What 500 (collective) years in the wine business teaches you

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My first wine encounter after a stint in hospital with double pneumonia was a lunch with fellow members of a group known as “The 1950 Babes”, although only three of us are female. This informal band of UK wine professionals born in 1950, notching up about 500 years of wine experience between us, meets about once a year to chew the cud and share far too many special bottles.

It includes Allan Cheesman who, as head of Sainsbury’s wine department in the 1980s and 1990s, was the country’s most powerful professional wine buyer in an era when supermarkets really cared about the quality and range of bottles on their shelves. Tim How turned Majestic Wine into a successful public company. Tim Littler of Whitwhams was the UK’s most successful international fine wine trader then.

Bill Rolfe was marketing director of the Unwins chain, the sort of high-street wine retailer that has now largely disappeared. In 2002, he jumped to the more future-proof field of wine supply. Tony Stebbings is a fifth-generation wine merchant who has worked in most aspects of the wine trade but also ended up as an importer, selling millions of cases of wine. Like Stebbings, Anthony Sykes spent most of his career importing wine, buying Corney & Barrow’s cash cow Ernst Gorge Wine Shippers in 1994.

Joanna Delaforce was born into the Delaforce port family and, after a few years working outside the wine trade, bowed to the inevitable in 1983. Since then, she has been the “first female . . . .” in several capacities. Like me, Rosemary George is now a self-employed Master of Wine and wine writer, having written 14 books. She started out as a secretary at The Wine Society and worked at wine importers Sichel, where fellow 1950 Babe David Hunter spent 25 years, ending up as purchasing director. Many wine students in the UK will know him best in his subsequent role as an educator at the Wine & Spirit Education Trust.

I asked them all how they feel the wine world today compares with the one they started out in. With only one exception, and completely independently, they volunteered that the main difference is that the overall quality and range of wine has improved immeasurably. Only Tim Littler had another suggestion for how the wine world has improved: “From a fine-wine broker’s perspective, that there is now instant access to all available fine wines due to the advent of the internet.” But then he also argued that this is why things are worse, because it has “made brokers less relevant and put downward pressure on margins”. Bad news for brokers is of course good news for us consumers.

The other Babes’ observations about how the wine world is worse than it used to be were more varied. Cheesman, whose buying mantra was “firm but fair”, laments that, today, supermarket wine buyers are more likely to buy to a price than on quality and that long-term relationships with suppliers are no longer cultivated: “We were not in business to put suppliers out of business!” In his words, “Suppliers could have one Rolls-Royce but not two.”

Rosemary George regrets “the internationalisation of some flavours. You can find Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon all over the world, and so many of those wines lack a sense of place.” Stebbings is similarly shocked that people today order wine by grape variety without having a clue where it’s from.

I asked everyone what they felt was their greatest disappointment and greatest achievement. Delaforce, Cheesman and Hunter all regret their lack of formal qualification, especially the last two, who got close to becoming Masters of Wine. George cited becoming one of the first women to pass the MW as her greatest achievement.

For some, their chief regret was not snapping up what now look like irresistible wine bargains, especially the classed growth bordeaux that was offloaded en masse, chiefly by British brewers who overbought in the early 1970s. Rosemary George regretted “not buying more bottles of 1970 Château Palmer with Sichel’s generous staff discount” (the Sichel family are part-owners of Palmer). Sykes cited as his primary regret “not marrying a Puligny-Montrachet grower’s daughter”.

Cheesman regards his greatest achievement as introducing own-label wines (which, at one stage, constituted 95 per cent of all the wine sold by Sainsbury’s) and “demystifying and popularising wine”. He started out just as the UK joined the Common Market (now EU), when wine sold in the UK became much more likely to be bottled at source rather than in the UK, with much more rigorous authenticity.

Hunter, when working for Sichel, is justifiably proudest of blending Blue Nun so that it was a consistent, superior example of that much-traduced commodity Liebfraumilch. As Cheesman pointed out, when we all started out, the wine landscape was populated by the likes of Blue Nun, Mateus Rosé, Lutomer Riesling (which wasn’t Riesling) and Bull’s Blood (which, of course, had nothing to do with either bulls or blood).

Today we all drink much better, as witness the wines at our lunch: Dom Pérignon 2010 in both magnum and bottle; Ch Brown Blanc 2019 Pessac-Léognan; magnum of Dom des Malandes, Fourchaume Premier Cru 2005 Chablis; Dom Courbis, Les Sabarottes 2004 Cornas; Ch Clerc Milon 2000 Pauillac; magnum of Ch Léoville Barton 1986 St Julien; Army & Navy bottling of Taylor’s 1963 port; and a whiff of Delamain cognac.

Only two of the Babes have severed professional links with the wine trade. How sails between fulfilling several chairmanships. Littler now runs a luxury train-tour company. His colourful career includes some fine tales about handing over cash for Crimean wine treasures to a distinctly dodgy middleman with a gold-embossed Cadillac. All very different from filling out a supermarket purchase order.

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