How The Wine Society puts ‘passion before profit’

British wine lovers are so lucky. We may pay through the nose for our pleasures via the increasingly complicated taxation of our favourite liquid, and wine prices are likely to rise even further towards October when the government will start collecting EPR payments from retailers. (EPR no longer stands for my FT predecessor Edmund Penning-Rowsell, but for “extended producer responsibility”, another complex scheme, in this case designed to reduce the environmental impact of packaging.)

But we do have a national treasure in the form of The Wine Society, a long-standing, exceptionally good wine retailer that is owned by its members rather than by rapacious shareholders. As it happens, the original E P-R was chairman of the society for decades, and was scrupulous about never mentioning it in his FT columns.

“Passion before profit” has been one of the society’s slogans, but recently it has been all too true. As current chief executive Steve Finlan told me through gritted teeth at its spring tasting for wine media last month, “we really have been a mutual recently, and made hardly any profit at all”. This was a result of the society’s much-vaunted pledge to hold “the vast majority” of its prices, despite a perfect storm of pressures, from May 2023 to February 2025. According to Finlan, the society is now starting to increase prices by an average of 2.5 to 3 per cent, which will presumably help fund the raft of eco measures that are already under way, and well publicised to members.

These include not just reducing carbon emissions right through the supply chain, with a special emphasis on solar energy and packaging, but also reducing bottle weight and dispensing with capsules on its own-label bottles, apparently saving the equivalent of the weight of a giraffe (roughly 850kg) in plastic and aluminium in the first year. The society is proactively encouraging its hundreds of suppliers around the world to become more environmentally and socially responsible themselves by hosting free webinars to help them, and by investing £60,000 a year in specially vetted producer schemes. The third pillar of sustainability of course is financial; this must lead to some interesting discussions between supplier and the supplied. (To be fair, the society’s most obvious competitor, Laithwaites, is also pretty hot on sustainability.)

All this should make members feel virtuous about buying from this particular merchant, but what about the quality and range of the wines on offer? I have spent nearly 50 years trying to remain as neutral as possible in my dealings with both producers and retailers, so it rather goes against the grain to express my extreme enthusiasm for what the society has to offer wine lovers. The prices have always been keen across the board, usefully translating into genuine value rather than cost-cutting. At its tastings, I find myself liberally sprinkling “GV” for good value and “VGV” for very good value in my notes. At the most recent one, I tasted a total of 81 wines and found 17 of them GV, another 16 VGV and one, The Society’s Exhibition Chenin Blanc 2022, made by South African winemaking heroes Chris and Suzaan Alheit, VVGV at £14.50.

The society has a wide range of its own handpicked bottlings (whose prices are still being held), with the top of the range labelled Exhibition. This is a nod to the society’s genesis in 1874 when a group of professional men formed a wine-buying society to use up an embarrassing surplus of Portuguese wine that had been overlooked after being shipped over for the London International Exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall. The gentlemen’s stated objective then was “to introduce foreign wines hitherto unknown”, a practice the society continues to this day.

It has just increased its team of enthusiastic professional wine buyers to nine, with a much lower average age than used to be the case. Their job is to continuously refresh the range of wines, currently totalling 1,650, from the society’s Portuguese Red at £6.50 to a Chave, Cuvée Cathelin 1995 Hermitage recently sold for £6,500 a bottle (£7,800 currently on wine-searcher.com) — although the most expensive bottle on the list today is £380. They tend to be fleeter of foot than their supermarket counterparts and can get wines on the list much faster. According to Finlan, they have recently been able to acquire several interesting parcels of wine from overstocked UK importers.

Because the society has such a long history, it has established solid relationships with the producers of many of the world’s most sought-after wines, though allocating these to members can be a headache nowadays of course, risking complaints on the society’s online forum. But what distinguishes the society’s range is its quirkiness. At the recent tasting, I marked several wines such as the pair from Syria, a Ukrainian Chardonnay, a Czech red, a New Zealand Albariño and an obscure Puglia varietal as typical of society buyers’ enthusiasms.

A fifth warehouse has recently been added to the society’s site in Stevenage, north of London, where members can store their wines, typically those bought in bond en primeur from the society, for £10.80 per case per year including VAT, insurance and replacement at current value should anything go wrong. But also in store is £18mn worth (at cost) of maturing fine wines that will be offered to members when they are judged ready to drink, a rare asset. Below the Stevenage offices, a short walk from the railway station, is a shop with some bottles available in too small a quantity to make it on to the society’s (still printed) lists.

The total number of active members is currently 182,000. Finlan claims that the price-holding exercise brought in some of the younger members the society is so keen to court (average age of members has been 60). An initiative last year aimed at publicising the society’s existence to a more youthful crowd involved offering some of its mature treasures to Noble Rot restaurants, though this did not go down well with some of the members. A wider selection of orange and natural wines might help?

Membership involves buying a lifetime share for £40, with a £20 discount redeemable on the first order. Delivery is free, a welcome change from many merchants. Director of sustainability and social impact Dom de Ville has trialled electric vehicles for the delivery fleet but reluctantly abandoned the idea because the society’s drivers wouldn’t be able to make nearly enough deliveries. “We then looked at using HVO fuel,” he reported, “but on close investigation I decided against it. Because of the explosion in demand for HVO, suppliers are now having to source from outside the EU and couldn’t guarantee that the feedstock didn’t include virgin palm oil, hence contributing to deforestation. A minefield.”

Perhaps in a nod to the current economic mood, the average price of the wines on show last month seemed lower than usual, with the most expensive wine being the Syrian red, Bargylus Grand Vin Rouge 2016 at £35 a bottle. But even that, with its layer upon layer of exotic fruit and interest, I thought excellent value.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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