Diary of a Shopkeeper, 26th May 2024

It’s not all wine…sake tasting at LWF. Why it says National Tax Agency, I have no idea.

I returned from my week in London just in time for the Orkney Fog Festival. That joyous celebration of music and community will be covered elsewhere in these pages, so I’ll write instead about the joyous celebration of fermented grape juice that was the London Wine Fair (LWF). Trade magazine, The Drinks Business, reported on Friday, “LWF sees visitor decline but improvement in audience quality.” Initially I thought they meant quality had improved because Kirkness & Gorie were attending for the first time. Actually they were reporting on the amount of interaction between visitors and exhibitors: the number of serious conversations about importing or distributing new wine. It was all about the deals.

The Fair was held in a vast glass-vaulted hall at Olympia in west London. I’ve been there many times before, but always for gift, craft, and fashion trade fairs (as assistant to the boss of The Longship.) This event felt smaller, more focussed, and less frenetic than those shows, which often have a frenzied feeling as thousands of companies compete to sell their very similar products to increasingly frazzled buyers.        There were 401 wine producers, importers and distributors at LWF, which is still too many to get round in three days. But it was relatively easy to come up with a shortlist that might be genuinely interesting and useful.

Actually, those are two different criteria. Tasting wines from Moldova or Turkey would be interesting, as I’ve never encountered them before, but K&G is definitely not the right organisation to spearhead their import drive into the UK. So they were crossed off my list straight away. Also struck through were Chinese glass companies manufacturing bottles in weird shapes and colours. And I didn’t think I could sell small electronic gadgets that mimic the effect of decanting a wine by subjecting them to a minute of electromagnetic radiation. Not when they retail for £150, anyway.

Instead I focussed on two main areas that were genuinely useful: potential new general importers to partner with, and individual wineries offering hard to find or unusually good wines. The fruits of those conversations will reach our shelves in the coming months: look out for exciting reds from the Loire Valley and the Southern Rhône, and zingy whites from New Zealand and the Languedoc.

It’s not just about the wines. The people are also crucial. I don’t care about discovering a fantastic wine if the person making it turns unfriendly or unhelpful when they learn I run a small shop in a small town in a small island. I want to find winemakers I can work with for years, learning more about their land, their farming and their winemaking practices. I want to try their wines in good vintages and bad. I want to hear their stories. It’s vitally important to look a new contact in the eye, to shake their hand, to make some small talk as well as wine talk. It’s good to have a chance to ask them searching questions, and for them to do the same of me. We’re both weighing each other up.

“Orkney?” they’re thinking. “Where is that? Is this guy serious?”

“Terres d’Orb?” I’m thinking. “That’s near Beziers, isn’t it? What’s the freight cost from the south of France to the north of Scotland? Will this wee winery make the effort to attach the new post-Brexit labelling for a one-pallet order?”

That’s why the LWF is worth attending, despite the cost and inconvenience of a week in London. I could have done online research then emailed off requests for sample bottles. Some of the recipients of my emails would eventually take the risk of sending them to me. I might have liked the wines. But who made them? How? Why? What are they planning, and what are they dreaming?

I said at the start of this diary that LWF was all about the deals. I was wrong. It’s all about the dreams.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 30th May 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.