Soapbox: Storytelling and Self-Sabotage in the Wine Industry – an excerpt from Harpers Magazine

The wine industry has a love affair with self-sabotage. We’re told “no one makes money in the wine trade”, that it’s a “lifestyle business”, with its gatekeepers in pulled-up red trousers whiling away the afternoon in gentlemen’s clubs.

“How do you make a million quid in the wine trade?” the joke goes. “You start with £2m and plant a vineyard” comes the reply.

You may shrug this off as self-deprecation, and you’ll certainly find plenty of anecdotal evidence from wine merchants up and down the country implying that scraping a living from wine is anything but easy. But that’s part of the problem. As a wine merchant you become comfortable in ‘getting by’ because that’s how it goes when everyone is telling you there’s no money to be made. You stop innovating, writing business plans or searching for investment. It’s a lifestyle business after all and no one wants to be square-eyed from inputting formulas into spreadsheets and writing pitch decks.

Talking about the wine trade like it can only be a hobby venture is at odds with the successes happening all around us. You have Coterie Holdings buying the increasingly successful Hallgarten & Novum wholesaler; the juggernaut distributor C&C Group that keeps driving forward; institutions like Berry Bros. & Rudd or Tanners; powerhouses like Direct Wines; and a plethora of British press from Decanter and Harpers to Drinks Business and The Buyer.

The UK has become a beautifully diverse and multicultural hub of choice for wine drinkers, with bottles, cans, boxes, kegs and all sorts from every corner of the world. You have mid-sized ambitious importers like Wanderlust Wines raising money and investing in bringing truly exciting wines to market. And as people drink less we respond with a burgeoning start-up culture of low & no brands that shake up the market and give customers what they want.

Read more at: https://harpers.co.uk/news/fullstory.php/aid/32968/Soapbox:_Storytelling_and_self-sabotage_in_the_wine_industry.html 

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Have you had an experience with wine industry gatekeeping? Is there an exciting future, or is it an alienating one? Get involved in the discussion below.