Meet the man behind the Winefest!

Our highly successful annual wine-tasting, being held this year on August 15, has only been made possible with the support & expertise of David Motion, the man who’s run the Winery on Clifton Road since 1996 (he also has another shop in Fulham). With its distinctive wooden shelving accommodating around 17,000 bottles it is unchanged from its previous incarnation as a pharmacy. Younger customers in particular seem to like it, he says, because it reminds them of some kind of Harry Potter-style time warp.

Even though the shop is almost directly opposite Tesco’s it seems it more than holds its own against supermarket prices. It’s not just about cost, David insists: all his wines are imported,often from small growers (he goes abroad sourcing them around a dozen times a year) which make for some unusual & highly specialist labels. Even in Lockdown both shops flourished as they opened every day, somewhat bizzarely being deemed to provide “an essential service” (but then we are talking the days of Partygate here)!

David reckons that in a cosmopolitan area like Little Venice his customer base is less than 50 per cent British, with interest from as far afield as Australia & the U.S. But he hastens to say that palates don't come much more discerning than the ones on Formosa Garden.....

*The two shops also hold wine-tastings in-store on alternate months -- go to the Winery website to sign up for their mailing list.