This year Britain’s biggest wine company is 40 years old. It is privately owned and still very much guided by one married couple. Tony Laithwaite, whom I have never seen at professional wine tastings and events, might be called the invisible man of the British wine trade – except that in the last few years, possibly prompted by The Sunday Times Rich List, the trade has, at last, begun to recognise his existence with various lifetime achievement awards.

But his wife Barbara Laithwaite is completely unacknowledged for her part in building up Direct Wines, which this year expects to sell £350m worth of wine – not just in the UK but in the US, Germany, Switzerland, Australia and, soon, Hong Kong. As Simon McMurtrie, their new chief executive, puts it: “Everyone in Direct Wines knows there would not be a company without Barbara. She is able to combine long-term vision with the short-term need to balance the books etc. Left on his own, Tony would have run out of money long ago.”

WINE INVESTMENT REPORT

John Stimpfig on this year’s en primeur tastings and Michael Steinberger on the importance of buyers in Asia sustaining demand for fine wines

She is more diplomatic. “We’ve always complemented each other,” she says. “He concentrates on the wines, marketing and the creative bit and I concentrate on the business side of things. I have a pragmatic nature and a logical brain.”

They met through her sister when Tony was studying geography at Durham; Barbara studied chemistry. After a stint in a market research company in London, she ended up working for him in 1971, two years after he first drove a van full of wine back from the village in Bordeaux he’d got to know as a student and set up the company, then known as Bordeaux Direct, in a railway arch in Windsor. “From the word go, we were successful professionally but we only married in 1975 – to everyone’s relief,” she says now.

The company, which employs about 1,000 people globally, has always been innovative. The first in the world to employ flying winemakers, well-trained young Australians hired to turn cheap French grapes into modern wine, Direct Wines is now capitalising on the vast numbers of highly trained and motivated oenology graduates from Adelaide University by offering them a contract winery in McLaren Vale to play in – thereby getting their hands on small lots of serious Australian wine. They have a similar outfit in the Dordogne.

But Tony Laithwaite is probably best known to British wine drinkers via the Sunday Times Wine Club, which the Laithwaites have operated since Barbara negotiated a deal in 1973. Indeed, Sunday Times editor Harry Evans’s patronage of this young upstart was probably the single biggest leg-up the company ever enjoyed – along with a lifelong friendship with wine writer Hugh Johnson, the club’s president. Today, Direct Wines is behind a good 90 per cent of any wine mail order offer in the UK press and mailings from the likes of British Airways, the National Trust and several banks. If another outfit seems to be presenting some direct competition, Direct Wines tends to buy it, as it did between 2002 and 2005 with Virgin Wines, Warehouse Wines of Preston and even the venerable Averys of Bristol.

Its mailing lists are unparalleled and most of its income is from its UK mail order company, known as Laithwaites Wine since a 21st-century corporate decision to bring Tony out of the shadows.

Thanks to Tony, their tone and sales pitch has always relied on folksy, direct and extremely effective writing – so effective that even I can easily find myself swayed into a state of excited curiosity about what they describe as their exclusive special finds. Only partly because they are seen as outsiders, they have come in for more than their fair share of flak over the years from wine writers complaining that their policy of avoiding direct price comparisons is simply a ploy to allow them to overprice sometimes quite ordinary wine. But there seems to be a new energy in the wine buying department now under Dan Snook, ex-Averys. They have also regained from Sainsbury’s (“we should never have lost her”) buyer Abigail Hirshfeld.

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Over tea in a smart London hotel, I asked Barbara Laithwaite what she thought their greatest mistake had been. “We probably relaxed a bit too much over the last four to six years,” she admitted. “We always prided ourselves on being light on our feet but I think we slowed down. I wouldn’t say we were leapfrogged, but we weren’t as innovative as we should have been.”

For someone at the helm of such a successful company, virtually without competitors, Barbara is surprisingly edgy. “We do have competition,” she insisted. “We’re copied all the time by companies like Majestic – the supermarkets less so.” She is gloomy about prospects at home. “The whole UK wine business is going to change. The government is making it so hard to trade well here. In March 2011, duty will go up to £20.83 a case.” This means £1.74 will go to the Exchequer for every bottle sold, no matter what its price.

It is partly this that has driven Direct Wines abroad, virtually unnoticed by the rest of the UK wine trade. They have long had a similar operation in Australia, but three years ago – great timing – they bought Lionstone in Illinois, a virtual copycat company that they had known for over 20 years, in order to get a foothold in the vast and expanding US wine market. And since last September they have had a tie-up with The Wall Street Journal that Barbara described as “the thing we’re most proud of”. They have apparently sold £20m worth of wine to the Journal’s readers in the first nine months.

As if to prove that Murdoch ownership is not crucial to their expansion plans, this weekend they launch a similar deal with Germany’s Die Welt – owned by Axel Springer – and are finalising a similar deal in Hong Kong.

All of this is run from its base in a warehouse in Theale, Berkshire, where Direct Wines has planted a vineyard which produces a fizz. With a girlfriend, Barbara also has her own vineyard, which has helped revive her interest in the family business (all three Laithwaite sons are now connected with it in some way).

“I’ve never had a profound interest in wine but I’m actually more interested than I used to be. We have two hectares of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in the next village. We studied at Plumpton [college] and we do most of the hand work between us. Winter pruning in old ski clothes sort of thing. It really makes you feel alive, responding to the seasons. Ours is much healthier than the Theale vineyard, even though it’s only a few miles away.” The Laithwaites have had health problems, but their financial health is not in doubt.

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Recommended Laithwaite wines

Valdespera NV £7.49, unfortified “sherry”
Senza Confini 2008 £6.99, Italian/Slovenian white blend £8.99, good balance
Domaine St-Benoît Syrah Vieilles Vignes 2007 Vin de Pays d’Oc £7.99, top Minervois
Collezione di Paolo Riserva 2005 Chianti £10.49, super lively
Mission Estate Winery Syrah 2007 Hawkes Bay £10.99, liquorice-scented Kiwi

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