Smooth Red - When wine leads the way
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For someone as enmeshed in the wine trade as Tony Stebbings,
travel is determined by where they’re growing grapes, as he tells Liz Granirer.
“I was made a Chevalier du Tastevin – amongst other things,”
Tony Stebbings, a man who has spent his entire life involved in the business of
wine, almost throws away toward the end of our interview. This is a rare
honour, reserved for a brotherhood that promotes everything to do with Burgundy
and, in particular, its wine, that has operated out of the beautiful Chateau du
Clos du Vougeot in Burgundy since 1934. So, he has clearly been more than ‘just’
a wine importer.
In fact, if you google Tony Stebbings, an entertaining
article by Jancis Robinson, the doyenne of wine writing, pops up. It includes
the recounting of a celebratory wine-trade lunch which ends with the line: “How
Tony Stebbings, with co-conspirators, managed what he referred to the next
morning as 'a cleansing ale' afterwards, I shall never know.” One imagines this
is a man who knows how to enjoy himself.
And so, perhaps, he should, being the fifth generation of
the Stebbings family to be involved with wine. It all started back in Lowestoft
in 1858, when Tony’s great, great grandfather set up a wine and spirit
importer, bottler and bonder business. And now Tony’s son, Adam, the sixth
generation, has spearheaded another wine-related company, SmoothRed, taking couples and small
groups of friends on carefully planned, tailor-made holidays centred around
wine-producing regions. “Only two weeks ago, we did a black-tie dinner in some
cellars in the Loire Valley and it was at producers that my father and
grandfather had bought from,” Tony tells me, clearly – and rightly – proud
of the long connection between Stebbings and wine.
But back to Burgundy. “I did my first grape harvest in Cos
du Vougeot back in 1968,” Tony says. “Not a good year,” he adds, almost as an
afterthought. “It was winter and it rained nearly every day. I lived with a
French family in Nuits-Saint-George and had to cycle to the vineyard in
Vougeot. There was another gentleman from the UK there and he said to me, 'Tony,
if you want to get on in the wine trade, you need to come down to London where
they hold wine exams.’ So, I upped sticks from Suffolk and came down to London
and started my own business in 1974 at the tender age of 23.”
He went on to develop a very successful wine-brokering
business, counting all the major supermarkets, regional wholesalers and brewers
as clients. “My little business sold over 300 million bottles,” he says
modestly. Then, in 2002, he sold the business and since 2004 has been helping
Adam run SmoothRed, curating tailor-made wine holidays to the world’s finest
wine regions.
But where does Tony like to holiday? “I’m afraid my wife
used to say, ‘We’re going back to France for our holiday, aren’t we?’ So, yes,
wine does definitely influence where I go, without a shadow of a doubt. Even
now, if you asked me, ‘Where do I want to go back to?’, I have to admit it would
be Bordeaux. I love going there. It’s just been voted number-one city to visit
in 2017 by Lonely Planet and I think it’s stunning. It’s a lovely city to
visit. I’ve been to-ing and fro-ing to Bordeaux for 40 years.”
This year, as well as Bordeaux, he’s also been to Avignon to
see an old friend he used to work for (also in the wine trade); southern Spain,
where SmoothRed may start doing trips; and Scotland, where he plays a regular
bi-annual golf match in Prestwick (Wine Trade against Whisky Trade, of course).
“I’m going to Hungary next. We have a lot of repeat business. Clients who say, ‘We’ve
been to Bordeaux, Champagne, Lisbon. Where can we go next?’ We haven’t done a
trip yet to Hungary, so Adam and I are going out to do a little recce in
January. We’ll find the restaurants, the hotels, the wineries, flights and
everything else and put together a package.” And then there’s Romania. “We’re
doing a trip to Romania in 2018, so we’ll be going out there too.”
Does he ever travel without wine on the agenda? He has to
think for a minute. “My wife and I always said we’d never go on a cruise,” he
says. “We didn’t think it would be our sort of thing, but we went on a
Silverseas cruise around the Caribbean and it was a wonderful holiday.
Absolutely fantastic. We’ll probably do another, somewhere different. We’re
thinking about one going through the Panama Canal and do a bit of South
America.” And would he be stopping off – “At the wineries?” he says, taking the
words out of my mouth. “Definitely.”
Hmmm. So maybe, where Tony is concerned, wine is never
really off the agenda.
SmoothRed offers bespoke wine holidays for couples, private
groups, wine societies and for corporate hospitality. To find out more, visit www.smoothred.co.uk or call 020 8877
4940.
Silver Travel Advisor recommends SmoothRed.
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