The return of the independent wine merchant

Jancis Robinson

Saturday 22 January 2005 • 5 min read

It is fashionable to complain about the increasing power of the big supermarket groups, many of these complaints, incidentally, coming from those who regularly shop in those wickedly dominant stores themselves. But in British wine retailing at least, I would argue that there is at least one beneficial side-effect of the fact that so much wine, probably more than 70 per cent of all wine retailed in this country, is bought by the buying departments of just four supermarket groups.

While the range of wine on offer in many of the supermarkets, and such high street chains as remain, is largely limited to heavily branded varietals at carefully managed price points with an obviously stage-managed rotation of ‘special’ promotions, the average British wine drinker has become much more sophisticated and discerning. This has left the field clear for what seems to me a veritable flowering of small, independent wine merchants all over Britain.

I have always seen a strong parallel between wine and book retailing. There are the big retailers who can offer discounts on big names but the really interesting places to buy are small outfits run by passionate, knowledgeable enthusiasts who are willing and able to take the trouble to address individual customers’ tastes. But while setting up a bookshop is extremely capital-intensive, setting up a wine business can be a much more casual affair, especially in this era of online retailing.

In my nearly 30 years in wine cannot remember a time when I have been assailed by as many new UK wine merchants as in the last few years and months. Many of them give the impression of being fuelled simply by enthusiasm for the product rather than by anything as prosaic as a business plan. And I must say that I would be very wary of buying en primeur, futures in expensive wine, from a firm that did not have a track record of at least a decade. But many of these new wine entrepreneurs have some stunningly good wines for current and medium-term drinking at what often seem like exceptionally good prices.

Whether these prices genuinely reflect lower overheads than larger, longer-established business, or merely the proselytising enthusiasm of a newcomer, I am not sure, but I strongly recommend British wine lovers to take advantage of this phenomenon.

There are specialists such as The Wine Barn for modern German wines, Eclectic Wines for Greek wines and Oz Wines and Gunson Fine Wines for Australians, but the great majority of these new wine retailers specialise in French wine, presumably because France is our nearest neighbour and favourite destination, and has an almost incredible surplus of interesting mid-priced wines from family-owned wine farms. One wonders how many ‘wine merchants’ began simply by bringing back a few cases in the back of the Volvo after a holiday in France. Wine Discoveries' website, for instance, even shows the young couple and their 2CV van responsible for finding “real gems made by small scale winemakers with great reputations locally but unknown beyond their region”. Some of these companies such as Grand Cru Wines, Pic Wines and Red White & You are at least partly based in France, but they deliberately focus all their marketing energies on the British market since it is so much livelier than the stagnant domestic French one.

The established wine trade tends to have long-term historical links with established French wine producers, but of course the French wine scene has been evolving fast and there are hundreds of newer producers of potential interest to importers from Britain (or anywhere else). All it takes is a bit of sleuthing which, initially anyway, must seem rather fun. The Bordeaux market may already be tightly sewn up, but there are rich pickings to be had all over Burgundy and the Rhône for those prepared to put in the ‘work’, and wines made in the scores of interesting domaines in the Languedoc with their relatively low prices and terroir-driven flavours seem particularly suitable for the value-conscious British wine drinker.

Garrigue Wines, Indigo Wine, Le Midi Wines, Leon Stolarksy Fine Wines and Terroir Languedoc are all recent examples of companies formed to sell southern French wines via the internet. Others such as the innovative Modern French Wines and The Vineking spread their nets rather wider, while Cadman Fine Wines is a new, fine wine merchant backed by venture capitalists. Many mail order operations are helped by the existence of call handling services so that operations can continue while the owners are buying wine hundreds of miles away.

Arguably the paradigm new independent is Stone Vine & Sun which has won a string of awards already but was set up as recently as November 2002 by Simon Taylor, ex deputy managing director of Sotheby’s Europe. He and his team put most of their effort, like the much older company Vine Trail and AB Vintners formed by a couple of wine enthusiasts in 2000, into visits to wine regions to buy particular wines that are currently tasting well – rather than following the old wine trade model of representing specific companies over the long term. A series of attractive printed offers largely suffices to sell what they buy, together one imagines with a pretty good address book to start with. Regions to have been particularly targeted by Stone Vine & Sun include most of France and South Africa with Burgundy and southern France their strongest suits.

A substantial proportion of these outfits have been set up by refugees from the more conventional wine trade. The ex-Thresher owners of Off the Vine, for example, now have three shops in the home counties, while Food and Fine Wine is informed by its owner’s previous employment at Harrods. Below are some of those new(ish) independents which have particularly impressed me, although there are dozens if not scores more.

Some recommended wines from the new independents

Cheverny 2003 Domaine du Salvard £6.99 Modern French Wine

Tingling, nervy, admirably fruity white blend of Sauvignon with Chardonnay.

Lune Blanche 2002 Conte de Floris £11.95 Indigo Wine, and www.wine2you.co.uk

Miraculously good, deep flavoured white from old Carignan Blanc vines.

Ch Beaubois, Cuvée Elegance 2003 Costières de Nîmes £6.75 Stone Vine & Sun

Not unlike a good, particularly fruity Crozes Hermitage – very ambitious for the price.

Carrick Pinot Noir 2001 Central Otago £237.35 a dozen The Vineking

Expensive and I am not sure you would want 12 bottles of this, but it is one particularly interesting producer in New Zealand’s answer to the Côte d’Or.

Some favourite newish indpendents:

AB Vintners of Brenchley, Kent www.abvintners.co.uk

Cadman Fine Wines of Moulton Park www.cadmanfinewines.co.uk

Decorum Vintners of London SW7

Eclectic Wines of London SW6

Flying Corkscrew/Great Gaddesden Wines of Water End, Herts

Food and Fine Wine of Sheffield and Altrincham www.foodandfinewine.com

Garrigue Wines of Falkirk www.garriguewines.com

Grand Cru Wines of St Martin de Crau, France www.grandcruwinesltd.net

Gunson Fine Wines of S Godstone Surrey

Indigo Wine of London SW2 www.indigowine.com

Le Midi of Stroud www.le-midi.co.uk