Thousands of people first noticed Luca Dusi when his outspoken social media monologues started to go viral. But the Italian has been a force of nature in east London for more than two decades. Jacob Stokes meets him.
Luca Dusi hails from Verona but is about as close to an honorary Londoner as you can get. His company, Passione Vino, has prided itself on bringing Italy’s latest and greatest wines to the capital since 2003.
A bolt of blue in a Shoreditch side street, Luca’s exhibitionist space has a split personality. Is it a shop, a bar, a restaurant? In fact it’s all three, and you sense the order can change according the whims of its charismatic and outspoken owner.
Connected by a tangle of step-downs, tiny corridors and creaky staircases, the numerous rooms in the building can be vaguely categorised as a carnival of versatile spaces for dining, meeting, tasting and exploring.
Luca was “surrounded by wine from a young age, because Verona is one of Italy’s biggest winemaking towns”, he says.
“When I was around 16 years old, my friends and I would bunk school, jump straight on a bus to the city centre and go to this wine bar that was open from nine in the morning.
“We were all big lads and didn’t look particularly innocent, so back then they would serve us a glass of wine. I just remember enjoying standing in there, listening to the many wine stories that the owner would share with us. When I would challenge him on trying wines from California, for example, he used to say to me: ‘My dear Luca, you have just begun your journey in wine. You might go and taste wine from all over the world. You may fall in love with wines from the craziest areas, and with some of the most beautiful grape varieties around the world, but you will always come back home.’”
This early grounding sparked Luca’s curiosity so, as an aspiring 20-year-old, keen to discover more, he came to England. “Moving to London as a young Italian, it was obvious for me to go straight into restaurant work,” he says.
“I started as a kitchen porter, and as I picked up some English I moved on to the floor where I really started to get a taste for wine. Normally in Italy, people are not as open-minded as here in London: people only tend to drink wine from the specific region they are from.
“For example, in Verona, often you wouldn’t even get as far as bottled wine, it would just be local bulk sfuso, which is essentially like a farmer’s wine – super-honest, straightforward wine. And then suddenly in London, I had this ‘wow’ moment because I could easily access wine from all over Italy and all over the world.”
Tell us about those early days in London.
My first job was in a greasy spoon. I moved to London in the November and went straight into working in this basement kitchen from seven in the morning till five in the evening. It was dark when I started and dark when I finished.
Looking back, I didn’t see the sunlight for those first three months. I’d spend the Saturday recovering, then out clubbing on the night … then, as you can imagine, spending the Sunday recovering again. It was a tough introduction to London life, but something about it resonated with me.
I quickly learned that London is a bit of a beast, like a drug. It magnifies what you feel inside. If you’re feeling great, it doesn’t matter if it’s raining, foggy and the trains are packed, it is the most amazing place to live. If you’re in a bad mood, though, you don’t even want to wake up, it’s too overwhelming. So, finding your balance with London is essential. It’s a give-and-take relationship.
So how did Passione Vino start?
Naturally, spending my first 10 years in various bars and restaurants, I met lots of Italian tourists and the story was always the same: “London is dirty, London is complicated, London is expensive, and the food is shit.”
Of course this wasn’t true at all: if you go to Pizza Hut expecting proper pizza then bless you. They were barely scratching the surface of London, not seeing the real offering.
So in the end I just stopped talking to Italian tourists, until one night when I was working at a bar in Soho. I served two guys speaking my language, my exact dialect from Veneto, and straight away we clicked. One was a winemaker looking to expand into the UK and the other was looking to invest in something new.
Three months later they set up a limited company and employed me as an agent. I was travelling with them, understanding producers, production and so on. Then in 2003, I decided I had to do my own thing, so I joined forces with my now ex-business partner and created Passione Vino.
How has the business model changed?
Initially we were purely importing and wholesaling to bars, restaurants and hotels. It wasn’t until 2014 when, in the hunt for a bigger office, we found this place and realised it had enough space for a bigger office in the back and at the front we could try having a hybrid selling space.
At that time, we had 300,000 bottles in bond so we put some shelves up and thought, if we sell five bottles, very good, if we sell 10 bottles, even better – it will pay for the toilet paper for a month.
When we started here it was nothing like what it is now. We literally had one table with four chairs right in the middle of the shop. At six o’clock we would just open a few bottles, catch some passers-by and they would try some wine. Then gradually we started adding other elements. It was a long process.
Today we are now the most specialist Italian wine merchant and bar in the UK. We have an operation with 14 full-time members of staff doing 100-120 covers every night. Some customers just want a glass of wine, others want a full meal, some might want a full-blown party. We can cater to all those people.
No wine list?
No. Every wine we have in the shop is available by the glass but there is no list. The big difference between Italy and everywhere else in the world is that Italy has some 1,200 different grape varieties, 21 regions and god knows how many appellations. So, if I give my customers a wine list, they will always order within their comfort zone, whether that be through what they recognise or how much they want to pay.
We have a mission of extending people’s comfort zone, exposing the many wines of Italy that they do not yet know.
So, to do that we thought: fuck the wine list. We are going to be the ones asking questions. When a customer comes in and sits down, through various questions they, without mentioning names, varieties, appellations or similarities, but through the mood they’re in and the types of flavours they want to experience, tell us exactly what they want to drink. Then, with that information, we come to the table with three bottles and the customer gets to taste them all free of charge and decide which one suits them best in that moment.
Have you had any backlash with this system?
When I am set on something, and I gamble my reputation, there is no way I’m going to stop. Of course, in the beginning people would say, “you don’t have a wine list? Are you crazy?” Maybe I am crazy, yes, but I need you to try wines that you would never have tried otherwise.
Sometimes when people first sit down and realise there’s no list, you can get some highbrow reactions. But once we present three wines for them to try, everyone relaxes.
For me, there’s an element of conviviality but it’s also about knowledge. With wine, consolidated knowledge only comes by tasting. You can read, watch and study all you like but if you don’t taste as much as you can, your knowledge will never reach that deeper level.
With all of this said, if someone comes in demanding a Chianti, perfect, of course they can have it. I’m not going to force them into something they don’t want. In this business you must understand psychology too.
But, in keeping with extending and delivering knowledge, the focus will then switch to: what kind of Chianti? Do you like your Chianti on steroids like the Americans? Do you want something more traditional? Do you love the purity of Sangiovese or something that has been blended with international grape varieties? And so on.
It involves lots of interaction with customers. How do you explain wines to your clients?
The way that we talk about wine is never too technical or analytical. We have broken down the barriers on wine.
Most of the time if you go to a shop, wine bar or restaurant, the customer is the one asking questions. If you’re lucky, you might find a less miserable shopkeeper or sommelier who is kind enough to share some knowledge. The snobbery of “if you don’t know, then go back to the pub”. Fuck that!
We are the complete opposite. We are so glad to meet to our customers, we are so proud to speak about our producers and their wine. We have the pleasure of being able to say, “we were there with them last week getting our hands dirty, then we got drunk trying all the vintages”.
All the wines that we have, we import ourselves, so we know them inside out. This means that we can extrapolate all the wow factors of that bottle, whether it be about the producer, area, variety or vintage. We try and convey the things that make a wine’s identity so powerful.
It is a unique model that relies on having a close, insightful relationship with our producers.
The shop looks great. How did you design it?
My friend, Toby Sanders, is a fantastic London-based product designer from Scotland. Sometimes I have an idea, and I can visualise the result, but I don’t know how to get there. Toby is the only person I’ve met in my life who can get me there.
So, I told him: “I want bold and eye-catching without being pretentious. Something that feels alive, something that people won’t be able to resist.” He said: “OK, for the next week we will go through whatever we can get our hands on, whether it be magazines, newspapers, websites etcetera and collect anything that triggers our interest.”
We met on the Friday afternoon to go through the whole lot. We drank four bottles of wine and explored lots of options, but nothing really stuck. The week after we did the same thing with the same result. On the third week of the process, I found this Wallpaper magazine and there was an advertisement in there about some fabric dealer – he had covered his full office in fabric patchwork. As soon as I saw that I thought, “fuck, that’s it, we have to go with that”.
Funnily enough, on the next page of the very same magazine, there was an article on a Dutch wallpaper designer called Ellie Cashman. It showed her extreme, romantic flower-patterned wallpaper that gave the impression of being hand-painted.
At this point everything clicked: we combine the big bold floral wallpaper with the patchwork technique. The bold wallpaper also inspired the idea of clear glass shelving. The glass-on-glass effect creates this sense of delicacy and fragility. Every wine feels precious.
Are there any other arms to your business?
Yes, we do ecommerce. I’d always been very snobbish about ecommerce because I always thought it was just about well-known wine from big brands at cheap prices and of course we are the exact opposite of that. So, I never really invested into it. And then Covid hit. Woah … we changed the website immediately. Before Covid the website was very artistic and poetic, more of an exhibition than something practical.
I believe that wine is all about personality, a wine is an extension of the personality of the winemaker which is then an extension of their terroir and grape varieties which should all also be reflected in the label too. Therefore, if Passione Vino is all about highlighting the personality of wine, then the website should be following suit.
So, it took a few years and a few different website designers to come to something that we liked. We wanted it to feel convivial.
In terms of functionality, when Covid hit, we realised the huge gap that was left by us not being able to ask questions to the customer. We had to get that function into the website. So, we wrote down all the possible questions and answers, creating a huge tree of possibilities.
Then together with the website designers we put all that information into this kind of video game called Wine Flight where you enter the shop virtually, and within 42 seconds of questions you are then presented with three options that would be the exact three options that we would suggest in the shop.
It was something crazy, like 1,500 questions for 1,600 different options. It took around eight months to create. Typically, it went live exactly when Covid restrictions lifted. So I would say that our Wine Flight hasn’t been fully discovered yet.
What’s your process for choosing your producers and how has it changed over the years?
I think that Italy develops in certain ways because of our influence. We don’t follow any trends. We create trends.
When I go to Italy to taste, in my mind I have a triangle: its three tips represent three fundamental elements that wines must meet for us to import them. The first element is when I drink the wine, I need to feel that energy; the wine must be alive and singing. Commercially-made wines never sing, everything is muted. We want wines that are free, wines that are unchained. You feel it straight away.
The second element is the winemaker. Even though most of our suppliers have become great friends over the years, it’s not necessarily about friendship. I just need to see that the wine is an extension of the winemaker’s personality. If a wine is full of personality but the winemaker doesn’t reflect that same energy, something isn’t right.
The third element is the winery and the area. Not because I need to see a spick and span modern winery, but because I need to understand what the wow factors are for this wine. Can I create a market for it? Is there a story to tell? Are people going to turn to me and go “where the hell is this wine made?”
If all these elements come together 100%, it’s business.
Two years ago, we started investing a lot in Sardinia because it seemed like those wines were disappearing. It was all about boring chunky, rubbery red wines and tropical Vermentino.
So, we started exploring Sardinia, like we do, and found this tremendous, fucking unbelievable area in the mountains. You think of Sardinia as palm trees, flip flops and crystal-clear water, and of course, there is all of that. But in the Moro County, right in the middle of the island, there is this place called Barbagia.
The name comes from the Roman word Barbaria because the inhabitants were wild people, they all live up in the mountains and make these wines which are incredible. All granitic soils … the wines are so mineral. The main indigenous variety, Granatza, is just like lemon, chalk and salt.
Another example is what we have done with Valtellina. We created the market for Valtellina in the UK back in 2005 with Marco Fay, then in 2007 with Dirupi, then with Mario Lanzini and now with, in my opinion, the most formidable of them all, Marco Ferrari. It’s an area that even the Italians don’t know that well, but it is sensational.
So yes, the stock changes but the mindset for finding it stays the same.
Is it viable for all independent merchants to be importing rather than using only distributors?
The thing is, if you are only a shop, it will be difficult to organise the stock. Brexit has made everything slower, and you need a dedicated member of staff to deal with the logistics and paperwork. The amount of time you would spend as a shop owner, dealing with red tape and all the rest of it, would be time better spent holding tasting events and creating other streams of revenue.
I don’t blame people who use distributors at all. It costs a fortune to import on your own. Many Italian restaurant start-ups would tell me in their early days: “We don’t need you, Luca, we are going to import ourselves.” Slowly you would see their wine offering reduce and reduce and then, lo and behold, a few weeks after, they would be ringing me asking for wine.
What has been your toughest moment with Passione Vino?
The 2008 credit crunch. That was insane. The loss of value in the pound was so damaging for us. We went from a team of seven back down to two.
It was painful. The exchange rate to the euro went from 1.44 to 1.01 so we lost all our profit just in the decline in exchange rate.
It would be nice to have 15 years without an Armageddon. Every five years there is something. Credit crunch, then Brexit, then Covid and now Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis.
It demands us to restructure and recalculate in different ways. The credit crunch was like, “fuck, there is no more money, shrink yourself like a porcupine and hope you weather the storm”. But Covid, even though I have my strong views on it, did oblige us to think deeply about how we do business. How can we be more proactive? How can we invest more efficiently? In that way it was great.
Let’s talk about social media. It’s a successful channel for you. How did you get to where you are now?
Our success seemed to just happen. For the first few years it was just me taking pictures and writing a quick caption.
Then we thought, let’s open the door to people who don’t know who we are yet. So, we started talking about who we are, where we are from and what we do. Simple stuff.
But a major turning point was when an ex-manager of the shop, who has now gone back to Italy, had placed some wines in a bin-end section. One rule for me is avoiding negativity in the shop and a bin-end gives you only negative messages – either that we have made a mistake in buying, made a mistake when selling or the producer has made a mistake when making the wine.
She was pushing me, saying, “but Luca, we need to sell these bottles”, blah blah blah. So, I grabbed a bottle, took my jacket off and said “film me”. This was the first video for Passione Vino. I pulled the cork, poured a glass, spoke about the wine, the perfume and so on, said that this week it would be discounted. Within 60 seconds, it was done and uploaded. By the end of the week, we had sold all the remaining 50 bottles.
That’s when we realised there was something there. So, every week I would record a video, speaking about a wine, its story and all its wow factors. Which then became “the wine of the fucking week”.
Through Covid I was on Instagram every day because I had nothing else to do. People told me they would look forward to the videos. All I would do is joke around, drink some wine, tell the story and so on. It was at this time when we saw the Instagram go above 10,000 followers.
I love and hate social media. But whether you like it or not, social media is the new way of communicating so you must have it. You can be against it, but it doesn’t matter. You can choose how you communicate; you can still choose to communicate that you hate social networks, but through the social networks. You must let the world know that you are there and alive and doing X and Y.
There are also some extremes with people who are sick with social media … you can see they’re so deep into it that they can’t stop. They are in the turbine of having to spend their full lives on it, which is quite sad because it creates a situation where it is a battle to make the biggest noise, competing for the loudest voice with the strongest flavours and brightest colours and so on.
We simply open the doors of Passione Vino for a few minutes each week and everyone is welcome to come inside, and that has seemed to work for us.
What’s the most exciting region in Italy?
Oh god. If you would’ve asked me three years ago, I would’ve said Valtellina, two years ago I would’ve said Campania. Now I would say Sardinia. It keeps on moving but I love all the wines of Italy.
The diversity and dynamics of Italy is both its strength and its weakness. Italy is amazingly diverse and colourful with wonderful flavours and perfumes. But for non-Italians, understanding our food and wine is complicated and hard to market. It’s a labyrinth.
Away from wine, I think the most exciting region to visit would be Sicily. You can ski on Etna, you have beautiful beaches, beautiful food and the people there just love tourists. They’re so welcoming.
And what’s the most exciting region outside of Italy?
I’m very much looking into Greek wines; I’m drinking them with real pleasure at the moment. I love their acidity and flintiness.
I’m a big fan of Syrah too. I drink a lot of Cornas and enjoy the little hint of carbonic maceration they seem to have. I think Barbera is to Italy what Syrah is to France, very similar in taste.
I’ll tell you a secret. Of course, I’m 100% Italian. I believe Nebbiolo and Sangiovese are the two greatest red varieties in the world along with Trebbiano and Garganega for whites.
But the wine that got my brain to strive for the perfection of wine was an Australian Shiraz. It was Penfolds Grange 1995 in magnum which my friend and I consumed very happily without any food. It was insane.
What’s your desert island wine?
My grandfather would never forgive me for saying this but the greatest wines on earth … they’re French. It has to be Romanée-Conti, no doubt.
What plans do you have for the future?
To find the perfect wine, which probably will never happen. But that’s the beauty of this job. My great friend and chef Alberico Penati once told me, “it’s a pity to die, because you stop learning”.
But more practically, I’d be more than happy to open shop number two in west London, where they absolutely need us! They’re so stuffy down there. We were very close to opening in Notting Hill Gate but it would’ve been too expensive, and the last thing I want to do is sacrifice our style and model for revenue.
I am a wine guy, on a wine mission, and if we open elsewhere that focus stays the same.
