The wine business is ripe for disruption, and this man is doing it

(Quartz) - “There are only two important people in the wine business—the winemaker and the wine drinker. Right now, they’re both getting screwed."

Rowan Gormley doesn’t mince words. The founder of Naked Wines, part venture capital firm and part wholesale buying club, has little time for the wine industry’s traditional ways. This might be because he’s an accountant by training. But his background belies a deep appreciation for wine, and a missionary’s zeal for rewriting the rules of how the product gets from grape to glass. He thinks he can apply his financial background and some fresh thinking to shake up the established order in an old-fashioned, exclusive, and often incestuous industry. So far, it seems to be working.

From spreadsheet jockey to cellar dweller

Although he got his start crunching numbers at Arthur Andersen in his native South Africa, Gormley made his way to the UK with a private equity firm and, later, helped launch the online wine retailing arm of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. In 2008, Gormley and a group of his former Virgin colleagues founded Naked Wines in the UK, a week after Lehman Brothers collapsed and threatened to take the global economy with it. “This forced us to be radical, to turn the conventional wisdom on its head,” Gormley says. How radical? This is how he puts it:   

The astonishing thing about the wine business is that there isn’t a bottle in the world that can’t be made for about £10 [$17]. So there isn’t a bottle of wine that should cost more than £20. That’s what we want to do—take wines that others are charging £50, £100, or £300 and sell them for £20.