A series of interviews and articles with a theme of buying and selling wine here in NZ. Part 2: The Fine Wine shop. Interview: Kingsley Wood, First Glass Fine Wine and Spirits
In your First Glass newsletter you said you’ve had a record year in 2019? Can you explain why you think that is? Best in 21 years. It’s longevity. And it’s experience, service, and familiarity with regular customers.
And the situation where we are with excellent car parking. Retailers who set up a wine shop without good car parking are kidding themselves because they forget about the weight of a bottle of wine. Even two bottles, to carry it 400 yards is an effort. Because we’ve got 14 car parks right at our doorstep, we can take 6 bottles, 12 bottles out to their car. We’ve got an aged clientele, so we probably carry a lot of it out there – it’s service.
Andrew and I have got 60-70 combined years in the industry. We love people – we probably know 80% of our customers by name. And people like that.
I guess it’s maybe a surprise in this era though, where there’s a perception that everything is online. To see old fashioned service winning through must be pleasing. Yes; and the other thing is – we have established a core range of products which we are very good at. Our range of Chardonnay and Shiraz is as good as anybody has in New Zealand. People can come here and they can buy wine, and they might buy six bottles, and come back next week and buy another six – could be a case – but we specialise in having wines that people can drink tonight. And they’re good value.
I’ve noticed when I’ve been in the store that you’re very good at recommendations. Well, we’ll take wine out of somebody’s hands if we think that’s not the wine to suit them. Particularly if you get a Chardonnay and somebody looks at a fancy label, and say ‘I’ve got people coming round for dinner, I want to spend $50’ but a $50 Chardonnay might be a wine that you can’t drink tonight comfortably – it may be that the wine you buy at $25 is the wine that will suit the dinner party and everyone will enjoy.
Do you do much through the website? A bit. Not enough, but some companies specialise in that and hit you every second day. We can’t compete in that market. We’ll do what we can, but it’s never going to be huge. We’ll survive on personal service, location, convenience, and a range of high quality, fairly-priced products that suit our clientele.
And the Wednesday tastings – that’s a big part of it? We wouldn’t be here without them. Our tastings are somewhat unique. Most people have never encountered anything like our way of presenting on a Wednesday night. And, yes, it might not be the biggest retail success on the nights; but over the course of a month and you do four tastings, and look at what you’ve sold and it’s pretty good. And it keeps turning the wines over, because if we’re doing 10-11 wines every Wednesday night; that’s 40 new wines we’re putting out every month. And maybe ten of them will be a pretty good successes, in retail.
The other thirty will be interesting and new additions to the shelves. We will have tried them and get people’s feedback – we are then in a position to recommend having tried over forty new wines every month. So when someone says to us “Recommend a good rosé or a good prosecco”, we can say ‘we’ve tried this, and people loved it’. An example of that would be the Framingham ‘Nobody’s Hero’ Pinot Gris. I mean you wouldn’t buy it normally on the label… the reason we bought that wine is because it got a Gold medal in the New Zealand International Wine Show. So we tried it, and people loved it. So in the space of 3-4 months it is likely to be our biggest selling Pinot Gris for the year. Put out blind to a group of people in the room – who by and large, hate Pinot Gris! – the room said “Wow! This is really different, and interesting” So, that’s what you find. You find some stars every now and then.
That Lawson’s Dry Hills tasting last year was a revelation, to me, certainly. We’ve sold a lot of Lawson’s Dry Hills Reserve Chardonnay. A lot. It’s become one of the major sellers. They don’t all work.. for example, there’s a lot of American chardonnays around, and the good importers move on if it’s not working for them. There’s been a few brought in, that have been culled. Which is interesting, because some people fall in love with it – but not everybody falls in love with that style.
Any trends over the last year? Yes, I question where Prosecco is going. It’s been huge, and I just question the long term popularity of that wine. We saw for a long time how Cava was successful, then gradually it died. Prosecco gave it a huge nudge, because Prosecco was perceived to be lighter; but we’ve seen a fairly significant fall off of sales of Prosecco this year.
What do you think of New Zealand sparkling wines? Yeah, they are getting up in price. The Methodes are terrific quality – they’re all Pinot Noir or Chardonnay. By the time you take Quartz Reef, and Akarua, and Daniel le Brun, and Hunters Miru Miru, and No.1. They’re terrific wines – absolutely world class. But, they’re getting to the point of having to compete with $40 champagnes. And if someone stands there and looks at a $33 or $38 New Zealand sparkling and says ‘OK, I can have this wine with Champagne written on the label, and go to my friends for their 21st, or housewarming and say “let’s have a Champagne”. That’s a lot different from saying “would you like a Central Otago Methode Traditionalle?”. That magical word ‘champagne’ is on the label.
What do you think of New Zealand sparkling wines? Yeah, they are getting up in price. The Methodes are terrific quality – they’re all Pinot Noir or Chardonnay. By the time you take Quartz Reef, and Akarua, and Daniel le Brun, and Hunters Miru Miru, and No.1. They’re terrific wines – absolutely world class. But, they’re getting to the point of having to compete with $40 champagnes. And if someone stands there and looks at a $33 or $38 New Zealand sparkling and says ‘OK, I can have this wine with Champagne written on the label, and go to my friends for their 21st, or housewarming and say “let’s have a Champagne”. That’s a lot different from saying “would you like a Central Otago Methode Traditionalle?”. That magical word ‘champagne’ is on the label.
What about rosé? Rosé is huge, and going to keep that way – it’s here to stay. A lot of it is a result of people travelling to Europe, where there is always drinking at lunchtime. And nobody knows what to buy, so the safety first is rosé. And whether it’s a good rosé or not, you can always drink it. And it goes with food. And I think New Zealand rosés are better quality than French. Not necessarily in Wine Show terms, but they have fruit, so you can drink them without food. In New Zealand we do drink wine without food. And if you get a French rosé it has to have food with it – it doesn’t have enough fruit character.
Is there still a thing in wine, where if you want the best, it’s got to be French, then? Your shop doesn’t appear to be full of expensive bottles of Claret, for example? There’s a reason for that – why we have a token range of French wines. Firstly Maison Vauron, with 47 employees and 90% of them French! Then there is Caro’s, then there are eighteen Glengarry stores, full of French wines. You take what you can. But you can’t compete against people who specialise in it. I am envious of my friend in Christchurch who has a fine wine shop called Vino Fino. He doesn’t have a Maison Vauron, a Caro’s, a Fine Wine Delivery Company… so he’s got the whole town to himself, apart from a shop called Decant – which is a solo operator with a good range of European wines.
We do very well with Italian.. We have a very good range of Italians – and there isn’t too many specialist retailers. You get very good value out of Southern Italy, and it really suits our market – the depth of fruit content – like Australian and New Zealand wines. We do what we can in French – and we sell lots of champagne.
And the Wine Show? That works very well for us. It’s a big effort – three to five months of work. And it’s successful, both in terms of entries, and some reward for the effort. Where we benefit out of the Wine Show is it keeps our name out there. Some of that comes down to my length of time in the industry and knowing so many of the actual importers, retailers and whatever else. I used to know every winemaker in New Zealand, but that was thirty years ago. We pick and choose the wines out of the Wine Show that have done well, and we do very well in retail – taking those wines and making them work. Three months after the Wine Show our shop is full of the best value Gold medal wines. We can’t take them all – there’s 290 Gold Medals this year – but we took 80-90 of them.
We enjoy the Show – enjoy the hoopla of it. But, no-one other than myself understands how much work’s involved! The amount of effort that’s involved in moving 9000 bottles of wine in the course of a morning. Then setting them all up on tables the next morning. And then three days later, it’s all gone. But, yes, love the Show, I hope it continues to do well.
Some of the other shows are struggling. The Royal Easter Wine Show – I fear for that because it just seems to be going backwards. The New Zealand Wine of the Year has lost its way a little bit – the volumes that they require people to have in order to enter; demands on the availability and so on. The wine show that I see as the biggest, most effective retailing competition in New Zealand, is the ‘New World Wine Awards’. And it’s taken them ten years; but, by and large because of their size and success in selling products – they’ve done very well. I have a lot of respect for their judging team. They get judges with experience. The New Zealand Wine of the Year Awards with a policy where after three years they stand judges down, and get in someone new – you’re losing that experience. And sometimes I think that’s reflected in the results.
What do you think of The Fine Wines of New Zealand List? I don’t know. Where does it go? Other than on an aircraft? Some of those wines turn up on Air New Zealand flights, but what else happens to them? They’ve been under promoted. I don’t know, but I don’t think they ‘vintage’ the wines or do they? I query them, because every vintage isn’t the same. You get marginal vintages, or bad vintages like 2017 – good in Central Otago, but only Central Otago. So if you’ve got a Te Mata Coleraine 2017 in there, and someone rushes out and buys a 2017 at $130 a bottle – they are going to be disappointed.
The wines have been selected by a range of people who have achieved status. If you sat them down and said ‘give me your top five chardonnays of this country’ They’ll say Neudorf Moutere is in there; Keltern is in there; Riflemans is in there; Te Mata Elston is in there; Kumeu River would be in there. These are favourites of theirs, but I’m just questioning if they’ve tried some of those wines lately. They’ll traditionally say these are right at the top level, but if that list was re-hashed every year based on the wine that’s currently available, would they be?
And a lot of the people in that list don’t enter shows? Bell Hill, or you mention Kumeu River – they don’t enter your show? But they’re on this list, of the greatest wines of New Zealand. Well, you don’t find some of these wineries entering wine competitions here in New Zealand. You will find that they have been entered into tastings for magazines overseas. For example, Kumeu River, and I have the highest respect for the Brajkovich family, and their wines; but you only have to pick up a Wine Spectator magazine to know that their wine has been sent to the Wine Spectator magazine for review and rating. So, that’s a competition. The same as Cuisine Magazine – you might say that a lot of those wines aren’t in Cuisine magazine – often, they are. They don’t actually do very well. I know some of the wines have been in there. You don’t see them in the 5-star, 4-star or 3-star. But they were in there. You have to look at the Decanter magazine – the New Zealand Pinot Noirs are in there, and those wines were sent to be in there. It’s a judging competition – they’ve got points. Schubert, Pegasus Bay – would you ever see Pegasus Bay in a New Zealand wine show? No! They are certainly entered – whether by themselves, or by their importers; and sometimes the wineries themselves don’t know they are in judging competitions.
I have a feeling that sometimes the big names don’t want to see where they rate in New Zealand, for fear of not succeeding. And I can also say to you, as a person who runs wine competitions – if you saw all of the wines that got ‘no awards’ in our competition, you would be horrified at some of the names!
