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Profile: Octavian

Provenance is a word that’s used a lot in the wine industry, but apart from telling us what the earth was, and the weather when it was produced, wine then tends to fall into this black hole and very little has been developed to give more transparency.”

Vincent O’Brien delivers these strong words while descending into his domaine, which comprises some 1m sq ft of old mining tunnels beneath the Cotswold hills, providing a secure home to over 9 million bottles of wines and spirits, with a combined open market value of around £2bn. He’s the MD of Octavian, one of the leading bonded wine storage facilities in the UK, but also by far its most extraordinary, having famously been described by Bloomberg as the “Fort Knox of wine”.

With storage space equivalent to 18 football pitches, these cellars began life in 1800 as limestone was mined for construction around the Bath area, later being acquired and upgraded by the MOD in the 1930s to store ammunition and for other military usage.

When Octavian’s owners took control of the site in 1991 as a storage facility there was already some wine stored here, along with private individuals using the space for nuclear bunkers, but in 2012 the decision was made to go fully wine and spirit in these bonded caves.

Today, security remains as tight as ever, with an additional quirk that visitors are required to carry mining-grade emergency breathing apparatus to descend into the labyrinth of tunnels. It’s all a bit James Bond and the cheek-by-jowl cases of iconic, collectable and rare wines and spirits packing this limestone warren, plus the gentle whirring of distant fork-lifts at work, do little to dispel that image.

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Ensuring Transparency

Back to O’Brien and his focus is on the very modern challenge of not just storing wine correctly, but ensuring that every client benefits from the greatest “transparency” possible in terms of being able to identify and track their own wines and spirits, to ensure that aforementioned provenance.

“Auto Trader has better provenance than the wine industry, but this is something we believe in very strongly, that the customer has their name on the case, that there is a unique reference and that details are uploaded on the customer’s portal, so when there is rotation the customer gets exactly the same case out that went in,” he says.

It’s no mean feat keeping track of so many bottles and cases, with around a million cases coming and going each year, and up to 25% changing hands each year even if the wines and spirits stay put. “For a warehouse that’s not actually that big a volume,” says O’Brien, “but it’s the level of care and attention that we put into it that makes the difference.”

Aside from the strict security (Octavian’s cellars have one main access point, with just a couple of emergency exits), each consignment is photographed up to three times a year, as randomised stock checks sweep the 15 miles of tunnels, allowing updates to the client portal during the six to seven years that the average case spends here.

“With a lot of our customers an order [for stock movement] is the only interaction we are going to get, so

we’ve built a relationship of trust,” says O’Brien. “Most of the time they’re not interacting with us and are assuming everything is going to be perfect, so we don’t want that interaction to be a disappointment.”

This has been developed and rolled out as MyCellar Portal, to fold in an integrated trading exchange for Octavian customers and also some of the merchants that store wine with the company. In addition to up-to-date information on market values, and providing a trading platform, the portal majors in traceability and provenance, giving a full history of both storage and ownership.

This, says O’Brien, gives Octavian the edge over competitor bonded warehouses, helping bring wine storage up to speed with the kind of transparency and professionalism that investors would expect with the likes of stocks and shares or fine art. Another of his big selling points is insurance. A Lloyds syndicate is responsible for underwriting requirements, and the scale of this cover is hinted at by a ‘high-value threshold’ kicking in at over £8,000 a bottle, while every vehicle sent out to deliver is insured for up to £1m.

“When I sit down with private individuals who have various investments, the first question I ask is, ‘Why would you treat wine investment differently from any other investment?’. I think perhaps because it’s also a consumable it sometimes changes the way that wine is perceived,” says O’Brien.

He does, however, allow that Octavian has a certain cachet for being quite different, itself adding something to the story behind the wine and its provenance.

“I think we have got a reputation of being unique and there is some romance behind that as well, it’s not just a standard warehouse,” O’Brien concedes.

• Octavian
• cellar management
• private cellar
• storage