Three women over three centuries

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To celebrate International Women’s Day, we wanted to share the stories of three significant women in our history. Each one has played a huge part in forming the Berry Bros. & Rudd we see today. Here, Alexandra Gray de Walden introduces them.  

With the word “Bros.” in our company name, people are often surprised to discover that our history starts, in fact, with a woman. While very little is known about the Widow Bourne, she was clearly important enough for her reputation to outlive that of her husband (unusual for the period) and the inevitable passing of time. What we do know, however, is we have her to thank for the founding of what is today “Berry Bros. & Rudd”.

Our business is Bourne

From the early 1500s, Whitehall Palace had been the primary residence of the British monarch until it was almost totally destroyed by fire in 1698. It is no coincidence that this is the same year the Widow Bourne opened her shop at No.3 St James’s Street. The Royal Court moved from the wreckage of Whitehall to St James’s Palace that same year, bringing the great and the good of London society, the affluent and aspirational.

While not trading the wines and spirits we offer today, the Widow Bourne was certainly in the business of trading goods from far-flung shores at her Italian Grocers. Foreign spices, tea from the distant lands of Asia, snuff and most importantly, coffee were all on sale at No.3 St James’s Street. The fashion for this new beverage had seen swathes of coffee houses opening in the St James’s area. Here, businessmen would meet to make deals and share the news of the day. Indeed, the humble newspaper has its origins in these coffee houses. Weighing scales at No.3 were employed to measure customers’ coffee purchases and before too long, the shop sign hanging above No.3 St James’s Street was a picture of a coffee mill. An unofficial, alternative address for No.3 has been “At the sign of the coffee mill” ever since.

So little is known of the Widow Bourne that we don’t even know when she died. Her hugely successful business outlived her and was inherited by her daughter Elizabeth and son-in-law, William Pickering.

Ethel takes the chair

Fast forward over 200 years and another woman is making her mark on the history of Berry Bros. & Rudd.

In 1949, then Chair of Berry Bros. & Rudd, Major Hugh Rudd died at the age of 66 and his wife, Ethel, stepped up to the plate, becoming Non-Executive Chair. The Second World War had been hard for Hugh and Ethel – not only had they shouldered the business through the conflict, but their son Brian was killed in action in Italy at only 20 years old.

Ethel knew what was required when she became Chair at the age of 63. The international conflict came with an unusual set of challenges for the new lady at the top.

Not only did rationing continue in England for another nine years after the end of the war but the business had no wine stock. German occupation of Europe made export impossible, so existing stock was all the Berrys and Rudds had to offer. Our Cutty Sark Scots whisky, so beloved by customers in the USA, couldn’t make it overseas either – much to the delight of American soldiers stationed in London who could, once again, get hold of it – as our sales ledgers confirm.

While having a healthy work/life balance is a common topic in the 21st century it was not so for Ethel. The relentless bombing of London made the city an unsafe place to be. After No.3 St James’s Street was damaged by bomb-related fire in 1943, the company’s export office moved to Ethel and Hugh’s home in the countryside – along with several Berry Bros. & Rudd employees.

“It really was a question of survival”, says Lizzy Rudd, our current Chair and Ethel’s proud granddaughter. “I remember her always being very calm. She was firm but fair. She will have held a steady hand on the tiller.”

Ethel’s steady hand remained at the tiller, in the role of Non-Executive Chair, until she was 79.

Ethel Rudd

A very busy Lizzy

Ethel’s granddaughter Lizzy joined Berry Bros. & Rudd in the 1980s, working first in the marketing team for the Cutty Sark whisky. She briefly left the company to concentrate on family and was then appointed to the Board as a Non-Executive Director before becoming Deputy Chair in 2005. Less than 60 years after her grandmother, Lizzy became Chair of Berry Bros. & Rudd in 2017.

It was under Lizzy’s stewardship that the world was plunged into the confusion and panic of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns and dangers.

“It was quite frightening to begin with,” Lizzy says of those uncertain days in 2020. “I remember being very worried about the safety of our colleagues, but I very much drew on my grandmother’s strength at that time.”   

I have heard others in the wine and spirits industry say the secret to Berry Bros. & Rudd’s longevity is its forward glance – always steering the ship ahead, not merely harking back to its illustrious history. This is one of many reasons why Lizzy is so committed to the company’s environmental sustainability and that of its business actions. Berry Bros. & Rudd’s first Sustainability Report was published in 2021 and Lizzy has firmly cemented sustainability and positive impact as two of the company’s core values.

At the time of writing, Berry Bros. & Rudd is in its 326th year of trading at No.3 St James’s Street and has women in the roles of Chair, CEO, CFO, CTO and CCO.   

What can the women of Berry Bros. & Rudd’s future learn from the Widow Bourne and Ethel Rudd? “To be confident”, says Lizzy. “If we put our minds to it, we can all take the plunge and swim.”

Lizzy Rudd
Category: Family,History,Miscellaneous

Guidalberto: a rising star of Bolgheri

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Tenuta San Guido’s Guidalberto is an exceptional wine and a wonderful expression of its legendary Bolgheri terroir. Now, justifiably, it’s being celebrated in its own right, rather than compared to others that came before it. We spoke to Priscilla Incisa della Rochetta, the third-generation face of Tenuta San Guido, about how – and why – this change has come about  

Bolgheri has no shortage of iconic producers. This small Italian appellation, located on the coast of Tuscany’s Maremma region, is home to some of the country’s most famed wines. 

Bolgheri’s history is inextricably entwined with that of the Super Tuscans. In the 1970s and ‘80s, a small group of winemakers defied Italian norms to create wines from international varieties. Amongst these, and perhaps the most famous of them, is Tenuta San Guido, best known for creating Sassicaia. 

In the early 1940s, Mario Incisa della Rocchetta realised something about his home of Maremma: its soils, rich in pebbles and gravel, were incredibly similar to those of Graves in Bordeaux. Alongside that, its unique microclimate, tempered by rolling coastal breezes, meant that the Bordeaux grape varieties – Cabernet Sauvignon in particular – had a better chance of thriving there than Tuscany’s favoured Sangiovese.  

As Mario’s granddaughter Priscilla describes, some of her grandfather’s friends had already begun producing wines based on Cabernet Sauvignon in surrounding farms. He believed that his land, on what today is the Tenuta San Guido estate, could produce something even better. 

“He asked his friends to give him some cuttings of these Cabernet Sauvignon vines, and he started experimenting,” she recalls. The result was a success – for Mario himself at least, if not on a commercial scale. That was still to come.  

“He was making a wine for his own consumption, to be shared with family and friends,” Priscilla says. That lasted about 20 years, until Priscilla’s own father, Nicolò Incisa della Rocchetta, came onto the scene. The youngest of Mario’s three children, he was entrusted with the agriculture of the estate, the family’s other pursuits of horse-breeding and racing being looked after by his siblings.  

“The wine was transformed into something different,” Priscilla says. Nicolò had seen an opportunity to sell the wine on a far wider scale, and had taken it. The result was Sassicaia, now one of Italy’s foremost fine wines, and the “grandfather”, as Priscilla describes it, of the Super Tuscans.  

The Guidalberto story  

Many are acquainted with Sassicaia, but – importantly – it’s not the only wine that Tenuta San Guido produces. At the turn of the millennium, an exciting new name emerged: Guidalberto.  

“The idea started in the mid-1990s,” Priscilla explains. Discovering clay threads running through the gravelly soils of the estate, Nicolò knew what to do. After all, the example had already been set by Bordeaux’s Right Bank estates, their clay soils, and their multitude of Merlot plantings.  

Guidalberto was born, representing the Tenuta San Guido team’s demonstration of exactly what they could do with this grape. Despite being a new venture, they were keen to keep it closely rooted within the estate’s long history. 

The wine is named after the Incisa della Rocchetta family’s ancestor, Guidalberto della Gherardesca: “a pioneer in agriculture for his time”, as Priscilla describes him. This Guidalberto was responsible for the famous Viale dei Cipressi in Bolgheri: the avenue of cypress trees so often featured in pictures of the area. “It was very significant to my father, to give the wine the name of somebody important in our history.” 

More than a “second wine” 

While Bolgheri has mirrored Bordeaux in many things, there’s one likeness that Priscilla is keen to minimise: the term “second wine”. In fact, it’s a description that the team vehemently reject when it comes to Guidalberto. 

“[Guidalberto] has its own identity,” says Priscilla. “It has its own expression, and its own purpose.” There’s no attempt to follow in Sassicaia’s footsteps here, either in the vineyard, or in the winery itself – and no sense of it using lower-quality fruit, or fruit from less desirable sites. “It has its own vineyards that we have planted over the years, which are mostly Merlot.” 

“Of course, you can tell that they’re related,” Priscilla concedes – the Tenuta San Guido hallmarks of elegance and drinkability still shine through. “But it’s an alternate expression of our terroir. You can’t compare [Guidalberto and Sassicaia]. They’re completely different things.”  

Now, she says, people are recognising Guidalberto’s quality in its own right – and rightly so. “At wine tastings, many customers are asking if they can try the Guidalberto, without asking for the Sassicaia.”  

Why does she think this is? “It’s all a question of taste,” she says. “There’s this portion of Merlot which is fantastic. With this bottle, you can maybe enjoy it younger – it’s easier to approach in a younger age. But we’ve been producing it now for just over 20 years, and sometimes we do vertical tastings, going back through the vintages. And it’s actually holding very nicely, all the way back to the first vintages. It’s a wine that you can collect.”  

The 2022 Guidalberto  

On the day that we speak, we’re on the cusp of releasing the 2022 Guidalberto – a vintage, Priscilla says, that has enormous promise. 

“The 2022 vintage was a bit warmer than 2021,” she says. “But that’s not a negative for grape varieties that ripen earlier. It was a good year for Merlot.” In 2022, the percentage of Merlot sits slightly higher than the norm, at 40% of the blend – imparting extra layers of dark, ripe, juicy fruit to the wine. 

 “The 2022 is very approachable, very nice,” she confirms, confident that this marks another year of success for Guidalberto. It’s good news for collectors of Italian fine wine, and Super Tuscans, in general. “It’s one that will do well with a little time.”  

The 2022 Guidalberto is now available to add to cellars here. To discover more about the Bolgheri region and the wines produced here, visit our blog post.

Category: Italian Wine

Behind the scenes: crafting the latest vintages of our sparkling wines

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We recently visited Hambledon Vineyard to witness the craft process behind our upcoming Own Selection sparkling wines. Discover how the latest vintages of our Own Selection English Sparkling Wine and Own Selection English Sparkling Rosé have been made.  

It’s a drab winter day at Hambledon Vineyard in Hampshire. The vines are stripped bare, skeletal against the thick winter sky. Felix Gabillet and Sam Picton, Head and Assistant Winemaker respectively, are sitting upstairs in the winery alongside two members of the Berry Bros. & Rudd Buying team, Mark Pardoe MW and Charlie Leech. Around the table, there is an array of bottles marked only by a number indicating the grams of sugar in the liquid. What I’m witnessing – and invited to participate in – is the careful crafting of two new cuvées for the Own Selection range: the English Sparkling Wine and the Sparkling Rosé, both of which are made for us by Hambledon.  

It is a collaborative process. From this fleet of bottles, the team will select two base wines to make up the final cuvées. The wine for the new English Sparkling comes from the 2019 vintage, while the Sparkling Rosé comes from the ’18 vintage. What the team are looking for today is the perfect balance between an expression of the character of the vintage and the personality of the fruit, while capturing a palatability that will chime with consumers.  

The liquid from each bottle is poured in small amounts around the table, and we taste our way up the sugar scale, from 0 dosage (grams of sugar) to 12 grams per bottle. As we sip through the wines for the English Sparkling selection, I’m struck by flavours of crisp green apple, lemon, subtle hints of biscuit and bread. These are taut, refreshing wines with a delicate mousse. They have a complexity to stand up to Champagne but with a sharp, lean edge that is distinctly English.  

The Sparkling Rosé wines, on the other hand, have that same freshness and brightness, but with a gentle red fruit character from the Pinot Noir grapes, and a slightly savoury note that comes from a little age. The ripeness of the vintage shines through, with a lovely note like plum crumble emerging. 

There are moments of quiet deliberation, letting the flavour and weight of each wine settle and allowing impressions to take shape. Then there is a lot of discussion, as 12 wines are whittled down to three. Wines are blended together, until the perfect balance is achieved. Striking this equilibrium between sugar, fruit character and acidity is perhaps the most fascinating – and challenging – part of the process. As little as half a gram of sugar can transform or enhance the whole profile of the wine. It truly is a craft, in which flavour and quality are at the heart, while always prioritising what the customer will enjoy.  

The latest vintages of our Own Selection sparkling wines are due to arrive in the next couple of months. In the meantime, explore the current range of our own-label sparkling here

Category: Miscellaneous

Domaine Jean-Noël Gagnard: it’s complicated 

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Mother-and-son Caroline Lestimé and Philippe Lestimé stand in front of a tractor.
Caroline Lestimé and her son Philippe hard at work. Photography: Jason Lowe

Can it be that it was all so simple then?  Caroline Lestimé has spent the past three decades making life complicated for herself – and the wines from her family domaine in Chassagne-Montrachet have never been better 

Caroline Lestimé wasn’t expecting visitors until this afternoon. It’s just gone 9am and she’s got a lot on her mind, not least the 2023 harvest; picking finished last month and she’s been working flat-out in the cellar since. It’s a homely cellar, labyrinthine in layout if not size. Space is at a premium because this year’s crop is big, and Caroline makes 11 separate Premiers Crus from Chassagne-Montrachet alone. Finding a home for each will be a complicated logistical operation. 

Things used to be simpler here at the estate which still bears Caroline’s father’s name. 

Making life complicated

Jean-Noël Gagnard inherited his share of his parents’ domaine back in 1960: a smattering of tiny parcels, mostly Chardonnay, dotted around the village of Chassagne-Montrachet.   

The 0.13-hectare plot in the Premier Cru of Blanchot Dessus, for example, might yield 600 bottles in a good year, little more than two barrels of wine.  

For Jean-Noël, producing many different wines in such small quantities would have been to complicate matters unduly. Blending individual plots to create a smaller number of bigger bottlings was much simpler. “He wasn’t thinking about micro-cuvées,” Caroline says. His focus was on “volume, volume, volume”.  

When Caroline took over in 1989, she had other ideas. “My first decision was to vinify some plots separately,” she explains. Having grown up among these vines, she knew them intimately: the slight changes in exposition or soil composition as you step from one end of a small plot to another; the barely perceptible change in temperature between two sites that almost touch one another.

Bottles of Chassagne-Montrachet Les Masures from Domaine Jean-Noël Gagnard.
Les Masures, one of Caroline’s individual Chassagne-Montrachet bottlings

Blanchots Dessus sits a little lower on the slope than nearby Les Chaumées (0.59 hectares), both at the northern end of the commune. Yet each can yield a distinct expression of Chassagne-Montrachet – if given the chance. Les Chaumées is tight, tense and high in acid, with a chalky mineral character. Blanchots Dessus touches the Grand Cru of Le Montrachet; it’s got some of the weight and density of its prestigious neighbour, with sunny stone-fruit flavours and stinging freshness. 

Breaking things down in this way was certain to complicate the operation, but for Caroline, the decision was no decision at all. “It was obvious,” she says – though perhaps not to the rest of the Gagnard clan.  

This plot-by-plot approach may be ubiquitous today, but it was a radical suggestion for Caroline to put to her family at the time. “In my family, you always have to struggle a little bit for everybody to agree,” she says. 

With the family’s blessing, she got to work, reshaping the range with an emphasis on expressing the specificities of those individual sites. What had been one large village-level bottling of Chassagne-Montrachet soon became three. Her father had bottled a large Premier Cru blend; Caroline split it into four. 

The estate today

Three decades on, her vision and her patience have paid off. It is the Premiers Crus in particular that have helped Caroline take the domaine to new heights and critical acclaim. The estate’s modern reputation is built on these age-worthy single-site bottlings, notably her flagship, Les Caillerets. 

Caroline can’t make enough wine to meet the increased demand. She has bought additional plots over the years, though hasn’t grown her overall production materially. Her yields have reduced over time, she says, due to working organically in the vineyard (since 2010) and the impact of climate change. 

To scale up her production a little, she decided in 2015 to open a négociant business. With her warm, friendly demeanour, round-rimmed glasses and colourful fashion sense, Caroline doesn’t exactly look the part of the hard-nosed wine merchant. Suitably, Maison Caroline Lestimé is less a corporate behemoth and more a gentle extension of the family firm. Her son Philippe now tends a small 1.5-hectare domaine of his own; for now, Caroline buys his grapes as well as fruit from vineyards belonging to members of the wider Gagnard family. The négociant wines bolster her production somewhat, but this is still a very modest operation. 

Philippe Lestimé cleaning some equipment with a powerhose.
Philippe Lestimé during harvest 2023

Caroline sells about 95% of what she makes on allocation every year. Demand is so high, and her wines now so highly regarded, that she could surely make a lot of money selling to deep-pocketed suitors. But she seems to value loyalty too much to fall for sweet talk. “This one promises me beautiful things if I work with them,” she says. “But no, first we have to look after the people we work with for the long term.” 

Running for everything

Notwithstanding youthful stints living in the nearby cities of Chalon-sur-Saône and Dijon, and ultimately Paris, Caroline remains firmly rooted in Chassagne-Montrachet. The population has declined steadily in her lifetime, with just 288 inhabitants at the last census. At the same time, the village and the wider Côte de Beaune have rocketed to international acclaim. 

A lot has changed, and Caroline is a little nostalgic about how her hometown once was. “With age, when you look back, sometimes you think it was better back then,” she says. “It was different, things moved slowly. Now we have to run for everything.” 

The pace of life is not the only thing that has Caroline lamenting for times past. The erratic nature of recent growing seasons is an increasing concern. “We’re stressed all throughout the year,” she says. “In the morning it might feel like winter and by the afternoon it’s like summer.” Burgundy has been hard hit in recent years; Caroline has felt it acutely. 

Her Sous Eguisons cuvée comes from a small 0.41-hectare vineyard in the Hautes-Côtes de Beaune, above and to the west of St Aubin. At over 430 metres’ altitude, the cooler temperatures here can offer some respite against excessive heat. Yet in 2021, her entire crop here was wiped out by a cruel combination of frost and powdery mildew. Many of her other vineyards were affected that year: Les Caillerets, which can yield as many as 25 barrels, produced just eight. 

Many growers facing such challenges would just blend what they could together to achieve some sort of critical mass. Such is Caroline’s belief in her approach, however, that she managed to bottle something from each of her Chassagne-Montrachet sites in vintage 2021. Reassuringly, Caroline was a lot happier with her volumes in 2022. And 2023, still a work in progress, was so generous that Caroline found herself struggling for space in the cellar. 

What one little bit of land can do

This morning’s visit, though, is all about the 2022 vintage. There has been a slight scheduling mix-up, but not to worry: as our Buyers bow their heads to get through the low door and descend into the cellar, Caroline is on hand with a bag-for-life full of wine glasses. Fold-up chairs are proffered and passed around. An upturned foudre, sawed in half, makes for a suitable desk. 

Caroline was planning on preparing our barrel samples later in the day, so this will be a tasting on the fly. Pipette in hand, she dashes between one part of the cellar and another. She draws a sample of Sous Eguisons, alive and very well in 2022, and pours a delicious drop into each outstretched glass. 

There’s sniffing, swirling, spitting. The patter of laptop keys, the scratch of pen on paper. Caroline is up and down, in and out of the cellar’s various little nooks and crannies: a sample of this cuvée here, a detailed account of what happened in that vineyard there. Props, including a large cardboard map of Chassagne-Montrachet, are put to good use. She might not have been expecting us, but Caroline knows her work inside out. Spend an hour or two with her and you feel the benefit of her decades of working in this way. She is completely and utterly prepared. 

A tasting here pre-1989 would have involved a small number of perfectly respectable, relatively large multi-site blends. Today is a richer, more complex and more complete experience. These wines are the fruits of Caroline’s labour this year, of course. They are also the result of more than 30 years of meticulous attention-to-detail, of patience and of borderline obsession with what one little bit of land can do that its neighbour cannot.

Browse our range of Domaine Jean-Noël Gagnard wines.

Category: Burgundy Wine