Winemaker
(Wine Jobs:
Vineyards & Cellars )
Full Time
London,
England
We're looking for someone special.
Renegade is looking to hire a winemaker to start in early 2019.
We are a new urban winery based in Bethnal Green, East London. We source fruit from all over the UK as well as Germany, Spain, France, Italy and others. We do everything in-house from pressing, fermentation, ageing, bottling and sales. We also have a small winery bar. We make a wide variety of wine styles. We make high quality wines but we are not classical in our approach.
What do we want? Formal winemaking education essential. Super hard worker. Someone who uses their initiative and someone who likes a challenge. Someone who doesn't know it all, but wants to learn. A great team member. The personality and fit is more important than experience. We are not looking for a novice. We need someone who has been formally educated, done well, worked at least 3-5 harvests and has had a lot of hands on experience. Ideally you will have been a decision making winemaker previously but this is not essential. If you know your sh*t, we can work with that. We want someone with an open mind. Someone who wants to innovate and make killer wines.
We can't be dealing with moaners, wingers, complainers and 'everything is a problem' people. We are a new urban winery based in London and make circa 27,000 bottles a year. We need a doer and a hard worker and someone who can deal with problems and issues and just sort it out. You will need to be able to work alone at times but also as part of a team.
What is out winemaking style? We're evolving but at the moment we are doing a lot of Nat Fiz (Pet Nats for the French amongst you), skin contact whites, whole bunch reds, unfiltered, interesting, Qvevri, natural ferment, manual destemming, small batch, experimental wines. We also make a number of more 'classic', 'clean' wines for the less adventurous. We make around 14 wines a year including still whites, rosés, reds, nat fiz, traditional method and other experiments.
We work with around 10 growers in the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany at the moment, but every year we work with new regions and new varietals. Grapes are hand harvested and shipped to London by refrigerated trucks over night. We press, ferment, age and bottle all on site in London.
We have a range of french oak barrels, a qvevri, open red fermenters and stainless chilled VC tanks.
We have a small space and we use it as a winery bar in the evenings. It is a very manual and physical job as we don't have a forklift all year round. We lug cages of bottles and empty barrels around by hand. It is like a jigsaw puzzle inside the winery and space is an issue. You need to be up for the challenge. We also bring in bottles, bottle and package with minimal semi-automatic bottling equipement. It is hard work but very rewarding.
We are not made of money and we only spend on the essentials. Amazing grapes, key people and vital equipment. We are growing but new. We are essentially a winery start up so do not have all the resources that bigger wineries have. What we don't have, we make up for in hard work and effort.
We sell to some of London's best restaurants and bars as well as market leading department stores and export markets.
Are you interested? If so, drop us a line.
Salary based upon experience.
We can pay well enough to keep an energetic hardworking winemaker in London and enjoying it. We can't pay enough to relocate a winemaker and their family from the end of the earth and put their 5 kids through private education.