English wine maker Chapel Down gets sales fizzing

Jul 22, 2013

(Telegraph) - How a move upmarket has helped English winemaker Chapel Down toast rising profits at home and abroad.

After two years of miserable grape harvests, the current heatwave is boding well for English winemakers.

However, Frazer Thompson, chief executive of Chapel Down Wines, which employs 41 people in Tenterden, Kent, is not taking anything for granted.

A former strategy director of Whitbread and global brand director of Dutch brewer Heineken, he was brought in to run the then English Wines in 2001, six months after it was “crashed together” by original investors.

“On day three, men came to repossess the photocopier,” recalls Thompson, 53. “That didn’t happen at Heineken or Whitbread.

“The company had been started six months earlier and had a lot of stock of wine made from grapes that nobody had heard of. It also had a lot of other stuff that probably didn’t have a great deal of value and it had a wage bill, grapes that had to be paid for and vineyards to manage.


Share: Delicious Digg StumbleUpon Reddit Furl Facebook Google Yahoo Twitter

Comments:

 
Leave a comment





Advertisement