Where are they now? John Ratcliffe – from Oddbins to Australian wine pioneer

John Ratcliffe helped transform UK wine buying, putting Australian wines firmly on the map and shaping how consumers engage with wine. He has no internet footprint or known photographs, but reflects here on a career of innovation, challenges and the future of wine.

Catching up with John Ratcliffe at the Don Restaurant in St Swithins Lane, London’s Square Mile, I was surprised to find him on crutches after he’d managed to drop an oak beam on his foot. This is a man who was not known for dropping the ball, let alone an oak beam, in a long and fruitful career that started at Wimbledon Oddbins. “I didn’t realise it was serious until I flew to Adelaide and my foot had swollen to three times the size”, he recalls. “The immigration officer said to me, ‘you’re a w****r, mate’, and I went straight to the hospital.”

John Ratcliffe was born in Manchester to an academic family on 15 November 1957. His parents wanted him to be an academic, like his brother, a senior professor at Oxford University. He studied classics at Pembroke College, Oxford (same college as Oz Clarke) and just about scraped through. Like Nicholas Urfe in John Fowles’ The Magus, he left Oxford with a third-class degree and a first-class illusion.

The illusion in John’s case was that he knew more than a bit about wine. He walked into Wimbledon Oddbins in 1982 as a junior assistant only to realise how little he actually did know. “That’s when I came down to earth and realised I had to learn the trade.” Oddbins encouraged him to do the WSET courses up to diploma level and, “ironically”, he says, “I won the Port scholarship”.

The turning point: introducing Australians to Australian wine

He then became the company demonstrator, going from store to store as far as the Midlands, putting on wine tastings with customers. “I got a commission on every bottle sold and I made good money.” The experience gave him his first taste of the public appetite for wine. “I discovered just how interested people were in wine. It was a real connection.” John then moved to the Oxford High Street branch of Oddbins as an under-manager, now part of the Oxford Wine Company.

His big break came when the trainee buyer role was advertised. Over 60 people had applied for it and the shortlist ended up as a dead heat between Richard Macadam and him. Macadam got the wine job and John was put in charge of confectionery, paper and plastic bags as assistant buyer to Perry Mill at Seagram-owned Gough Brothers. It was Seagram’s plan for Gough Brothers to be the dominant force, but they wanted Oddbins to be “shaken up”, and since John was perceived as the more aggressive of the two buyers, with a can-do attitude, they switched him and Richard Macadam around.

Joining a team of Tim Waters, the senior buyer, and John Vaughan-Hughes, MW, the consultant, his portfolio was Eastern European wine, “essentially tafelwein, and Australasia. I looked at the portfolio and I thought ‘can I do this?’”. Luck played its part. His father had been in Newcastle, New South Wales, on a sabbatical and brought him back a book on Australian wine, called Wines and Wineries of the Southern Vales. “I suddenly thought, tafelwein, Romania, hmmm, let’s have a look at these Australian wines.”

At the time, imports of Australian wine were in the region of 25-30,000 cases. John went to the main importers, Ian Whigham at Penfolds, Michael Hill Smith, who provided the BV wines from Negociants, Thierry Villard and Mike Raymond. Along with John Vaughan-Hughes and Tim Waters, they tasted 60 odd wines. “There was a concern that these wines would never work because there was too much fruit in them’”. Undeterred, he approached David Isaacs, the marketing director, and told him he wanted to do a promotion on Australian wine. “David laughed and said ‘you’re kidding me’”.

John was insistent. Isaacs told him he could go ahead as long as he raised £60,000 of marketing money (around £200,000 in today’s money). When John approached the big importers and raised the money, he went back to Isaacs who agreed to the promotion. “That’s when Australia kicked off. We ordered over 34,000 cases from Oz, and everyone thought I was mad.” They put a six-foot kangaroo with boxing gloves on outside every Oddbins store. “Jane MacQuitty did me a great favour when she wrote up the BV wines at £2.69 a bottle. The wines sold out.” Australia had arrived and so, in a sense, had John.

Isaacs sent John to Australia. “I was petrified. We didn’t have company cars, I was worried my credit card would bounce. But it was epic because I met really supportive people. I remember going for a pie floater with Max Schubert (Penfolds winemaker and creator of Grange) outside the Adelaide Casino. It was really taking off. I owe Australia a huge amount.” John would travel to Australia every January for three weeks, finding himself bumping into more and more UK wine buyers. Oddbins’ Australia range reached 220 wines at the market’s peak in the mid-1990s. By 1994, Australia had shot to fourth in the league table of imported wines behind France, Italy and Germany. Oddbins earned the sobriquet ‘Ozbins’. By 1998, Oddbins’ Australian wines were outselling France.

The Oddbins revolution and democratising wine

What made Oddbins so special? “Consumers wanted to know about wine. There was a genuine interest, and people didn’t know much about it then.” His co-buyer, Steve Daniel, and he would go out and find interesting wines and send them to the press through the PR team of Katie MacAulay and Caroline Miles, and the press generally wrote them up highly. “We had 250 managers and assistants. If you went into an Oddbins on a Saturday, you’d get someone who really knew their stuff. So we managed to get wines to a broader marketplace. We were democratising wine.”

It was a hard and fast rule that they never bought wines while abroad, but would always bring them back and taste them together on the bench at Weir Road, Wimbledon HQ: John, Steve Daniel, Richard Macadam, Nick Blacknell, Adrian Atkinson, Katie MacAulay and Roger Higgs. And they were quick. They could pick up parcels so much more quickly than their competitors. If they put them in front of the right members of the press, the press generally wrote them up positively. “The press would be honest. If the press said they were good, we’d put them on customer tasting. If the press were less complimentary, and we did have the odd dog, they would still sell.”

The wine revolution was not just happening in Australia. Steve Daniel, appointed by John, was introducing Chile to the UK in the late 1980s when Pinochet was still around. New Zealand was working well for Oddbins in tandem with Australia. But John admits that “we never really cracked South Africa and we always found the US expensive. Argentina came later”. Meanwhile, flying winemakers like Geoff Merrill, Jacques Lurton and Hugh Ryman were starting their peripatetic travels around the world. “All of a sudden, they were showing the old world their ‘secrets’. The old world didn’t respond until they realised they had lost so much volume.”

The supermarket effect and high street decline

The start of the noughties saw more aggressive discounting activity by the supermarkets on the wine front, not least because of the arrival of the discounters, Netto, Aldi and Kwik Save. The BOGOF – Buy One Get One Free – surfaced like two bad pennies. “Suddenly the supermarkets realised how important wine could be because you put two bottles in the basket and the total sale goes up. The trade made the consumer discount-driven, not product-driven”.

The high street became marginalised, and while Peter Dominic had already been snapped up by Thresher and August Barnett by Victoria Wine, most of the remaining well-known high street brands – Bottoms Up, Thresher, Wine Rack, Victoria Wine, and smaller regional chains – Unwins, Davisons, Fullers – were starting to keel over like dominoes. “Majestic did their best to keep it going, but basically the supermarkets took over.”

From wine democratisation to commoditisation

John was eventually moved to Seagram UK. “My time as managing director of Seagram UK got me to understand the importance of brands and of margins, both almost dirty words in wine. I transformed the business with the help of an excellent management team.” Seagram’s Edgar Bronfman Jnr wanted to get into films, so he sold the business. Seagram UK was the 17th most important wine and spirit operation in the group, but by the time John left in 2000, it had become second only to the US. “I learnt about change management. I make things happen and I pride myself on it.”

“Wine had moved from democratisation to commoditisation. The consumer changed but the trade was slow to pick up on it. The younger consumers coming through today are saying they are not that interested in wine. 72% don’t like what wine stands for.” John thinks that the industry was too fixated on moving volumes through the supermarkets. “How did we miss this trend? How are spirits and beer so far ahead of wine? The no and low phenomenon is basically consumers saying I want a beverage, but I don’t want it to have alcohol in it. Things have changed since Covid. Health and wellness have negatively impacted consumption.”

Declining wine consumption and changing attitudes

John is concerned about the collision between the overproduction of wine and the lack of interest in it by younger drinkers. “The consumption of wine has been in decline for over 20 years. The industry needs to talk to consumers like we used to do. They can live without wine.” He believes that too much wine is being made and feels that the current generation that will dominate consumer spending in 10 – 15 years’ time may well not want to drink wine. He is concerned about mainstream wine, roughly speaking £7.50 and below. “By the time the government has taken VAT, duty and the ERP and the retailer has taken their profit margin, what is left for the producer? To make any money, lots of the big guys are having to reduce the quality, which in turn will further reduce consumption.”

A challenging future for mainstream wine

“Society marginalised tobacco in 40 years and the same is happening in alcohol. Cigars are the exception and have done well by concentrating on quality.” The big difference today, he feels, is that social media could marginalise wine in a much shorter period of time. He looks on with concern. His gut feeling is that wine consumption in this market will drop by 5 – 10% over the next three years and the trade itself could slim down by 20%. “If you’re in the middle and struggling, you’re in a very challenging place. Despite the tricks of the industry in trying to make us believe that premiumization is the way forward, sadly, it appears it has had its day.”

John is also concerned about the calibre of people the wine trade is attracting, given the scale of the challenges now facing the industry. “The traditional trade can’t quite believe how quickly things are moving. The fragmentation of the wine industry is now its weakness. There are some notable exceptions and there’s plenty of enthusiasm, but are they up to the major changes now happening? Where’s the leadership you see, for instance, in spirits and beers?”

A busy life beyond wine: consultancy, M&A and new ventures

Far from slowing down, John does a lot of consultancy and M&A work with multi-nationals, financial institutions, distributors, retailers and brand owners. Now in the fortunate position of being able to help people, he says, “a lot of people come to me who want to sell the business and because I understand the financials and have some wine empathy”. As well as a share in the restaurant, the Sandeman Quarter, and a share in the McLaren Vale winery W100, John is also chairman of Hiver beer, which is flavoured with honey. Life for John Ratcliffe, it seems, was never so sweet.