Serena Sutcliffe interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2004, catalogue reference C1088/20. © British Library Board.

Transcript

Just gradually I began to think, well, it’s a bit stupid having something you’re passionately interested in and not making it your career, I mean it really is pointless.  And okay, I can’t think of a single opening, because I’m not going to inherit a chateau or a wine estate, everyone I know in the wine trade is male and a lot of them have a family connection, but I think it was good that I was in France because I think I really would have thought there wasn’t much hope in England, but in France there’s always much- it’s funny, they’ve always been more open to bright women, it’s not such a problem for French men as it is for English men, I think.  So I thought, well, maybe there are ways, maybe, anyway, maybe you can make your own way, for goodness’ sake, there’s always, you know, you’ve got to start somewhere.  And I thought, well, I don’t really want to slog round the world flogging wine.  And I thought, well, what the hell, I desperately did not want to go back to London, but it was fairly obvious when you started to look at it that London was the centre for the world wine trade, and that the other problem is, you know, I adored all the wines of France, but I knew there were other wines apart from that – Germany and Italy and the New World was just sort of beginning – but also in France, if you work, say, in Bordeaux, that’s all you do, you don’t do Burgundy or anything.  I wasn’t prepared to give up one over the other, whereas of course London, in the EWT, as we used to call it, the English Wine Trade, you deal with everything.  And I thought well, I really want to deal with everything because I adore lots of wines, I don’t just adore Bordeaux or Burgundy.  So, eventually one day I actually sat down and wrote a dozen letters to the main importing houses, more than the retail wine merchants, it was the main importing houses and the agency companies, and just told them about myself and said I was prepared to work very hard and da-da-da.  And anyway, one summoned me to see him and said he didn’t have anything but hang on, but a friend of mine may have, and then rang David Rutherford at Rutherford, Osborne and Perkin, and he did have an opening as a sort of a, assistant with languages, a general dogsbody, couldn’t have been more basic.  And so I took it.

[ends at 0:02:34]

Serena Sutcliffe (It is stupid having something you're interested in and not making it your career)

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