It’s been almost exactly a year since I quit my job at Oddbins wine merchants and left on my year travelling and working around the Southern hemisphere to learn more about the wine industry.

I’ve been back in the UK for a few days now after returning from Mendoza via Chile and Rio de Janeiro, and after getting over the jetlag and adjusting to the scorching British summer weather, I have been chatting to a few old friends back in Cardiff…

Well it seems as though the past year has been a busy one with one thing and another for Oddbins, while I was in the Barossa I heard that the head buyer Emma Nichols had left after returning from maternity leave, which in itself isn’t so surprising given the recent history of the buying team, losing senior buyers at the rate of at least one a year in the five years I worked for the company…

But now, on top of hearing rumours about goings on at my own branch in Cardiff, I have just learned about the surprise sale of the whole company yesterday! The French parent company Castel, have sold the chain of 158 shops to Ex Cellar – a company I had not come across before, who have two retail outlets of their own, one in Surrey and one in Paris. The Oddbins-link with this relatively new company (established in 1999) is that the managing director, Simon Baile, is the son of Nick Baile, former Managing director of the company from back in the 1970s.

The chain of wine merchants has been riddled with problems since wine-giant Castel bought it back in 2002 – I started just after the sale so saw from the inside the changes that went in their first five years of ownership. The trend seemed to be to make the shops more corporate and uniform, something that gradually watered down what had had one of the major appeals for me – the independence and quirkiness of the shops. Hopefully under this new-but-oldschool ownership, the unique character of Oddbins will return. It has been interesting to watch over the last few years as the wine trade in the UK has rapidly polarised, with the Supermarkets dominating the Off trade, Large wholesalers consolidating and dominating the On trade and some smaller wine merchants successfully occupying the more niche end of both markets. Oddbins has, under various diverse Castel-based management teams attempted to fit somewhere in the middle of all of this, and been torn to shreds as a result.

Castel in the last couple of years have been splitting the estate into two, running the Oddbins chain side by side with the French specialist ‘Nicolas‘ chain, with many old Oddbins stores rebranded and refitted under the Nicolas name. This sale was only for the Oddbins chain though, so Castel keep the Nicolas shops. It would appear to have been a cherry-picking exercise, and it would make perfect sense for them to have kept the more profitable stores by this route, but from what I have seen from when I was still inside, it wasn’t always the big-money stores that were converted, as Nicolas have no wholesale business – successful wholesale often the reason for higher turnover in Oddbins shops.

I just hope that this new blood will manage the almost impossible task of both retaining the character and running the company profitably. I wish them the best of luck, it has been proven by the success of independant wine merchants, and by the continuing growth of direct competitor Majestic in recent years that there is still room to find a niche, but I think the key will be finding their niche and keeping to it, rather than the desperate flip-flopping of the Castel years.

Read more on Decanter.com and OffLicenceNews.co.uk