Sebastian Payne interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2003-04, catalogue reference C1088/02. © British Library Board.

Transcript

What I did was write to Michael Broadbent.  I just wrote totally out of the blue, said I was interested in wine.  He wrote back a handwritten note, thanking me for my interest and saying his was only a very small department and they’d got nothing at all, but that he would put me in touch with some of his friends.  He said he thought that they would all tell me that there weren’t really any jobs in the wine business.  So Michael Broadbent rang up or wrote to a friend of his called Geoffrey Jameson, who was the MD of a company called Justerini & Brooks, just down the road at the bottom of St James’s, he was not far away at Christie’s.  And Geoffrey Jameson wrote a letter, which he gave me copies, to five of his contacts in the wine trade, which was extraordinarily generous.  And he said, he told them that he thought I was worth interviewing.  God knows why, because I was just a callow youth who knew damn all really, about business or anything, just had an interest in wine.  And in those days the wine and spirit business was dominated by the big five, as I think they were called, brewers, who all owned their own wine arms, and he introduced me to pretty influential people in most of those places.  And in fact, the job when it came, came through one of them, who was called Rob Kewley, who died rather young, sadly, who simply knew of a friend who ran a very small shipping business, who he'd met, presumably the week before, who said he wanted somebody as chief cook and bottlewasher in his little office.  And I went along to see this guy, who was called Fred May, and I think he was desperate for anybody at all, and he gave me the job.

[ends at 0:02:16]

Sebastian Payne (Wrote to Michael Broadbent - networks and contacts)

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