About
No fees. No Spam. Just great deals.
My Story
Hi! I’m Rich, welcome to my wine club! I have been in the wine trade for over 15 years. After studying Physics at the University of Bath, I left with no idea what I wanted to do with my life, other than the fact that I didn’t want to be alone with equations for a job.
A place on the Majestic Wine retail management scheme seemed a decent place to start, and after stints in their stores in Beverley, Newcastle and Windsor I moved to the head office working in their e-commerce department. From here I then moved to Spanish wine producer and importer Gonzalez Byass UK where I spent over 10 yrs working with their portfolio across marketing and sales. My customers included Michelin starred restaurants, boutique hotels, and independent shops. Regional wholesalers, e-commerce giants and supermarkets. So pretty much everyone.
Along the way I’ve learnt a lot about how the wine trade works, dealing directly with brand owners, wine makers, supermarket buyers and the heads of multinational drinks groups. I’d like to think I’ve a very well rounded view of the trade.
Why am I telling you all this? Because for this club to work, you need to trust me. Trust that I know what I’m talking about, and trust that when I say you’re getting a stonking deal, you are!
Why Rich’s Wine Club
The idea for Rich’s Wine Club came from what is a fairly common situation with lots of importers. We had a pallet of an amazing single vineyard Pinot Noir, it was produced just for the UK market by a producer that sold a big volume of more entry level wine through us. Now for some reason, we never really sold it, it wasn’t even on the price list, it just sat in the warehouse gathering dust. It was brought up in a sales meeting that we needed to shift this wine as it’s just sitting around costing us money in storage. We tried a sample and my goodness! What a wine, 10yrs of cellaring and at its absolute peak. After that sales meeting me and a few colleagues ended up mopping up most of the stock on our staff orders.
So that’s the essence of the club, I will be going direct to the suppliers finding small parcels of wine that they need to get off their books. Maybe it’s a ‘winemaker special’ shipped on a whim in amongst a container of commercial stock. Maybe a hotel tasted it at the winery, said they would take a pallet and then reneged on the deal when it arrived in the UK (amazingly this happens!!). Maybe a big customer of a product moved on a vintage and a single pallet of older vintage has been left behind. Maybe it was all “on allocation” but somebody didn’t take their allocation and nobody else sold it because they thought it was reserved. Or maybe they just have wonky labels…
Whatever the reason, suppliers want to clear it, and we will take it. For solving their problem we will demand a great price. And that’s the rub, it doesn’t work if we only take half of the stock, suppliers want the stock off their books. So it all sells or none of it sells. Each Rich’s Wine Club offer will run for a maximum of four weeks, you will receive an email with details of the offer, what the wine is, how much there is, and what the price is. You will then have the opportunity to reserve your case, once we get to 80% reserved, the deal is secured and your wine is shipped. Collectively, we will have the buying power to secure fantastic deals on these interesting and unique wines.
And that’s it. No subscriptions. No spam. No constant emails to keep you ‘engaged’. Just a mailing list. If I find a deal, you get an email, and when it’s gone it’s gone. If there’s no email for a month or so, then I haven’t found any great deals.
So what are you waiting for? Get involved and together we can get some truly excellent wine at genuinely great prices.