5 minutes with…

By Andrew Catchpole

Published: 02 July, 2025

Charlotte Wallace managing and technical director, Graham Crawford, sales director, and Luke Flunder, brand ambassador, Oakley Wine Agencies

Colchester-based Iberian specialist Oakley Wine Agencies dived back into the London Wine Fair this year, where Andrew Catchpole caught up with their new consumer-first approach

GC: Luke Flunder [of online merchant Flunder Wines] has joined us as a brand ambassador. We’re changing slightly to have a consumer-first approach, so it’s an additional sales arm. Rather than have Charlotte and I doing the sales, we’re having Luke talk to consumers. The big hope is the consumers will ask retailers for the brands, and then the retailers will go, ‘oh, how do we buy them?’.

CW: Our job has been to get the wines on the shelf, but then what are we doing, as a business, to help get them into the hands of the consumer? So this is something we are trying. Our job is to find new retailers and importers for wineries. We asked the buyers ‘what do we do to make this work’? Their response was, ‘tell people on the street your wine is available in the store’. So not only do you invest in the stores, you invest in the outside world. That’s where Luke comes in.

LF: Portugal represents fantastic value, with great complexity. I’m not sure if consumers are fully understanding this, but it’s an exciting time and we need to be showing different styles from different regions to give a different avenue into wine. Tourism is a factor, a lot of people are visiting now and becoming more familiar with the wines.

Printer friendly version