Entering the world of wine after a career in advertising, Carole Bryon opened Lady of the Grapes as a space to champion female winemakers. She talks about her inspiration, importing her own selection and opening a new location after Christmas
I opened Lady of the Grapes in 2018 after a previous career as an advertising director. I did that for eight years and then, at some point, I didn’t like it anymore. I began working in wine, then I started realising the disparity between men and women. Sometimes that was unconscious, that a customer might want to speak to a male colleague. But also on the shelf, where many wines were made by men, or even when it was a couple, the woman’s name wasn’t on the bottle.
My first job in wine was working at The Grocery in Shoreditch. There, I started discovering more about natural and organic wine, which, for me, became important and is what we serve here. Approximately 90% of all our wine is also made by women, with a few exceptions for other wines and people who we really like.
It’s not on a very regular basis, but when we have a winemaker around, we also put on masterclasses. We had a few before the summer and now is the season we’re going to start again. We have one with Svitlana Tsybak, who is the CEO of Beykush Winery in Ukraine. All the profit from that will be donated to the charity Ukrainian Action, and it’s also a way for people to be introduced to an unknown region. It’s important, I think, with the situation there, for people to understand how they can still make wine and what life there is like.
As for our wine list, we started with about 100 wines, and now we’re at 450-plus. In the beginning, I knew some female winemakers who I wanted to put on the list. From there, people started contacting me, and I began importing some of the wines. We do a bit of wholesale too. We have wine from all over the world – probably the most from France and Italy – but we like to have as many countries as we can, including emerging regions such as Georgia or Ukraine.
Recent additions to our list include two from the producer Mel Solo, created by Mélanie Kröber. She’s from Berlin originally and worked in finance before she decided to learn how to make cheese, then fermentation guided her naturally to wine. Now she lives in France and only works with local grape varieties, such as Mauzac (a white variety grown in Gaillac and Limoux, found in her wine: Disco).
In the future, we’re looking to build more of a portfolio of female winemakers to import. Then, after that, we’re working on the second Lady of the Grapes, which we have plans to open after Christmas. It’s going to be much bigger, with a full restaurant on the ground floor and a wine bar in the basement. We’re 40sqm, and this will be triple the size.
