This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
News
UK wine press celebrate Fiona Campbell’s 50-year PR career
“I was merely someone who was bossy for 50 years,” joked Fiona Campbell at a retirement lunch given in her honour by AXA Millésimes managing director, Christian Seely in London on Friday.
Held at Noizé, the event saw the UK’s top wine writers gather in secret to celebrate Fiona Campbell’s remarkable and lengthy PR career, which has seen her work with a wide range of clients, from the high end – such as Champagne Krug – to the generic, with Wines from Spain, as well as retailers, notably Majestic.
Her most longstanding customer has, however, been Seely, who hired Campbell when he took on the role as MD of Quinta do Noval, the prized Port producer, owned by AXA Millésimes.
That was in 1994, with Campbell pitching for the account along with a host of other PR agencies, all of whom had been tasked with marketing a “renaissance” of Noval, under Seely’s management.
Seely, who recalled this meeting with Campbell, said that she came armed with no presentation and told him exactly what he needed to do, and then said that she could do it for him.
As Seely previously said to db, “I chose her, without hesitation, out of a selection of PR agencies who came to pitch for the business, and I never regretted it.”
Commenting that she has been “marvellous to work with”, he thanked her, before marking her retirement, which coincided with her 81st birthday, by serving Noval’s most sought-after Port – Nacional – and from the year the pair started their working relationship: 1994.
Among other Ports served at the celebration lunch, which brought together key members of the UK wine press, including Jancis Robinson MW OBE and Victoria Moore, was the 2003 vintage of Noval and then the ’17 of Nacional.
Having hosted press trips to Noval almost every vintage during the past 30 years, Campbell commented on the amazing selection of Ports, saying “I’ve had my feet in all of these”.
As you can read about in former db editor Gabriel Stone’s extensive interview with Campbell earlier this year, Campbell’s career in wine marketing can be traced by to 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.
Gabriel Stone writes, 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.
It was working with that latter brand that instilled her great love of Port and its source region, the Douro.
At the end of the lunch on Friday, at which guests also drank great wines from some of the other properties owned by AXA Millésimes – such as Suduiraut and Pichon-Baron (pictured below) – Campbell urged the press to give her protégée, Madeleine Waters of The Co Company, “all the support you can”, with Waters taking on the AXA brands following a year-long handover by Campbell.
Read more
The Big Interview: Fiona Campbell
Related news
Bodegas Sonsierra targets export markets for its boutique Rioja