Graham Northeast has been running wine shops for more than 30 years, adapting to all the challenges that have hit the specialist trade over that time. But as a seasoned marathon runner, he knows all about endurance. By Graham Holter
Graham Northeast may only be 51 but his career in wine retailing probably warrants a long-service medal.
Starting out as a teenager stacking the wine shelves of Marks & Spencer in Chichester, he caught the wine bug and within a year or two was working for Woodhouse Wines, a small chain of off-licences run by the Hall & Woodhouse brewery.
“For a few years, I was sort of a floating manager, helping out with holiday cover,” he recalls. “And then there was an issue with the shop in Fairmile [a suburb of Christchurch, in Dorset], which is just up the road here, and I was thrown in there rather hastily. That’s how it happened. We turned that one right around.”
Three years later, Hall & Woodhouse decided it no longer wanted its shop estate. “I had a very scary meeting one day – all the managers did. The ones that were leasehold were basically told, you can take the lease over yourself, or you’ll be made redundant.”
Only two managers – including Northeast, whose girlfriend had just become pregnant – took the lease option, and so Bonafide Wines was born.
He signed a 10-year lease with the vague idea of building up the business, selling it off and then trying his hand at something different. But with the economy in the doldrums in 2009, and sales suffering, he signed another lease that carried him all the way to a different sort of crisis: Covid.
“The landlord was being rather silly with the lease, shall we say,” Northeast says. “They wanted to put the rent up by 30% and I just said: ‘I’ve been here for 20 years, looked after the place, paid the rent on time. I’m not paying any more. Forget it.’
“So I moved here. One of my customers is the landlord, so there’s no middleman, no horrible agents. He wanted me to be in here because he knew I’d make a nice shop of it.”
The store sits on a busy road just beyond a roundabout that marks the start of the town centre proper, at the point where business rates double. There’s 30-minute parking right outside, and the British Legion car park to the rear, which customers can also use.
Opposite, the Christchurch Conservative Club proudly flies its Union Jack in the August sunshine. This Dorset constituency returned its Tory candidate on July 4 with another thumping majority, and with its elderly demographic you sense it’s a town where the residents are conservative with both a small and a large C.
Northeast doesn’t dwell on politics, but he is happy to discuss his sport of choice: long-distance running, which seems a natural fit for someone who’s demonstrated such stamina in his professional career.
“The last run I trained properly for was the Marathon du Médoc last year,” he says.
“It was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I must have done seven marathons, I think. But that … oh my god. With the heat, the elevation and the alcohol, it took me five hours. I should be able to walk a marathon in four.”
Of course, they gave him a medal, celebrating his endurance and dedication to the cause of fine wine. It was more appropriate than they realised.
How does this shop compare to the original one?
Well, they both have pros and cons. It was just a small shop, but we had oceans and oceans of storage at the back, to the tune of about three garages, so that was great. There was a pull-in which you could use the whole time, which was really good. But we were completely restricted to retail, and that’s it. We couldn’t do anything else.
This place came up, which has much more retail space. But the storage is a problem, so logistically it is a nightmare. We now rent space off site for a shipping container and we use that.
We had a clean-sheet design, whereas at the other shop we were improving and changing it over 20 years. I came in with a very clear vision of what I wanted to do. We ripped everything out in this room; every single electrical wire, back to nothing. It’s all been designed exactly how I want it.
The kitchen is built at the back there, which we use for the bread and cheese at tastings, and the coffees and teas. But our long-term dream will be to do a much better food offering for our tastings. That will happen in time, but we’re not quite ready yet.
There are some very big hurdles that we’ve had to get past. We’ve been thrust in at the deep end here.
What are the next challenges on the agenda?
We went down the EPoS path this year, which is a massive step. We’ve never done it before. It’s now working really well. The next massive project is the ecommerce website, which will mean I can sell my event tickets online and not have to deal with the hassle of people WhatsApping me, emailing me and phoning me, leaving phone messages. It will be all in one place.
Your website as it stands probably doesn’t reflect the reality and personality of the business today.
Not at all. And if you don’t update every single price every time something changes and take off the wines you don’t have any more it just becomes logistically very difficult. When we had the website built for us 15 years ago, it was actually quite good. So we’ve got a new one coming. But of course, you’ve got issues with cost, reliability and support, and it has to talk to the till.
How much of an investment will the website represent?
Realistically it’s going to cost £2,500 to set up.
I don’t know the way retail will go. Currently we close on Monday; when we came here three years ago, we were open seven days a week. Maybe in future I might focus on ecommerce sales on Tuesday and/or Sunday. I don’t know.
But it will allow me to do things that I’m not quite confident enough to do with all the allocations of wines that I’ve been offered by suppliers. I don’t take them because I don’t have a route to market for these very expensive £60 bottles of wine. I don’t know who’s going to come in off the street and buy them. With an ecommerce site, I can put a case on there. I don’t even have to keep the stock in store.
Are you hoping that ecommerce will allow you to create a whole new tier in the client base?
Yes, and also offer something that other shops don’t or can’t. So that is the next step, and then it will be the food offering after that.
The fact that you’re thinking about projects like these suggests you’re still quite fired up about the industry and still enjoy it.
It’s just disappointing that retail is sliding back towards pre-Covid times, whereas during Covid and just after Covid, people were buying a little bit better, and they were supporting local shops.
I understand it fully: when people are pushed financially, you know, they go back to buying their meat at supermarkets, and their wine from supermarkets. So if you were just trying to survive on walk-in retail sales, that would be difficult.
You obviously feel that the cost-of-living crisis is still biting.
I just wish that we could take the retail sales back to 10 years ago, when all you had to worry about was opening the door, ordering the stock, getting stock in the morning, filling the shop up, making it look nice, and then sell. Pound for pound, it’s probably now four times the amount of effort, with things like social media, tastings, deliveries and everything else. Just literally get it and put it on the shelf and it would sell, as long as you were good at your job.
Looking at your shelves, I can see Hatch Mansfield is an important supplier for you. Which others do you buy from?
Yeah, we like Hatch. Ellis are the most convenient, and they pull out all the stops. Customer service is amazing. They’ve got their own vehicles and, crucially, they have a few brands that are higher volume.
With any supplier that I deal with, they’ve got to have something that I can get some traction on to drive regular orders. There’s nothing worse than having to order from a supplier for six months because they won’t move on their minimum, and then I just don’t sell enough from them.
So Ellis is top by frequency, but by monetary value, it would be Boutinot. Boutinot are great: I describe them as the mortar that holds the house together. We also deal with ABS, but not that frequently – they’re amazing. Hallgarten, Joie de Vin, Marta Vine … she’s got amazing wine but it’s not the easiest sell. Alliance.
We’ve got a lot. We cherry pick. We make our lives difficult by using many suppliers, but we’re usually only taking really good wines that work for us.
You like to go to trade tastings and it seems like you’re always trying to stay up to date with what’s new in the market.
Events are now such a big part of our business, and people don’t want to come in and try the same wine they had two weeks ago. So we do a wine tasting in store here virtually every week, sometimes twice a week.
They have to be ticketed events because you need to know how much bread and cheese to have, and how much wine. The perfect number for us is 16 people.
I go to a very classy bread shop up the road in the morning and buy some really good-quality bread, and some cheese and crisps, but people can bring their own.
Do you get more or less the same people at each event?
We use MailChimp for our emailing, and we’ve now got 750 people on the mailing list. That’s good. So we can usually get good attendance every time. I still struggle, when we do very specific tastings, to get people to come to things that are amazing but not the norm. So if I did a Ribera del Duero event I’d have no problem filling that. But if I did a Riesling tasting, it would take a few weeks.
How has the wine range come together? I see there are some orange wines, which you might not expect for a conservative clientele.
No wine in this shop gets on the shelf unless it meets our approval. It has to be good enough to get there in the first place. If it doesn’t sell, for whatever reason, we can then show it at a tasting at some point. That bottle, or two bottles, of that wine will get drunk on that night, and customers will say, yes, thank you, or no, thank you, or they’ll order it. So we’re always changing stuff.
Occasionally people do come in for an orange wine. But I think orange wine and pet nats are more the young person’s market, or the London market, as I understand it, which is not really our market.
From a personal perspective, are Iberian wines your favourites?
Yeah, I think it’s very exciting, and very diverse. You can get any style, can’t you, from Spain – from your Albariño and Txakoli, right up to your heavy, oak-aged white wines, to your light Grenaches and Ribera del Duero and then sherry.
My partner is from northern Spain. She gets involved in tasting but she’s not really involved in the business as such. Whenever we do a Spanish tasting, it’s quite entertaining. She corrects my pronunciation and people find that hilarious.
It’s good to have a local person’s view of that country’s wine. She will tell you that in northern Spain their red wine of choice, other than Mencia, of course, would be Ribera del Duero, and they would tend to see Rioja as a little bit mainstream.
You have a strong German line-up too.
Carl from ABS once suggested I needed educating when it came to German wine due to our lack of sales. So I went there, and that was a revelation, it really was. I’m very passionate about Riesling and German wine in general. It’s a very tough sell, but we’ll always show it. We slip it into tastings, and we’ve got a good selection of Riesling now. We must have about 20, I think.
Any other countries that are exciting you right now?
I went to a very small Greek wines roadshow tasting of Hallgarten’s a few months ago which was very good. So next month, we’re going to get a whole load of new Greek wines. I do a fair amount anyway, but we’re really going to start pushing those.
We’ve got a hit rate when we go to trade tastings of liking and selecting one in 10 that we try, or less. But at that particular Greek tasting, there were 40 wines there, and I wouldn’t hesitate in buying about 35 of them, which is unheard of. They were nearly all first class. Absolutely brilliant.
What’s your sweet spot now when it comes to pricing?
It’s now 15 quid. But the problem with a £15 sweet spot is that’s not affordable for what I would call a daily drinker, for most people. If they come in and buy four bottles a week, you know, that’s 60 quid. But what do you do? I mean, the cheapest wines from Boutinot are now £9 or £10. Do I start filling the shop up with cheap wine just to compete? Do I really want to choose that path?
It’s a shame that the duty increase has affected sales, I cannot lie. Because that sweet spot for us used to be £12.
How many staff do you have?
Alec is here two and a half days a week. He helps out and does some really good things like the social media. I have an autistic son, JJ, who’s 22 [above right], and he’s on the books a few hours a week. He’s the star of the show at the tastings. He comes in and helps with doing the cheese and bread.
What about wholesaling?
I did a little bit of wholesaling. We did get caught with one that went bankrupt, a posh restaurant. But with all due credit to them, they did call me, and we retrieved stock to cover the bill.
We had another one, which we did successfully for about a year. We don’t do that anymore, which is sad, but it is hard work, and it was new for us. So if we wanted to go down that route again, we’d start things a bit differently.
It was very difficult at a time when the prices were changing every three months. I can understand the frustration from our customers’ point of view, and they might think it wasn’t very professional, but it wasn’t my fault. What can you do?
Things have settled down now, but do I want to go down the wholesaling route? It’s a minefield.
You’ve got two Enomatics. How are they working out for you?
From a visual perspective, they are second to none. They show the shop in a completely different light to other shops and it shows that you’re very professional. We are getting more and more people coming in for a glass of wine, because we’re fully licensed for that. I absolutely love it, but it’s quite labour-intensive. People don’t want to just come and sit and have a glass of wine. They want to have a glass of wine and talk to you.
Do they serve themselves?
Well, they can serve themselves, but they don’t, because you can’t rely on the Enomatics to pour correctly. They are designed to be used a lot, and if you’re not drawing stuff through all of the time, somebody could put their card in there, and they could ask for a 125ml glass of wine, but it might pour 120ml. So you’ve physically got to watch, otherwise it’s Weights & Measures. But it is very good because we can put more expensive wines in there, and obviously half-full bottles of wines that we haven’t used at a tasting.
We bought our Enomatics second-hand. I’d never buy a new one. We couldn’t afford it.
I heard you talking to a customer earlier about organising a tasting at their house.
Yeah, I do tastings to order; parties and things like that. I can provide the whole service, turn up with the glasses and the wine and do everything.
We’re going to do our first trade-style tasting on November 1 in the British Legion next door, where we’re going to get about six suppliers. Hopefully they’ll all have about 10 wines, and people will pay an entrance fee that’s then deducted off any wine that they buy. So that’s a big step into the unknown.
Do you enjoy off-site events?
As long as people are having a good time, that’s the most important thing for me. Do I get sales off the back of it? Sometimes. Sometimes you don’t.
I just think you’ve got to be a little bit entertaining with what you say. You have to be able to command your voice. It’s a very fine balance between entertaining and boring, and you’ve got to get that just right.
It feels like you’ve kept pace with all the trends that the independent trade has been through over the past decade or so, from Enomatics to going hybrid and embracing ecommerce and food. What do you think is on the horizon next?
I think the way the business will go in the longer term is it will be open fewer days, and we’ll do much more lavish events.
I think people seem to try and save as much money as they can during the week by shopping at the likes of Aldi and Lidl just so they can have enough money for their night out. If that’s the way that it’s going to go, then that’s the way we will have to change our business plan.
