Adam Brett-Smith: blue-chip disrupter

by Adam Lechmere

“He was a gentleman pirate,” Adam Brett-Smith says in his easy drawl. We’re talking about London publishers of old, but I wonder if that’s how he sees himself. “Thank you, thank you. But no. Though you know what they always say – a gentleman is merely a patient wolf.”

We’re sitting in the reception room of Corney & Barrow’s headquarters, the elegant 1805 customs house just north of Tower Bridge in London. Brett-Smith has been at Corney’s for a little over 40 years – he joined as a junior salesman in 1981 and was made managing director in 1988. In the ensuing decades he’s established Corney’s as one of London’s blue-chip wine merchants.

For all his urbanity, it’s been a tenure not without controversy. “They called us bastards, renegades and traitors,” he happily recalls of the kerfuffle he caused in the early 1990s when Corney’s set up as the first proper wine broking business in the UK, upending a couple of centuries of tradition whereby buying and selling wines on behalf of customers was done on a nod and a wink with no attention paid to provenance. Certainly, the London wine establishment saw it as a rapacious move.

Keys to the King’s cellar
Impeccably tailored, handsome and languidly charming in the style of a 50s matinée idol, Brett-Smith seems the very type of old-fashioned Englishness. He’s known for his discretion – “he’s a very, very private man”, one of his close friends says. When I ask him about his new job as Clerk to the Royal Cellars (a sinecure he inherited from Simon Berry of Berry Bros, though he’s looked after the former Prince of Wales’s wines for 20 years) he shifts his long frame around in his chair and smiles almost secretively. “How did you find out?” Well, it’s not exactly a secret. They’re clients, he says, and he’d no more talk about them than he would any other client.

“One thing I will say is that for the first time in very long time we have members of the royal family who are really interested in wine. There may be changes ahead with regard to the shape and form of those wines.” This is the week before the Coronation of King Charles III and he adds that he’s delighted to have been invited.

Adam Brett-Smith was born in Maryland to a journalist father – later, his stepfather was a diplomat – and seems to have knocked around the world a bit as a boy. “I went to a French nunnery school in Cairo, which gave me a lifelong appreciation of nuns and their ability to look cool even in torrid conditions,” he muses intriguingly. “That always amazed me. They never seemed to sweat.”

He went on to read English Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and became a dispatch rider (he still loves motorcycles, and has “a number” of them – his current bike is a BMW K1300S) then pestered Corney & Barrow for nine months until they gave him a job. He’d flirted with publishing  – “I love it – I looove it – I love books” and worked for Leo Cooper, who published military books and was the husband of the more-famous Jilly. He would have unhesitatingly made publishing his career except that it was “so mean” it made the wine industry “look like Midas”.

What Brett-Smith loved about wine was “the people. Unique people from every single walk of life, every nationality in the world.” He’s what they used to call “clubbable”. He’s naturally invited me to lunch after our interview, he’s asked his colleagues, veteran wine buyer Rebecca Palmer and head of fine wine Guy Seddon to join us, and it’s nice to see the easy dynamic between the three. We touch on politics (as regards Brexit, Brett-Smith was “a reluctant remainer”), and the future of Corney’s – “how can we keep the business personal as we grow bigger?”

200 years of wine history
Established in 1780, Corney & Barrow is about 100 years younger than its two venerable competitors Justerini & Brooks and Berry Bros (with turnover of £94m it’s less than half the size of Berry’s and a bit bigger than Justerini’s). It’s a multinational operation, with offices in Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, a couple of shops, and a new £4m “shed” in East Kilbride, with which Brett-Smith is delighted.

Corney’s is agent for Petrus and for Domaine de la Romanée Conti, Comte Georges de Vogüé in Chambolle-Musigny, Domaine Leflaive in Puligny-Montrachet, Champagne Salon and Delamotte, Conterno in Piemonte, Dominio de Pingus in Ribera del Duero, Achaval Ferrer in Mendoza, Hyde de Villaine and many more. It’s quite a list, and if you’re a Bordeaux or a Burgundy nut, you’re in the best possible hands. Similarly, if your tastes in California are ultra-conservative (Dominus, Colgin, Paul Hobbs, Ridge) or simply loud (Hundred Acre), you’ll be fine. Spain ditto (Pingus, Palacios), Piemonte (Conterno, Giacosa, Gaja) and so on.

If this seems a bit claustrophobic, there are some exciting projects in the pipeline, including La Pèira in the Languedoc, an Argentinian winery working in ultra-extreme terroirs, and the Maturana project in Chile which wine buyer Rebecca Palmer says works with “heritage varietals (such as Torontel, Negra)… using ‘ancestral’ methods and dry-farmed old vines more than 70 years old.” This last is in the £10-12 bracket – perhaps unexpectedly, Corney’s lists some 1,000 bottles at less than £40.

When I ask Brett-Smith what are his criteria for taking on a new wine, he says simply, “Instinct”. He expands: it has to be “small and beautiful”, less than ten thousand cases made, preferably dry-grown (“a vineyard that needs irrigation is a one that is incorrectly sited.”). Their latest high-end exclusivity is the Gevrey-Chambertin domaine of Dugat-Py. “They do everything beautifully, but not enough people know about it. And that’s the moment I love more than anything else. When it’s on the cusp. We call it rather crudely market-making. It’s fascinating.”

Market making 
The magic moment is taking a new listing to the customers – “tapping your nose, raising your eyebrows”. This is what he loves, and as anyone who’s seen him working the room at a tasting knows, it’s what he excels at.

He has no truck with the idea that to make money is somehow vulgar – “that’s a licence for laziness and mediocrity” – but some of his ideas do seem to lean toward the impractical. He wants Corney’s to buy a vineyard (they actually made an offer some years ago, and the idea “is still on the table”). It sounds a bit mad. “Yes, it probably is,” he says, unfazed. The business sense behind the idea is the danger of “disintermediation”, or producers selling direct to the customer. The more you control the supply, the better. The board remains “intrigued.”

I’m sure it is. Working with Brett-Smith must be anything but dull. Of course, you don’t stay at the top of your game for more than 40 years without having a well-honed sense of the market and, dare I say, a piratical streak. But, as any gentleman will tell you, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.

“All I can say is that any decision we’ve ever made has been based on absolute belief and a real love of the objective. It has not been based on what’s going to be the most profitable avenue or how much gross margin is there in it. If those come our way as a result of that belief, then that’s terrific. But if it if they don’t, then tough.”