The chain – owned by Oddbins’ parent, French wine company Castel – has opened 14 new shops in the past year. They are mainly in central London locations, including Angel, Fleet Street, Bayswater, Notting Hill and Knightsbridge, but also venture a little further afield to places such as Cobham in ­Surrey and Barnes in Middlesex. Nicolas’s key challenge for 2007 is to increase its profile…

Stepping into his shoes is ex-Gallo UK sales director Lloyd Stephens, who sa ys he w ill take time to understand the challenges facing the business before deciding on a strategy . “I certainly don’t have any preconceptions that I’m going to go in and create massive changes,” he sa ys. As 2006 drew to a close, one of the biggest talking points in the…

The prize is potentially bigger, but hard to obtain. The irony is that Oddbins could win all sorts of media friends by running crazy offers on Greek or Brazilian wines that don’t sell, but Castel wouldn’t have a business they could write about for very long. Head buyer Emma Nichols prefers to put the emphasis on a strong range of fairly-priced wines, yielding realistic margins…

Negative inflation in beer and spirits, wine hemmed in by psychological price barriers … that’s bad news for everyone except the consumer. But now it’s more than a question of profitability. Retailers are facing a barrage of criticism over discounting and claims that such activity is irresponsible. The attacks come from people with vested interests: the on-trade (rapidly losing market share to the offs); Scottish…

As everyone knows, the way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large one. But that hasn’t stopped an enthusiastic army of entrepreneurs opening dozens of wine merchants across the UK over the past few years. Why are they doing so? Haven’t they read the stories about collapsing margins and supermarket dominance? Somehow these shops are not only…

The report, commissioned in partnership with Wines of Chile, identified 512 independent retailers with a specialism in wine. The sector has been watched with some enthusiasm by suppliers, especially as it seems to have defied predictions of the demise of the independent sector with hundreds of new stores opening in the past few years. Wines of Chile UK director Michael Cox has called independents the…

First, the facts: the week was unusual, with a full trading week before Christmas, falling on a Monday for the first time in my tenure as a retailer. Although we’ve had an indifferent year, it was our busiest seven-day period ever. In fact, we set consecutive day records for takings on the Friday and Saturday before Christmas Eve (which thankfully, was a bit quieter, as…