(Scotsman) - A FREQUENT complaint, particularly about French and Italian wine producers, used to be their reluctance to learn from the New World. Equally, many have ascribed a similar conservatism to the top levels of the British wine trade. Perhaps those contentions were what prompted David Gleave MW to create the innovative Liberty Wines in 1997, and then to make Italy his initial focus. Though the business now employs 80 people and features wines from more than 200 producers, Liberty’s guiding principles remain the quest for exceptional wines and to be “stubbornly quality-focused”. As well as strongly supporting several of the – then unfashionable but very accomplished – Australian boutique wineries, Liberty was also behind the creation of Alpha Zeta wines in 1999. The project had two strands. One was to buy grapes – not the ready-made bulk wine traditionally used for entry-point products – but, more importantly, to improve quality by working with growers to reduce their yields and control harvesting. The other step was to bring in an experienced New World winemaker (in this case Matt Thomson from New Zealand) to create a range of the fruit-forward wines that had proved so successful in the southern hemisphere.