Keith Garrard interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2004, catalogue reference C1088/16. © British Library Board.

Transcript

Gradually, as the supermarket volumes grew, so they went directly to the suppliers themselves.  They were becoming big customers and could buy more than could a small wholesaler, who was previously supplying them.  And these buyers are totally happy in terms of applying their skills to negotiating terms for brands, which the spirits were.  So they got on absolutely splendidly in terms of getting the best deals for Gordon’s Gin and Bells Whiskey and Haig Whisky and Harveys Sherry and Cinzano and Martini.  And anything else that came into the branded spirit, fortified wine category.  What these people didn’t have was knowledge of wine.  There weren’t a lot of wines around.  There was Mateus Rosé, which was a brand, Mouton Cadet, which had been around some time.  There were various Liebfraumilch’s, notably Blue Nun.  Other than those, there would be a range of wines on the supermarket shelves that the buyers inherited, not a large range of wines, about which they knew very little.  And what they wanted was provided to them by most of the major brewery companies, who produced branded wine, and at the same time as Bass were producing Hirondelle, Allied were producing Nicolas and Don Cortez, and Whitbread’s were producing something, if I remember rightly, called Chaspre [sp? 01:55] and Viasepp [sp? 01:57].  Hirondelle probably was the first and most successful branded wines that was adopted by the supermarkets.  And so when the sales manager of Hedges & Butler walked into the buyer’s office in the supermarket and said, I know you’ve got this mishmash of wines on your shelves, variously supplied by a whole raft of different companies, but what we have got is something that will make your life easy.  It’s a range of branded table wines, under the name of Hirondelle, there’s a red, there's a medium white, there’s a dry white, and there’s a rosé.  We will guarantee the quality, and we’ve got our name on it, Hedges & Butler, which is a guarantee to you that this comes from an established stable, after all, we’ve been wine merchants at Hedges & Butler since 1667.  And the supermarket buyers welcomed this hugely, and it gave them security, they were actually buying another brand as opposed to a wine, they didn’t have to worry about grape varieties and didn’t have to worry about sort of showing their lack of knowledge.  They bought this in, it was supplied in bottles and litres, and it grew enormously as the supermarkets grew, and as the supermarkets got more licences.  So, Hirondelle grew and went past a million cases.  And it was only after they had run their own range of wines side by side with the successful brands for a number of years that they started to take the brands off the shelves, because their own label would not be carrying the marketing budgets that the brands covered.  And gradually the brands disappeared.  So the brands of wines grew with the supermarkets and then they declined as supermarket own label wine took over.

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Keith Garrard (Supermarkets were becoming big customers)

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