds, she reports, and implementing cork collection and sending all the bottles opened at the fair to re-use rather than recycle.

Beyond these worthy initiatives, Tovey is also keen to stress the LWF’s credentials as a tasting opportunity, with thousamds of wines to explore, including those picked out by 10 leading wine writers and influencers as part of the Wine Writers’ Edit.

It’s all part of another reason Tovey believes the event remains relevant to independents, and which she describes as the third of the London Wine Fair’s main pillars: education.

David Williams takes stock of the perhaps shocking state of play with pink wines

Talking to retailers, you sometimes get the sense they’re not 100% happy about the pre-eminence of Provence rosé. For those who are down on the style, it seems to fall, alongside fellow 21st-century success stories Pinot Grigio and Prosecco, into that special category of wines that they sell without ever really drinking themselves.

As with those two styles, the reasons given for the absence of enthusiasm are generally along the lines of “bland”, “unchallenging” or “it all tastes the same”.

Of course, you’d hear a lot less complaining about Provence rosé (and Prosecco and, to a lesser extent these days, Pinot Grigio) if it wasn’t such a commercial success. No matter what their personal feelings may be about the style (and there are plenty in the trade who love it), almost all merchants feel the need to stock Provence rosé because it’s what their customers want.

Take away that consumer demand and rosé sceptics would soon move on to grousing about the next big apparently bland thing they felt obliged to stock.

I do wonder, however, if the reason Provence gets up some merchants’ noses has more to do with what has happened in rosé production elsewhere – that Provence is being blamed for the rash of inferior imitations of the pale, pastel-shaded style of dry pink it has patented and perfected. Pale is now by far the leading strain of rosé, wherever the style is made.

Indeed, it’s quite astonishing how pervasive it has become in recent years. It dominates to the point where many retail buyers have pretty much stopped listing anything darker than “mandarin”, the darkest (but hardly dark in a wider context) hue on Vins de Provence’s official swatch of six Provence rosé colours.

All the same, I’m not convinced that anywhere has got close to matching Provence’s mastery of the medium just yet. Having participated in several comparative tastings of rosés over the past few years – some featuring Provence alone, some a mix of Provence and wannabe rivals from neighbouring Languedoc-Roussillon, Bordeaux and the Rhône, and others fullon international rosé compilations – what’s become clear to me is just how consistently better Provence is at this way of making the style.

Yet Provence doesn’t have a complete monopoly on quality at the lightest end of the rosé colour spectrum. You can find an increasing number of good quality pale pinks emerging along the French Mediterranean coast in the Languedoc-Roussillon; and many Spanish producers, notably in Navarra and Rioja, have also mastered the pastel arts. There are good wines being made in the style in almost every corner of the world, from California to Campania. Only a select handful, however, manage to approximate the best of Provence, with its combination of freshness, delicate fruit expression and creamy leesiness.

There are numerous reasons why that might be the case. First, Provence has simply been doing this kind of thing for longer than its rivals: the region has had a head start in figuring out what works.

Then there is the situation of its redgrape vineyards: relatively high-altitude sites cooled by the Med’s sea breezes that are, for the most part, actually better suited to rosé than red, meaning rosé has always been first on the agenda rather than a by-