Events, dear boy, events
"Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos." Few things sum up the state of the UK wine business than the wisdom of Feng Menglong. Oh yes, come and meet up IRL...
Everyone… come and meet, eat, drink, and be merry at dinners in St Albans and Skipton this autumn.
Join me first at Cellar Door Wines with Catalan chef Francesc Condal for a South American Fine Wine Tasting and Dinner on Saturday, October 26 · 7 - 10pm. For more information and to book your place, click here.
Then on Sunday 17th November we’ve A Night of Wine with Elsworth at the Mill in Skipton. I say “night”, it’s actually a civilised late afternoon and early evening so you’re all fresh on Monday morning, from 3.30pm – 8.30pm. For more info and to book click here.
Paid subscribers… see below for details of tomorrow night’s subscriber meet, greet, and drinks.
It says something about the challenges of selling wine to the UK that the first thing you need to do is to acquaint yourself with the many articles tagged “Brexit” on the Wine and Spirits Trade Association website.
Britain… or more properly The United Kingdom… is one of the world’s largest, most historic, adventurous, and diverse wine markets. The Methuen Treaty agreed a wine for wool deal with Portugal in 1703 and is (was) said to be the oldest extant trading agreement in the world. But that reputation is coming under threat from the sheer complexity of doing business there (I write from Sweden).
For a starter, let’s look at the difference between “Great Britain” and “The United Kingdom”. Contrary to often-held belief, they’re not the same thing. The first is the thing you’re probably going to focus on trading with. The second includes Northern Ireland which has its own Brexit-related differences and challenges.
They say the USA is not one market, but 50 (plus The District of Columbia). But at least they all nominally work to variations of the same set of general rules. The UK is one market, with hidden variations, overseen by absolutely no general set of rules at all. Just look at this (rough) representation of the structure of the market. Bear in mind that literally everyone who looks at it points out it’s “incomplete”. And invariably they do so in a different way:
So in the UK anyone can sell to anyone. But wherever you sit you need to be fully acquainted with the latest guidance from the Government on how to carry out those sales. And that guidance is often opaque, changeable, and likely to leave you with as much hair as I have.
I know this is meant to be a dispassionate and disinterested Marketing MBA-type analysis of the Place “P” in marketing. But allow me to make like former Prime Minister John Major and climb on my soapbox for a moment.
The UK’s wine market faces two “meta” problems. And if you want to sell wine to the UK those problems are, like herpes, your problems too.
First - no matter WHAT your view on the broader pros and cons of leaving the EU- the dildo of Brexit consequences did not arrive lubed. The UK imports vast amounts of wine from the EU, and and bringing it into the UK has been made immeasurably more complicated in the years since 2020.
The second is that all UK governments of all stripes have viewed wine drinkers as being Rowley Birkin QC-type figures who ought to be be subject to ever increasing tax rates on wine on the basis that (a) it’ll do them some good (b) they can surely afford it, and (c) voters generally agree that wine drinkers actually ARE Rowley Birkin QC-type figures even though wine drinkers actually look just like the normal voter. This is at least in part because the wine industry and its assorted commentators and communicators spend an inordinate amount of time bemoaning the inherent “elitism” and “snobbery” in wine, even though the only reason people become wine commentators and communicators is because it’s socially unacceptable to wear a hat that says “I went to private school”.
*gets down from soapbox*
Now there are many reasons this caricature is wrong. And they are also reasons why it’s worth persevering and selling wine to the UK.
The UK is a £20bn wine market. So there’s lots to go at. And polls suggest wine is the “most preferred” alcoholic beverage in every region and every age group of the UK. So far from being elitist, wine is as classless as beer, and arguably more so than many spirits. You can sell wine to everyone from the proverbial Duke to the dustman. Although statistically it’s more likely to be Duchess to daily help as wine is mostly bought by women. And statistically the chances are you’re looking at the daily help, as wine largely bought in that most snobbish and elitist of institutions… the supermarket.
But also wine is not in the terminal decline people will tell you. It turns out there are phenomenal reasons to sell wine to the UK.
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