Amy Matthews writes I have worked in sales, marketing and content in wine and drinks for around twenty years, over six of which was with the Vinoteca group. I now live in Oxford with my husband and 7-year-old twin boys. I drink widely, but have a lifelong soft spot for good sangiovese and very cold, very large martinis.
I also laughed
“Throw it like a rugby ball, it’s easier!” comes the cry up the stairs.
I am balanced precariously on a small landing between the first and second floors of a tall, winding staircase in a Clerkenwell townhouse converted into offices. Above me is Caroline, the financial controller. Just below me is Mike, the operations director. Below him is Charlie, one of the owners, just a few steps away from Brett, the other owner, and Willoughby, also in operations.
Between the entire senior leadership team of London’s most well-loved wine bar group and me, we are unpacking the contents of three groaning pallets of bag-in-box wine and, box by box, hurling them up the stairs into the rickety shelves which take up the back half of the Vinoteca head office. The boxes contain five litres of wine; they are heavy but not unmanageable. Still, it takes a considerable amount of concentration and strength to achieve exactly the right gentle but firm catch, and maintain the momentum of the box to perfect its onward journey safely up the stairs. One slip could mean catastrophe - and a great deal of Montsant-soaked carpet. As a box hurtles towards me at high speed, the insanity of the situation hits, and I become completely hysterical with laughter.
***
I first met Charlie Young and Brett Woonton like most people meet their bosses - by being made to publicly sing happy birthday to one of them across the dining room of a Veronese palazzo crowded with the upper echelons of the European wine trade. This was the first Vinoteca moment I’ll never forget. I knew who they were already - there was no-one working in wine in London in the early 2000s who didn’t know about Vinoteca.
The ebullient pair had, in the original Vinoteca Farringdon, recreated the enotecas of Spain and Italy where buying a bottle went hand in hand with pausing for a delicious snack and a glass of something tasty. Launching in 2005, it was a truly exciting place for London wine lovers. In my early twenties at the time, to me wine bars had only represented dark, musty places for brash City boys to loudly order expensive claret (and call it claret) or for groups gossiping over a cloying chardonnay. But here was a tiny, buzzing room in Farringdon (an area only just on the social radar for most) where a Kiwi and a Yorkshireman brought wine to life in a joyous, warm and utterly welcoming fashion for the thirsty crowds.
The next moments that came courtesy of Vinoteca were ones of flavour, as a customer-slash-fangirl, then as a member of the team. The first ever bottle I drank in the Farringdon site; a Pewsey Vale riesling, my earliest taste of the southern Australian style - stony and fresh, whipping to the back of my throat like an electric eel. Late night negronis in the Soho bar (always my favourite Vinoteca) made with a particularly good red vermouth shipped from Spain. That ripe, juicy bag-in-box Montsant, proudly imported in the lower-carbon format and poured to customers out of reused glass bottles. The frothy and delicious Lambrusco-adjacent bonarda that Brett dubbed ‘vampire spit’. Discovering extraordinary producers like Mac Forbes, Apostolos Thymiopolous, Filippa Pato and A.A. Badenhorst.
Then there were the moments that stay with me for other reasons. I remember watching Charlie and Brett run the business with a unique combination of enthusiasm, palpable passion for what they did and authentic charm. They led by example and showed me what hospitality is really about - the people. In a transient business where staff come and go with giddying speed, they spotted any new team faces on their daily visits to the bars and made a beeline to immediately introduce themselves.
I constantly saw great wine communication in action. I watched Brett give staff training sessions and run tastings where everyone felt included, from the beginner to the expert, where he ensured everyone had such a good time that they wouldn’t even notice how much they were learning. I’d see Charlie putting the wine list together, in awe of his entertaining and perfectly pitched tasting notes that made you want to drink every single wine after reading, a style I’m still trying to emulate twenty years into my career.
I also laughed. In fact, more than anything else, I remember the laughing. I’ve never laughed so much in any job I’ve had, before or since. I don’t know how you go about creating an atmosphere that enables so much laughing, nor did I anticipate ‘laughing a lot’ ending up on my future workplace wishlist, but somehow Charlie and Brett conjured it into being.
***
Later, when the business grew enough to rent a warehouse and the precious wine stocks moved out of the office, the boxes were sent straight to storage. Without regular deliveries of several tonnes of wine, the structural integrity of the office (and indeed the whole building) was certainly better off, but my days were significantly poorer without the back-straining, hilarious and completely unforgettable moments of the Vinoteca head office chain gang.
The photo of the now-closed Vinoteca Soho site is the author's own.
