For most of our twenty-seven years, Morgan Classic Wines has run on word of mouth. A customer buys a case, drinks it, mentions us to a friend. A collector sells us a cellar and rings again five years later with the next one. That built the business and it still carries most of it.
So why start publishing articles now? Fair question.
Buying wine has changed
In 1999, the year we opened, if you wanted the going rate for a case of mature claret you rang a merchant and trusted the answer. Wine-Searcher launched that same year, and the guesswork has been gone for a long time now.
These days most buyers have done their homework before they ever contact us. They may have compared our price on Wine-Searcher, checked a critic score or two, even read a forum thread on the vintage, and possibly asked an AI assistant to do the lot for them. Much of the buying decision is made before we hear a word.
Which means a merchant nobody can find, or read, is not really in the running, however good the wine or the price. Visibility used to mean an advert in Decanter magazine and a reputation in the right dining rooms. Now it means having something worth reading at the moment a buyer is deciding whom to trust.
Not every wine list is what it looks like
Online, an established merchant and a six-month-old operation can look much the same: clean website, long list, checkout page. But there is more to a wine list than meets the eye. A brand-new firm with a surprisingly deep list has rarely spent years buying cellars. Often those wines are listed straight off a trade exchange: cases the merchant has never seen, does not hold, and would have to go and buy if you ordered one.
We do not list a single wine off an exchange. Everything on our list is stock we hold or control, in bond in the UK, and we can check the condition of a case before it moves. Some of the wine on other companies’ lists is in fact ours.
John Morgan has been trading fine wine since 1979, and the company since 1999. But an About page is easy to type. Writing regularly about the market, with opinions you can check against what actually happened, is harder to fake. In May we put numbers on the market correction. In July, mid-campaign, we explained why we still don’t buy En Primeur. Odd things for a wine merchant to publish, which is rather the point.
What to expect
Mostly, the Journal is where we write down what we already say on the phone. The difference between In Bond and Duty Paid. What selling a cellar actually involves. Where we think the market is, and why.
It is not a sales channel. When we have wine to sell you, we will tell you directly, by email or on the list, with a price on it. Pieces here will appear when there is something worth saying, not to feed a schedule. And if you read one and disagree, or want the longer version, email us. Most of our oldest accounts started with exactly that sort of conversation.