Wine importing is a curious business. For us, as for many, it started as a hobby, a way to indulge our love of all things vinuous.  Our cellars soon buckled under the weight of the rapidly multiplying bottles and we decided it was time to try to make a living out of it.  Finally, we could justify spending every waking moment thinking, breathing and tasting wine and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 25 years, not a bad stint really.

The great news is that today, there is more quality wine than ever before being made in both Europe and on our own doorstep. Of course, today's global village brings with it global demand and so it is harder and harder to get decent allocations of the best wines. Everyone wants the stuff! All we can do is keep fighting for our share and use our years of experience to bring you the very best wines available.

Over the years we’ve learnt that to be successful in this game you need the following: first and foremost a supportive family who will put up with your many overseas trips, countless evenings spent wine 'tasting' and your outrageous wine expenditure in the name of ‘research’. Secondly, you need unfailing confidence in your own palate; how else could you make judgments on the quality and appeal of a wine still in barrel, served to you in a small glass, in a freezing cold cellar, on the other side of the world? Good contacts help too, as you're competing with a seemingly infinite band of wine merchants the world over, all fighting for a highly finite amount of top quality wine.

But above all you need to be in love. In love with the fruit of the vine and the myriad of wine styles it produces. In love with the thrill of new discoveries and hearing about those of your customers when they’ve just enjoyed one of your wines at their dinner table. In love with selling pleasure in a bottle, as after all, that is what we do. It's pretty addictive stuff really and at International Fine Wines, we are truly, madly, deeply and some may say irrationally in love with our chosen metier.

In term of buying wine, our philosophy is simple. When deciding which wines to bring to you, our customers, we ask ourselves the following:

1.Would I want to drink this wine?

2. Would I be happy to have this in my cellar?

3. Would I be happy to pay the price being offered?

If the answer to all three is a resounding “Yes!”, then we buy the wine and ship it with great haste to our customers for their enjoyment. It may not sound very sophisticated, but it’s an approach which has served us well for over 25 years. And the warmest of thanks to all of you who have joined us for all, or part of the journey to date, and to those of you who will join us in the future.

Cheers! 

The Team at International Fine Wines