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Wineaux Ltd Restaurant wines and craft beer Our story Wineaux was founded in 2005 by two old friends, Barry McCaughley and Ben Hayes. Barry had always had an incredible passion and aptitude for food and beer, and the idea of setting-up a business had long been in the back of his mind. With Ben on board, Wineaux was launched on a simple premise: to provide high-quality alternatives to the mass-produced wines and beers on the high street.
No grand plan, we just started selling wine. We had a lock-up in London Bridge and a tremendous amount of goodwill from suppliers. We sought out exceptional wines from small producers destined for the restaurant trade and sold them wherever we could: friends, family, old colleagues, restaurants, shops and events. We still believe that small, quality-focused producers inevitably create more authentic and better products than their factory-scale equivalents. In wine and beer, small is almost always better. Over the past few years this principle has taken us all over the world. Having attracted significant capital investment, we now import around 75% of the wines we sell. Our partners are like-minded producers and investors, people who share our values about what wine should be: an expression of the place it comes from and something to be cherished for its quality, something that can improve life. We’ve had to learn a lot along the way (about things like shipping, customs and logistics) and the Wineaux team has grown to seven people, four warehouses and an active board. Our corporate clients include/have inncluded the likes of Mitchells & Butlers, All Bar One, Browns, The Ashes 2009, Chepstow race course and over 100 pubs. In addition to supplying bars, restaurants and events, our wine can also be found in London’s leading financial, legal and media agencies. These accounts have allowed us to develop the retail the side of the business (centred upon http://www.wineaux.co.uk) and bring these exceptional wines to the home delivery market, at exceptional prices. Wineaux also started selling craft beer long before it was trendy to do so with a star beer in Little Creatures Pale Ale. The range has come on a lot recently and we now feature a unique range of top quality craft ales. With the microbrew/craft beer business showing a huge growth of new and interesting producers, Wineaux now truly has two strings to its bow.
We’ve come a long way in almost six years, but we still strive to do exactly what we did when we started out: to sell well-priced, high-quality, authentic wine and beer in a UK marketplace saturated by mass-produced booze. Simple as that. Thanks for choosing Wineaux, Barry and Ben |