British wine's local heroes
Our independent wine stores are leading the way in changing tastes - though new challenges lie ahead. Plus: what I've been drinking this week
I’M standing in The Sourcing Table Peckham on a Sunday morning, talking to staff member Henry Harrington, when a young couple walk in and neatly answer my question about why it is that wine shops like this are now thriving in the UK.
The young Londoners say they’re getting married at the end of August and need wine for 80 people at their wedding reception. They’d like something “low intervention’ – if not natural wine, then presumably organic. Harrington chats, ask questions, makes suggestions - and encourages them to come back for a tasting.
The day before, I talked to Lloyd Beedell, owner of Chesters Wine Merchants in Abergavenny, Wales. I’ve got a soft spot for the Black Mountains but Abergavenny’s not an obvious wine hub. So what are the locals buying just now?
“We’re absolutely flying through a Uruguayan pét nat at present,” says Beedell. “We’ve gone through 60 bottles in the last fortnight.” He concedes that “it was a bit of a gamble,” but they’ve sold by putting in on the rotating list of 10 wines they always have open in their bar area.
Something has changed for the better in British wine retailing – and the independents and their increasingly knowledgeable clientele are showing the way to the supermarkets and beyond.
This shift looked far from obvious 15 years ago. Then, it seemed the big supermarkets were poised to make high street wine shops extinct. In 2009 First Quench, the largest independent off-licence group, which had already absorbed Threshers, Victoria Wine, Wine Rack and others, went bust. Two years later, Oddbins closed a third of its branches and months later went into administration.
Shortly afterwards, when Graham Holter launched The Wine Merchant magazine in 2012, there were under 700 independent UK wine shops. Today there are more than 1,000.
“The collapse of the off-licence chains was the springboard for a lot of it,” says Holter, the magazine’s editor and publisher. “As they faded away because they were just too generalist, what happened was that you had experienced people coming on to the market, and locations coming free too. With increasingly adventurous consumers, it became a very potent combination.”
Even so, how do you persuade rural Welsh drinkers to buy a white Albillo from the central-Spanish Sierra de Gredos, the other wine Beedell says he’s selling a lot of just now? How for that matter do you entice south Londoners to try the cuvée that Liam Plowman, owner of my local Herne Hill wine shop, Wild and Lees, says is proving very popular, a Romanian orange wine?
“Developing a level of trust is so important,” says The Sourcing Table’s Harrington. “If customers know they can ask your opinion, they’ll ask. Probably more than half do ask for advice - there’s a lot of choice and people need help.” Indeed with the rise of natural and other low-intervention wines, even knowledgeable customers arguably need advice more than ever.
“We set out our stall early, smaller producers and so on,” says Beedell, who opened his shop in 2017. “And that’s starting to pay dividends. We definitely sell more Austrian Grüner Veltliner than Sauvignon Blanc - but it’s been a push getting there.”
“Developing a level of trust is so important. If customers know they can ask your opinion, they’ll ask. There’s a lot of choice and people need help.”
At Cellar Door Wines in St Albans, co-owner Penny Edwards encourages this spirit of adventure by arranging wines by flavour rather than by country. “It allows for more conversation with the customer and opens people to trying new things, she says.
“So rather than for instance them walking in and picking up a bottle of Argentine Malbec because it’s what they’re safe with, we can suggest other wines” on the “Bold” and “Silky” red shelves, such as a Georgian qvevri Saperavi. “Or if someone wanted a smooth Rioja, we could recommend something like Sella ‘Coste della Sesia’ Nebbiolo, or a South African Cabernet Sauvignon like Neil Ellis Cab.”
Edwards offers free samples, as well as wines by the glass via Enomatic machines. They also hold a couple of evening tastings a month: “It’s very important for getting new customers in the door, especially a younger demographic.”
Such tastings are crucial for all the successful independents I’ve talked to, as is the ability to offer samples, usually in a bar area. In Herne Hill, Plowman offers two wines on tap the whole time - natural wines from the Rhône and Sicily - from 20-litre kegs: he opens other bottles “according to the weather and what we’re excited about at the time”.
In the last 15 years, the rise of e-commerce has been important too. Most independents now sell online as well as in their physical shops: Edwards says about 20 per cent of her business is via her website.
Selling more niche wines does allow such specialist merchants to demand higher average prices than supermarkets – and indeed their costs are higher too. This does not seem to discourage customers. Beedell, for instance, says that from the start, Chesters set out to offer only grower champagnes – and “we never get people asking for grandes marques.” At The Sourcing Table there are plenty of bottles at over £30 – and they sell.
It’s important to keep the rise of the independents in perspective: supermarkets still have more than 70% of the UK retail wine market. The majority of the consumer market will remain acutely price sensitive. But increasingly it is independents who introduce drinkers to new wines.
“It starts with the independents, the experimentation, then goes to the multiples,” says Edwards. This can be tricky, she says, because when the supermarkets pick new ideas up, indies can’t compete on price on those wines.
“So I go out of my way to source smaller, more boutique producers who don’t produce enough to get into a multiple,” says Edwards. “On my desk I’ve got a Pinot Noir from Ukraine. I don’t expect it’ll ever be seen on the shelves of M&S or Majestic.”
The effect is international too. In Georgia last month, George Margvelashvili, Director of leading producer Tbilvino, told me that the UK had been the best place for him to start exporting his wines in western Europe, “because the British are willing to try new things”.
“The UK trade are the trend setters in Europe,” he adds. “German retailers say they always look at Britain, because in four to five years, the UK trends will be big in Germany.”
“The strength and arguably the USP of the UK independent sector is the fact you can buy wine from every corner of the world on the high street,” agrees Richard Siddle, editor of industry publication The Buyer. “It’s what makes the UK still such a hugely attractive market for premium producers around the world to sell their wines.”
But Siddle cautions that “there is also a long tail of average operators” who he thinks can learn from local independent grocers: “as the price of every bottle of wine goes up, independent merchants need to become as good as all the other retailers on the high street - and internet. There are currently far too many that are not.”
Siddle also raises what promises to be a major headache for independents: looming changes to the wine duty regime (I wrote about these last year.) The new regime levies duty according to a wine’s alcohol content, in half-per-cent increments. It’s a complicated, nightmarish piece of red tape dreamt up by Rishi Sunak as Chancellor in 2021, meaning up to 105 different possible tax payments per bottle, varying between vintages. The changes’ introduction was delayed until next February by the last government.
“The new duty regulations will make it far harder for independents to be as brave and bold in where they source their wines from,” thinks Siddle. “The onus will switch far more to the best importers and wine suppliers to take those risks.”
Let’s hope the new Labour government sees sense and scraps Sunak’s destructive legacy. Meanwhile, the independents continue their mission to supply us with interesting wines. “I have to deal with a rosé crisis now!” Edwards tells me as we finish our call. That’s the kind of dedication the nation’s wine drinkers are grateful for.
What I’ve been drinking this week
Sanchez Romate Fino Perdido - one of my go-to sherries, this is a fino in a rich and mature (though still bone dry) style, achieved by it spending around eight years in barrel. Hence “perdido” - very nearly “lost” to being an amontillado in style. Good value (The Wine Society, Baythorne Wines, from £9.95.)
Domaine des Deux Roches Mâcon-Villages “Tradition” 2022 - I’d enjoyed this producer’s excellent St-Véran before but not their theoretically more humble Mâcon-Villages, which I fell on gladly when I spotted it on the list in a small Devon restaurant with my parents last week. A classic white Mâcon, generous peachy fruit but lovely freshness and balancing acidity too, even in this hot vintage. Much better value than a lot of Côte d’Or white Burgundies (Street Wines, Bancroft Wines, from £18.)
Avamposti Rosso Slarina 2021, Monferrato - I’d never come across the obscure red Italian Slarina grape until drinking this: you learn something new every week in wine. From the catch-all Piemonte denominazione of Monferrato, this brims with fresh, juicy red berry fruit (All About Wine, St Andrews Wine Co, The Oxford Wine Co, Drinkmonger, from £12.49.)
Interesting - I had no idea the independent sector was so big there. German supermarkets certainly have a particularly bad reputation among producers…
I do not know about the UK leading German trends on this one. There are 11,000 independent wine merchants in Germany, and, it seems, more all the time. Like the UK, however, the supermarkets, especially the super discounters, sell most of the wine here. Aldi is the largest wine dealer in Germany, and the worst thing about that is that it sets the price expectations.