The Big Interview: Fiona Campbell

Fiona Campbell’s career in wine PR has spanned six tumultuous decades, involving clients as varied as Krug, Majestic and Quinta do Noval.

This article is free for 24 hours. To subscribe to the drinks business and read all our exclusive content click here.

Ask someone how they found their way into the wine trade and you can expect an unconventional response. Indeed, it would take an unusually imaginative careers advisor to suggest this path. Yet that’s precisely why the wine trade tends to attract such an interesting bunch of people, often with a strong entrepreneurial streak that helps them to navigate the fascinating alleyways that run from vineyard to shelf. Combine such an engaging crowd with the most convivial of all products and the result – for all this industry’s well-documented challenges – can make the idea of retirement rather unpalatable.

Just ask Fiona Campbell, whose career in wine PR has spanned six decades of radical change in the way producers connect with their customers. Her role in this evolution, like the PR business itself, is difficult to quantify with precision, but Campbell has done much to create the template for these relationships that we now take for granted.

On the way, she has lent her expertise and steely charm to everyone from Champagne Krug through to generic campaigns by Wines from Spain and game-changing retailers such as Majestic. It’s not only the brands who have benefitted: several generations of wine PR managers have learned from the best, while countless journalists have breathed a sigh of relief after liaising with someone who understands their needs just as much as those of the producers she represents.

Now, at last, everyone must learn to fend for themselves. Having celebrated her 80th birthday last November, Campbell is determined to leave the stage for good. After all, the last two decades have really been an encore. “I did once attempt to retire about 20 years ago,” she admits. “I sold my company to a big multinational and said to my children that I was going to move to a cottage and make jam. They gave me six weeks and I lasted three.”

Enticed back

The individual who enticed her back into the fray was Christian Seely, managing director of AXA Millésimes, whose portfolio enfolds Bordeaux second growth Château Pichon Baron, Sauternes’ Château Suduiraut, and insiders’ Pauillac pearl Château Pibran, right through to Domaine de l’Arlot in Burgundy, Disznókő in Tokaj, Quinta do Noval in the Douro and its most recent addition, Outpost Wines in Napa Valley. That would have been an enticing treasure chest for anyone to turn down.

It also helped that Seely and Campbell had worked together since 1995, when he first took charge of Quinta do Noval and handed UK distribution to the now defunct agency Paragon Vintners, a client of Campbell’s. “Everything Christian did was so admirable: his vision, his style,” recalls Campbell of those early efforts to restore Noval’s fortunes.

Campbell is also quick to offer generous credit to the many other people who have had such a formative impact on her long career, especially in the early days when both women and PR were rare features of the wine trade ecosystem.

Alongside Tony Dee, managing director of Paragon Vintners, she singles out Jeremy Watson, who ran the Wines from Spain office and encouraged Campbell to channel her talents into the new field of generic campaigns. But perhaps the earliest, most pivotal supporter was Peter Hasslacher, whose family wine brand Deinhard was a client during her days as director of the Bristol-based southwest division of Royds advertising group in the late 1970s.

In the run-up to the Bristol Wine Fair, Campbell used her fashion PR nous to ensure that Deinhard appeared in shop windows across the city. “No-one else was doing anything like that,” she recalls. Clearly impressed, Hasslacher persuaded this woman with then minimal wine knowledge to handle PR not only for his own brand, but also those he imported, which included Taylor’s Port.

“In those days, the wine trade was not terribly keen to talk to the consumer; that was the retailer’s job,” remarks Campbell. “If they wanted to talk to them, they had to use the Press, which tended to mean the Circle of Wine Writers.”

Having come up with her own, rather broader, press list, Campbell then set about persuading producers to embrace the novel concept of a press trip. With no template in place, Campbell once again created her own.

“I remember explaining that people need to get a feel for the place, to have dinner, to go for a swim,” she muses. “You have to make them fun and through that you build relationships and they’ll get the spirit of the vineyard.”

Portugal’s Quinta do Noval has been one of Campbell’s clients for 28 years

One early learning curve was the importance of Campbell herself being present on these trips, especially the earliest ones, in order to deploy skilful diplomacy when clients voiced opinions that might not come across so well beyond the intimate confines of the dinner table. Likewise, at times her job has involved persuading producers what not to show journalists, although she must be one of the few people who can conjure up genuine enthusiasm for a bottling line. “I’m always fascinated by the romance of it,” she admits. “All the work that went into getting to that point, where the bottles are going and who’s going to drink them.”

Strategy staple

These days, many producers run a highly professional hospitality arm for all corners of the trade, and often consumers too. The press trip may be a staple of their communications strategy, but it has inevitably evolved in line with the space and budget pressures now imposed on newspaper wine columns themselves. “Nowadays, time is so precious that people won’t necessarily spent four days visiting one vineyard,” observes Campbell.

Another major change, perhaps the biggest, is the rise of digital communication. As a regular judge for The Drinks Business Awards, Campbell has seen at first hand “how much emphasis PR firms put on social media”. Unafraid to swim against the tide, she argues: “I’m still not so sure it’s a good idea. You’re not just after numbers; it’s about relevance.” That’s not to say these online platforms aren’t a useful component of her PR toolbox. “The key to it is choosing the right people to work with; people who are talking to an audience that is interested.”

It’s clear that Campbell sets far higher store by real-life relationships. It was these, rather than any large budget, that enabled her to secure Quinta do Noval as the main base for series three of The Wine Show. The sight of three Hollywood stars relaxing on your terrace with a glass of your own dry white wine, then treading your grapes with real gusto, must surely be worth more than an expensive advertising campaign or flurry of Facebook ‘likes’.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, though: just try putting up 26 crew members in the middle of harvest. A few brief dalliances with larger PR firms confirmed to Campbell that this route was unsuited to her approach and personality. “I don’t knock big corporate PR companies because they do a certain job, but it’s not for me,” she remarks. “Unless you’re a very big brand with a budget to spend, you need a very entrepreneurial take on PR, someone who knows the journalists and has those relationships.”

Creativity has always been key. “Even if you’re given a socking great trade and press tasting to run, you’ve got to make it fun,” insists Campbell. A prime, personal example of this left-field yet highly effective approach was the rather surreal experience of interviewing Chariots of Fire director David Puttnam at Royal residence Clarence House on the unlikely subject of cork oak forest preservation.

Another of Campbell’s great supporters was Christopher Fielden, who recruited her services in the 1980s for PR assistance on Spanish brand Marqués de Cáceres. It’s fair to say that not many wine trade events before or since have seen three generations of the Spanish Royal Family descend on Claridges.

Campbell with her lurcher, Maisie

Fielden and Campbell also introduced California wine brand Sutter Home, taking a stand at Vinexpo. Apart from the Bordeaux trade show’s infamous heat, Campbell remembers with amusement “the sight of all these Frenchmen coming to see what a Californian wine was doing there. They’d have a taste, say: ‘Pas mal,’ then come back with their winemaker”.

The 1980s were also fledgling days for dynamic UK retailer Majestic. Meetings for this particular client would see Campbell perch on cases of wine alongside Majestic’s Esme Johnstone and Giles Clarke in their Battersea branch. “They got into buying special parcels and the tasting idea,” she notes. “It was all very new at the time.”

Majestic wasn’t the only company to shake up the UK’s wine retail landscape during this era.

“Supermarkets were not really selling wine when I started,” observes Campbell. Together with the rise of retailers who import direct and a now urgent desire from all corners of the trade to communicate with their customers via such a proliferation of channels and writers, today’s wine world would have been unimaginable when Campbell joined it in the 1970s. What’s more, it’s a world she has played a quiet but vital role in shaping.

“There’s a lot of mystery about wine, and it’s been good to see how that’s been broken down,” remarks Campbell. “Doors have been opened.”

In fact, with so much noise and fragmentation, the major challenge for wine PR professionals these days is to find a way to cut through. Crucial too is the recognition that today’s winning formula may not be so effective tomorrow. “You’ve always got to be prepared to learn,” insists Campbell, “even if, these days, it’s possibly from someone the same age as my grandchildren. Be open to new ideas.”

It certainly doesn’t take much digging below the surface of exciting developments in the UK wine scene to unearth Campbell’s expert touch. She was involved in the 1999 creation of Wine Relief, a spin-off from charitable fundraiser Comic Relief, which ran successfully for many years. The nascent English wine industry has also benefitted from her expertise – most notably, the respected Hampshire producer Exton Park.

“It’s never felt like a job,” sums up Campbell. “If you’re going to do it well, you have to feel like you’re an important part of the team. It’s not just about the budget – it’s ‘us’, not ‘them’.” Only now, as she completes a steady handover of these clients to Madeleine Waters of The Co Company – a former protégée now firmly established in her own right – does Campbell break one of her cast-iron rules of good PR. Finally, if reluctantly, she has allowed herself to become the story.