Indigo turns 21 with special guests tasting

By Jo Gilbert

Published: 11 September, 2024

Indigo Wine celebrated 21 years in business this week via a special gathering of the wines and winemakers which helped to put the business on the UK map.

Lindes de Remelluri (pictured), which has worked widely across Spain to revive abandoned vineyards, is just one of a handful of special producers in attendance at yesterday’s (10 September) event.

A total of 11 names were present at the tasting at The Winemakers Club in London’s Farringdon Street, which aimed to offer up something different to the autumn calendar’s largescale format.

Read more: Hallgarten expands portfolio with new Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and South African producers

While much of the northern hemisphere is in the midst of harvest, several of Indigo’s leading producers – both longstanding and more recent – took a brief sabatical to show their wines.

This includes Spain’s Pamela Geddes (Vino Espumoso de Calida) and M. Ant. De la Riva (Jerez), while Sussex's Sugrue South Downs, Australia’s Luke Lambert and Stellenbosch’s Rebel Rebel helped to show the breadth of the distributor’s well-rounded portfolio.

Spain of course, remains a mainstay of the Indigo range. Having begun the company out of his spare bedroom in 2003, founder Ben Henshaw was one of the first to spot the potential of new wave Spain back in the mid-2000s, helping to introduce a stream of artisanal Spanish wines to British consumers.

Looking back on those 21 years, Henshaw described a “breakthrough moment” in Barcelona in 2005, when he walked into well-known merchant. It was here that he realised that Spain had “very interesting wines, winemakers and regions that are not in the UK”.

“During that trip, I bought whole load of samples which I drank over next few days, and thought ‘there is an opportunity to do something here’. From there, I set myself the objective to have the most interesting Spanish wine range in the UK. That was in the mid-2000s when Spain was starting to kick off, so I was lucky in terms of timing,” he said.

Henshaw quickly started to meet with younger, more vineyard-focused producers who lacked the investment of starrier names, but offered a completely new approach to winemaking in Spain.

“These were the producers that didn’t have a lot of money or fancy cellars with a lot of expensive oak, and who were all following a vigneron model. Once I was in that community or network, I was soon able to pick up other wines and producers,” Henshaw said.

Today, Spain still makes up 50% of the portfolio, while the rest is largely evenly spread among Australia, South Africa, Italy and England.

The business hasn’t gone far. Still based in Brixton, Indigo’s modern HQ is “only five minutes away” from where Henshaw began back in 2003, with dreams of making it out of the spare room. Now, the business has 11 members of staff and counts 120 producers in its portfolio – and probably too many varieties to count.

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