London Wine Club / Survey

Dear all,

I’m reaching out for a huge favour, for any of you that want to contribute to the wine community in London and have 5 minutes to spare!

I’m about to launch a small project — a wine clubhouse — in East London (close to Lyle’s, Brawn etc…).
The clubhouse will be as accessible as it can be for wine-drinkers of all demographics, with a real focus on food and wine which has been given its due, but with minimal fuss.

I’m a bit lost about the finer points of the offering. There’s no real way to market research as any other similar concepts in London are at very different price points, intended to be super ‘exclusive’, etc. For any of you that have a few spare moments to answer a few questions so I can make sure my offering work for people at different stages of their wine journey, please read and comment with your answers to the questions below…

Intro to the concept:

The concept will be a small clubhouse, with shared cellar storage and a restaurant, bottle shop and events space attached. The restaurant will feature a rotation of chef residencies (a few months at a time) and pop-ups, with members given priority for bookings and non-members dining as walk-ins, unless they’re guests of members. There will be a specially curated wine list (of my own collection) at reasonable mark-ups, but members can drink from their own collection. Take the prices below with a grain of salt, as you probably all store wine already (like me, I have 5,000 bottles all stored by 3PL, I know the drill). This is not pure storage, this a club membership that allows you to drink wine at the restaurant attached to it, similar to what 67 Pall Mall does.
For people who want to store a lot of wine, in the thousands, prices will go down significantly depending on the quantity, from 32p to 20p / bottle / month.

Questions:

1. If there was an option of 2 tiers, which would you go for?
   a. Tier 1:
   ⁃ £60/month — 36 bottles
   ⁃ Possibility to book dining space
   ⁃ First release tickets to tastings and special pop-up dinners
   ⁃ Access to our proprietary cellar management software (inventory management for the wine stored with us, not a CT type thing)
   ⁃ Wine concierge: personalised recommended drinking times or pairings
   ⁃ All logistics done on your behalf: receiving, storing, cataloguing
   ⁃ Pick & pack + delivery in London
   ⁃ £10 corkage to drink your wine onsite

•  Access to our education platform
  

b. Tier 2:
⁃ £120 / month—72 bottles
⁃ Possibility to book dining space
⁃ First release tickets to tastings and special pop-up dinners
⁃ Access to our proprietary cellar management software (inventory management for the wine stored with us, not a CT type thing)
⁃ Wine concierge: personalised recommended drinking times or pairings
⁃ All logistics done on your behalf: receiving, storing, cataloguing
⁃ Pick & pack + same day wine delivery in London *
⁃ No corkage to drink your wine onsite
⁃ BYO rights in some renowned London restaurants
⁃ Personalised, one on one consultancy for cellar aspirations

•  Access to our education platform
  

2. Why have you chosen that tier?

3. How often do you think you would dine at the restaurant if you were a member (assuming a new chef is in residency every 3 months)
   a. once a week
   b. once a fortnight
   c. once a month
   d. once every 3 months
   e. once a year
   f. depends on the chef
   g. never, I’m just interested in the cellar storage

4. How many bottles on average would you want to store, if pricing were no object?

5. What are the highlights of this clubhouse offering for you? Please pick x2:
   a. media (interviews with somms and chefs about wine and food)
   b. learning (masterclasses to geek out with winemakers and somms)
   c. storage and concierge services
   d. dining/chef residencies
   e. tasting and events with other members in the wine community
   f. a shop to scope out rare and interesting bottles

6. How long have you been collecting wine?
   a. up to 2 years
   b. 2-4 years
   c. 4-7 years
   d. over 7 years

Thank you so much, means a lot, and hope to see you there one day!!

Jon

Quick reaction is that it 100% depends on how much I might enjoy the restaurant. I, like many here, already store many multiples of even the larger tier at an off-site Storage facility already. I don’t have any comparison for London storage prices, but yours are very high relative to what I can get in Seattle.

I personally don’t need cellar management software, as I already use Cellar Tracker. I also wouldn’t make use of the concierge, the consultancy, or the education platform.

Realistically, I couldn’t see the value in what you propose. That said, I doubt that I’m your target client.

Hi Jonathan

I’m not sure this is the correct board to ask these question as most posters are in the USA.

I am in the UK, but I won’t be joining. First reason is location. I no longer work in London and I can’t see myself paying £60 a month to be allowed to book a table at a restaurant. East London is not impossible from St Albans, but I can’t see myself travelling there and back just to use the clubhouse or dine.

I am not attracted by the ‘proprietary cellar management software’, as this will presumably only be available while remaining a member, and I already use Cellartracker. With CT the vast majority of wines are already on the database, with yours I assume it will hold only details of members wines, and thus many members will have to enter details from scratch.

For storage of wines I bought on EP I use the Wine Society; they charge £9.24 per annum for 12 bottles including tax and replacement value insurance. Yours has the advantage of storing wines bought from other than TWS, but I’d have to get them to - and from - east London.

So for many reasons, but I suppose primarily my location, I am not interested.

BTW you’ll be competing with 67 Pall Mall which seems to offer much of what you intend, albeit at more expense, but they are centrally placed.

I think the location will sink the project if you want to do it as a wine club with a restaurant attached. It is going to live and die based on the quality of the food, and only if it becomes a seriously good restaurant attracting people from all of London does it make sense for the punters to spend the money to store wine.

Thanks a lot for your feedback. Please take the prices with a grain of salt, it’s not pure storage, it’s a club membership that includes storage of your own bottles so you can drink them onsite. Let’s consider you like the restaurant

You can also store thousands of bottles, and of course the price will be very different, from 32p down to 20p / bottle / month, depending on quantity.

I use Cellar Tracker but where I store my wine (in Geneva and Paris, I have over 5,000 bottles), I also need inventory management by the people who handle the bottles, this is what I offer here.

Best,

Jon

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

I contacted the moderators, and they said to post it here. Wherever the feedback is from, it does not matter, let’s think I am opening this in your city.

Fair enough if you live far. The £60 is not just to be able to book, but also to store some of your wine onsite and drink it there, the ultimate byob, as the wine stays in one place and his handled minimally.

The software will be inventory management for the wine you store with us, not a spin off of CT, as explained above. Our team would enter all the details of the wines you store, and you’d be able to see your current inventory at any given time, and request a wine to be taken out to be picked up, delivered or drank onsite.

A lot of people, like me, get their wine delivered. You can get it delivered to us, and we handle it from there, cataloguing it in the software. Obviously if you pick up wine from a winery, you would have to drop it off, or we could arrange a collection from your home.

67 Pall Mall is definitely the benchmark, but it’s also very posh and luxe. The idea here is to bring some East London flair (think Lyle’s, Clove Club, Brawn, Brat…) to the equation.

Best,

Jon

Thank you for your feedback.

I don’t think any restaurant succeeds if it is bad. Sorry to be a little cheeky. Let’s assume the chef and restaurant will be attractive, even without the membership attached to it, otherwise I might as well not even try!

Best,

Jon

There are levels of success. I was talking about a destination restaurant where people are prepared to cross London to get to.

Fair point. I assume the location is ok for many people, considering it is close to lauded restaurants like Brawn, Lyle’s, Clove Club, Brat… it is not in a dead part of town. That’s all I meant.

Shoreditch and its surroundings have become quite the dining hub, and many people live/work close by - myself included!

Assuming it would be in my city (Zurich), here my two cents:

1. The most avid collectors, those who regurarly bring bottles of wine to restaurants, all already have storage (probably close to their home, at their home) and usually at lower costs - so storage alone isnt gone make the business. It would be great, however, to have some bottles at your favorite (or one of your favorite) restaurants. So that’s worth something. But is it worth 60 or even 120?..

2. …That depends on how much I like the restaurant - as Mark said. Is it my new cozy go-to place with good food, good vibes, good people at a great location? Assuming, it is all that, how much you’re willing to pay as a customer depends mostly on how many time you go out for dinner (or lunch) a month. I have roughly 12-15 dinner/lunches a month. I would probably spend 3, 4 or 5 dinners at the club (you want to visit other restaurants too). In such a case, 60, 120 or even 200 wouldn’t be too high (solely on safed corkage fees). If I would be a person that has 3 dinners a month at a restaurant (in total) and hence probably just one of the dinners at the club, 60 already might be too high.

3. So in order to make it a success and attract a broad array of people (and not only those wine lovers who eat out 10+ times a month), you have to sweeten the deal: In my opinion the master classes, vertical tasting etc. could be quite important here. If you have great list of events at very competitive prices with limited seats which first go to club members, people will pay the fee to be able to attend the tastings. If every other restaurant or merchant offers a seat at a 10 vintages Chateau Margaux tasting for 1000 but you offer it for 600 (little to no markups, throwing in the 2015 at the release price when you bought it, not at the market prices which is 3x as high), there will be enough people paying 120 a month.

I’m not sure that the other perks you wanna offer are so important (most wine lovers don’t need coaching, storage, software, as they all know or have it).

Thanks a lot for your feedback Andy, this is super helpful.

We definitely want to be very active on the tastings, wine dinners etc… so the space is busy with members, who eventually end up meeting and getting along, and coming together. I am going to put all of my cellar (over 5,000 bottles) at reasonable mark ups, which hopefully will be attractive to most.

Best,

Jon

Interesting concept.

At first I thought it wasn’t something I’d ever be interested in but then considered the similarity to my old storage location. I could arrange to meet a few people but anyone who came by to visit their storage would be invited to join us for a glass and would sometimes open something of their own. Or not, we were pretty relaxed about the whole thing and the main point was opening bottles and enjoying them with other people who also enjoyed them. And if someone felt like another bottle it was a simple matter to walk over and open something else, sometimes blind, sometimes "anyone feel like a Burgundy? or perhaps a Gruner? Or I have a great Sherry I’ve been wanting to open (no one ever took me up on that last one)? I’d easily spend $50 on bringing bread, cheese, and charcuterie from upstairs as we whiled away the afternoon.

So in addition to booked tables you might consider an “open seating” option where people who were so inclined could just show up with or without friends and do communal tasting at larger tables welcoming whoever stopped by. You could then adjust the ratio of seating as you see what most people gravitated towards.

I’d think part of the key is that the location has to be easy to get to, e.g., not a long walk from a subway (I think you call them “Tubes” ) stop.

You might also consider a third pricing option. Something like £20 at the door to open as much as you like. That means you don’t have to commit for the month but it gives more flexibility where you might stop by and, if no one else was around, just have a small bite to eat but if you ran into people you can start pulling bottles without thinking about the added an incremental cost.

and having small and/or large shared plates of wine friendly options if people just want a bit more food while lingering over the wine would also be a good idea.

Thanks a lot for your feedback Jay. The space is literally a minute away from a tube station, which I assume is a big plus. The storage is not “self-managed”, it’s handled by our team, so there won’t really be a possibility to go in and pick up something unfortunately. Still working on how spontaneous one can be in such a venue, with security and all the parameters taken into account.

There is definitely the idea that on weekends, the afternoons will be very much member focussed, where we might have a themed day (Northern Rhone, Chenin…) and a tasting day where we run a tasting, which hopefully helps people meet. The ultimate idea is to make like-minded friends through us, and have more people to share wine with!

Best,

Jon

As a Londoner this looks like an absolute non-starter, not least because it looks extremely unlikely that Shoreditch is going to regain its erstwhile buzz in the near future. Why would I pay these prices to store a few bottles of wine and to have access to reservations in an unknown restaurant? 67 Pall Mall at least offers a certain cachet and comfort to its corporate-type clientele even if its restaurant and wine services do not exactly set the world on fire.
I very much doubt that there is a single Berserkers subscriber that desires the assistance of a ‘wine concierge’!

Former Londoner here. If this concept is going to work then I’m about 100% sure it’s going to have the same kind of “exclusive” environment that you’re trying to avoid.

£60 is the markup on a really, really nice bottle of wine on the wine list at many fantastic London restaurants. With so many incredible dining options, I don’t know anyone in London who eats at the same restaurant more than once a month. So for the vast majority of people this isn’t any more attractive than simply having a good wine list, and it’s a lot more work for the customer.

And if I want to taste incredible wine in London I can spend £60 a month at The Sampler or Vagabond and be happy as Larry, on top of all the free tasting options around.

There may well be a market for what you’re looking to do, but I don’t know anyone in it.

Moved to London 2 years ago. I joined 67 and love it. Food doesn’t blow me away but it’s fine and service is very good in my opinion - wine service in particular.

Given the price point, if close to me, I’d join - why not - assuming food was at least decent. If you’re setting up an outpost in Fulham or Chelsea let me know and I’ll be your first member!

Thank you for your feedback Tom, duly noted.

Best,

Jon

Thank you for your feedback Ben.

Best,

Jon

Thanks a lot Anthony! If this goes well, the plan is to open a second one in the South-West. The concept will probably be most appealing for people who don’t have to travel too much, and I understand how long it can take to get to our neck of the woods for one who lives or work central or West.

I know this well because I currently store my wine in Fulham and it’s an hour in the car to get there from where I live!

Best,

Jon

I havent taken the time to fully understand the offering yet but the storage alone puts me off. Any serious wine collector in London probably has a cellar or fridge in their home and stores the rest in a bonded warehouse - that costs about 8p/bottle/month and has much better track record of not being interfered with etc. I’ll take some time to digest the rest of this later as I am your target audience though.

Many of your other benefits you get for free through CT or wine merchants anyway - every single merchant i use has a decent inventory management system with suggested windows etc. So I dont see any USP there. In terms of personalised investment advice I can pick up the phone to a dozen merchants and get their unbiased opinion on a purchase im about to make through a separate merchant. Also most of the merchants im personally aware of do do this service for free as well.

The question for me would ultimately be against corkage cost vs storage cost and how much I liked your restaurant. I’d basically need to like it to go enough in a month to offset the storage cost through the cheaper corkage cost and then that is relatively unlikely because of restaurant fatigue tbh. If you were the Fat Duck at a tenth the cost for example id be all over this, but I suspect im being unfair!


Ultimately you’re charging 20 quid a bottle a year to store it - prevailing rate in London is 1 pound a bottle a year. Corkage typically is about 20-25 /bottle (top places ive been to go up to 50), so locking in to your restaurant to arguably save a few quid seems a bad idea.