When Rowan Gormley was running Virgin Wine, he conducted a simple experiment. He took ten pairs of different bottles of wine and carefully wrapped them in paper so that the labels were unreadable.
He took four professional wine experts. Each was asked to write notes on each bottle, tasted blind. There should have been some correlation between the notes on the two identical bottles. From three out of four tasters, there was not.
“One was a winemaker, the only one who knew what he was doing. Three were completely random. What these people actually do is look at the label, make a mental calculation on price and extrapolate from that for their taste buds.”
Mr Gormley is not a fan of professional wine shippers, nor of the mail-order firms that dominate that part of the market that does not go into the supermarkets. As for the latter, most are deliberately misleading the public with the “half price” productions they depend on.
His new venture, Naked Wines, takes its first orders on its website on Monday. This is an odd hybrid of online wine retailer – Virgin did nearly all its business online at first – and a social networking site, on which those with a shared interest in wine can contact each other and the small-time growers identified by a network of locals on the ground in various wine-growing regions.
His aim is to source direct from very small but enthusiastic growers around the world. “There are hundreds who would rather be winemakers than international wine sellers. They would rather be with their vines than in a Travelodge waiting for an appointment with Tesco.” He has 32 of these “little people”. “They are often interesting, charismatic people who have made a lifestyle choice. They are often foodies.” Some are very little people, indeed. One, a Catalan so local that he does not even speak Spanish, has 120 vines, each known to him by name. These produce two bunches each year, enough for 120 bottles. “He potters around squeezing the pests personally.”
Photo by elusive.