My Life in Wine - Part 9

Starting The Sunday Times Wine Club

To get our little business known, we did a lot of leafleting … by hand. That seemed to us the cheapest, most effective way of finding new customers. No way could we afford to advertise. So we would likely remain a small, local business, and were happy with that … truly. We still hoped to earn more money, as it was, literally a hand to mouth existence.  A good sale and we’d blow it immediately on a meal over at Signor Pattochi’s 'La Taverna'. No sales and it was a bacon and egg butty at the Greasy Spoon. But we were young and in charge of our own destiny. Our bosses were our customers. And they were good to us. Almost always.

I said before it wasn't us deciding things. One day in '72, The Sunday Times did another exposé about fraud in the wine trade. Among more important campaigns, Harry Evans – the greatest editor of his day – had, with the great Nick Tomalin and the Insight team maintained  a constant attack on wine fraud. At that time French Appellation Controlée (other countries didn't yet have such things) was not legally recognised in Britain. Many in the wine trade still maintained that names like Pommard and Châteauneuf du Pape were indicative of 'styles' rather than specific geographic locations. It had worked that way for centuries. However various bad lads were now going too far; shipping good old plonk and baptising it Beaujolais or Pommard or Châteauneuf or Pomerol or whatever … when it all came out of the same two tanks!

Maybe after a little too much wine that night, I composed a cheeky 'Dear Editor' letter, thanking the paper, and saying how it unfair it was, the St James lot living so well and us having to live in a damp packing case. Everything we sold was bottled by the people who made it, fully conforming to Appellation Controlée rules.

Harry Evans printed the whole letter! Even the address of our archway! I read it in a cubicle at a service station on the M6. My yell must've worried the other Gents. But we got, as a result, hundreds of letters expressing interest and support. We sent them all our very short wine list.

All very fine.

Then it went crazy. A customer of mine called Chris Dolly – a publisher – called to say he knew Harry Evans well and would ask him if we could do a Reader Offer … on one condition.

We were charmed by the plausibility of this Very Important Businessman. We were in our early 20's, both very naive, with no business training whatever, apart from Monsieur Cassin's little lectures. As Managing Director and Chairman of a very well known Publishing House, it did seem likely this man could help us to grow faster. He could name-drop for hours and he had a chauffeur! So at his request we sold him 20% of our business for the – to us – huge sum of £10,000. And off he went to The Sunday Times – bold as brass – and got them to let us do one of the reader offers they did with wine merchants for a mixed box of a dozen bottles, called an 'Instant Cellar'.  (He didn't mention the packing case office in the old coal-arch.)

The offer worked a treat though. We sold, I think, three thousand cases! A stupendous number for us. Of course we couldn't handle that with a small van, a railway arch and a packing case. We ordered three or four big  40 foot artic's of wine, scrambled into the old NCL warehouse at Slough Station and worked packing and stacking, without sleep till we dropped. Of course it stretched us and our finances to breaking. 

However, The Sunday Times, it seems had never had a wine offer go so well. So they asked us to do another. We repeated the exercise six months later … and it worked again!

So, on the strength of this, Mr Dolly, our Svengali pitched the paper to create a whole new concept … a Wine Club! As well as reader offers , there would be a Wine List and lots of other things going on to entertain and educate a public which was just getting interested in wine stuff. The newspaper went for it … even though by then they knew about the Railway Arch.

It was their guy Bruce Howell who did the site inspection. Luckily Bruce was as mad as us.  We got on well. He told his bosses we were up to the job. He was a lot more confident than we were.

We quickly hired our first 'executives'; Martin Wright became Wine Club Manager, and Tim Bleach helped me buying and shipping. Both were fresh out of school. We moved ourselves from the Arch to 6,000 sq. feet of old World War I munitions factory (more recently a bra warehouse) in Slough.  Lovely downtown Slough!

From 1973 to 1979 we traded there and the business grew alarmingly fast. But there was problem. Our Svengali became very critical of our ways and made it plain he thought we should sell out completely to him – he’d ensure we still had nice jobs but it was to be his Company!

But the business – now called Direct Wines (Windsor) Ltd on account of that earlier unpleasantness when another customer had registered the Bordeaux Direct name – was our baby.  You don’t sell your baby. But he was determined to have it.

Our small team worked incredibly hard, particularly during the Christmas rush, and would always be dropping with exhaustion on Christmas Eve … our only break in the year.  (We could never be ill any other time - there was just no time and anyway we were so high on adrenaline, but on Christmas Day we always went down with colds and ’flu!)

So it was on Christmas Eve just as we were finishing up, that he called to tell us we were technically insolvent and we had no choice but to sell. He actually had our Bank Manager waiting outside, to be brought in with papers to sign away the business when we capitulated.

We didn't, we wouldn't, but there was no Christmas that year! With help from our parents and Monsieur Cassin getting all our suppliers to give us extra months’ credit, we hung on.

Then luck again. (There really is no doubt of the need for a lot of luck in business.) Our Svengali got into some financial troubles of his own and badly needed to raise cash.  Barbara and our legal mate David Wright negotiated I know not how, to buy back our shares for the same money he had paid - just £10,000!

  

We were free again!

Except for the Bank, of course. 

The launch of The Direct Sunday Times Wine Club (we dropped the 'Direct' bit later to simplify) caused quite a stir. It was a joint venture. Almost at a stroke we became the second largest mail based wine retailer in the UK, after the 100 year old Co-operative Wine Society. 

We even had a cartoon about us in Punch.  And two Pseud’s Corner appearances in Private Eye for our rather original tasting notes.

Now who wrote those? When we were discussing the structure of the Club, the paper asked me who would be a good President.  Only recently I’d been given the most revolutionary wine book ever seen, The World Atlas of Wine. Before 'The Atlas' we were all drinking blind. After the Atlas we could all see the whole great world of wine through those glorious maps, lovely photos and friendly, uncomplicated, riveting, beautiful, witty writing.

Whoever wrote this well was clearly the only choice for President of our new Club. He was, I told them called Hugh Johnson and was some ancient bearded guy – check out his photo that was on the cover of his first book, 'Wine' (another great read). He really looked the part.

So there we were, the newspaper and us, all signing papers in the Boardroom on top of Printing House Square – then at Blackfriars – and  in walks this dapper laddie in a bow tie, clearly only a bit older than me and says "Hello, I'm Hugh Johnson". Well … I felt robbed! People had said I looked too young to be a proper wine merchant, so I was banking on a grand old, whiskery President to balance things.

But I could only smile back as the young chap beamed round at everyone. Turned out the old guy on the cover was the Maitre de Chai of Chateau Yquem who featured in the book. NB Always read captions properly!  Anyway we welcomed him in and got him to say what he'd like his Club to do.

A lot, it seemed. He'd written all about wine, and had many theories, now he relished the chance of some practical stuff. He got so excited.  But then he always does. Still does. I’ve never known anyone who lives at the fever pitch of constant excitement that H.J. does. Where does he get that energy? He kills me. Quite early on I had to take to leaving the phone off the hook, Sunday nights, just to get away from all that enthusiasm and get some sleep.  I don’t think HJ does sleep! Writes all night, gardens all day.

 We did far too much. All Hugh's fault. We went everywhere to find wine. If he'd mapped it he wanted us to ship some in for the Members. We ran Member's tours everywhere, we took over a thousand Members a year sometimes, everywhere from Champagne to the Napa Valley. We hired whole cruise ship stocked with 600 Members and unbelievable amounts of wine. 

We went where no-one had ever been before to find wines … and took the Members with us. If not actually, then in print. We published a great little magazine, Wine Times, edited by Cyril Ray, Jancis Robinson. We started a great annual Wine Festival in London, and did tastings and dinners around Britain. All this was very new to a trade which had been quite sleepy for some time.  God, where did I get the energy? From HJ! 

Barbara and I also got married, up in Perth, in her village kirk with bagpipes, the Johnsons and massed wine growers. Being married meant we could talk business all night as well as all day.

Perhaps not the best of ideas. Except that I was now away so much. Half the year was traveling. I was now seriously on what became called 'Laithwaite's Great Wine Trek'… episodes published monthly, and eventually put together into a book. That was, I thought happily, to be the rest of my life.