Mr Majestic

06 November 2005 By db staff writer

“standfirst”>A practised survivor with an unwavering eye for an opportunity, Tony Mason – recently retired – was the power behind the throne at the UK’s best-loved wine warehouse, says Nick Faith

It was only meant to be a temporary job as a cellar boy, taken in the summer of 1962, before the 17-year-old Tony Mason was to start his apprenticeship at a smart West End photographers. Forty-three years later Mason retired as the long-serving trading director for Majestic Wine Warehouses, with a reputation as the canniest buyer in the wine business. He was also the longestserving survivor of the drinks trade, having weathered and, mostly prospered, during by far the most revolutionary period the business had ever experienced.

The “temporary” job was in Fortnum & Mason’s cellars, then located under Dean Street in Soho, premises that are now a recording studio. “It was the days of Upstairs Downstairs in the drinks trade,” he remembers, with the salesmen well above the lower orders. Nevertheless, he was soon hooked and chucked the chance of a career in photography. In those far-off days firms like Fortnums bottled their own wine. Mason remembers particularly Fortnum’s Sidi Marbi entry-level wine, much of it imported from Algeria in 50-gallon oil drums formerly used by the US army. The wines were bottled 25 dozen at a time, two barrels (or rather drums) before the tea break, a further two before lunch, and another couple in the afternoon. The bottling had to be continuous, to stop would mean a shockwave disturbing the sediment, so the team of two could never stop. Among other products to be bottled was Fortnum’s then-famous London Dry Gin, a favourite of the cellar manager, partial to a bottle every morning before he started work.

Next to Nelly

Within a couple of years Mason had been poached by a much more powerful outfit, Hedges & Butler, with a shop in Regent Street and innumerable agencies. After the then-usual trial period spent on hand-bottling even the best claret, Mason’s talents were spotted and he graduated to the rank of “management trainee” which meant that he made the rounds of a number of establishments in a traditional apprenticeship spent “sitting next to Nelly”. This gave him the opportunity to leave while he was doing a stint with Taplow’s Whitehall Gin distillery, then the UK’s smallest gin distillery. In doing so he jumped several generations in a single leap for he went to work for Ahmed Pochee, the Persian trading genius behind Oddbins, a trader, a hustler, entirely lacking the social pretensions or limited outlook of the traditional wine trade. As a commis chef in a number of leading London hotels, Pochee had noted just how overstocked and undervalued their stock was and started to trade their surplus wines. His first major opportunity came when Hedges & Butler sold 600 dozen half-bottles, then an enormous quantity, of the 1962 Mouton Cadet, in those days a wine largely from Pauillac, which had thrown a tartrate deposit. Luckily for Pochee, Hedges’ primitive computer system had sent credit notes, not invoices, and by the time the mess had been sorted out he had sold the lot, providing Pochee with a massive, if temporary, boost to his cash flow.

Oddbins’ origins

Pochee then opened his first Oddbins shop in Monmouth Street. It was not a success and it was only with the second shop in Wigmore Street that sales took off, an experience repeated with Majestic.

Pochee was different. “With our low prices we were the Ryanair of the drinks business,” says Mason.

Pochee was not the only revolutionary. There was Brian Barnett of Augustus Barnett (his father’s name). “He had a pub in Silvertown in the East End,” Mason recalls. “One of the first with Sunday strippers, and he understood low-margin retailing.” Barnett eventually sold out to the Spanish giant Rumasa, started trading again as Bottoms Up, and went massively bankrupt. Pochee had also gone bust (quite needlessly as it turned out) and the receivers sold to Nick Baile and Dennis Ing from Peter Dominic. Oddbins was later sold to Seagram. In any case the pair’s reputation had never recovered from a drunken brawl at the Benevolent dinner which upset the established trade!

The next step in Mason’s zig-zag career pattern was a two-year stint running the LiquorSave concessions in Kwiksave and Woolworth’s for a firm called North West Vintners. Through a takeover the company had inherited an old dairy in Hampstead which Mason converted into a wine warehouse, a concept Pochee had pioneered in Wapping.

Approached by a fine wine broker called Sheldon Graner Mason helped set up the first “Majestic” warehouse to sell his residual fine wine. One of the customers was a rich young man, Chris Collins. When Graner went under, Mason and Collins tried to buy the business, but they made the mistake of overcomplicating their offer to the administrator, by not offering to take the whole business, a lesson not lost on Mason

Collins went on to fund the fledgling Bibendum business while Mason remained involved with Majestic which had been sold to Bill Mullins, an American banker working in London. This provided Mason with a major opportunity. “My defining moment,” he says, “came with Majestic in the early 1980s when I could see the possibilities.”

Mullins didn’t have time to oversee the business, so he left it to two of his sparkier junior employees, Giles Clarke, his acquisitions manager, and Esme Johnstone. They brought in a new shareholder, Alan Johnson-Hill, who had made a fortune as a banker in Singapore and Hong Kong. The business flourished, until Johnstone and Clarke bought a Californian chain, Liquor Barn, which soon went under.

Likely lads

By this time Mason had grown disenchanted with the pair of likely lads, had left to set up Wizard Wine and joined up with John Apthorp, then the owner of Bejam, the pioneering frozen-food chain.

They opened 16 Wizard Wine Warehouses in redundant Bejam stores. Unfortunately, this meant that some of the stores were badly sited, although the experience helped Mason hone his purchasing skills in finding the 30 or so key wines on the list, a far cry from the 800 sold in Majestic’s warehouses today.

When Apthorp sold his Bejam shares to Iceland he retained the Wizard Warehouses as part of the deal and immediately recruited Mason. When he bought the by then failing Majestic in 1991 he installed Tim How, a professional manager who had risen to be managing director of Bejam at the age of 37, and he and Mason embarked on their historic partnership. Mason was not interested in the top job, he knows he’s not an organisation man and enjoys the hustle, bustle and trading too much to be confined to a desk. Happily, as Mason puts it, “Tim was patient, he understood that wine was a different sort of business, it had to be trading, not logistics led.”

The new team could not have taken over at a worse time. Britain’s dramatic departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992 resulted in the first dip in wine sales in 40 years and a drop in the value of the pound that wiped out Majestic’s profit margins. It was only in 1993 after a rights issue that the rise to fame and fortune began. The ever-cautious How and the enthusiastic truffle-hunter Mason proved a brilliant combination. How ensured that the company kept to its formula: only case sales to simplify licensing problems; large stores away from expensive high streets with ample parking and stockage capacity (to remove the need for costly warehousing). For his part Mason had to provide ever-better margins by shrewd buying. “We probably buy better than anyone else in the world,” he says proudly. But in those days the rule in family wine businesses was “always let the brightest son do the buying”.

The task got more complex because the number of stores more than trebled in a decade to reach 122 last year. How reckons there’s room in the UK for 200, and he points out that Majestic still has only a 3% share of the country’s wine market. But Majestic’s growth also enabled Mason to be able to tackle the biggest bargains.

The Majestic formula was not inflexible. Mason went back to Pochee’s example to see how much money could be made by acting as a wholesaler, picking up job lots of wine for re-selling. As Mason says with a gleam in his eye, there were lots of opportunities. “Lots of rich men go into the business, and often screw up,” he says. “The wine trade is so fragmented that there’s always someone in trouble,” he adds. Early coups included the stock of Stoddart & Taylor, a wine merchant bought by an asset stripper for its property and the enormous and splendid stock of wines bought by Clive Coates – “itself a guarantee of quality” – for Malmaison, British Rail’s hotel business.

But his best-known coup came with the purchase of two gigantic lots of claret from the Swedish state’s retail wine monopoly after a tip-off from a friend from Mason’s days at Hedges & Butler 25 years earlier. In this and his other big deals Mason remembered the earlier failure to acquire Majestic: “I kept it simple and had to take the lot with no recourse.” This was more of a hassle than it sounds, and Mason admits, “I had sleepless nights.” The first shipment had been bottled in Sweden and was fragile, so when resold the wines naturally carried a warning – drink up and enjoy quickly! The two coups reinforced Majestic’s reputation for “taking the lot and paying on time”.

Hong Kong phew-y

There’s been another coup or two since, including one bought from the Hong Kong giant Hutchison Whampoa of clarets from the late 1990s in their original wooden boxes and stored punctiliously in Switzerland.

Over the past year or two Mason has been gradually disentangling himself from Majestic, his role, now taken by his team led by Justin Apthorp, son of John Apthorp, who has also retired. Not surprisingly, Mason was a bit wary of employing the boss’s son, but 15 years later is impressed by the toughness and negotiating skills the son has inherited from the father.

As for Mason, well he’s enjoying having more time to run his large-scale model GWR Manor-class steam locomotive and renovating an old farmhouse in Pembrokeshire. He’s also advising a group of supermarkets in Ireland, a country which, he reckons, offers the same sort of opportunities as the UK did 20 years ago.