Bringing the joy back into wine… one glass at a time

The call came in at 6.30am: ‘We’re going under. The liquidators are coming to clear us out so you need to come now and get your wine.’ The wine in question, worth £50,000, was in the cellar of a big City property firm and, as yet, not paid for.

For a split second, wine seller and expert Tom Gilbey froze in his Hammersmith office. The only reasonable course of action was to drop everything, drive across London, break into the cellar with the entry code provided by the whistleblower and take all of their wine back, while the chatter of liquidators filling in paperwork could be heard upstairs.

By 7.15am Tom and his men were pulling up outside, by 8.30am they had rescued the lot.

Glass half full: the infectious fun of Tom Gilbey

It may not be Dan Brown but who would have thought that selling wine would be so fraught? According to Tom’s fascinating new book, life in the wine world is far from simple.

Whether it be wine heists, 72-hour round trips to Spain to collect missing Christmas party season shipments, or supplying five of the ‘best’ French wines to a dinner of 24 Chinese businessmen in Wellington Arch (the budget? £12,000), there is little time to put your feet up.

Tom is a popular figure on social media, dispelling the myths and banishing the snobbery of traditional wine buffs. He seems just as happy enjoying a glass of chicken wine (La Vieille Ferme to those not in the know) as he is a classically produced Chablis.

But you shouldn’t doubt his credentials as he takes us on a tour of 100 wines. Not only did Gilbey grow up in his parents’ wine bar, surrounded by a variety of grapes, customs and tastes, but he has impeccable wine pedigree. Back in 1857 his great-great-great-grandfather Alfred Gilbey and his older brother Walter started importing ‘good, cheap plonk’ from South Africa.

After only three years, W. and A. Gilbey supplied 20,000 very merry customers. Ten years later there was a shop on Oxford Street and a gin distillery in Camden, and the family were on their way to becoming one of the next great booze dynasties.

However, as with any family business, when you ‘employ the eldest son, no matter how stupid he is, and give him way more responsibility than he can manage’, the path rarely runs smooth.

By the time Tom’s father came to the firm he was merely a number on an HR form, as W. and A. Gilbey had been subsumed into the colossus that is Diageo.

Tom’s inherited business acumen shines through when he gets his first job selling wine. He bolstered his £9k salary with 10 per cent commission, selling £700,000 worth of wine in his first year; £1.3 million in his second. In his third he was made partner. No drunken fool then.

His childlike enthusiasm displayed in his TikToks translates rather better on page than screen. There are laugh-out-loud moments, and real excitement and heart in this book.

We go to Beaujolais in the back of a Citroen CX with his dad, uncle and cousin; we go on his first date with his wife; we meet wine growers, makers and tasters that produce the wine that sits in cellars across the world. By the end we realise that what is special about wine is not that it can taste like the nectar of the gods, or evoke a bad hangover (although that is an important consideration), but that it recalls memories, transports our tastebuds, and suffuses our lunches, evenings and dinner tables with joy.

Combined with Tom’s extensive but easily comprehensible knowledge, we get a full-bodied book that’s really got legs.