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David Gleave MW on Remo Nardone's legacy

I first got to know Remo in 1983 and 1984, when Enotria was supplying the restaurant and retail outlets I worked in. Nick Belfrage was the consultant to the restaurant and then my boss when I worked in retail, and he of course had bought from Remo for a number of years.

First of all as a customer, then as someone doing part-time writing – I interviewed Remo in 1987 for events surrounding Enotria’s 15th anniversary, an article commissioned by the then new editor at Wine & Spirit magazine, Tim Atkin – and finally as a competitor, I watched Enotria’s development and growth during the 1980s. Winecellars, the so-called competitor to Enotria, opened as a wine warehouse in southwest London in November 1986, specialising in Italian wines. The range was put together by Nick Belfrage with a little input from me. We had a few of our own imports to begin with – 1982 Barolo ‘Monprivato’ from Giuseppe Mascarello at £9.99 and Isole e Olena. We soon found space for new wines on our shelves, so Nick was happy for me to trot off to Italy to look for producers to fill those gaps. We started importing from the likes of Fontodi, Capezzana, Aldo Conterno, Vajra, Selvapiana and Felsina Berardenga. Soon, we had more wine than we could sell retail, so we started wholesaling, and within a couple of years were like a flea annoying the elephant that was Enotria.

Remo, ever sensitive to competition, saw the challenge. His genius as an importer was to stay abreast of every lasting trend. He was very good at sifting through what was passing and what would last. In the mid-1980s, he had decided that Enotria could sell more Italian wine if it developed its French portfolio, so he brought in the great James Rogers to help him do that. In Winecellars, he saw a company that represented the new face of Italian wine that had emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s. He was immediately aware of what that meant for his business: change or fade away. His response was typical: “I want to buy Winecellars,” he said first to Nick and then to me.

• Read more: Enotria&Coe founder Remo Nardone passes away

After 18 months of talks, silence, discussions and negotiations, he bought Winecellars in April 1994. Initially, Winecellars was run as a stand-alone company. In early 1995, it was merged with Enotria. That was a difficult time for the producers who had been in the Winecellars portfolio, but together we convinced them it would work. We both tried to make Enotria Winecellars, as it became known, work. But Remo ran Enotria very much in a command and control manner. He knew what was happening throughout the business, and was in control of the detail of the business, something key in a distribution company. That, quite simply, is why Enotria was such a successful company under his leadership. But from my point of view, there were two ways of doing things at Enotria: Remo’s way and the wrong way. And I wasn’t very good at being told what to do. Within 18 months, our relationship was breaking down, and in November 1996 he fired me.

I had a small shareholding in Enotria, and Remo admitted unfair dismissal, so it was a tense period. I had no plans for starting a business until producers who had been at Winecellars started to call to ask what I was going to do. Liberty Wines started to take shape, and we started trading in early March 1997. Remo used our emergence as a competitor as a way of driving his business. Despite losing producers who moved to Liberty Wines, Enotria thrived as they took on new producers and continued to provide outstanding service to their customers.

Remo and I resolved our outstanding differences once Liberty was successfully up and running. We agreed to have lunch, something we continued to do in subsequent years. Each time I would thank him for his role in the creation of Liberty Wines. He would laugh, for he also knew how much he had taught me about running a distribution company. His obsession with service and margin was key. Soon after we’d set up Liberty Wines, I was asked by the MD of another company how Enotria had consistently managed to produce profits that were among the best in the industry. Was there any financial hanky panky with the Italians? he wondered. No, Remo knew he needed to a make profit to continue to improve the company, so he ran it to make a profit and the company continued to improve – it was as simple as that.

The wine ethos I learned from Nick Belfrage and the service ethos instilled by Remo have been two of the two key factors in the success enjoyed by Liberty Wines over the past 27 years. In fact, service was the reason Remo decided to set up Enotria in 1971. He was fed up with Hedges & Butler. They had a portfolio with most of the great names, but Remo was frustrated by their inability to meet customer expectations as they were out of stock on certain wines. Even worse, there was no ‘sense of urgency’, one of his favourite phrases. “The directors would be having lunch in the corporate dining room while our customers weren’t getting their deliveries,” he recalled – still with disdain after 25 years – to me several times. He knew he could do better, so got backing from a couple of brothers in Verona who ran the Fabiano winery and an Italian restaurateur in London. Enotria started trading in 1972 and Remo’s energy and drive ensured it succeeded.

He professionalised distribution long before that word was in use. As a result, he has left a lasting legacy to the UK wine trade.

• Enotria
• distribution
• Italian Wine
• David Gleave MW
• obituary
• Remo Nardone