WILLIE’S WORLD – THE STORY SO FAR

“I soon discovered that I had the ability to identify different smells wherever I was. What’s interesting about a sensitive sense of smell, is that it tends to exaggerate flavour and perception of other experiences. I am sure that my ability to taste in an individual and confident way stems from my early experience of food and drink. ”

As you may know I’m passionate about food and wine. This all began with my family. From an early age I was lucky enough to sit in the kitchen at home watching my mother and various helpers cooking all sorts of goodies. This goes some way to explaining the size of my girth, as I was keen to try all the food being produced at the time! It was also the earliest example of learning on the job, the main reason why I have such an in depth understanding of Food and Wine.

I soon found that I wanted to experiment and cook recipes for myself. My early experiments well not particularly successful, and I feel very sorry for the poor recipients of my repertoire. I was also lucky enough to enjoy wine from an early age. The family spent a lot of time travelling through Europe. This gave me an opportunity to enjoy the marvellous culture  of different European traditions. Drinking wine with food was an accepted way of life particularly in The Iberian Peninsula and France and Italy. Here it was common to have a glass of diluted wine with food from an early age. 

I soon discovered that I had the ability to identify different smells wherever I was. What's interesting about a sensitive sense of smell, is that it tends to exaggerate flavour and perception of other experiences. I am sure that my ability to taste in an individual and confident way stems from my early experience of food and drink. 

Apart from learning about food and wine at home and experiencing the delights or food markets in France and Italy, I was lucky enough to eat in London restaurants, because my parents were early foodie's. In those days, London’s restaurants were fewer and further between. Hotels were a source of high-quality eating and drinking. I had a great uncle Louis Lebus who lived in a suite of apartments at the Savoy Hotel for 29 years! Uncle Louis used to have us for lunch regularly. The original Savoy Grill was a thing of beauty! Imagine being able to order prawn cocktail, steak Diane and crepes suzette flambe for pudding! This was French Classic Cooking served by White Tie and Tails waiters. Great memories.

At school I would cook whenever I could, and, as I grew older, I would force my cooking on friends and family. When I first started work, I spent a lot of what I earned on taking members of the opposite sex out to restaurants and learning all about them (the girls and the restaurants!). In the mid 1970s London was beginning to be a fun place to eat. Whilst French and Italian food were still the most popular, you could eat exceptional ‘Indian and Chinese’ food if you knew where to look. 

I started immersing myself in wine in the late 1970s. I bought some very dodgy 1975 clarets and I started to build a wine collection in the early 1980s. This coincided with my commercial life turning to food and wine. I cut my teeth in the supermarket business, but soon found it far too corporate! I had always wanted to be my own boss, so I developed a catering business called Bovingdons. We also had a deli making unbelievably delicious sandwiches and amazing salads. Our first important client was Saatchi and Saatchi. I remember delivering lunches to their HQ in Charlotte St in the early 1980s. The catering business morphed into a wine specialist. The Wine Studio was the first and probably the last specialist importer of wines from California and Australia. This is where I first wanted to bring the world of wine into the 20th century . Intuitively, I knew that the potential for making wine a more popular drink lay in the absolute necessity to remove all the  snobbery and mystery attached to it. My idea was to use California and Australian wine as my stalking horse. The idea was absolutely brilliant except for one small but vital detail. Importing wines from California and Australia was extremely expensive particularly compared to what was available elsewhere. The end came when in February 1985 the pound fell to parity against the dollar. I had to sell the business. Luckily, I was good friends with the late, great Geoffrey Roberts, the father of New World Wine. Geoffrey and Neville Abraham bought the business, and I started my life in a more generalist but still entrepreneurial world of wine. there were two distinctive businesses that I had joined. Les Amis du Vin was a retail business with a wine club. What I liked about the business was it unstuffy approach. But things rarely got exciting when I got stuck in to Geoffrey Roberts associates. In 1985 several New London restaurants came along, the most important being Kensington Place, Alastair Little, and the River Cafe. Other restaurants of note were Nick Lander and Jancis Robinson’s L’Escargot, and Jeremy King and Chris Corbin’s Le Caprice, shortly followed by the Ivy.

As Geoffrey Roberts Associates concentrated on New World wines, and the competition was non existent, I was able to make good friends with all these new restaurants. Naturally I could combine my two loves food and wine ,and, whilst the money wasn't great, the lifestyle was pretty nice! The last piece of the professional jigsaw took place in early 1989 when I joined Bibendum. In those days the old Flight Petroleum garage in Primrose Hill employed 15 people. It was the most wonderful place to work, and I continued to learn huge amounts about food and wine ever since. 

As you can see, I am a massive fan of people, good food and good wine. What I have learned over the years is that people are fascinated by eating and drinking. Whereas the mysteries of eating have been broken down successfully over the last 25 years the same cannot be said for the world of wine. Indeed, it could be argued that I have been party to this failure with my inability to breakdown the wall of complexity that surrounds this subject. So, I am making it my next challenge to bring this amazing subject to life in a way that more people can understand and enjoy. I look forward to sharing my ideas with you!