Museum Wines is a relatively rare example of a wine merchant that thrives despite its isolated location. There are several reasons for that, one being its specialism in high-end South African wines, many of which it imports exclusively. Nigel Huddleston pulls on his wellies and jump-starts his 4×4 to find out more

Daniel Grigg’s wine journey started in the unlikely location of the wine aisle of Tesco in Hook, Hampshire. 

“I was 18 and didn’t really know what I was looking at,” he recalls. “I picked a bottle where I liked the look of the label and price. It was a Banrock Station Shiraz at £5.99, which was quite a lot 20 years ago. Aussie Shiraz was my gateway drug.”

He took his WSET Level 1 a year later and the Level 2 the following year. Now, via stints in retail with Spirited Wines, Majestic and Wickham Vineyards, he’s managing director of Museum Wines, in the village of Tarrant Hinton, about five miles north east of Blandford Forum in Dorset.

Museum’s next-door neighbour on the site of a former dairy farm is The Labrador Co, which specialises in all manner of Lab-related merchandise. “Foot stools, armchairs, teapots, cups, curtains: anything you can get a Labrador print on, they have,” notes Grigg.

Museum is owned at long distance by Alex Boon, who now lives in South Africa. Greg Sherwood MW joined the team in 2022 after 22 years of building London wine merchant Handford Wines’s unrivalled reputation in selling South African wines.

Unrivalled until Museum came along, that is, and bagged Decanter’s top South African wine merchant award for three years on the bounce.

Many of the South African wines Museum sells are directly imported on an agency basis.

“I love the bravery and entrepreneurial spirit of South Africans, to work with grapes like Cinsault, Colombard, Palomino and so on, which traditionally don’t or didn’t have much commercial demand,” says Grigg.

“They do it because they’re true winemakers, not robots trying to pump out the next 100-pointer manufactured to the taste of whichever critic is flavour of the moment.”

The wine shop is based in a stylish, modern, barn-like retail space that was purpose-built for Museum, which originally operated out of the car park of one of two pubs run by Boon. The other, the Museum Arms, gave the wine business its name.

“People would have lunch and buy a case of the claret they’d had with it,” says Grigg. “Then they’d add some Burgundy and Champagne and suddenly lunch had gone from 90 quid to £450 because they’d bought six bottles of wine. 

“It was obvious there was demand for a wine merchant. It’s a very affluent area: lots of people who’ve done well in the City retire here. Or, if they’re still working in the City, they have a second home.”

Has the business always specialised in South Africa?

My first trip to South Africa was in 2016 and that was when we made the decision to focus on it and work with farms exclusively, acting as their agents.

Alex is married to a South African and has lived there since 2020, and he lived there in the 1990s as well, so there’s a connection.

We identified it as a bit of a gap in the market where there was unfilled demand. Seckford has a very good portfolio but it’s more the old-school brands, and there wasn’t so much of people doing the new wave, apart from a little bit with Swig. We found producers to work with who weren’t represented in the UK who we thought should be, and we’re now at around 25 producers, all but one of which are exclusive.

And you wholesale outside of the agency producers as well?

We don’t really distinguish agency from wholesale. We use predominantly Alliance for Prosecco, Malbec, Sauvignon, Pinot Grigio … pub wine. Our biggest volume from Alliance is from a Romanian producer. We probably could go and find our own and bring in a pallet, but because Alliance are so big and have such buying power it’s convenient being able to order 300 bottles one month, or 120 another; it comes as part of a mixed pallet and arrives the next day. There’s no benefit to doing it ourselves for wines we’re not particularly passionate about. We focus our agencies on wines that we are passionate about it, rather than trying to source wines to save 20p or 30p a bottle.

What’s the turnover split like?

About 40%-50% is wholesale and then retail is split between my private clients, Greg’s private clients, bricks and mortar through the door, and then ecommerce, which is our website and Vivino – and we’ve now added business from South African tasting rooms.

What’s that about?

We’ve started an initiative with the farms we represent, so that visitors from the UK can order at their cellar doors. We raise an invoice and it gets delivered once they get home. It’s been a long time setting it up. The order forms have a QR code on them and the idea is they scan the code and it goes to that winery’s section on our website and they place the order there. But very often they don’t and we’re trying to figure out why. It may be older customers who don’t understand how QR codes work, but you’d be amazed at how many people just fill in the form, write out their credit card details and hand it to someone else who then sends it to us.

What is Greg Sherwood’s involvement in the business?

He’s the fine wine director, which has an element of buying about it. After 22 years at Handford he had relationships and allocations that came with him. We already had an allocation of Sassicaia but we got a bit more. But there were things like Raats MR de Compostella where we were offered much more access than we would ever have had before because he had a client base that he brought with him.

But you were already focusing on South Africa before he joined.

We’d already won the Decanter award three times, but he had customers who like buying South African wine for over 22 years and they’re now being introduced to our portfolio as a captive audience.

What is it about South Africa that makes it so appealing?

South African wine was probably the one I had least interest in when I started in the industry. I think going back around 15 years it had whites that were a bit homogenous. They were often the cheapest on a pub wine list or on the bottom shelf in retail.

I describe Chenin Blanc as having done a reverse New Zealand Sauvignon, which in the 1990s could be quite scarce. A wine merchant might get 36 bottles of Cloudy Bay but now with New Zealand Sauvignon it’s turn the tap on, turn the tap off. It’s lost that exclusivity, whereas 15 or 20 years ago South African Chenin was not very well regarded, a bit nothingy, almost Pinot Grigio-y. There were exceptions, like Ken Forrester’s FMC, but there wasn’t the variety of different styles we have in the South African section now.

What sort of variety do you offer now?

There a are a lot of options from South Africa for a customer base who wants something like Burgundy in style and alcohol. One of our best sellers is Axle, a Chenin Blanc from Natte Valleij, which is £24.98 and has a fantastic story. Alex Milner is a Cinsault specialist. His wife said: “Alex, as much as I love your Cinsaults, we do live in South Africa where it’s very hot and it would be lovely to have a white wine in the range”. So, he made one to her brief, from old bush vines in Darling, certified 1985. He made 360 bottles of the 2018 vintage and said to me that even with the wind behind her she was never going to drink 360 bottles a year, so would we take half. He’s scaled up production but we’ve always taken about half. 

How would you describe its style to a customer?

It’s a very pure style, 13% alcohol, with some time in old seasoned barrels on its lees. It’s a bit of a Burgundy botherer. We have lots of lapsed Burgundy customers. When I first started here our cheapest Montrachet was £29.99 and now the cheapest one is £95.50. That was only 10 years ago. People don’t want to spend three times what they used to pay for something.

Similarly, with Gevrey and Nuits-Saint-Georges we probably would have been half the current price 10 years ago. We do have customers who we’ve got into South African Cinsault as an alternative.

There are also some good Burgundian styles of Chardonnay from South Africa that aren’t as full blown as American. All of our American Chardonnays are £75 and above and 14.5% alcohol, whereas South Africa seems to have been one of the few new world countries that’s been able to grasp heat management and produce wines at 11%. 

Lokaia’s Call of the Void is a Cabernet Franc that’s 10% abv, so it’s duty-defying. It makes a Sémillon, a Chardonnay and a Cabernet Franc, all in a single amphora, so production is only about 600 bottles.

Tell us more about your location.

It’s an old dairy farm. The site includes a business park with much less interesting businesses like accountants and architects. We have storage across the way, but it’s basically just flat pack packaging and WBC boxes. We’ve got a bond with EHD in Amesbury and that’s where all of our trade orders are delivered from. It means we can have a Dorset headquarters with rural rate relief but still deliver into London the next day as standard. Anywhere else in the country is 48 hours.

The barn just across the way is going to be pulled down and converted into more units. The landlord has promised to try and get some more relevant businesses like a butcher or a cheesemonger, like a little farm shop hub, but whether that will happen we don’t know. But that was always the intention when this was built; it was going to be a one-stop shop for artisan fare. 

What’s the competition like?

There are Majestics in Poole, Salisbury and Dorchester, which are all about 30-40 minutes away. For a lot of people, we’re much closer … and you can’t go into Majestic and buy half a case of Talbot 2016 or grand cru Chablis or Gaja Pieve Santa Restituta Brunello or Kistler Russian River Pinot or Chardonnay. If you want to spend 120 quid on American wine here, you can, but we’ve got stuff that starts at £8.99, and a good range from Simonsig, which is all £9.99, so we do cater to every pocket and palate.

Is it a lonely existence out here on the farm or is there a steady stream of walk-in business?

There’s a pretty steady stream. More than you’d expect. There’s the convenience factor of being able to park right outside. It’s almost the Majestic model of plenty of parking and very little queue. And everyone’s got a Range Rover, so they just reverse up and open the boot. Some people will come and buy four weeks’ worth of wine and then “see you next month”. At Christmas someone might come in and spend £1,500 on 30 bottles, which on a high street you can’t do because very rarely can you park right outside.

You’ve a terrace at the front with some tables and chairs – and a pizza oven. What level is the hybrid element at?

When I started, we did a Friday evening bar scenario but invariably people would leave to go to the pub to eat. The answer seemed to be food. Initially we did food trucks but they were a bit unreliable. They’d either break down on the way, or forget, or not put it in their diary. You’d advertise that they were coming in and they wouldn’t turn up.

So, we thought “we’ll build our own pizza oven”. It was a joint investment with the landlord. We did it every week through 2017, 2018, 2019. But then a farm shop 1.8 miles away had the bright idea of putting in their own pizza oven, but their wine was a lower-end offering. We stopped doing pizza and one night did lobster and chips, for £25, and found people were buying £45 bottles of sparkling rosé to have with it. We ended up with maybe half the number of people, but they were spending two or three times as much on wine. We’ve done burritos, curries … we did a fine dining pop-up restaurant when Alex was living in the UK. He was a chef in a former life, so he did most of the cooking. We turned the whole shop into a restaurant with 25 covers, pre-sold at £75 a head including wine – four courses with a wine match for each.

Has the cost-of-living crisis had an impact?

We’re doing very well with wealthy customers, who are still spending willy-nilly despite it. I had a customer who bought a dozen Vega Sicilia Unico in the middle of January at £379 a bottle, and spent another £1,000 the following week on Groth Cabernet.

If we are losing in any way, it’s the base of the aspirational middle class who used to have a budget of £500 a month for wine, but have seen their mortgage go up by the same amount. It’s not that they’re not coming in any more, but instead of buying 24 bottles they’re coming in on a Friday and buying two or three to get them through the weekend and cutting their cloth.

Even though we have wines at £8.99 and £9.99 we are a destination; you’ve got to come out of your way to get here. If you’re going to the supermarket to buy milk and toilet paper and you see a bottle of wine at £8.99 there’s got to be a real incentive to not buy that bottle and come here instead and make an extra trip. 

How can you persuade them they should?

Every time you come here you get good service and a good experience – and it’s a fun place to be … giving them the level of service they wouldn’t get in a supermarket, or even in Majestic. I do go into Majestic every so often just to see what’s going on and I don’t think the level of service is what it was. 

That’s what independents do best. Before they go on the shelf we try every wine to make sure they’re good enough. If we’ve got 12 Chenin Blancs with stylistic differences, we need to be able to tell people what those differences are. We have people come in and say they don’t know anything about wine. That’s why we’re here!