Business is Booming for wine trader Bordeaux Index
While we’re toiling away at screens and desks day-dreaming about the Grand Cru we might open with friends on Saturday, Gary Boom lives that dream every day. He’s the former City broker who had a brainwave about the wine business after making his first fortune, and has turned it into Bordeaux Index, one of Britain’s largest wine merchants.
In the last 17 years Bordeaux Index has become a familiar name to anyone who is serious about wine. The company’s unique appeal is that it views wine as a tradeable commodity, and makes live prices in 150 of the world’s finest wines, allowing people to buy and sell with only a 10 per cent spread. While other wine merchants want to sell you wine to drink, Bordeaux Index is delighted for customers to buy and sell it as many times as they like without ever pulling a cork.
He also has panache. When I turn up to his Holborn offices to interview him one chilly evening, he opens a crystal decanter of Taylor’s Port – 1863 vintage Taylor’s to be precise, a wine that was growing during the American civil war, when Queen Victoria was celebrating the wedding of her eldest son. It tasted like intense, vinous treacle – it was quite a tipple for a Tuesday evening.
Gary Boom had an unusual start to life as a wine magnate. Whilst many others at the top of the trade are born into it, with wine families stretching back four, five or six generations, he was born in Cape Town and barely even thought about wine. “Back then in South Africa the wine industry was in the doldrums and we drank beer. It wasn’t until a friend took me to dinner with his father, who had a wine cellar, and he served us something and I thought ‘my God’. I realised this was a world I wanted to explore.”
That chance came when Boom arrived in London, seeking his fortune. He managed to find a job at Fulton Prebon, the money broker, on their capital markets desk. He finally had access to fine wines and the money to buy them.
Boom then went to work for Michael Spencer just as he was setting up Intercapital, the fledging broking house which has since become the global giant ICAP. “If wine had been an interest before I met Michael, it became a screaming passion afterwards. His dad used to come to our offices with these great bottles of Burgundy and we just used to talk about wine the whole time.” Spencer is now BI’s Chairman and has a 3 per cent stake in the business.
I asked Gary for his “Desert Island” wines. First, he chose Chateau Leoville Barton 1985 (£70, duty paid L’Assemblage). “I bought this from the Islington branch of Majestic Wines and took it straight home to have with my girlfriend and it was amazing.”
Intercapital was growing fast and Boom made a good living. Fittingly, wine number two on his list was the 1970 Latour (£216, Four Walls Wine Co for a bottle). “I will always remember this one. We had had a great day in the broking firm, we had made £250,000, and Michael and I opened a magnum and drank it to celebrate.”
As a further reward Spencer made Boom the unofficial head of wine buying at Intercapital.
“We were so lucky. We tried all the great wines, often before they became great. We were in the right place at the right time.”
Boom had always promised himself he would retire from the City when he made some money and he did just that a few years later. “I arrived in London with £10 in my pocket and I lived in a squat. So I always said I would quit once I had made £1 million. I made a multiple of that and thought, ‘this is my opportunity’. I wasn’t going to do anything at all.”
But Boom set up Bordeaux Index instead, with a determination to shake up the crusty old world of fine wine merchanting.
“I realised this was a business that needed to be modernised and I thought I could bring a trader’s mentality to it.”
Today Bordeaux Index has grown and diversified massively, but it is still a unique business – one that allows customers to buy and sell their wines.
And so to wine number three and this one is a Bordeaux, too. It’s a Margaux 1983 (over £200 if you can find a bottle these days), which is the first case of wine he ever bought.
Boom has exciting development plans for the business but none of that has dimmed his love for drinking the stuff. For Christmas dinner, he has a magnum of 1985 Margaux lined up.
For the full interview go to morningwire.eu