By Adam Lechmere
Cliff Roberson’s face is of a type generally described as “lived in”, a phrase intended to convey the idea of hinterland, a life lived to the full. Certainly the 75-year-old wine merchant has done enough to ensure he has a fund of memories to draw on as he sits by the fire in his dotage, with a rug over his knees and a small whisky at his elbow.
Anyone who knows Roberson would find it difficult to imagine him going so gently into the twilight. Laid back he may be, but he’s not the retiring type. At the moment, for example, he’s running a five-centre operation. There’s the flagship West Kensington shop, a magnet for wine lovers both professional and amateur; there’s the website; the on-trade business; the fine wine business, and another website which sells directly into Sweden. That’s not forgetting London Cru, the capital’s first urban winery.
An audacious idea
Roberson’s career began in 1974 when he started Buckingham Vintners, which he built into a chain of five shops before selling the lot to the French group Nicolas in 1989, keeping a share in Buckingham’s importing arm. He jumped back into retail in 1991 with the opening of Roberson Wine in Kensington, while he also consolidated a partnership with the European wine group Schenk, creating Buckingham Schenk, which became one of the UK’s biggest wine companies, selling 40m bottles a year.
By 2004 he’d sold all of his shares in Buckingham in order to concentrate on the retail side of the business. He’d loved working with Schenk, which he describes as “a really nice family”.
“I worked with them for 40 years. It wasn’t about money – I wanted a gang. I wanted to be in the family because they were a considerable force in the wine world. I got the same prices that Germany got so I could have the same power as supermarkets, and power is a useful tool if you’re dealing with important people.”
Roberson, the business, now has a turnover of “between £10m ($15m) and £12m,” broken down into three main divisions. The business-to-business side – hotels and restaurants, other wine merchants and multiples – makes up about 75%, while the shop and the website account for the other quarter. The composition has “changed quite radically” in the last few years, business development director Adam Green says.
It has indeed. Cliff Roberson is a restless character, and a couple of years ago, he “got itchy,” as he puts it. Asked for some ideas, Green suggested a winery. In Central London. So they enlisted an itinerant entrepreneur, Will Tomlinson, as a partner and with a million pounds in start-up capital, they bought five open-topped stainless steel fermenters and some barrels, to a capacity of 2,500 cases. They hired a winemaker, the Australian Gavin Monery, whose CV includes premium wineries like Cullen Wines and Cape Mentelle, Jean-Louis Chave, Remoissenet Pére et Fils and Alex Gambal.
Grapes from Roussillon and Piedmont come through Europe and across the English Channel in a fleet of refrigerated trucks (there’s also a wine from Sandhurst Vineyards in Kent). Monery spends half his time in vineyards negotiating prices. If a batch is substandard, he rejects it, as has happened. The four wines have been well-received by the critics, but they’re made in such tiny quantities, and the whole set-up seems so expensive and quixotic (how much must it cost to run a fleet of refrigerated trucks around Europe?), wouldn’t most businessmen have run a mile from such an undertaking?
“It’s not the safest or the most rational business plan,” Green concedes, but he insists it will give investors a good return, and he stresses how attracted they were to the idea of bringing something “genuinely new” to London.
There’s another advantage. While the Roberson wine store is little-known to consumers outside its Kensington catchment area, London Cru has garnered a good deal of interest, and “the trick is to use that to cast light back onto Roberson,” Green says.
As a business, Roberson has spent the last couple of years thinking hard about its image. “In the last 18 months we’ve had a dedicated team for business-to-consumer marketing. It’s taken us a little bit longer than it should have done. In this industry it’s not good enough to say ‘We’ve got lovely wines, why is nobody coming to us?’ You’ve got to go out and show people.”
Roberson is now a well-known presence at big consumer events like the Good Food Show. The head of buying, Mark Andrew, is frequently to be found behind a table selling copies of the samizdat magazine Noble Rot that he produces in his spare time. Early last year he invited the pick of his American producers to show their wares at a tasting and seminar hosted by Jon Bonné, the San Francisco Chronicle’s wine editor and author of the seminal The New California Wine. The crowd was a distillation of high-end London wine trade: Jancis Robinson, Neal Martin, Steven Spurrier, buyers such as Greg Sherwood of veteran California specialists Handford Wines; big-name sommeliers like Andrea Briccarello of Galvin and Claire Pancrazi of MASH.
Cliff Roberson, who says he has never been to Napa, champions such initiatives. “I try to create a work environment where people are free to express their own thoughts and so on. Adam [Green] says ‘I’ve got this idea’ or Mark [Andrew] might come up with an idea for California – and I say go ahead and do it. I encourage innovation. I like the idea that people can use their talents to the advantage of themselves and the business.”
In order to bolster the “fickle” fine wine category, in 2011 Roberson decided to follow some other distributors and cap the prices of its top-end wines to the wholesale price plus VAT. It was a characteristic move: canny marketing disguised as democratisation. ‘Roberson slashes fine wine prices’ was one headline, though in fact its fine wine prices are pretty much of a level with its competitors – indeed, you can pick up some top claret, like Lafite 2009, cheaper at Berry Bros.
For all that, Roberson – the shop – does have a democratic feel, its black scaffold-pole shelves still managing to look futuristic, its stock a real pleasure for browsers. Across the business, fine wine – classed as £60.00 ($90.00) and above – represents 50% of sales by value but the average sale price is £18.00 a bottle. The California list is particularly strong, with Andrew diligent in his pursuit of both classics and the avant-garde, like Sonoma’s Arnot-Roberts or Santa Barbara’s Graham Tatomer.
If you were to ask what Roberson’s USP is, the answer would probably be ‘diversity’. “It’s essential to retain the diversity of the business and to re-invest in other areas and use that as a catalyst to push on,” Green says.
Diversity’s also a good way of not being bored. Roberson readily agrees when Green teasingly says, “you get excited by volume, don’t you, Cliff?”, but he also loves the tiny scale of London Cru. His office décor is an exhilarating mix of business-like computer stations and eccentric, hippyish artwork. There’s a hefty pair of marble lions, African fetishes, a valuable Indonesian screen, vintage posters – and a picture of Roberson grinning at a worried-looking Prince Charles. “I like contradictions,” he says before heading off to his yoga class. “Contrast in lots of things is what turns me on.”
