The Bag-in-box is back!

Commentators and critics in the world of wine, and wine business, have been predicting the demise (or decline) of the 75cl glass bottle for some time now.

Let’s face it, it is strange that we still drink wine from a vessel that represents the approximate lung capacity of the mediaeval glass blower’s lungs.

75cl may be about right for two people having dinner together on a weekend, but what when you only want a glass, or you want a red and your partner wants a white? What if you only take a glass or two out of a bottle, and travel / dinner / theatre / diet plans mean that the next occasion when you will need another glassful at home is a whole week later?

Many solutions have been presented, and all have found a small place in the market – the airline bottle, the half bottle, the single plastic glass with a peel-back lid – but nothing has taken off yet.

One of the obvious answers has been with us for 30 years – the Bag-in-Box.

So why hasn’t this format made inroads into the UK wine market? (in fact its share started to decline when the ‘half price promotion’ became a thing)

The answer is that our prior associations with Bag-in-box in the UK have been with lowest common denominator generic wines of only average quality.

But two things have changed.

One is that in Scandinavia, in a market that doesn’t allow price promotions, a 4 bottle wine box is typically sold at a decent discount to the regular price per bottle. So they are enormously popular. Around 60% of all volume sold in Sweden is in BIB.

And this means that much more premium producers have been encouraged to look at the BIB sector, and they have shown that good wine tastes great in a BIB.

Secondly, technology has made it easier and easier to physically handle the shipping and filling of BIBs on a small scale.

No longer does a winemaker have to fill a 24,000 litre steel tanker with their precious wine, and wave goodbye while it makes its way to some wine factory in Germany or Newcastle, where hundreds of wines a week are pushed through the system and given the same identikit, safety first treatment.

Now, small, often organic, producers who have loving laboured over small batches of delicious wine can fill much smaller vessels that sit nicely on a pallet, and can be shipped on the normal wine transport network. They can be sent to a fellow winemaker in a small winery in the UK, who understands each individual wine, and tailors the filtration regime to the absolute minimum necessary, and uses as little sulphur as strictly necessary, to respect the lower sulphur levels used by organic producers.

About six months ago, I was approached by four siblings from the Lea family of Suffolk, Oliver, Tom, Alex and Rebecca (who is now a ‘Roberts’). They had a dream that they could be the ones to open up the Premium BIB market in the UK, had founded The BIB Wine Company, and were looking for a founding partner to help find producers to work with, and select the wines.

Six months later, and after several trips to European wine fairs, organic wine events and visits to individual growers, we have pulled together a range of 12 wines to launch this month, including a wine of my own – Bee Pink – made with the help of Jean-Marc Lafage in the Roussillon – which I also sell in bottle on http://www.domaineofthebee.com (new vintage arriving in May).

What have we learned?

1. Winemakers are really interested to supply us – it is a new route to market, and a premium one (we pay WAY higher prices than the standard ‘vrac’ price.)
2. Winemakers like having their label on the box, and being associated with the other growers in the range.
3. Every wine gets a lot of input from the winemaker as to how they would like it to be handled.
4. Now that we have packed them, we know that good wines DO taste great from a BIB!
5. There is a big market out there of engaged wine drinkers easily persuadable about the convenience, and the environmental benefits of BIB.
6. The commentators and critics are keen to write about this revolution in Bag-in-Box quality.

Our London launch is this week (26th April). We are nearly at capacity, but if anyone interested in coming along reads this, drop me a line at justin@thehivewine.com, and I will see if we can squeeze you in.

And sales on the website go live in a matter of days. For now, it is just informational, but to sign up to learn more, have a look here – https://www.bibwine.co.uk/

Join the revolution!

Justin is awarded major industry accolade

At the International Wine and Spirits Competition Awards Dinner on Wednesday night, Justin was delighted to be jointly awarded the Julian Brind Memorial Award for outstanding achievement in the wine industry.

The judges described Justin as ‘one of the industry’s most creative thinkers and most active do-ers’ and singled out his role in the success of the International Cool Climate Wine Symposium.

Justin said ‘I was lucky enough to work with Julian for a short time at Waitrose, and he instilled in all of us his insistence of quality first. He was also a man with a keen eye for a bargain!. He was an inspiring man, and a pioneer.’

Sharing the award with Ross Carter, the man who revived the London Wine Fair, Justin and Ross follow a worthy list of other wine trade luminaries including Sam Harrop MW, Xavier Rousset MS, Dawn Davies MW and Michael & Charlotte Sager.

The celebration began on stage, and lasted well into the night….

At the French Embassy to see Jancis awarded her gong!

We picked a fabulous day to gather on Kensington Palace Gardens at the French Ambassador’s Residence to see Jancis receive her medal for services to the French WIne Industry – she is now an ‘Officer of the Ordre du Merite Agricole’.

All of the other guests have previously been awarded (or were also awarded today) the lower level of award – the ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre du Merite Agricole, and we were all allowed to wear our medals for the day – very proud! Good to see Mr Tony Laithwaite, and Mr Allan Cheesman in good form – two important mentors in my wine life.

French wine has been good to us, and we have all done our bit to champion wines from this wonderful country. And days like this allow us to pause and give thanks for being in a position to help.

One small observation – we tasted some delicious wines at lunch, but each bottle went round a table of eight. Perhaps this is how the French stay so elegant and thin!

Award for Hart of Gold

12 December 2015

In April this year Justin launched an English sparkling wine called Hart of Gold.

The wine is from the highly-rated 2010 vintage, and is made from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier grapes, which were grown in Herefordshire.

This week it was awarded Gold at the International Wine Challenge.  Justin’s really excited that Hart of Gold has been given such a significant medal in the first year of production. It was the only Gold Medal winner to be awarded to an English wine in this round of the IWC awards.

The judges thought our fizz was, “Generous and fruity, yet elegant and fine.”

Having judged many times at The Wine Challenge, Justin knows how hard it is to impress the judges, and when a wine wins a Gold Medal, it has been tasted and loved by a lot of really good, and discriminating tasters.

For more information on Hart of Gold go to www.hart-of-gold.co.uk

Shortlisted for Major Award

Justin is very proud to have been shortlisted for the The Julian Brind Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Wine Industry by the IWSC.

Julian Brind was the inspirational driving force behind the excellence and professionalism of the Waitrose Wine Department. Justin led the team at Waitrose for 5 years, and Julian’s legacy there was clear – an unremitting focus on quality, and obsession with value for money, and a true desire to focus on the new and the different.

This is one of the wine industry’s most important awards that recognise excellence, and Justin is absolutely delighted to have been shortlisted.

English Fizz – will the bubble burst?

Over the last 10 years, The English Wine Industry has built up to producing and selling approximately 2 million bottles of English Sparkling Wine.

For the vast majority of that period, we have been in a situation of undersupply, with even big players like Ridgeview and Nyetimber having to ration their wine to customers like Waitrose, and not able to supply new accounts, as there simply has not been enough wine to go round.

The huge boom in plantings in the late 2000’s has now resulted in enough vines in the ground, producing a crop, to make 4-5 million bottles a year. More vines have been planted since 2010, although the pace of planting has slowed a little.

The very poor vintage of 2012 has delayed the onset of this new volume hitting the market. We are now in the calm before the storm where new labels are springing up all over the place, but, as yet, without the capacity to make (or the necessity of selling) very large volumes.

All of this changes once the 2013 and 2014 vintages come on stream – both of which are predicted to deliver in the region of 4-5 million bottles (and maybe another 4 million in 2015, and potentially 4-6 million a year every year into the future).

There has been a scramble among producers to gain listings with the right kinds of customers, while supply is still quite scarce. Demand from gatekeepers is high, as buyers – tuned in as they are to the zeitgeist – are enthusiastically adding listings of new and exciting wines, in the quest for novelty and differentiation.

But this honeymoon phase won’t last for long once the oversupply starts to kick in, and producers begin to compete for opportunities to sell significant volumes of their wine. Rather as gin brands have proliferated in recent years, English fizz labels are two-a-penny, and many of them, while attractive propositions, have not yet built up any real brand equity, or consumer franchise.

The balance of power will shift away from the producers and towards the buyers, and producers who haven’t controlled their costs very well, or who do not control their own route to market, risk being squeezed out. Buyers can smell blood in the water, and won’t hesitate to exploit the situation ruthlessly if producers start to find themselves in difficulty.

In my view it is really important that in order to ensure a successful future for English Sparkling Wines, our producers do five things:

1. Remain fanatically committed to quality, and refuse to put out wines that may devalue the positive impression that prevails among the converted drinker that ‘English Sparkling Wine is better than Champagne’

2. Hold their nerve on pricing, and not start a race to the bottom in order to shift volumes of unsold wine.

3. Begin serious efforts to evangelise about English Sparkling wine in key export markets – especially the USA and China

4. Maintain a united front, and to work together to market the ‘English’ proposition, rather than squabbling about regional differences (which may develop in parallel, but should only ever be a supplementary designation).

5. Stop planting new vineyards, until demand once more exceeds supply.

I think that the history of New Zealand Sauvignon is a good model for how the market for English Sparkling Wine could develop.

This too was a premium product that was NOT cheaper than the French archetype, but tasted really good, if not better. It was marketed skilfully through a long period of undersupply, and just about weathered periods of significant oversupply without badly devaluing the proposition.

There were times when NZ producers flooded their existing markets with cheap ‘me-too’ brands, but they seem to have recognised the damage that this can do (and maybe still is doing), and have focussed on opening new markets (especially the USA), which has relieved the pressure somewhat, and helped to maintain a viable grape price.

There are a number of parallels with English Sparkling Wine, but I fear that unlike NZ Sauvignon, the difficulty we have in the UK is that all of the Sparkling Wine producers’ business plans are built on the majority of wine being sold at a price point equivalent to Grand Marque Champagne.

This may be achievable in the longer term for some niche, premium producers, and for the top tier of the larger producers, but don’t forget that the market for un-discounted Grand Marque Champagne around the world is quite small. In England, maybe 10 Million of the 35 Million bottles of Champagne we drink every year are sold at over £25.

In England, it is realistic that English wines could take a 20-30% share of this market over time, where patriotism, and ‘localism’ play a big part, but it is hard to imagine English Sparklers gaining more than a 5% share of the £25+ fizz category in other markets.

If you are a consumer in the USA, or Asia, buying a bottle of English Fizz may appeal once or twice as a curiosity, but there is little rationale for it becoming a regular choice when you can have ‘the real thing’ for the same price, or less.

Whether in England, or in New York, Tokyo or Berlin, selling 5 million bottles a year of English Sparkling Wine is not going to be easy.

Profiled by Andrew Jefford in Decanter.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of weeks ago I had an extremely pleasant surprise, when wine writer and excellent arbiter of quality, Andrew Jefford, called to interview me for his weekly Decanter column, ‘Jefford on Monday‘.

His article talks about my wine career, taking particular interest in how Domaine of the Bee came into being in the Roussillon, and why I have turned my attention to English sparkling wine, with Hart of Gold.

His eloquent and detailed praise left me (almost) speechless, and his thoughtful profile was the perfect start to my summer.

To read Andrew’s  full article click here

Cool Climate Wine Symposium briefing at London Wine Fair

Justin is delighted to be co-hosting a one hour industry briefing on behalf of the International Cool Climate Wine Symposium team, with Dr Jamie Goode at the London Wine Fair. The session will focus on the challenges of producing and selling cool-climate wines.

Justin notes, “With climate change a growing phenomenon, it’s clear that new cool climate areas of production will continue to emerge.

Fleur wines top student award!

I am really proud of Fleur Pushack, who works for me 2 days a week at The Hive, who has won ‘The Freixenet Bursary’ – A study visit to four Spanish wine regions as the guest of Freixenet and associated companies, which is awarded to a high achiever in Unit 3 Light Wines of the World in the WSET’s Diploma Exams.

This is a great result for Fleur, and no surprise to me, as her knowledge and determination are matched only by her enthusiasm and positivity. Well done Fleur!

March for the Independents – Get involved

Justin is pleased to be involved in the ‘March for the Independents’, a new one-day conference, held in London on Tuesday 3rd March, 2015. It’s focus is to champion the voice of the independent retailers.

Despite significant challenges, the future of the UK independent wine sector looks bright, it’s worth nearly £500 million and growing. Wine Intelligence research from November 2014 noted that the number of UK independent retailers has increased by 50% between 2007 and 2014 to more than 750.

Justin will be speaking on a panel, to discuss ‘How to make the most of online sales and make it a vital profitable part of your business’. To register for the event click here.