To be a success as a fine wine merchant, you need to have three things going for you: an encyclopaedic knowledge of the fine wine countries and regions; personal relationships with the producers and winemakers of the most sought-after fine wines; and an extensive network of both loyal and well-heeled trade and private clients.
Cecily Chappel has spent her career honing her skills and knowledge in these three vital areas to such a degree that she can confidently help collectors find the wines they need, at the prices they can afford, in major cities all over the world. She has even lived and worked in three of them: London, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Cecily Chappel is one of the most connected - and liked - fine wine merchants in the world
For she might now be based in London, responsible for running and steering the fine wine buying and sales strategy for Chelsea Vintners, but she has spent a large part of her career in South East Asia helping to set up, from scratch, the Hong Kong office for Corney & Barrow.
After the obligatory couple of years working in-store for Oddbins in the mid-2000s, Chappel cut her teeth in fine wine when she joined the Corney & Barrow team in London in 2006. It was when taking a break in Asia that she fell in love with the energy and excitement of Hong Kong and came up with the idea of starting a fine wine office there for Corney & Barrow.
“I actually also got offered a job there at the same time by Berry Bros, but I have a lot to thank Oliver Hartley at Corney & Barrow for, as he gave me the go ahead to start up an office in Hong Kong at the age of 26,” she explains.
Asian adventures
An opportunity she grasped with both hands, spending the next eight years growing sales, customers and opportunities across the region, first in Hong Kong and then three years later when she set up a C&B office in Singapore too.
“It was also the time when duty got abolished in Hong Kong. So it was the right place at the right time and the office proved to be super successful.”
After six years in Asia, Cecily was then able to build up her black book of private customers even more when she moved to FICOFI, a private client business which takes the concept of connecting the finest wine producers with the best placed collectors in the world to another level. A Grand Cru level.
She describes FICOFI as the “most private of private members clubs” where you really do have access to “the greatest portfolio of wines in the world”. She says its annual Le Palais des Grands Crus® tasting in Paris is a wine event like no other where the “world’s elite” come to buy wine directly from a Who’s Who of fine wine winemakers.
“It really was the most incredible job. I got so much out of it,” she says.
First love
Cecily Chappel has taken her fine wine skills and experience honed in Hong Kong and Singapore to help take Chelsea Vintners to the next level of its growth
Chappel says she has her dad to thank for honing her love of fine wine from an early age, where Sunday lunches involved him sharing and talking through fine wines from his cellar at the dinner table. So much so that when she went to Exeter University she struggled to drink “normal” wine and would seek out finer bottles at the local wine merchants.
But it was during time spent in both Italy and France as part of her language degree that saw her really take wine to heart.So much so that she even turned down opportunities to embark on a career in finance and banking in order to follow her love of wine, first with an internship with J&F Lurton and then the chance to join Oddbins where she worked both in South Kensington and High Street Kensington shops between 2004-2006.
“I took half a second to decide I wanted to work in wine and not for a bank in Switzerland. I can remember a lecturer at university advising us to go into a career you think you could excel at and that was not going to be in finance. I don’t regret it at all. I don’t think I would have felt so fulfilled had I worked in finance. Instead, the job I have gives me the chance to travel and enjoy the world’s finest wines - on multiple occasions.”
Chelsea callling
She admits she did not know a great deal about the Chelsea Vintners business when she first sat down to talk about the possible chief executive role. But the more she did, the more fascinated she was by it.
“All my career I had worked for agency businesses with a set portfolio of wines and producers. I just loved how Chelsea Vintners is all about the client and what the client should have in their cellar.”
“We want to get the best wines into our clients’ cellars," says Chelsea Vintners' Cecily Chappel
A business model that puts its clients at the heart of everything it does and not just try and give them what the market wants to sell.
“We want to get the best wines into our clients’ cellars,” she says, ‘and we are not, like many fine wine merchants, looking after a long list of producers and making sure they are happy too.”
This gives Chelsea Vintners and its sales team the freedom to truly work with clients to determine which are the right wines for them, their lifestyle and what they are buying them for.
“It’s like having the blinkers removed. I love the fact we can sell anything we like. It’s a great freedom to have. It’s also very exciting.”
She adds: “For us it is all about the client. There is no allocation process. Why are you collecting wine? What wines do you like and and more importantly what don’t you like? What vintages are important to you in terms of birthdays and anniversaries and other special occasions? We understand them and what is going to work for them and their lifestyles. I have taken a lot of learnings from FICOFI.”
Chappel says there is a very clear distinction between buying the right wine over the finest wine. It does not need to be the most valuable, or rarest wine. It just needs to be the right wine for that client, she stresses.
“Every wine we sell we believe should be bought by that client based on their personal preferences.”
For example, at FICOFI she had a maximum of 30 clients to manage. At C&B it was significantly more. At Chelsea Vintners it is between 50 to 100 depending on your experience. “We want to get it closer to 50 if we can,” she adds.
“We have taken on more sales people in order to give as much of a personal service as we can. It’s all about long term relationships.”
Which means, when possible, getting on the phone to speak to them and build relationships person to person and not always behind email.
The Chelsea Vintners team has grown in recent years in order to give its customers a more personal service - here are some of the team on a recent trip to Bordeaux
“How do you stand out from the other brokers?” she asks. It is about telling your clients about an exceptional young winemaker who may not have been “scored” by all the top wine critics, but it is someone Chelsea Vintners believes in, says Chappel.
It might also be about advising a client not to buy a particular wine or vintage “because we don’t think it is the right fit for you and and your lifestyle”.
It means that the business can also be a lot more flexible and fleet of foot when it comes to taking new wines on and seeing what works.
High spirits
Chelsea Vintners also has a fast growing fine and premium spirits side of the business, which now makes up around 10% of its turnover. It is an area that Chappel knows well, having have spent nearly three years sourcing and selling premium spirits for private clients, first at the Last Drop Distillers and then two years at Beamish International.
She says her journey into fine spirits came in response to constant requests from her fine wine clients who were also looking to buy some of the world’s best and rarest spirits too.
“I found I did not where to turn to recommend an advisor so decided to look into it myself and ended up as commercial director at The Last Drop Distillers,” she says.
Right values
Cecily Chappel says working with people who share the same values is a key part of Chelsea Vintners
Chappel’s wide experience working across fine wines - and spirits - means she also has had access to a large pool of sales talent and been able to pick and choose what she describes as a “brilliant team of people” who have the “passion” and “knowledge” but also fit into the values of the business. Although the majority of its 17-strong team is in London (10 in sales), it does have two people working out of Australia managing its growing Asian business.
“We spend a lot of time talking about our values. We are, after all not selling triple glazing. You are selling a passion product. Our clients are drinkers as well as collectors.”
She adds: “We also have a team of incredible storytellers who are so knowledgeable, passionate and enjoy talking about the wines they sell. But the relationships within our team are also incredibly important. We all have the same moral values. We spend a lot of time making sure we recruit the right people to work with us.
“The way to grow a fine wine business is through referrals and you only get referrals if you are doing the best job you can and you can only do the best job if you are selling them the right wine and providing the best service,” she explains. “If any problems come up you sort them out as quickly and efficiently as you can.”
Building the right culture and team spirit is a key part of Cecily Chappel's management style
To do all that you need to be working closely as a team. “Communication is key,” she adds. “We have a daily call with everyone to run through what wines we are going to offer and why.”
Its clients are also spending, on average, around £400 a bottle so it’s important the Chelsea Vintners team is giving them a bottle they want.
Next generation
She says they do not struggle with an ageing client base - they have worked hard to attract a younger customer base, who are in their twenties and thirties, who are looking to drink as well as buy wine, and is greatly encouraged by the number of young women who are a regular and growing client base.
It has started to put on bespoke informal tastings and dinners, often at a customer’s house, for its younger clients, most recently with Chateau Lafite, that are proving to be very successful.
It also recently hosted a “Lunch & Dinner” event where up to 12 guests - two thirds of whom were women - took part in a 22-year vertical tasting of Burgundy’s Domaine Coche-Dury starting at Trivet for lunch and ending, via an energy drink break, with dinner at 67 Pall Mall.
“We want people to be drinking and enjoying these sort of wines with us,” says Chappel.
A younger client is also less interested in putting a wine away for 20 years, she says. “They often want to buy a wine and drink it with friends over the next two to three years. So it is important we are finding the right wines for them.”
There is also now so much more access to fine wine producers than there was before and these are the customers that producers want to build relationships with as well, she adds.
“Everyone on our team has their own individual voice and it is important that comes across with our clients as well as having a corporate voice too.”
Healthy competition
Cecily Chappel says the fine wine market has been difficult over recent months but Chelsea Vintner is still enjoying good growth figures
The one fine wine area that Chelsea Vintners is not involved in is wines for investment. “We don’t push that side of it at all,” she stresses, although it is very much up on the trends and what is happening.
Around 10% of its business is also selling wine to brokers and other fine wine merchants and she says it enjoys good working relationships with all the major players. Picking out, in particular, the team at Farr Vintners and her old colleagues at Corney & Barrow and the work they do.
“A lot of people do things similar to us, but our client first focus is a bit different. We have an experienced team who spent time with most of the major UK trade. We have used our experience to replicate the things they do really well and, where we can, we try to cut out the things we did’t like and always continue to look at areas where we can improve. We will sit down as a team and discuss what parts of a customer’s journey we can do better. We do that time and again.”
Looking ahead
She says the fine wine sector as a whole is going through a “tricky year” with sluggish sales and a noticeable drop in travel and entertainment. Chelsea Vintners, however, is bucking that trend with sales up 37% on last year in the first six months of 2024. “But it has been a grind,” she admits.
“We just need, as a industry, to get though this tricky time. We need to be heads down selling the wines we should and not compromising on anything. We have big aspirations for the business,” she says, pointing to the opportunities there are to grow internationally, particularly in the US.
“We are also considering an office in Hong Kong or Singapore. But we need to do things in the right way. We want to keep our freedom and independence and carry on making sure we have wines being drunk by the the right people.”
* You can find out more about Chelsea Vintners at its website here.
