Wines from Renegade urban winery in London.
Renegade founder Warwick Smith said he has been speaking to prospective investors and that some capital had already been committed, as part of a fresh funding drive to take the London urban winery ‘to the next level’.
Renegade, established more than eight years ago, built a new winery in 2021 after a previous investment round raised £500,000.
Smith said he was now looking to raise a further £800,000 to expand operations, under the UK government’s Enterprise Investment Scheme.
Plans include hiring senior staff members, as well as the creation of ‘a scalable, lower-priced sister brand’, he said.
Renegade has so far made a name for itself by crafting different styles of wines from ‘grape to glass’; refrigerated trucks bring fresh grapes to the winery in Walthamstow.
Michelin-starred restaurants have featured its wines on their lists, and Renegade also hosts regular supper clubs and tastings at its winery and at its wine bar in the Bethnal Green area.
Smith said he has only bought grapes from UK vineyards for the past two years, but may return to buying a portion of fruit from European vineyards this year.
He said costs and scale were among the biggest challenges facing urban winemakers like Renegade, and this impacts pricing. Most of its wines retail in the mid-£20s and upwards.
‘With our core brand, [we’re] really trying to make sure that we make wines that are worth the money, that are different and that add something of value to the wine industry,’ said Smith.
He cited innovations like ‘Bethnal Bubbles’, which he described as a dry-hopped English sparkling produced via a traditional-method secondary fermentation in the bottle. ‘We make a Herefordshire-grown English Cabernet Sauvignon rosé, barrel-fermented, and [grapes are] grown in polytunnels on the Welsh border,’ he added.
Smith said he didn’t want to divulge full details of his thinking for a new sister brand at this stage, but he intended to pitch it as more of an entry-level wine that would be more easily scalable and could retail for around £14.
He said the winery had a current capacity of up to 80,000 bottles and that Renegade’s revenue reached £1.2m in its last financial year spanning 2023-2024, up from £912,000 a year earlier.
Urban wineries have been identified as a growing trend in the US and UK in recent years. Another London-based winery, London Cru, was founded back in 2013, and acquired the Foxhole Vineyard in southern England in 2023.
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Source : https://www.decanter.com/wine-news/london-urban-winery-renegade-launches-investment-bid-548987/
