Majestic Wine Stores aren’t housed in palaces. The company takes old car showrooms, cinemas and other premises with large floor areas and parking spaces and piles them high with wine left in their cardboard cases.

It’s not an original concept. Some thirty years ago the then stuffy wine trade was shaken up by Brian Barnett stacking the floor of his ‘Augustus Barnett’ shops with wine boxes and opening just the top one. He later sold out to Bottoms Up.

In my first View from Snorbens I said that "all our wine stores are branches of national chains and include Oddbins, Majestic, Unwins, Victoria Wine and Bottoms Up". Unwins struggles on but Oddbins was sold to the French Castel company, owners of the dire Nicolas shops, who subsequently drastically pruned Oddbins list. The century old Victoria Wine name has vanished under a reorganisation by owners First Quench who also now own Bottoms Up, and they closed Snorbens large Bottoms Up branch. But Majestic continues its steady growth. From 35 stores in 1989, there are now 113 and most recent half year profits increased by £1.6m to £4.2m. Many Majestic stores are on the outskirts of cities but we are lucky in Snorbens with a branch just of our high street.

Majestic are unusual in that they operate as a wholesaler which means the minimum quantity of wine they can sell in a transaction is 9 litres, i.e. one dozen bottles. I believe they originally did this to avoid the expense and effort of applying for retail liquor licenses, and they were also able to sell wine outside normal licensing hours. I used to aim buying from them on Sunday afternoons when retail wine sales were not legal, as my riposte to the stuffy alcohol laws. Those laws have now been greatly relaxed but Majestic continues with their policy. They have found they attract a loyal and big spending clientele. Their average customer buys 18 bottles, at a higher per bottle spend, and they also load up with bottled water and beers by the case.

Although it’s now a large chain, Majestic is a sharp operator who moves fast, snapping up bargains from around the world and offering them at remarkable prices. When Sweden joined the European Union their government monopoly alcohol stores, the execrable System Bolaget, had to start towards liberalisation and sold large parcels of wine from its maturation cellars. Majestic snapped up the lot and sold aged clarets and burgundies at low prices. Last year they snaffled the stock of a bankrupt European importer of American wine. There was tremendous buzz on the UK’s wine discussion board www.wine-pages.com as details of stores which had received allocations were posted. Wines listed at $20-$30 dollars in the US were on sale at less that a third of that in Majestic.

However Majestic majors in old world wines and French wines account for 45% of their sales. They stock 18 New Zealand wines, with six Sauvignon Blancs, three Pinot Noirs and a handful of sparklers from Lindauer and Duetz. Prices range from £6.99 to £13.99. Names include Montana, Villa Maria, Oyster Bay Wither Hills and Waimea Estate and there’s a single vineyard Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from Fairleigh Estate. Majestic’s web-sales are increasing and they offer free home delivery. They also own booze cruise outlets in France. Let’s hope they scoop up an interesting parcel of NZ wines. www.majestic.co.uk

Voyager Awards
Voyager magazine voted Villa Maria Reserve Marlborough Pinot Noir as 'Best Wine'. Voyager is the in flight magazine of bmi. bmi –with its irritating lower case initials - used to be British Midland Airways until its recent corporate makeover. It’s Britain’s second largest scheduled airline, after British Airways. Their in-flight magazine asked readers to nominate the 2003 'best in the business', and they chose Villa Maria in the wine category, describing it as "Consistently top quality wine from New Zealand". Votes are recorded at www.voyagerawards.com

Wine Rebellion
I brought home several bottles from my recent visits to New York state’s Finger Lakes wine region and had put a bottle of Cayuga White in the fridge to accompany Friday’s grilled plaice. This is a variety specially bred in the area; it is a hybrid as some of its ancestors are native American vines and I was looking forward to tasting it at home with dinner and discussing it with my partner. One of my (few) household tasks is the purchase of wines and matching them with dinner, a job I have done without complaint for many years. This time however my partner returned from work with a rare bottle of wine under her arm. "This is what we are having with dinner" she stated, and put it in the fridge. My protestations that Cayuga White was really rather pleasant and that she would like it fell on deaf ears and so we had her emergency purchase which was Kaituna Hills New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc 2003, produced and bottled by Montana exclusively for Marks & Spencer.

This is a deliciously typical Sauvignon Blanc with muted gooseberry and grass flavours over crisp fruit acids, and it matched very well with our fish.

The back label is informative, with logos showing dryness level (2), that it should be chilled, consumed within 12 months, has 1.6 alcohol units and is closed with natural cork. The label text tells us the winemaker was Jamie Marfell who is 'a master at vinifying the Sauvignon style for which the region has become famous'. It cost £5.99.

By coincidence, the day after I wrote this, The Guardian reviewed the Kaituna Hills Sauvignon Blanc 2003. Malcolm Gluck said it was "a very grapey, fresh clean interpretation of the grape, with a finishing tough of peach."

I didn’t notice peach, but Malcolm’s column commences by stating that everyone has a unique perception of taste because of the reaction of wine with our saliva as we drink. Apparently men produce at least two litres of saliva daily, women half that. He pursued the theory until he realised that its widespread acceptance would put him out of work. So there you have it – if your spit is like Gluck’s you get peach, if like mine gooseberry and grass.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

© Peter May
26 January 2004

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