After finishing that first proper batch of forty bottles with Faye and Devil’s Dyke Distillery, the story took another slightly unexpected turn. I disappeared to South Africa for a few weeks. We’re incredibly lucky to be able to travel as much as we do, but the timing suddenly made things complicated. The Business Leaders Wine Club launch event was approaching fast, and for a while it looked like I might not actually be able to attend my own launch party. To make matters worse, I was due to travel to Manchester the day after returning from South Africa – on exactly the same date as the event.

By mid-2025 the Vermouth Actually idea had gone quiet again. I had told plenty of people about the project, but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to face the mountain of paperwork required to make it legal. Selling alcohol in the UK is not exactly simple. There’s a personal licence, a premises licence, alcohol storage permissions, food premises registration, alcohol duty registration – and even the requirement to advertise in the local newspaper that you intend to sell alcohol from your home so that neighbours have the opportunity to object. It’s… a lot. So once again I stepped away from the idea.

We were travelling through India. It was an incredible trip, driven mostly by wildlife and landscape in Goa and Ranthambore, but like any journey through India, the food played a massive role in the experience. One evening in Jaipur we were served the most memorable dish of the whole trip: Laal Maas. A rich, slow-cooked Rajasthani curry, deeply spiced and intensely comforting. There was one particular flavour in it that completely caught my attention. It was something I had never tasted before – smoky, slightly medicinal, savoury, and incredibly moreish.

The small batch of bottles I made for Christmas 2023 ended up bringing me back to something I had long forgotten. One of the bottles went to my parents. After tasting it, my mother started telling me stories about her parents – my maternal grandparents, Ann and Bertie Gray. Apparently, they had a serious fondness for vermouth. Vermouth was incredibly fashionable in the mid-1900s, but by the time the 1970s arrived it had fallen out of favour for many drinkers. Not for Ann and Bertie though. For them it remained a firm favourite.

Like a lot of good things in life, my relationship with vermouth started completely by accident. For years, whenever I travelled abroad, I seemed to develop a mildly irritating but persistent problem – indigestion. Probably underlying stress or anxiety. Nothing dramatic, just enough discomfort to make enjoying food and wine a little less fun than it should have been. I tried all the usual solutions: different foods, smaller meals, avoiding certain drinks. Nothing really worked.

Like a lot of good things in life, my relationship with vermouth started completely by accident. For years, whenever I travelled abroad, I seemed to develop a mildly irritating but persistent problem – indigestion. Probably underlying stress or anxiety. Nothing dramatic, just enough discomfort to make enjoying food and wine a little less fun than it should have been. I tried all the usual solutions: different foods, smaller meals, avoiding certain drinks. Nothing really worked.