Finding high quality wines at an affordable price can often be fraught with difficulties for consumers and wine enthusiasts alike, given the sheer breadth of the ranges that are available in grocery retail outlets. Indeed, just knowing whether a certain brand is worth the price-tag or worth buying on promotion can be hard to discern for those lacking in specialist knowledge. To help shoppers and enthusiasts pick the best of the bunch available, Red Communications’ John Valentine has founded Wine Trust 100; an enterprise that aims to distil the knowledge of wine experts for the benefits ordinary consumers.
How did Wine Trust 100 come into being?
The idea came to me in early 2012. We worked throughout that year and soft-launched in January 2013, before launching nationally in March 2013.
My background is retail – I started in Tesco and I’ve always been interested in wine, but I’ve found it increasingly frustrating to buy top quality wines at reasonable prices.
I had done my Wine & Spirit Trust qualifications and in the process got to know a couple of Masters of Wine. There are only about 300 people worldwide that have reached that level.
The idea came to me to put together a panel of Masters of Wine to select the best wines for their price. For instance, we only sell one Chablis, but this will be the best Chablis that the Masters of Wine can find for the price.
Likewise, if we take a wine like Muscadet, we’ve searched and found the very best Muscadet that you could sell for under £10 a bottle.
As a group, we get together 10 times a year and the Masters of Wine put together a list of candidate wines. We then sample these blind and choose the best wines for the price.
Who or what is the focus of the business?
We wanted it to be accessible to anyone who enjoys wine. Typically, we have about 100 live lines and about a third of those are priced under £10 and two-thirds are under £15, so they are very affordable and accessible wines.
One of our best customers is the actor Adam Woodyatt who plays Ian Beale in the BBC soap opera Eastenders, so gradually the word is getting out there.
People may consider wine a bit of a departure from the fresh produce market (Valentine’s other business is fresh produce marketer Red Communications), but the two companies sit quite nicely together given that most of lead producing countries for wine are also major producers of fruits and vegetables.
What products will Wine Trust 100 be highlighting at its stand?
Both businesses will be present on the stand and we will be carrying out wine tastings. Many of the people I know in the fresh produce sector love wine.
We will also be launching Amalaya, a wine produced in the Calchaquí Valley in Chile’s northern Salta region, the highest wine region in the world. It is produced using 85% Torrontes grapes – an Argentinian variety – and 15% Riesling and has just won the international trophy for best Argentinian white wine. We’re selling that for £8.50.
Our most affordable wine starts at £5.50 and it’s very drinkable.
We’re all about selling absolutely stunning wines for affordable prices, so there will be some fantastic wines available to sample at the show. We’ll also be giving people vouchers to try our services sometime.
Do you believe online wine retailing will be a growth area?
Everyone understands the growth of internet retailing – a third of all entertainment products are now sold online. My personal view is that wine will certainly be one of these areas of growth.
They are quite bulky products, so it’s actually quite convenient to have them delivered to your home. It’s also easier to browse wines on a website. Retailers typically have very little information about the wine you might be buying, whereas here you can click on the wine and read about where it was produced and what food it matches with.
There’s a lot of wine being sold through supermarkets and some are doing a good job, but they struggle to lift things off the commodity level. I think there are a lot of people out there that want something better than that and they want to know what they are buying.
Source: Perishable News
