Vinotopia’s smart new premises in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, could be said to bring its story full circle – though the purpose-built barn it now calls home is a far cry from the agricultural building where it started out back in 2011.   Nigel Huddleston pays a visit

When Jeremy Hill founded Vinotopia in 2011 its first home was in a modified barn in the Gloucestershire village of Long Newnton. “It was a great space, but the location was wrong,” he recalls. “Most of the passing trade had four legs and no pockets to put a credit card, and they weren’t allowed to drink because it would upset the milk.”

Relocation came after just 18 months, to the former Oxford Wine Co branch in nearby Tetbury. Things went well through Vinotopia’s time on the site, but a growing wholesale business started to put a strain on storage.

An old contact from Jeremy’s schooldays runs a successful chain of garden centres and the talk turned to the possibility of doing something at one of its sites in Nailsworth, six miles away from Tetbury.

A new-build barn-style development was the outcome, with the space divided between Vinotopia and the garden centre’s own Local Larder food hall business.

“Next door to a garden centre with 100 parking spaces and a shop doing food? We thought it wasn’t the worst place to put a wine merchant,” says Jeremy, whose pre-Vinotopia CV includes spells with Nick Baile-era Oddbins, selling Mateus for Hedges & Butler and running a City wine bar company.

Managing director Andy Cole joined a decade ago, after a career in events catering, and says annual turnover has risen from £400,000 to £1.5m in that time.

“We would have been much further ahead if he didn’t have weekends off,” jokes Jeremy.

The Vinotopia bit of the new-build has an outdoor terrace. An indoor lounge area, with wood burner, sofas and the day’s newspapers, is where customers land as they go through the main door.

Flags of the world and time-zone clocks for Nailsworth, Napa and Barossa provide a playful wine flavour to the lounge décor, and it’s overlooked by a huge mezzanine-level events space.

The trading style is a Enomatic-assisted hybrid, with a product range that encompasses spirits and local beers in addition to wine. 

“It’s the antithesis of a smart wine merchant,”Jeremy says. “It’s not old-fashioned and stuffy. This is much more like you get in France where you use the available space and put your own stamp on it. People feel more encouraged to come in if they can see the sofas, they can see the wood burner, and they say, let’s sit down and have a glass of wine while we work out what we’re going to do. Your dog can jump on the knackered sofa and it doesn’t matter.”

Andy adds: “We changed the layout of the shop I don’t know how many times, just trying to make it more friendly for the non-discerning wine drinker, so that when they walk in, they’re not walking into a display of Charles Heidsieck Champagne, they’re walking into a no/low display, or a Christmas display or Proseccos and Cavas – to make sure people don’t feel put off by expensive wines.”

While the building was being readied for the summer 2023 opening, there was a short spell in two shipping containers in the garden centre car park.

“We’ve been in a box or a barn for many years,” says Jeremy. “We started off in a barn and have ended up in barn.”

Is the mezzanine space only used for big events and tastings or is it part of the hybrid offer?

Andy: We don’t tend to get enough people yet to open it up, but we hope to do more. We do sip and stitch: on the first Tuesday of the month we get a crafting club in and they have a glass of wine and have a knit and a natter. We then do a brush party, where you come along and paint a picture with a teacher who takes you through the process of layering up the canvas into a final picture. They take the space and it brings new people in we wouldn’t normally see. We’re trying to finalise a book club and we’re talking to galleries to use it for exhibitions. 

Lighting seems important in creating a warm feel.

Andy: Everything’s on different switches, so we can change the atmosphere in the evening. We can turn the central lights off and just have the spotlights, or vice versa. If it’s more of a moody event we can just have the central lights, and if it’s a gallery event we can have the spotlights.

Tell us about your own events.

Andy: We do wine pairing dinners once a month and spring and winter portfolio tastings, and then we have two exclusive tastings for Wine Club members. Then we do smaller, pop-up tastings once a fortnight. We try to do a mixture of formal and informal.

We’ve taken the commercial decision not to take the GP a restaurant would on dinners. We did a Burn’s Night game dinner, which was five wines and four courses for £65. Highgrove down the road was doing three courses for £250, with no wine.

Jeremy: I approve of the king, but ….

Andy: We think getting more people in, enjoying the space and talking about it and saying it’s amazing, is much better than getting fewer people, paying less, but with less atmosphere, and going away saying it was quite good. 

How does the Wine Club work?

Andy: It’s about making the most of customer loyalty. Customers pay £30 a month and in return they buy their wine for a better-than-trade price. The £30 doesn’t go to building up a pot of money. It’s a subscription, so if you don’t use it, you lose it. The idea is to help people to buy better quality wine for less. We link into that free tickets to the annual tastings, discounts at local restaurants, and first dibs on rare parcels we bring in or any other special offers we might have running. 

Did you manage to retain your customer base from Tetbury?

Andy: It’s unbelievable … I don’t know what it is, but they’re happy to drive to the supermarket and do their weekly shopping, but to drive a few miles down the road to buy wine wouldn’t happen. So, we have had to remarket ourselves to this area. We’re trying to encourage click and collect and deliveries to Tetbury, but, yeah, we lost a lot of people. 

Has the new business from local people in Nailsworth compensated for what you lost from Tetbury?

Andy: We are easily ahead on retail sales, probably 50% up. We’ve also focused on corporate business, as opposed to conventional on-trade wholesale, although we still do that. When you’re dealing with restaurants and pubs, you’re competing with everyone else dealing with restaurants and pubs. The margins and the wines available are very limited. When you start dealing with solicitors, estate agents and accountants there are fewer people in the pond fishing for the same business. We’ve got our own printing, so we can do bespoke labels. If someone buys a house, they get a bottle of wine with the estate agent’s label on. It’s been worth spending the money because it brings an awful lot of business in.

How do the sales break down across the business?

Andy: Internet is a very small part. We keep on pushing it. It goes up and down in spikes, but it’s probably only about 5% of the business. The corporate side of things is growing and probably about 15%. The on-trade [wholesale] is about 40% and the other 40% is retail. 

Who does the buying?

Jeremy: We have discussions across the team. We’ll get in all sorts of samples of, say, Chablis – I’ve got some sitting on my desk right now – and we’ll taste them. Personally, I don’t like Chablis, because I think it’s too expensive for what it is, but I’m prepared to be out-voted.

Andy: We don’t buy any wine without tasting it first, and that’s generally a process of at least three of us, if not four, tasting that wine. We think we have a very good collective palate: we’ve got a fine wine palate, a medium wine palate and the Joe-on-the-street palate as well. If we’ve got customers in, we’ll ask them what they think of the wine as well. There’s no point in buying a wine if no one’s going to buy it. It’s trying to remember we’re buying wine for customers and not for us.

Is there a blueprint for a Vinotopia wine then?

Andy: We like to buy the wines that are next door to the big brother: having a declassified white Burgundy rather than stocking a Puligny-Montrachet. We’ve got Malintoppo from the north-facing slopes of the Orcia valley [in Tuscany]. It’s still looked after as well as a wine from south-facing slopes but takes longer to mature and develop. 

Jeremy: We refer to is to as the baby Brunello because it’s half the price but tastes very similar. Also, for 10 years now we’ve been importing a rosé called Figuière from Provence. We work very closely with the Combard family who are just outside St Tropez and we have that at different quality levels.

Andy: We have a grower Champagne, which we’ve had for just as long. I’d rather sell that than a cheaper Grande Marque. We don’t steer away from Grandes Marques, but we only deal with ones we feel we can put our name next to, such as Charles Heidsieck, Pol Roger and Bollinger. That’s about it.

Are those smaller producers all shipped direct?

Andy: The rosé and the Champagne are. We’ve got a négociant down in the south west, who we deal with for Pays d’Oc wines, we’ve got two négociants in Bordeaux, one in Rhône, we’ve done some dealing in Loire, and we’ve got one in Burgundy. We used to deal with Spain, but it’s hard work – shipping’s difficult.

Between £8 and £15 is the best place for us. If you’d have asked me two years ago I’d easily have said 20 quid but in the last 12 months the price has come right down. We sold more wine in 2024 than we did in 2023, but at a lower average price bracket. 

When we first set up there were conversations about Prosecco and Pinot Grigio, but you need to make sure you’ve got all levels of the business available, so that people coming in don’t feel overwhelmed by the cost of some of the wines. That is more important to us than having showcase wines that people are just going to have as a library. Most customers tend to buy wine to drink rather than wine to invest. We’re buying wine for people.

We’re tending to focus much more on sustainably sourced wines. A lot of people are coming to us and saying ‘OK, it’s wine, but how’s it made, how does it affect the climate, what are they doing to give something back?’ We do a lot with Vintage Roots. Organic was once seen as a high-priced option, but it seems now a lot of people now are thinking they should be buying it, anyway.

Is sustainability a point of interest in your own operation?

Andy: When they built this, we put some ideas to them. We said it had to made from sustainably- sourced timber, and had to be looking at insulation. This is insulated on the roof, the sides and underneath as well. We’ve got solar panels going in this year. There was going to be rainwater harvesting but I think they felt there was probably enough water around these parts as it was, from all the floods. The vehicles we’re sourcing have to be either hybrid or electric. We’re doing our journey for carbon net zero with the local council and their Growth Hub. 

The shop’s very much a drinks all-rounder rather than just dedicated to wine. Why did you take that route?

Andy: There’s no point opening a shop with only one thing to buy. You’ve got to offer people the opportunity to buy wine, but they might be having a drinks party and need some beer or a bottle of gin, and tonic to go with it. When we started we had three gins, and we’ve been up to 30 at one point. We’ve always kept a good selection of Cognac and Armagnac, and a couple of Calvados, and then we make sure there’s some sort of marc available, then sherry and Madeira. Sherry is having a resurgence, so we’ve been playing a lot with González Byass and have run some tastings. Doing pop-up tastings means you’ve got the chance to have a play with customers and see what works. 

You have a big selection of no/low for an indie.

Andy: We always make a big thing of Dry January: you know, we’ve got dry gin, dry sherry, dry vermouth, but we’ve also got the zeroes. We do two or three tastings in January that are zero only and the sales are going up and up and up.

We’ve got two Spanish sparkling wines that we can’t call Cava because they’ve got no alcohol in them, and we’ve got a couple of sparkling wines from the south of France, a sparkling tea, a rosé from the south of France, a Sauvignon and Monastrell from Spain that are alcohol-free. We’ve done fantastically with [alcohol-fee aperitif] Mother Root. It’s been a life changer for all of us. Most of us in the team drink it now. Lucky Saint has been brilliant. We just keep on adding to the range.

Is it just a seasonal January thing?

Jeremy: I think it’s spreading out. My first drink of the evening is either Lucky Saint or a no-alcohol cider, and then I’ll have a glass of wine with supper later. But I want to let the dust settle first with something that has no alcohol.

Andy: The 20-somethings aren’t drinking. If we’re going to attract a younger market we need to make sure we’ve got something there for them to drink.

Nailsworth’s also home to Raffles Fine Wines. Was there a concern about coming into a town that already had an independent?

Andy: We’re doing very different things. Their focus is on cases. We’ve also got Nailsworth Wines & Spirits, which is more of an off-licence, and then, recently, Athila Roos has opened Holy Spirits. He’s more of whisky shop but does fine wine investment as well. We’ve reached out more to him than anyone else in the town and we do collab events. We don’t sell whisky to the level he does, so we’ll send him people who are looking for something specific that we don’t have, and if people are looking for a £15 bottle of Chardonnay he’ll say it’s not his thing and go and see Andy at Vinotopia. We work together and we try to involve the rest of the town in that as well. We work with Hobbs House bakery, who provide bread for tastings. We’ve got a local cheese place that comes in and we’ve got a high-end savoury baker. We try to bring people in the community together, so we can work in partnership. 

Having got this up and running, what are the future plans?

Jeremy: It depends on our neighbours. They’ve got 45 garden centres and a dozen or 15 have a farm shop. If we can prove we can add value to a farm shop maybe we can have a discussion about some of the other branches that aren’t too far away and enhance their value as well.

Andy: They buy from Laithwaites at the moment because they are able to buy two of this, three of that, four of this, six of that, and the shipping charges are very reasonable. But we are talking to them about how we can do the same, with a section that we can create with them and have in their farm shops under our management.

The other thing we are going to do this year is food trucks. We’ve contacted 10 this year and ended up with six and we’ve got them coming every other month, doing Sri Lankan food, pizzas, burgers, loaded fries, chicken wings, and there’s a Greek one coming as well. We’re bringing their customer base to us – they can follow the truck. Next door shuts at 5pm, and we will start at 6.30pm. We’ll put a bit of music on, and it will add another dimension.

Jeremy: It’s part of making it somewhere for people to come for an evening for a bit of fun, and next week, when they’ve got Fred and Mary coming to dinner, they might think we won’t go to Morrisons, we’ll come here. 

Andy: It’s thinking outside the box. Because if you stay in the box no one will come to you.