Extracts from An Oral History of the UK Wine Trade, a collaboration between the National Life Story Collection, The Institute of Masters of Wine and The Vintners' Company.

Taken from over 250 hours of recorded audio interviews with forty individuals from the wine trade and affiliates, In Vino Veritas takes the listener on a journey that spans the period from around 1930 to 2004, and is a vivid testimony to the key changes and events in the UK wine trade. 
The extracts do not attempt to document the entire history of the wine trade in the UK, but rather provide insights and reflections into the trade within living memory through the experiences of those who have worked in it. The youngest interviewee was born in 1965 and the oldest in 1915. All interviews were carried out by Mark Bilbe. Recordings were made on location in the interviewee's home or at their place of work, and occasionally at The British Library itself. The discrepancies in audio quality and acoustic reflect the challenge of recording in these multiple locations.

Part 2 of this collection covers the following themes: 

The Changing Trade (tracks 1-9): documents the key changes in the wine trade. The story of wine departments within large brewing firms is a fascinating one. The purchasing power of the brewers meant they forced a lot of traditional merchants out of business. Slowly, family firms were absorbed by the conglomerates. There was a more sinister side to the story of the brewers - that of tied establishments and leased premises. This section also marks the emergence of the licensed grocers and early rise of the supermarkets.

Trade Bodies and Education (tracks 10-17): a section that includes details of the early education initiatives by the Wine Trade Club, the Wine and Spirit Association, the formation of the Institute of Masters of Wine and the formation of the Wine and Spirit Education Trust. Underpinning the stories of these organisations is the god-fatherly figure of the Vintners' Company. Stories of this livery from cellar men to Masters give a vivid and often humorous account of this revered city institution and wine trade sponsor.

Old Versus New World (tracks 18-22): brings to the fore the origins of the term "New World", thoughts on the concept and comments on practices from the revival of the old to technological advances.

From Trade to Industry (tracks 23-30): the final theme, focusing on the trade after 1980. The advent of email, online retailing and the democratisation of wine are all illuminated through the following voices.

Final Thoughts (tracks 31-35).

In Vino Veritas: Part 2

Peter Hofman interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2004, catalogue reference C1088/03. © British Library Board.

Transcript

There have been a lot of changes during my time in the trade, which have been crucial.  Some of them started to happen without us perhaps being totally aware of what was going on.  And I suppose when I started, for example, wines were quoted, always, in shillings per dozen, so you had to know your twelve times table up unto about thirty times twelve, and that was one of the most useful things to know, that 216, for example, shillings per dozen, means eighteen shillings a bottle.  That of course changed when we went decimal.  Measures have changed.  Today a standard bottle of wine is seventy-five centilitres.  When I started it was twenty-six and two-thirds fluid ounces.  And so the imperial measures have gone.  The abolition of retail price maintenance by Edward Heath was, at the time, not seen as anything too dramatic, but it certainly had a dramatic effect upon the wine trade, because it enabled the grocery sector to develop, and what became the supermarkets started offering wines and spirits, which they had not done previously, and that really changed the whole face of the wine trade, and has continued to do so.  Then of course entry into the European Common Market, as it then was, had a great effect, and we have become subject to a lot of legislation out of Brussels, all of which we had to learn about and to incorporate into our business practices, into our label printing and so on.  And so there have been a lot of changes.  And the mere fact that wines now are virtually all bottled at source, rather than shipped in bulk.  There is still some shipping in bulk, but in the main, wines are, certainly the classic wines, tend to be bottled at source.  And I think that’s probably a good thing.

[ends at 0:02:19]

Peter Hofman (There have been a lot of crucial changes)

Colin Anderson interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2004, catalogue reference C1088/26. © British Library Board.

Transcript

Friary Meux got taken over by Allied Breweries, they got actually taken over by Ind Coope, which was one of the breweries which formed Allied Breweries.  And in those days, the brewers were the power behind the wine trade, the brewers owned the wine merchants and they funded the wine merchants.  I think there were very, very few totally independently funded wine merchants of any size.  There were independent agencies, by all means, but not retail chains.  Roundabout 1960, I think Allied Breweries was formed, of Ind Coope, Tetley Walker and Ansells, those were the three breweries, which were all big Burton breweries.  Ind Coope had a wine merchant called Grants of St James.  So Grants of St James became the flagship centre of the wine arm of Allied Breweries.  Grants’ head office was, surprise, in Burton-on-Trent, it wasn’t in St James’s, but we did have an office in St James’s.  And it was always a bit of a fudge and a dodge to say we were Grants of St James’s, we never even had an office in St James’s.  Bury Street we had one in, round the corner.  And they had Victoria Wine, which by then had taken over Tyler’s, which had taken over George Peters.  So you think of this succession of fish, each with a slightly bigger mouth, eating the one in front.  So the big fish in the end was Victoria Wine as far as the retail companies were concerned, and the big wholesaler was Grants of St James.  I was buyer, Friary Meux, buying then for Tyler’s shops.  They amalgamated Tyler’s into Victoria Wine and needed somebody in the Ind Coope office, which was in Clerkenwell, where they were doing all the Grants of St James London bottling.  They had bottling plants all over the country.  There was one in Burton, one in London, one in Liverpool.  They’d by then closed the others down, so those were the three big bottling plants.  So the Grants’ buying office in London was at Clerkenwell, and that was where Stanley Dennis, the buying director, was.  And he had two assistants.  One was a chap called Ian Cottle, and he had me.  I transferred to London to help on the buying side of things.  And Ian Cottle and I were young, much the same age, I suppose, at that time.  How old were we?  Twenty-five, twenty-seven, something like that.  And we used to come into the office in our bowler hats with our umbrellas, that was what you wore.  And the great trick was to spin your bowler off your head – flick! – onto the hatstand.  And I could do it and Ian couldn’t.  

[ends at 0:03:46]

Colin Anderson (Consolidation among brewers - the power behind the wine trade)

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

Transcript

Retail price maintenance, we must remind ourselves, was the ability of the brand owner to set the retail price at which his bottle of whiskey, or his bottle of gin, or anything else was sold.  That meant that there was no competition in the retail marketplace, because everybody had to sell their gin at £4 a bottle.  They couldn’t use the discounts, and they couldn’t cut their own margin, that’s what it had to be.  And if you undercut, then, as a retailer you were in danger of having the supplier, the brand owner, take you to court, and you would be in danger of losing your licence.  Suddenly, with the abolition of resale, ie, retail price maintenance, with the abolition of that, the supermarkets could start applying whatever margins they wanted to.  They didn’t apply the margin that the brand owner wanted, they could apply a margin that would attract people into their shops.  They were already working for lower margins, the grocery shops were working for lower margins anyway, and so they were used to making six or seven per cent, so they were quite happy to apply that percentage margin application to their wines and spirits.  And all hell was let loose as a result of this, because almost immediately Tesco’s and Augustus Barnett started cutting the prices of the main brands, and the brands were spirits, and wine was very small.  But Harvey’s sherry, martini, the whiskey and gin suddenly was cut in prices, to the great consternation of all the rest of the off-licence trade.  And we would have been supplying Tesco’s with mixed cases of spirits, and mixed cases of sherries and vermouths, and a sprinkling of wines, most of which would have been either Spanish Graves, Sauternes or Burgundy, or alternatively they might have been Beaujolais and Côte du Rhône and a little bit of Nuits-Saint-Georges and Beaune, and a bit of champagne.  Wines and spirits were not important to Tesco’s, and I don’t know, but I don’t think Sainsbury’s had any licences at all, and the other supermarkets might have had the odd one or two.  And what we’ve got to remember as well is that although they had licences in their supermarket, they were kiosks within the supermarkets.  You couldn’t actually go and help yourself off the shelf, that was a long time downstream.  It was rather like cigarettes are today, whereby you had to be served by somebody from behind a counter.  This was all part of the licensing restrictions imposed, locally, because it was going to be, in their view at the time, sort of very bad to expose young people to the ability to take wine straight off the shelf.  And what we saw in the run-up to that first Christmas were huge quantities going into Tesco’s, and I speak of Tesco’s because we have personal example of Tesco’s, but it must have applied to other supermarkets as well, and it certainly applied to Augustus Barnett.  But instead of us delivering mixed pallets of wines and spirits to these four Tesco off-licences, because they had cut their prices and they’d advertised the fact that they had cut their prices, we, in the weeks running up to Christmas were sending lorryloads a day of whiskey, gin and everything else, and the stock was flying out of the stores and they had queues down the road and round the corner as people suddenly found that they could buy their chosen drink - spirits and wine - for substantially less than they’d paid for it in the past.

[ends at 0:04:49]

Keith Garrard (Retail Price Maintenance)

Simon Loftus interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2004, catalogue reference C1088/36. © British Library Board.

Transcript

A typical chain between a grower and a consumer ran something like this.  The grower sold his wine to a negociant, which was a middleman, a sort of wholesaling business, but he sold to the negociant with another intermediary between them, the courtier, who was a person who negotiated the deal between the grower and the negociant and took a small percentage for doing so.  A percentage which was in fact determined by French law.  The negociant would then sell to an importing agent in the UK, the importing agent would sell to someone like us, we would sell to a wholesaler, the wholesaler would sell to a shop, and the shop would sell to a customer.  Now, some of those links in the chain might be circumvented, but there were certainly at least three or four links in any chain at all before the consumer got to it.  And each of those people took an enormous margin by current standards.  I mean it was quite usual for people to take really fat margins for doing almost nothing.  Which meant that the market for wine was very small, because the price of wine was very high.  But it was so obvious to me that this was going to change, that it was equally obvious that it was important to start going and travelling and making contact with the growers direct.  What I decided was, that this whole system of intermediaries was going to break down.  It didn’t in fact require great clairvoyance to see this, but because I had only just entered the wine trade, I was able to see it clearer than most people in the wine trade, because they didn’t really see how, why things should change as dramatically as they were going to.

[ends at 0:01:52]

Simon Loftus (The typical chain between the grower and the consumer)

John Davy interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2003-04, catalogue reference C1088/07. © British Library Board.

Transcript

We were entering into a phase where the brewers were beginning to set up their own, or had set up, their own wine and spirit departments and were tying their tenants, not just for beer, which had always been the situation, but were beginning to tie them for wines and spirits.  So a small company like ours was suddenly faced with the prospect of having pretty well all its wine and spirit business taken away from it.  My father was involved with this type of thing a little bit just towards the end of his life, and was obviously extremely upset about it all, because there were some instances where our relationship with the brewers had gone back forty or fifty years, always been free for wines and spirits, and it was a devastating prospect that this would just disappear.  You know, in spite of the fact that a tenant, theoretically, had a certain amount of latitude as to how he would run his business, the local brewery people would come along, they’d walk into a place, and I mean, for example, they’d say, right, you haven’t got enough Reid’s Stout showing on that shelf down there, and, we don’t like those bottles of wine you’ve got dominating the back counter.  Take them away please, and put up… whatever it might be.  You were expected, and the brewery demanded, that the whole of the business side of the premises reflected beer.  Obviously there were, well, you would have a few bottles of sherry around the place, and a few liqueurs, but apart from that, the entire emphasis of the business, you were obliged to lean towards beer.  And if you didn’t, the brewery would make their opinion strongly evident and you would be liable to be in difficulties.

[ends at 0:02:36]

John Davy (Stranglehold of the brewers)

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