We were recently approached by a new vendor to offer some of our barware on Liverpool Street, London. The Wine Pantry is a wine tasting room, dedicated to making English wine more affordable and more accessible, offering wine enthusiasts the opportunity to sample up to 20 still and sparkling wines, matched with a range of British cured meats and cheeses, with specialist tastings and events.
The company – which was set up in May 2011 and specialises in English wine – is also launching a crowdfunding campaign to raise £150k to rebuild the website and spend on stocks.
The retail business moved from its original Borough Market booth on Stoney Street – a 14 sq ft outlet in the market – to a bigger site on Devonshire Row near Liverpool Street in September last year, but owner Julia Stafford said the chance to return to a larger site in Borough Market that would enable it to diversify was “too good to miss”.
Stafford will concentrate on building a niche education and event business that can also supply English wines and spirits wholesale to other events companies, pop-ups and caterers and wants to partner with local companies. The new wholesale business will run alongside the Devonshire Row retail outlet as a separate, wholesale and education business. This will suit the site’s upstairs location, which does not have the level of visibility and footfall that a retail outlet of its size would require.
The 1,400 sq ft space can accommodate around 60 – 100 people for events, she said.
As well as English wine and Gin, The Wine Pantry will also be providing a range of Beaumont TM ice buckets, wine coolers and barware items.
“English wine has changed dramatically and we can’t compete with Waitrose who now sell about a hundred English wines rather than the half a dozen they used to stock. What stands out [with us] is experience, interaction and the ability for consumer to compare wines against each other”.
“We will focus on one-off events, for people who are looking for English wines, or who prefer a London supplier, or corporate events to offer comparative tastings, as well as hosting producer-led tasting and education events, which consumers can pre-book online.”
“The focus is very much on the tasting experience,” she said, adding that with the closure of Vinopolis, there was nowhere in the area for wine lovers to go to compare and contrast wines, but the new education outlet would help this. We want it to be a platform for English Wine,” she said.
The Wine Pantry now offers over 200 English wines to taste and has recently expanded to gin. We were very happy to help the Wine Pantry with their project to create a ‘Wall of Gin’. This ‘Wall of Gin’ has 300 different gin’s to try all of which are dispensed via our best selling Solo spirit measure. One thing is for certain, the ‘Gin Wall’ is breathtaking, we know where we would pick for our next lock in!
