Interview: Frazer Thompson of Chapel Down
Above: Frazer Thompson of Chapel Down Vineyard (Kent Life Magazine)
Above: Frazer Thompson of Chapel Down Vineyard (Kent Life Magazine)
Above: Frazer Thompson of Chapel Down Vineyard (Kent Life Magazine)
He may be a Geordie lad who tells me “I still get a prickle down my spine when I go back over the Tyne Bridge”, but Frazer Thompson is equally passionate about the county he and his family have called home for seven years.
The astonishing thing is that in that short time the managing director of the Tenterden-based English Wines Group, now the largest producer of English wines in the UK, has catapulted the Chapel Down brand into an internationally recognised, world-class premium league and altered forever the perception in this country that our home-grown wines aren’t worth investing in, let alone drinking.
Due south
The story about how he came to be such a part of the Garden of England and its food and drink heart really starts when the 18-year-old Frazer first came down south from Newcastle, to London and university, to read business studies.
He met Susan, the couple married in 1982 and Frazer started working in advertising and media while his wife joined Whitbread. A move by Frazer to Denby as brand manager meant leaving the capital for his wife’s home village in Leicestershire, where the pottery giant was based, and Susan taking up a new role with the wine merchant Grants of St James,.
Fate stepped in when Frazer himself got the chance to work for Whitbread, a company he had long admired, to run 650 pubs in the north of England which - and he lapses into broad vernacular here – “for a Geordie, it’s not a bad job, like!”
He does, however, have a confession: “I hold my hand up and admit I was partly responsible for Brewers’ Fayre and all those other hideous concepts, but my job was to get bums on seats in those 650 pubs, and to market them.”
After two successful years doing just that, Frazer was asked to work at head office in London, as marketing manager for ales. “That was a huge move for me,” he admits. “We arrived at the same moment the housing market collapsed, but for the first time, I really felt completely comfortable in my environment.
“I was marketing a product I liked and knew a lot about, I knew its consumers well and was in a company I felt very comfortable with, where there were systems in process to make sure you can’t make too many mistakes.”
Do interesting things, and interesting things will happen
Frazer, now 49, was canny enough to realise that he’d been promoted extremely quickly: “If you’re 26 or 27, with a bullet, you’re going to take a fall at some point, you have to learn by a lot of mistakes in business. And those were to come later.”
It was while he was looking after the whole Whitbread portfolio of ales, which included great old names like Mackesons and Gold Label Barley Wine, that the government introduced the Beer Orders - “which destroyed Whitbread as a company,” he says.
“Lord Young decided that they would break the tie between the brewer and their estates by saying that all brewers, regardless of their size, could only own 2,000 properties and that they had to allow foreign cask beers to be sold in their pubs.”
What that meant was that Whitbread, who owned 6,500 pubs at that time, had to sell 4,500 pubs - fast, changing overnight the old relationship with their tenants. The small brewers realised that all their money was in their estate, rather than in their brands, so the brewer Boddingtons decided that it was going to concentrate on its pub estate and sell its breweries and other assets.
Frazer led a team of four and acquired the Boddingtons brewery. “That was my real launch pad,” he says. “I was made director of marketing for ales for Whitbread shortly after that, which was pretty much unheard of under the age of 30, then very shortly switched over to lager, which was seen as a more important part of the business.”
Favourite mantras
It was at Boddingtons that Frazer met people like advertising guru, John Hegarty, whose wine Frazer now sells at Chapel Down, and picked up a great deal of wisdom, including two of his favourite mantras for life.
“John told me – ‘do interesting things, and interesting things will happen’ – it’s a great mantra, as is ‘try to go to bed a little less stupid than were when you woke up’. If you work too long in an industry, it becomes harder to do.”
Changes followed in rapid succession. The Thompsons had their first son, now a 20-year-old student at Newcastle University, followed “rather too quickly afterwards” by twin boys. Frazer was promoted to strategy director, then got approached by the incumbent brand director in Heineken Amsterdam to see if he was interested in doing the job.
The family ended up moving to Amsterdam, with the boys just seven and five, and straight into a really creative period in Frazer’s career. “It was a fantastic job, and a passport to do anything. The famous cream of Manchester ads were written on the brief, but the genius was making that work. I helped make lots of famous ads, because I worked with the very best people.”
But when the boys were 13 and 11, it was decision time, and Frazer made his first big mistake. “I decided to accept a role that wasn’t my core area of expertise, and stopped enjoying it,” he admits. He was posted to London, but missed the family dreadfully and also felt that he’d become part of a corporate machine – until serendipity decided to take a hand.
“An old friend from the advertising business, Tim Lindsay, was having a party and he passed me a glass of fizz, along with the words ‘you’ll never guess where that’s from.’ He was absolutely right, of course, I’d never have guessed – and it was Chapel Down Sparkling Wine.
“The very next day I opened The Sunday Times appointments section and there it was, ‘wanted – managing director for Chapel Down.’ And I thought, blimey, that really is a case of serendipity.”
Kent is the larder of London and the most beautiful garden
Frazer applied, and beat 400 other applicants to the post, but it was still a tough decision. “I was on a huge salary at Heineken and had to think, would we be prepared to move back to England to live not quite in the same luxury, just for me to follow a dream. I guess it was a slight middle-life crisis, but I took it on.”
This was November 2001 and Frazer admits that the first two or three years were tough. “What we had was a rather tawdry off-licence two miles from Tenterden high street that specialised in selling lavender talcum powder and horrible gifts for coachloads of people up from Eastbourne for the day. That was the cash that was coming in.”
Big changes clearly needed to be made and the first was to create a new board, bringing in entrepreneurs Richard Balfour-Lynn and John Rae, and forming the English Wines Group. In May 2004, they won the first ever gold medal for an English wine at the International Wine Challenge (the largest wine competition in the world) - then that August, there was a fire.
“It was awful,” remembers Frazer. “We lost 20 per cent of our stock, some of the best wines we’d made, and a lot of the stock was tainted, but we didn’t close the business and in retrospect it accelerated what we were doing anyway. It was one of the fastest learning experiences I’ve ever gone through.
“You learn a lot about yourself, and your own people. The easiest thing would have been would have been to go off and get a job at three times the salary, with a pension, but the whole team stuck together and you really find out your best people.”
The shop was totally refurbished and re-opened the following year, and Frazer and his team focused on planting up more vineyards while also encouraging people to plant for them.
Movers and shakers
As the transformed Chapel Down continued to soar, and people realised here was something that could be really good for Kent, the movers and shakers in the county started to take note. One of the first was Alison Howard at the Institute of Directors, who asked Frazer to become chairman, an honour he was delighted to accept and is currently halfway through his three-year tenure.
He was also asked by an old friend from his Whitbread days, Robert Clewley, to come and help them change Business Link, “so I now do both – because obviously I’m not busy enough!” laughs Frazer.
“But the best entrepreneurs have a real depth of vision about what it is they are trying to do and what else is going on around them. You are born pretty stupid and life is much more interesting if you try and do something different.”
So did he make the right move seven years ago? The answer is an emphatic ‘yes.’ “I consider myself a happy man because I have three wonderful kids, a wonderful wife, a job I love doing and I have surrounded myself with great people,” he tells me.
“I am genuinely amazed that I continue to get great people to come and work here – it’s pretty, and it’s a nice place to work, but we are still mile from anywhere, yet we get Richard Phillips to come and open a restaurant here, I have a sales and marketing guy who would earn three times as much if he worked in London, a Scottish chartered accountant and an Australian winemaker who worked at Taittinger – and it doesn’t get much better than that.
Entrepreneurs are not risk takers as such
“Entrepreneurs are not risk takers as such, though I have taken a few myself, they are risk managers – for example, I gave up a huge salary, but by gaining happiness, environment and enough to live on, I am more happy, grounded and content than I ever have been at any other stage in my life.”
The whole family has also benefited. Home is in nearby Cranbrook, which has provided excellent schooling for the boys and an opportunity for Frazer, who played rugby at a senior level until knee injuries got in the way, to coach the sport.
He is also passionate about his life’s dream here at Tenterden and explains that the model followed at Chapel Down for wine making is similar to the Champagne/New Zealand model whereby the brand owner owns between 30 and 50 per cent of its own vineyards, and all the rest is contracted out.
Chapel Down itself owns 22 acres of vines and also takes in the grapes at harvest time from 23 different vineyards, ranging from places like Lamberhurst in Kent to Essex and Sussex and amounting to around 180 acres in total - a rather large shortfall from his target of 500 acres.
“Owning our own land was always the goal and we were at the low end, so we have been looking to buy, if we found the right plot of land,” says Frazer. “When the right land comes up, you have to move very quickly.”
The right land did indeed come up – at Kits Coty, on the North Downs. “We analysed the soil and it was the best Champagne soil we had ever seen, perfect chalk. We had to buy a 120-acre plot to get the 75 acres of prime land, but we will probably plant the lot up.
“It was planted in May and 75 acres will produce 200,000 bottles of fizz, just in time for the London Olympics, which is wonderful. We hired a fantastic young viticulturist from New Zealand and he’s planted it out – it will be a fabulous vineyard. And we are really fortunate to have such a dedicated and creative winemaking team here, led by Owen Elias.
“Hever Castle are going to plant up 25 acres, we do a bit with Leeds Castle and also for the first time, there’ll be 30 acres at Squerryes Court in Westerham. It’s all happening in Kent.”
Educating Kent
Frazer is hoping to work with Hadlow College to set up a wine-making and viticulturist course and will create a business centre at the vineyard to provide the right facilities for students.
He also wants to see the Chapel Down model rolled out to each of the vineyards – another reason why he’s introduced the Richard Phillips@Chapel Down restaurant here and why he is so passionate that it succeeds. “This is not a normal landlord tenant relationship, it’s a fantastic symbiotic one where the food and wine work together,” he enthuses.
“We also make beer and that’s gone rather well,” adds Frazer. “We started three years ago, after the fire when we ran out of wine. Once you’re in with wine, it’s easier to get another product in – we might try a cider next.”
So what would be his perfect tipple? “I match drink to occasions – for example, I had the pink fizz for my birthday, then it’s English Rose if I’m just glugging, I love our Pinot Noir red and I could drink Bacchus all day, every day.”
So how are these wonderful, award-winning wines faring after last year’s dreadful summer? “If Cliff Richards sings at Wimbledon, we are tearing our hair out,” he admits. “The flowering was poor, the vines got stressed – the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir actually took it in their stride but we are worried about Bacchus, because the crop is low at the moment and when we are selling more than we can produce, we could have really done with a big bumper harvest.
“What’s more likely is that we’ll get that big bumper harvest next year, as we have had an excellent summer – it was good during Wimbledon week and it’s been pretty warm all summer. So we have another year to consolidate our position, and to make more friends. The only think we can’t do is make more wine.”
London is moving eastwards and Kent has to work hard to preserve its identity
So what is it about Kent that has made a Geordie fall in love with it so completely and utterly? Frazer smiles, but he’s deadly serious: “If we ever lost the feeling that Kent was the Garden of England, we’d lose the single biggest piece of identity of what the county is all about – it’s the larder of London and the most beautiful garden.
“London is moving eastwards and Kent has to work hard to preserve its identity. And if we start losing orchards, hop fields and vineyards, everything the county is famous for, we will struggle with our identity.
“It’s got this wonderful coastline and this rural idyll core that everybody fights for – it’s slightly quirky and original and it has to stand up and fight, like the Invicta motto tells us.
“I love it here.”