Our Story
Our story begins back in March 1988, visiting my sister and her family in Adelaide and spending a day with them touring wineries in the Barossa Valley.
My father had encouraged our visit and extolled the virtues of South Australia experienced during his own visit there earlier in the year.
In 1996 Mike won the Sales Person of the Year Award for selling Wolf Blass wines to the trade for his employers, Seagram. The prize was a personal visit to meet Wolf Blass and visits to various wineries in the region.
I joined him for this marvellous experience and we spent four weeks touring the Barossa, Clare, Adelaide Hills, McLaren Vale, Kangaroo Island and Coonawarra. We were very pleased to be able to spend two precious days with Wolf Blass plus another evening at dinner with him and his partner, Shirley.
During this visit we had many personal tours of wineries and vineyards and met and made friends with many people in the industry.
We opened our retail shop in the year 2000 with a heavy emphasis on South Australia especially with an exclusive wine we had found on Kangaroo Island. The success of this experience led us to start importing wines from small family producers who could offer great quality and value for money.
Realising that the larger producers were now well represented on supermarket shelves it was natural for us, as a small family concern, to support the smaller wineries that are under represented in the U.K and with this in mind we decided to specialise in South Australian wines in 2003.
A separate room was fitted with wine racks and stocked with around 300 wines from the regions of South Australia.
In 2004 we spent five weeks in South Australia with the intention of finding a good variety of special, exclusive wines for our customers, touring wineries, cementing previous relationships and further discovering the area, including Langhorne Creek and the Limestone Coast.
By choosing well made wines our choices of small parcel wines are often of very limited availability. This provides an exciting experience for our customers as, although the range is changing all the time, we are able to guarantee the consistent good quality of our imports.
This was also very successful and encouraged us to pay a further visit in 2006. Our agencies have now grown to around 12 from various regions and we hope our customers will enjoy these wines for their quality in the knowledge that they are supporting small family growers and winemakers.
We are also very grateful to Mike’s father, Roy Perry for his unfailing support over the years and without whom this venture would probably not have been realised. Cheers!
Chrissie
