ON-TRADE INTERVIEW: The business of winning

Armed with a wine MBA, Hotel du Vin co-founder Gérard Basset is going solo with his new venture. His success looks assured, writes Giles Fallowfield

Gerard Basset MW meets me at Ashurst station on the edge of the New Forest, wearing a brightly coloured rugby shirt and a friendly smile under his trademark moustache. As we make the short drive to see his new hotel, he apologises for the fact there isn’t really anywhere decent he knows nearby for us to go and have lunch. There will be soon, of course, as the restaurant at Hotel TerraVina, due to open on 21 August, will be looking to serve more than just the residents of its 11 rooms.

When we arrive, we can barely get in the hotel’s entrance, let alone find somewhere to park, as the place is crawling with every branch of the building trade. It’s due to open in just six weeks’ time but there seems to be a great deal more still to do; none of the rooms are actually finished, the new staircase hasn’t yet arrived and the kitchen equipment is all in boxes.

Under the circumstances Basset seems remarkably relaxed, for this is his first solo project and he has invested a lot of his own money. While he was involved in several such start-ups as co-founder and co-owner of the Hotel du Vin group, managing the building work and fitting out of rooms wasn’t really his area of expertise. That was more down to his co-owner, Robin Hutson.

On site we don hard hats and, dodging workmen, loose cables and boxes of fixtures, Basset shows me around the building shell, explaining what will go where. The oldest part of the building, with high ceilings and large picture windows, dates from 1860. In its previous existence as Busketts Lawn Hotel there were 14 bedrooms on the first floor, but for the style and level of comfort he wants this has been reduced to eight, with three more bedrooms on the ground floor.

“It was just a wedding machine, not a place to come for dinner. We didn’t even ask to see the accounts; the business we are planning is so totally different,” says Basset. “We first saw the property in September 2005, when it was on the market for £1.3 million. We quickly agreed a price of £1.2m, but partly because they had 40 weddings already booked ahead in 2006, we agreed to a long completion date.”

In fact, Basset and his wife, Nina, only formally took possession at the end of January this year. But this delay suited the Bassets, giving them time to refine their plans, find the right builder to complete the major refurbishment, as well as allowing Gérard the chance to complete his wine MBA at Bordeaux Business School before opening. He also admits he didn’t want to be responsible for upsetting the wedding plans of 40 local couples, appreciating that alienating any potential future clients is not a good start for a new business. 

However, their key target audience is clearly the business executive visiting nearby Southampton, as well as weekenders exploring the delights of the New Forest. “The centre of town is between 18 and 22 minutes’ drive away at peak times, I’ve done it myself at all times of day to make sure.

Twenty minutes’ drive for somewhere really nice is OK, but the centre of the New Forest is too far from Southampton for business people to want stay regularly.

“Southampton airport is only eight miles from here [Bournemouth airport is not much further], and we are also close to the M27 motorway and within easy reach of towns like Winchester [where the first Hotel du Vin opened back in 1994], Salisbury and Bournemouth.” There is plenty of money around too – the Poole–Sandbanks area, close to where the Bassets live, is said to have the largest collection of expensive properties outside London.

“Our room prices will be between £70 and £110 per night. We are not talking Chewton Glen rates (where prices start at around £300 a night); the Hotel du Vin rooms, priced between £130 and £230, are a better comparison. We’re offering a very good bed at a very competitive price, with a good restaurant and wine list, run by friendly people. It will be business friendly – that’s a sector of the market where there is still demand for the right sort of operation, provided the location is also right.  

“Between October and March, especially, we want to attract business people. All the rooms will have cable TV with 40 channels and broadband Wi-Fi free of charge, plus a big collection of DVDs to borrow. We won’t have to be full every day. We’re in the middle market, but at the very top of the middle market, offering great value. There won’t be a chocolate on the pillow, and if you leave your shoes outside the room we won’t clean them, but it’s a good product for the money,” says Basset.

As we look at two nearly finished bedrooms, with bathrooms stylishly fitted out in the sort of chic, understated way that attracted people to the Hotel du Vin offer, we bump into Basset’s builder and he introduces me. They obviously haven’t fallen out. Having paid £1.2m for the hotel, Basset had hoped to spend around a million more on the whole refurb, including kitting out rooms, not just the structural work. He asked three builders to quote, including the firm that had done the last four Hotel du Vin projects, thinking that they’d offer him a good deal. They didn’t, and the three quotes were dramatically different.

He ended up plumping for the relatively inexperienced local man and hasn’t regretted it. “We made the terrace wider at his suggestion, and even though it’s cost a little more, we’ll end up with a much more useful space,” says Basset. We are now standing there and Basset explains: “The kitchen will be open plan, with the chefs working in full view of diners. The restaurant (with around 25 to 30 covers) will open out onto the terrace, looking over landscaped gardens and the swimming pool [all yet to be completed and still just rubble].”

He points out the wood-burning oven waiting to be unpacked. “We’re going to have a Californian-style cuisine with things like roasted vegetables, tarts, herb-infused roast meats and fresh fish, flatbreads and proper pizzas. Rory [Duncan], the head chef [who has been working on his menus since the beginning of June], used to be chef at the Driftwood Hotel, Portscatho in Cornwall, and One Aldwych before that.

At the end of the dining room there will be special custom-made wine fridges displaying the restaurant’s 250-bin wine list; the actual cellar is immediately below. “I’ve just started buying the wine,” says Basset, with a broad smile; this is, after all, his particular passion. “Initially I’m investing around £40,000 in the wine cellar, which should be enough for a pretty decent list. Prices will be very competitive, with the normal mark-ups on the house offering and lower mark-ups as you go up in price.” 

Given that his MBA thesis was specifically about wine lists for operators in the “middle market” and was based on a survey in a Hampshire “gastropub” looking at what influences customers in making their choice in restaurants and what kind of layout works best, you’d expect this list to be a modern-day blueprint for success when Basset has finished putting it together. 

I ask him if he’s going to name any of the rooms after wine companies, à la Hotel du Vin.  “No, while that arrangement worked very well it did mean that we had to stock the wine of all the companies involved and I don’t want to have that restriction on my wine list here. In any case, while that was a new idea in 1994 when we opened in Winchester, it isn’t now. I am thinking of naming the rooms after generic styles of sweet wine, however, things like Essencia, Reciotto, Grains Nobles and Eiswein.”

Basset’s enthusiasm for wine and restaurants clearly hasn’t diminished, but why did he decide to come back into the catering business at all? Surely the proceeds of the sale of the Hotel du Vin group meant he didn’t really have to work any more? And what made him pick this area of Hampshire to do it? 

“We didn’t make as much from the sale of the Hotel du Vin group as some people think. While Robin Hutson and I owned 50% originally, by the time the business was sold [for £66.4m to Marylebone Warwick Balfour, owner of the Malmaison hotel chain, in October 2004], after we’d paid back the £26m owed to the bank my share was 8% of what remained. About £2.5m net, in fact a bit less.

“You may say why not put your capital in a bank and live off the interest, but the capital doesn’t grow if you do that and I am still relatively young. So we started to think about what to do next and the only thing we [Gérard and his wife, Nina, who has herself worked in the catering business since 1989] know anything about is the catering business. And this time we are free to do what we want with no partner or shareholders, just me and my wife and the bank.”

The location is partly a matter of not wanting to travel far from his home on the south coast: “I can be here in 25 minutes.” He still lives very close to Chewton Glen, where he worked for just over six years (1988–1994) as chef/sommelier and where he met Nina and his former business partner Hutson. He knows the area in and around the New Forest particularly well.

I, too, first met Basset at Chewton Glen, back in 1989. In those days, sommeliers were not the same force in the on-trade, and the magazine I was editing had decided to follow his progress in the UK Sommelier of the Year competition in an effort to highlight their importance. We chose well – even then it was clear this was someone with the ambition to be the best in the business. Despite long hours spent charming and guiding customers through Chewton Glen’s long and serious wine tome (in those days its restaurant had one Michelin star), Basset spent much of his spare time studying the 200-plus wine books he had already amassed. He once told me his interest in wine had been kindled when he was asked what noble rot was and, as a wine waiter, he was ashamed to admit he didn’t know. 

He became UK Sommelier of the Year for the second time in 1992, also coming second in the World Sommelier Championships, a feat he repeated in 2004 in Athens. In between he won the Best Sommelier in Europe in 1996. Despite these achievements and the small matter of setting up a highly successful hotel business from scratch with Hutson, Basset remains a charmingly modest and likeable man. He is a rare beast, a French sommelier without pretension. His dislike of the type of wine snobbery, typified by the superior French wine waiter who looks down his nose at customers and their choices, is well known.

As we lunch on a quick sandwich in a bar near Southampton station he tells me how frustrated he was not to win in the World Sommelier competition recently held in Rhodes, Greece. The timing would have been nice, given the imminent opening. Unassuming and modest though he is, Basset certainly isn’t an under-achiever and he’s still driven. As it says under “Miscellaneous” on his CV: “The only person in the world to be Master Sommelier, Master of Wine and Wine MBA”. And I wouldn’t bet against him having another pot at that Best Sommelier in the World competition in two years’ time. He just doesn’t like coming second.

© db September 2007

• Hotel TerraVina, 174 Woodlands Road, Woodlands, Netley Marsh, Southampton, Hampshire SO40 7GL, United Kingdom

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