There’s a nice symmetry to 67 Pall Mall, London. Its founder, Grant Ashton, makes the whole thing look simple. “I had a wine problem, basically. I had so much I couldn’t possibly drink it.” A lot of his friends – Ashton was a banker by trade – were in the same boat. They couldn’t drink it, and didn’t want to sell it because many wines fetch much less than their price at the top of the market. They were also dismayed by the huge markups that London restaurants charge on fine wine.
So, presumably at a series of boozy dinners, Ashton and his co-founders came up with the idea of opening a wine bar or a restaurant. The group had a look around Marylebone, the village-y network of wealthy streets north of Oxford Street. Nothing suited, and then the old Hambros Bank in Pall Mall, just opposite Berry Bros, came to their notice and they snapped it up. Pall Mall is London’s poshest street and the centre of classic London club land, with Boodle’s, White’s, Brooks’s, The Athenaeum and a host of other famous private members’ clubs within easy reach. The obvious thing to do – given the marvellous Edwin Lutyens heritage-listed building with parquet floors, a walk-in safe in the basement and a fine set of Victorian revolving doors – was to open a wine club.
Waiting list for entry
67 Pall Mall opened in December 2015 and has 1,600 members, with the list frozen for the time being. As well as just about anyone in the UK wine trade, there are lawyers, hedge-fund managers, doctors and other well-heeled types; the latest dinner, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Judgement of Paris, cost £750.00 ($1,083.00) a head. Members are allowed to keep 36 bottles at the club but it’s the astonishingly comprehensive wine list, curated by the veteran sommelier Ronan Sayburn, that is the big draw. The core of the list was put together from the cellars of the 88 shareholders, Ashton’s friends, and friends of friends, all avid wine collectors with a disinclination to pay over the odds whenever they dined out.
There are 523 wines by the glass (“the biggest by-the-glass list in the world, by a factor of two,” Ashton says), from basic Bourgogne Aligoté at £7.00 ($10.12) to Cheval Blanc 1947 at £500.00 for 125 ml. It took them six weeks to sell the ’47 – thanks to the Coravin system, the wine remains fresh indefinitely. One of the odder sights at No 67 are the half-empty bottles of legendary wines ranged behind the bar. For a wine lover, the list is a treasure trove, with not only the greats represented, but every region at every level, from odd Lebanese bottles to hundreds of years of Madeira. Mark-ups are “lower than industry standard,” Ashton says, and a quick trawl through the list shows that there are bargains – a bottle of Latour ‘98 will cost you £469.00, around half the price it goes for in most big London restaurants. They get good returns from what Ashton calls “up-sell – people tend to drink better. They see Haut-Brion 1989 at £1,200.00 a bottle, and they know it will cost them £3,500.00 somewhere else – or they might decide to have just a glass for £200.00.”
Amateurs meet professionals
To lunch at 67 Pall Mall is to meet a cross-section of the international wine world. On any given day the pleasant dining room, which occupies the entire ground floor of the old bank, will be filled with wine merchants, journalists, critics, editors and wine producers on their regular visits to London. Frédéric Engerer of Château Latour is a member, for example – one of the main reasons for joining, he said, was that he would no longer have to cart bottles around in a wheeled suitcase when he comes over to host dinners.
The food is excellent, the service exact yet pleasingly informal. Nicole Rolet, a founder member of the club and proprietor of the Chêne Bleu domaine in Gigondas, says that the tone is set by Ashton’s character. “There’s a genuine enthusiasm there. He’s like a kid in a candy shop.” She also stresses the importance of the club’s role in bridging the gap between amateur and professional. “Members are brought together by a shared love of wine. Within the trade there’s an implicit assumption that at a professional tasting one shouldn’t mix with amateurs, but at 67 I don’t feel that dividing line. I love that synergy when we come together.”
Ashton loves it as well, the sheer conviviality of the enterprise. “What’s surprised me is the degree to which we’ve been able to bring together all these different wine circles, and the amount of people who have latched on to the idea and love it. It seems so obvious now – why did no one think of doing it before?”
