Raising a class to city festival with bottle

I have lived in and around Oxford for more than 20 years, experiencing it both as a student and now as a local resident.

Two years ago I finally got the chance to pursue a dream, and founded the Oxford Wine Festival.

Food and drink are two of the great pleasures in my life, but what really got me into wine was, strangely, working for a charity in the Eurasian country of Georgia. I discovered that Georgia was the birthplace of winemaking, and has an incredible wine culture that almost no one knows about in the UK.

I decided to host a wine tasting of Georgian wines to raise money for the charity.

I always wanted the flexibility and freedom of running my own company, so a few years later I set up a small internet-based wine society in my spare time.

It has now been running for almost six years, and concentrates on wines from unusual and undiscovered countries like Georgia. The more time I spend around wine the more fascinating I find it – there is so much you can learn, and you never stop looking for the perfect bottle.

My work with wine also gave me an excuse to visit wine festivals all over Europe – my favourite is in Budapest, where vineyards from all over the country bring their wines to Buda castle and 30,000 locals come to sample them with live gypsy bands and huge knuckles of pork to line the stomach.

It has such a fantastic, celebratory atmosphere and I often thought how much I would like to bring a similar event to the UK.

A couple of years ago the events company I was working for was restructured and I was offered a lesser role or a payoff. I took the payoff and realised that here was an opportunity to put my events experience to work in an area that I was passionate about. Plus Oxford seemed like the perfect city to host a wine festival.

Last year’s Oxford Wine Festival was our first, and we had about 1,500 attendees, some flying in from as far away as the US and South Africa. This year’s event will be significantly larger, with more wines, more tutored tastings, and more attendees. We all get something different out of a glass of wine, so I want to create an atmospheric and renowned event that can appeal to everyone – from the person who just wants something nice to drink right up to the most serious wine connoisseur. Last year’s event had two Master of Wine-led masterclasses and there are only 300 Masters of Wine in the world.

I’m also keen to use the event to promote English wines, which are now competing and winning against the best in the world.

I have no doubt that English wineries are going to be one of the UK’s great success stories of the next decade – the best are already extraordinarily good, and we need to support that.

Our English Wine room gives visitors a chance not only to sample these wines but chat to the owners and wine makers of these award-winning vineyards too.

My ultimate goal is to run a festival like the one I visited in Budapest – an event that gets the whole city and visitors from across the UK celebrating, socialising, and trying the best wines in the world. Wine appeals to all ages – at last year’s festival we had visitors aged 18-75.

It’s going to be a lot of hard work, and things in business are almost always tougher than you expect, but if we can make a lasting contribution to the social life of this city that would be a really satisfying accomplishment.

TRY IT
The 2015 Oxford Wine Festival takes place at The Oxford Union on August 21- 22. Discounted Early Bird tickets  are on sale now.
For more information see oxfordwinefestival.org