Quaff Fine Wine Merchant was founded in 2005 as the brainchild of Toby Peirce. Toby's early adulthood was spent playing professional cricket, and this took him to Stellenbosch in South Africa in the English winters. Here he played cricket, coached schoolchildren, met his wife, and drank an intemperate amount of wine with the sporting sons of local producers and growers. This inevitably led to a ca
reer in wine when cricket finished, and Toby worked for a UK-based agent for a leading Champagne house, selling to the likes of everyone from Gordon Ramsay to Tesco. Having gleaned enough from this experience to set out on his own, he opened the first Quaff in Portland Road, Hove in 2005. The second shop was opened in early 2010 in partnership with Ronnie Janssen who has been immersed in the wine trade since he turned 18, having worked for the likes of Moet et Chandon, Lanson, Penfolds, and Lapostolle where he currently works. Nowadays we supply our customers with wines, mostly from small producers, that they won’t find in other shops. We don’t try to be overtly organic or biodynamic, although we find that a lot of our wines by coincidence tend to be made with less intervention in the winemaking process, and are thus more ‘natural’. Our aim is that regardless of style, region, colour or price point, we are offering you the best product available. We taste hard and often to ensure this is so. Each wine should be an archetype of that style; typical of the region, the vintage and showing the passion of the producer. We offer what we consider to be benchmark examples so that you are safe in the knowledge that what you are drinking is as it should be. The vast majority of our work is done by listening carefully to you, the customer, and making a recommendation accordingly, and we take this skill as seriously as selecting the wines themselves.
