31 January 2019 We're republishing this article from Tuesday free as we think it is of particular general interest.
29 January 2019 An investment group has been making quiet inroads in the UK and US wine scene.
The Conversion Group. Mean anything to you? Don’t worry if not. It used to be known as The Conversion Fund but I doubt you've heard of that either. I suspect relatively few people in the wine world have ever heard of this ‘global portfolio of lifestyle and creative businesses’ and yet it is quietly infiltrating the wine scene and has been, and still is, in acquisitive mode.
Its latest acquisition is a share of Gracie Events, Daniel Johnnes of New York’s operation that runs La Paulée and La Fête du Champagne, upscale wine events that seem to me to be responsible for decimating (precise meaning) the world’s stocks of fine wine in one bibulous evening. We reported here on Johnnes’ and Peter Liem’s attempt to run a Fête du Champagne in London in late 2017. Perhaps it was a bit too lavish for the average Brit.
The official line on the press release announcing the Gracie acquisition is, ‘The Conversion Group is a private investment vehicle that partners with businesses led by their founding entrepreneurs and management teams to drive sustainable value. It builds and invests in the creative sectors around the world, specialising in food and beverage business, as well as creative and performance organisations.’
The lead investor is Ty Comfort, who looks almost as though he should be in a boy band and is based in the UK but has a mid-Atlantic accent. Over lunch in London last year with Comfort and his right-hand man Allen Gibbons, I got the impression that Comfort (married, incidentally, to model Caprice), is less of a wine geek and more someone who has identified wine, and particularly wine events, as a growth area. He'd clearly like to have a globally interlocking empire but for the moment the bits don't seem to me to quite fit together.
The most important British wine subsidiaries of The Conversion Group are the fine-wine trader Fine + Rare (co-founder Bud Cuchet sold his share some time ago) and the International Wine & Spirit Competition, which (like the WSET) celebrates its half-century this year. Its most glorious manifestation is the well-attended annual IWSC awards dinner held in the Guildhall every November (see above right). In my experience the IWSC had a rather low profile in the British wine world until it poached Christelle Guibert from the Decanter World Wine Awards last year. Wine writer Adam Lechmere, another old Decanter hand, is also now on the team, charged with launching and editing Club Oenologique, an upmarket, rather well-designed gourmet magazine billed as a ‘repository of the interesting, the scarce and the expertly made’. Since the debut issue began with a profile of me by Joe Fattorini of The Wine Show to celebrate my lifetime achievement award from the IWSC, I’m wondering which of those three qualities specified by Adam I possess. Certainly not the second or third. The first, I’m hoping.
The fund has also invested in Agency 21, a company that organises food and drinks events around the US; the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival; Cochon 555 that organises pig-based events in America; Sugar Land Wine & Food Affair (whose website is currently rather enigmatic about its activities); and a Hong Kong version of the IWSC. The IWSC, incidentally, is the only company 100% owned by The Conversion Group.
They are certainly busy bees, and are believed to have been investigating all sorts of other investment opportunities – not a commonplace phenomenon in our little corner of the world.
I note that on The Conversion Group’s website that the post of CEO Wine & Spirits appears to be vacant… Although since publishing this, I have been told that their website is out of date and that in fact they are looking here for a publisher of Club Oenologique (so-named because it was the original name of the IWSC chosen by its founder, wine chemist Anton Massel).