Max Graham-Wood bought a long-established north Norfolk business in 1990. It no longer offers agricultural hardware or artists’ materials, and the decision to concentrate on wine sales, to locals and holidaymakers alike, has proved to be a wise one. By Nigel Huddleston

Hybrid wine retailing is regarded as a relatively modern affair. Satchells Wines takes no part in the contemporary weaving together of retail and wine bar, but the oldest shop in the north Norfolk village of Burnham Market has a history of splitting its wine space with other types of business that goes back to the 19th century.

Frederick Valentine Satchell – born on February 14, of course – was an iron founder by trade, and divided the premises between wine and agricultural hardware when he opened in the 1880s.

Later, one of the couple who ran the business during the 70s and 80s was a Royal Academy artist, and the part of the shop that had once been piled high with Frederick’s bits and bobs was used to sell art materials instead.

Max Graham-Wood was the next owner, buying it in 1990, and he’s still there today.

It’s a straight wine merchant these days, with a very old-school vibe (it has a claret room), catering to the indigenous local rural population and second-homers from the Smoke, attracted by the village’s serene charm and the stunning coastline just a mile up the road.

As an 18-year-old Max spurned university, opting for a working education in the vineyards of Beaujolais, Provence and Bordeaux.

“My father was a very enthusiastic amateur, a claret man,” he says. “I was always brought up with decent wine in the house. I thought the wine business sounded attractive; I didn’t fancy being a stockbroker or whatever people chose in those days. I presented myself in Beaujolais by appointment, with a tent and cooking equipment, and then just went from one [vineyard] recommendation to the next, occasionally coming back home, thrashing my poor Mark I Ford Escort, to get clothes and money.”

The educational wine trail eventually led to South Africa as well, before Max returned to the UK, working for a wine merchant in London’s St James’s district and as assistant manager for Hedges & Butler’s shop in nearby Regent Street. There was a spell selling advertising for Decanter in the 80s, before the move to Norfolk, initially to help another merchant set up a wine warehouse in King’s Lynn.

In the 34 years since buying Satchells, the team has expanded from one to two, with Max’s assistant of the past eight years, Oliver Nelson, more conventionally trained to WSET Diploma level.

There was never any thought of changing the name, says Max.

“I think there might be one remaining Satchell, but if there is they’re very old,” he says. 

“It’s not been in the family hands probably since the 1950s. 

“But it’s been Satchells since it started, so to carry on the originality of that was more important than calling it Maxwell’s,” [his full given name].

Oliver adds: “It’s been around a long time. You still get the odd farmer that finds a bit of old plough embossed with Satchells. It would be daft to change it because the name is so well known and historically linked to the village.”

Burnham Market is, says Max, “a lovely village”. He recalls: “When I was looking for somewhere to invest, my father said you’ve got to count the chimney pots. It’s difficult to do up here because half of the catchment area is the North Sea. But it’s worked out very well. I’m still here and still busy.”

What has changed about the business in your 34 years?

Max: It was pretty much an off-licence when I bought it, not a full-blown wine merchant like it is now. I ship quite a lot of my wine myself. I’ve got a specialist claret room because most of my customers are fairly traditional and like traditional styles of wine. When I took over it was quite a lot of lowest common denominator, entry-point stuff. After a while I thought it wasn’t terribly exciting or profitable. 

I started doing a bit of wholesale at one point but it never turned out to be particularly profitable. The money was always in retail – retail customers tend not to go bust on you and they pay their bills. What I do is swap wine for money. I give people wine and they give me money, and then everyone’s happy.

You’ve avoided the modern trappings of a wine bar or Enomatics.

Max: We haven’t got the right location to go hybrid because there isn’t enough year-round footfall. We’ve thought of having a bank of Enomatics but … when we’re busy, we’re very very busy, but when we’re quieter around January/February it’s very quiet.

The layout of the shop is completely different. There wasn’t a fridge. There wasn’t a display cascade in the middle of the shop and no shelves on the back wall. Most of the display was one bottle and the rest was down in the cellar. It was a busy shop but literally just supplied the village.

Has that footprint expanded?

Max: In those days the north Norfolk coast wasn’t what it is now. It’s now an area of outstanding natural beauty and changed from somewhere you might have gone to, to somewhere people really really want to go to. It’s more of a tourist destination. I wanted to make sure that the business was not just focusing on the people of Burnham Market. I wanted to sell on a 20-mile radius to King’s Lynn and Norwich and Swaffham, and get commissions for weddings and 21sts and things like that, to see if we could get a bit more business, rather than waiting for the odd farmer to come in for a bottle of gin and six bottles of wine.

How did you go about that?

Max: I can’t remember, it’s too long ago. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast. I think I got some electoral rolls and sent something out – and put leaflets in newspaper deliveries, which people had in the days before tablets. I think it was in 1991 that I thought what I needed was for everyone who came in to go on a mailing list – which in those days was an actual mailing list, involving envelopes and stamps.

That was also the first year I did a set-piece Christmas tasting in the shop. I was quite surprised by how many people turned up. That went from strength to strength and now we have two: one in the summer and one at Christmas, both in the shop. The summer tasting is about 17 wines and the Christmas one is about 34.

How has the product range changed?

Max: In my early times there wasn’t an awful lot of new world. There wasn’t an awful lot of Italy, to be honest. There was a bit but it was pretty bog standard. Five years ago we had a proper red Burgundy department and it was all proper, drinkable, affordable wine. Nowadays the stuff they send out is neither – it’s too young and too expensive – and so one of the things we’ve done in the past year is to take the five shelves of red Burgundy and reclassify it as “global Pinot Noir”. All the Pinot Noir is now in that space and the unaffordable expensive stuff is at the bottom.

Oliver: It’s allowed us to introduce Central Otago, Oregon and California and a few bits from Germany that have more bottle age but are more affordable. We’re selling a lot of them and it’s revitalised our Pinot Noir sales, which is good because the Burgundies were getting a bit ropey.

Max: I’m very keen on everyday language on signage, with a bit of humour. Nothing too stiff. It’s all laid out in countries. I will organise it in styles, such as light reds and big reds and chunky reds, only over my dead body.

You kept elements of that old off-licence range, with bigger brands in beer and spirits. 

Max: Yes. We don’t sell cigarettes but we do sell fine cigars. We don’t sell bars of chocolate but we do sell boxes of nice chocolates. 

We do sell Gordon’s but we don’t sell an awful lot of it, but we can’t not sell it, or Baileys or Kahlúa or whatever. If local people want something like Baileys they might drive to a supermarket and then buy their wine while they’re at it, and we don’t want them to do that. 

Do trends move differently in rural Norfolk? 

Oliver: Trends do get here from London but they take a long time. The resurgence of Riesling across London is a good example. It happened there five years ago and it’s only just reached us. People have got used to it and this year we’ve gone from having three to about 10.

Do the tourists and second-homers shop differently from the locals?

Oliver: People are on holiday and want what they know and feel safe with, but they’ll buy two bottles instead of one because they’re on holiday and they drink a bit more. If they’re someone who normally drinks £40 bottles of wine, they might well buy two at £25 and spend 10 quid more overall.

We do incredibly well with slightly alternative choices – baby or poor man’s versions. If we have a Puligny-Montrachet producer we might also have the Bourgogne Chardonnay from them. It says Puligny-Montrachet on the cork and it’s almost like a second wine from Burgundy to them. In the claret room we do extremely well with second wines. They’ve got their comfort zone, even up to silly prices, but if you can make a link into it …

Max: They’re here on holiday and they don’t want to be challenged by their drinking. They don’t mind that when they’re at home and can take the time, but when they’re up here they’re switched off and in wind-down mode. They don’t want to be taxed by something fancy but they do want something decent and we tailor our sweet spot on price to accommodate that.

What is that sweet spot?

Max: There’s very little under a tenner that we’d want to put ourselves to, so the first sweet spot is £12-£15 but I would think that overall our main market is £12-£25 or even £12-£30. We’ve got plenty of stuff over £30 and a bit under £12, but to be honest, with the duty rates at the moment, I’m struggling to find anything that gives value for money under £12. So much of it is duty and packaging and labels and bottles and shipping. By the time you put some wine in you’ve only got about 10p’s worth in the bottle. It’s difficult to see how that ends up as a drinkable good-value product. So we don’t go too low.

Where do you ship direct from?

Max: About 90% of our claret is shipped direct. We can offer better pricing than going through an agent. They ship it, put their margin on, put the managing director’s fancy car on, and the plush carpets in the office – and we don’t. We get much better pricing and we can lay our hands on slightly older stuff if necessary.

Our house wines are shipped from Cote de Duras, just outside Bordeaux – a red, a white and a rosé. I’ve shipped our house Champagne for 30 years now, working with a small family company called Baron-Fuenté. Inexpensive Champagne has a tendency to be a bit green and fizzy, whereas this has got 10 months’ ageing beyond the legal minimum, so it’s a bit softer and nicer to drink. It’s a staple of almost every party in Norfolk. We ship direct from Burgundy, from the Loire – and from Provence in the summer. I first shipped from Provence in the long hot summer of 2003. I ordered three pallets in six weeks. The owner rang me up and couldn’t understand how I was getting through so much of the stuff with only one shop. I think that was the one time we taught London how to do it. I was big in rosé before anyone else caught on.

Have you led the way on anything else?

Max: Yes! I was calling my deals a mixed six long before Majestic. It’s 10% off a mixed half-case. It’s been going great guns here for a long time – and then suddenly Majestic started using it. I thought oh, I should’ve trademarked it and made them pay for it.

Oliver: We’re a proper traditional old-school merchant selling wines for people to take home and drink. We do an awful lot of mixed sixes. Half-a-case sales or more is the bulk of what we do. 

Max: There’s an article each month in The Wine Merchant, Not You Again, and we do have quite a few Not You Again moments. One was: “How does this mixed six work then?”. I started off saying, “there’s a clue in the name”.

Oliver: Some people really don’t get it even when you explain it. They think they buy six and pay the cheapest price of the six for all six bottles. Noooo! You don’t buy Nero d’Avola at £10.99 and then a bottle of Latour and pay £10.99 for the Latour. We have tickets on bottles on the shelves saying “cold”, to show a wine’s also in the fridge. The amount of people we have saying “well, that’s not cold…”

Apart from the Christmas and summer tastings, are there other events through the year?

Oliver: We do private tastings every now and then. They fell off a lot during the pandemic and they’re only recovering now. 

Max: The concentration of population around here isn’t tight enough to be able to say, “next week we’re going to do claret and the week after we’ll do Rhône”.

Oliver: We’re on first-name terms with a lot of second-home owners but they’re only here every other week. If they could tell us their schedule it would be very helpful.

Max: People coming up here don’t want to be challenged. They want to come in, have a nice little chinwag with one of us, take the wine away and go and sit in their house or garden. They don’t want to traipse out at seven in the evening for a couple of hours to learn about something. It’s very much relaxation mode: most of them are switched off. 

How important is online?

Max: We do it but our offering is neither the top-drawer stuff nor the lowest common denominator. It’s not cheap or really expensive, and there are plenty of companies doing the same who have IT departments and dedicated staff. It’s not something we’ve ever spent a degree of time or money on.

Oliver: We’re only a two-person business and online can be pretty much a full-time job. The trouble is at the moment that with almost every other invoice, there’s some sort of price increase which has to be updated – it’s not even six-monthly – and it makes the workload on the website very heavy for not a lot. And most of the companies who sell the bulk of wine online in the UK are in higher population areas or near the M6 corridor. Shipping from here is expensive and we can’t offer the discounts they can. 

Outside of your direct shipments, what’s your supplier base like?

Max: Johnny Bingham at Delibo is very proactive and massively enthusiastic once he gets his teeth into something. He’s very good. We use ABS, through which we ship our own claret. 

We use Boutinot a bit, Hallgarten a bit, Hatch a bit, Liberty a bit, though we do quite a bit less with Liberty than we used to. I’m a member of Vindependents, so we get quite a bit from them. Vindependents has some very good wines, it’s just a bit slow. They used to be in bond at EHD but are in transition to LCB, which is where all my other stuff is, and that should sharpen things up a bit. 

Is exclusivity high on your list of buying criteria?

Max: I don’t want anything that’s widely available. If I come across a new wine, the first question is: “Is it in Majestic?”. We used to do quite well with a claret that started selling to Majestic. People would point out it was cheaper there, but I’d ask what vintage it was. Majestic would be selling the filthy 2013 and virtually giving it away and we were selling the 2015, which was much better and more exciting. “Yes, it is five quid more.” 

I don’t want to buy a load of the same stuff from Boutinot or Hallgarten because a lot of other people do that. In order to be passionately independent, as I am, I want to take my own decisions, and not have four or five wines from the same estate because it’s easy. That’s casual lazy buying. I strive to get what we need but not necessarily all from the same place – and it doesn’t automatically reappear next year if the vintage isn’t right.

Do you have personal great passions in the wine world?

Max: I think because of my father I’m a dyed-in-the-wool claret man. If I went on Desert Island Discs my luxury would have to be an everlasting bottle of Château Latour ’82. When I finished it, it would refill through the night and I’d drink it again.