Fine wine merchant Clos & Cru relaunches to target contemporary consumers

Traditional fine wine merchant Clos & Cru has relaunched itself as a video-led educational e-commerce site aiming to demystify the fine wine market, following the sale of the business.

The company was bought by its shareholders last year and has been remodelled and relaunched as a more contemporary way to buy fine wine, incorporating single bottles and mixed wine cases curated around video-content, to provide an “end-to-end learning process”. The company also plans to run ‘experiential’ events later in the year

The new business is headed up by MD John Fleetwood, who was brought on board last July from Coco-Cola, where he headed up the Tesco and online business, with co-founder Martyn Zemavicius, a former sommelier at Harvey Nichols Oxo Tower restaurant, as Wine Director.

“They wanted to build a new concept to contemporise the fine wine market, and make it more accessible,” marketing director Elly Ling, told db. 

“The main difference is that Clos & Cru was a traditional way of selling wine, focussed on personal sales and without a transactional website, but now the platform has a transactional and is a content-led business, although personal sales and service for B2B customers is still available.”

The site has launched with a seven-part series introduction on fine wine, The Essentials, to demystify fine wines which includes information on how to read labels, store and serve wine and understand its hidden costs, which will be followed by four further levels, The Explorer, The Connoisseur, The Expert, and The Master.

It has also released three short videos on wines from Burgundy, Champagne, and Bordeaux, but said it intends to cover regions in the New World, rare wines as well as lifestyle content, posting two new videos a week, as well as expanding its 250-300 sku range.

“We want to bring the customer on a journey,” she said, admitting it was less about targeting a specific age-group, but more about attracting people who enjoyed wine and wanted to know more, but struggled to find that information.

“As well as tapping into the current audience, we wanted to go beyond that and tape into a wider audience to bring them into fine wine,” she said, “demonstrating the difference between buying a £50 bottle and a £15 bottle.”

“We want to bridge that gap for people. But we’re mindful we’re a luxury brand and are mindful not to go too mainstream.”