The Waitrose Wine Team with Jamie Matthewson

This show was published Friday, May 5, 2023

Overview

Jamie Matthewson of Waitrose gives us an insight to the workings of the Waitrose wine buying team. The drinks team is headed up by Pierpaolo Petrassi MW who heads up the entire Waitrose drinks team and looks after beers, ciders, spirits and soft drinks, while Jamie heads up the wine buying team. They have buyers managing wines geographically, by country and they also manage Waitrose Cellar.com with a separate buyer. They are two buyers for France, a buyer for Iberia & Americas, one for Italy & South Africa, and so on. They group some countries together so that you have southern and northern hemisphere e.g. Italy and South Africa, which helps manage the workload by having the different key times of year. They have a separate buyer for sparkling wines and for fortified & sweet wines.

The buyers manage the entire process and are responsible from beginning to end of the buying process, from range selection, technical, labelling, transportation through to commercial negotiations with the producers. They are qualified to a minimum of WSET diploma and they have 4 masters of wine in the team. They have three own label wine brands - the core range is called Blueprint with classic wines from around the world. They also have wines under the Waitrose top tier brand 'No. 1'. A third own label range is Waitrose Loved & Found launched in 2019 with 10 products of which 5 wines are replaced with new variants every 12 months. We talk about their initiative to remove the foil capsule on a small selection of wines and how cans have been taking off for single serve consumption occasions.

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Music

The music used for the UK Wine Show is Griffes de Jingle 1 by Marcel de la Jartèle and Silence by Etoile Noire.