Published 17 March 2021
“Great wine doesn’t have to be complicated.” Focusing more on the experience of drinking rather than the technical jargon, Vintner prides itself on making wine accessible. This week, we caught up with co-founder and director of operations Hamish Kirwan to hear more about Vintner’s ethos, how to spot a good wine and his personal favourite.
Vintner is an online wine retailer, and we’ve been in business for 10 years now. Prior to the pandemic we were pretty much exclusively selling to restaurants, and about 18-months ago we started to look at the industry as a whole to understand what was engaging and what we could offer directly to consumers.
We identified that the wine industry can be stuffy and old school. There’s a lot of established players that cater to a specific audience, and we felt like the focus was on the wine, where it comes from and the technical aspects. We wanted to talk more about the experience: why people drink, and the parts of your life you include wine with.
We focus on the experiential side of things. Our take is looking at what’s happening in your life that you want a drink with. Are you binge watching something on Netflix like Bridgerton, are you having friends over for dinner, are you on Zoom calls with family members you don’t want to speak to? The situations in life when you think, I’m going to have a drink.
There’s a lot of personality in what we do and it’s quite unique. Wine is background music for us, rather than the focal point of what you’re doing. We’re strong believers in living life and enjoying wine on the side.
It’s been really easy, and I attribute that to the fact that more people want to have wine at home, and our team. We’re a team of consumers ourselves and are all interested in wine. We wanted to talk to people about wine in a way that we like to talk about wine internally and give our honest reaction. With a focus on the negatives of lockdown, we want to give people a reprieve.
When we rebranded last year, the idea was trying to make things streamlined and less complicated. We want to give people key bits of information that are digestible, and not stress too much about heavy information. Also, we really try and sell the experience of what we felt when we tried the product, and what we hope you will as well. Ultimately, wine is one of those things that can be alienating, and we thought that’s not what people really want to think about. Sometimes you just want to have a drink and enjoy it.
Seasonality plays a big role. We know that we have drinking patterns depending on what the weather is like – if it’s sunny, I’ll be drinking rose by the gallon! Our process is very selective. We usually say oh I’ve been fancying this recently, and we go out and start looking for examples and we go through all of them and decide what we do and don’t like. It’s a unique approach – it’s not one person’s role to make the choices, we all try to chip in. We really try and encourage people to have an input. For example, late last year we hoped to have a team Christmas party and starting to think of celebration and went from there.
First of all, trust sommeliers and don’t be afraid to tell them what you’re looking for. Never be embarrassed by what you like – sometimes wine can pick up stereotypes. If you like rose, you don’t have to be considered a basic bitch!
We’ll always want to work with end consumers, as there are a lot of people who associate buying wine with buying groceries for the supermarket. We want to give people a distinction and market it as a real treat.
Literally all of them! We have a California Pinot Noir that we’ve been working with for a really long time and it’s just such great value. It’s one of those wines that’s a great benchmark – if it’s not as good as this wine, it’s not good enough.
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