Catriona Nunn Alumni Voices speaks to alumnus Jerry Lockspeiser, founder of two successful wine companies and Chair of several other businesses. He is also a Director of Positive News, the media brand for rigorous and constructive journalism that highlights positive global developments and solutions.
Reflecting on his time at York from 1972-75 Jerry recalls his studies in Social Science, a combination of Politics, Economics, and Sociology. His university experience was marked by student activism, including a boycott of first-year exams and protests against Apartheid.
“I was in Alcuin college and I studied Social Science, which I don’t think exists anymore. It was Politics, Economics and Sociology – York’s answer to Oxford’s PPE and it met my interests. At the end of the first year, we had to pass an exam to go on to the second and third years and we all thought this was ridiculous, because it was much the same as we’d done for A level. So we went on strike and refused to do the exam. That was a very interesting experience for me in terms of learning about collective action because everybody said, ‘I’ll boycott the exam if everybody else does but how do I know if they will or not?’ So we all got together and stood on the mound opposite the hall, so that everyone could see that everybody else was there and not going in. It worked, no one took the exams except some foreign students who had to because their funding depended on it. No one was expelled. It was a very instructive memory in terms of learning how to get people together to do something. Unfortunately, the course was abolished soon after our degree was completed.
“My memory of York is really of a golden age in my life from the point of view of meeting people, developing personally and studying things I was interested in.”
I was External Affairs Officer on the Students Union during a fairly political time. There was a lot of radical action going on amongst students in the universities around the UK; both within the universities about rent and the cost of food and courses but also in the wider world, international issues like Apartheid.
I remember we stood outside Barclays Bank in Heslington and tried to get them to divest from their investments in South Africa. There were a lot of political debates in the university. I was there at the same time as Greg Dyke who later became chancellor of the university and ran the BBC before that. Everything about life at York as a student was good for me. From playing football to generally growing up. I lived in the university for the first year on campus, and then with friends in a house near St. John’s College in the city. My memory of York is really of a golden age in my life from the point of view of meeting people, developing personally and studying things I was interested in.”
After completing his Social Science studies at York, Jerry pursued his interest in International Development by volunteering as a teacher in Sudan, where he witnessed a more peaceful era before the current turmoil. Following a Master’s degree in African Studies from Edinburgh, he ventured into various jobs, including motorcycle instruction and youth work, before starting a successful organic wine business in Leeds, which grew to supply major supermarkets. His passion for innovative and ethical business practices continued, leading him to chair multiple other companies and advocate for the democratisation of wine culture.
“To be frank, I didn’t really have a love of wine other than as a consumer. I am by no means a wine geek. I remember the first wine tasting I did with friends when we were choosing wines for our initial range. We all sat around at a friend’s house, who had also been at York when I was and is now an MP in Leeds. We didn’t realise you were meant to spit it out, to taste not drink. It was a long evening! I liked wine but not passionately. What inspired me in business was having a creative idea and doing something that other people hadn’t done.
My father was a pilot living in Singapore and my sister and I went for a holiday to see him. We flew out on the Russian airline ‘Aeroflot’ and they served us some Russian red wine, which I thought was quite fun. This was the time of Glasnost and Mikhail Gorbachev. I tried to find the wine back in England but I couldn’t. So I contacted the Soviet Embassy who gave me the number of a small importer in London, a Soviet friendly British businessman. I bought a few cases to share with friends who liked the novelty and asked if there was anything else a bit different that I could find. So, I found some Indian sparkling wine and a friend of a friend was making organic wine in France so I got a little bit of that shipped over. Back then these wines were very unusual as the market was not as international as it is today.
“Many people may think organic wine is quite recent to the market, but it’s not. We were doing it in the mid-1980s.”
Supplying my friends for fun as a hobby began to take up more and more of my time and I decided I either need to stop or turn it into a business. I asked friends if they thought a business selling organic and unusual wines would work and they all said there was no chance. But I felt determined to succeed so I called it ‘Vinceremos’, a mix of the Spanish and Italian words for ‘We will win’. I started selling to individuals and to small local retailers including art centres, theatres, whole food shops and the like – retailers who I thought would be interested in products with a difference, and especially organic. I am pleased to say that we did win and Vinceremos is still going today nearly 40 years later.
I gave up my job as a youth worker and focused on growing ‘Vinceremos Wines’. I didn’t have any money to start it, I didn’t know anything about business or about wine, so I learnt by trial and error. As it gradually grew I got two friends involved. We were living on very low incomes and leaving any profit in the business so we could buy more stock. But eventually it worked and we built it up so that by the early 1990s we had 500 trade customers across the UK and a few thousand private clients.
Many people may think organic wine is quite recent to the market, but it’s not. We were doing it in the mid-1980s. Retail trends tend to go in waves. Hopefully, the organic and natural wine trend will stay for longer this time. It went out of fashion because the retailers all thought they could make more money doing something else.”
During the economic recession in the early 1990’s people stopped going to the slightly more expensive independent shops and went to the cheaper supermarkets. Our core customers were selling less and many stopped paying the money they owed us – we almost went bust as a result. I had to scale the whole thing back to a tiny team of three in a miniscule office above a printer in Leeds. We just survived. After five or six years of hard graft and a stable business we’d gone from starting with nothing back to having nothing again. I thought there must be a better way to survive and prosper selling wine, and asked myself which kind of retailer is least likely to go bust. Answer, the supermarkets. I decided to be Mr. Organic and sell at least one organic red and white to all of them.
I formed another company, called ‘Bottle Green’ to do that. Once I’d established the relationships with the major supermarket buyers selling organic wines and learnt what they needed from a supplier, I sold them other wines too. We employed our own winemakers based out of our Leeds office who went around the world working with our suppliers in many different countries to make wines in the style that the UK market wanted. This was an innovation for our big retail customers and gave them the confidence to deal with us. ‘Bottle Green’ became one of the biggest wine suppliers to the supermarkets in the 1990s.
I sold ‘Bottle Green’ in 2004 and left the business in 2007. I became chairman of another small wine company. They asked me to help develop their business as I had done for ‘Bottle Green’. I was with them for nine years. They’re now one of the two biggest independent wine companies in the country.
“My approach has been to democratise wine and prevent people feeling intimidated by the subject.”
I’m now chairman of ‘North South Wines’, which I joined because the founder and Managing Director has put ethical and sustainable values at the core of the business. She led it to become a B Corp which means it’s in business to be a force for good as well as make money. This approach matches my own values about the role of business in society.
I have always hated the snobbishness that can exist in some parts of the wine world. After all, it is just a fruit in a field that is transformed into a drink. After my wine career, I wrote a book called Your Wine Questions Answered – 25 Things Wine Drinkers Most Want to Know (all profits go to the charity ActionAid). It’s everything you’ve always wanted to know about wine but never dared ask. Most people I’ve met over the years have said, ‘I love wine, but of course I know nothing about it.’ I wrote this book to explain the most common 25 questions people have asked me. It answers questions like: What is Cabernet Sauvignon? How long can you keep wine in a bottle when you’ve drunk half of it? Why can’t I drink red wine with fish? My approach has been to democratise wine and prevent people feeling intimidated by the subject.
Wine has become acceptable to everyone because it’s become global, more affordable and adapted its style to one that millions of people enjoy. When I started out most wine had a lower quality and lower profile. Most people drank beer or spirits. The rise in wine as an everyday drink in the UK is relatively recent, from the 1970s onwards. In customer service surveys wine now comes up as people’s preferred drink, ahead of beers and spirits – it’s a big change. However, today wine consumption is on the wane as people cut back on alcohol, especially younger people, and the industry faces real challenges as sales decline.
Football is my first sporting love, and I played until I was 55 when frequent injuries led me to take up running instead. I run 2 or 3 marathons a year and came first in my age group in the European Masters Games Half Marathon in Tampere, Finland in 2023, as I did in the same year at the Gothenburg Half marathon in Sweden, and I have qualified to run for England in my age group in the 2025 Masters representative races at both Marathon and Half Marathon distances (Masters running is anyone over 35 and grades in 5 year age groups, so I am now in the 70-75 age group.) I combined my passions for writing and running in a book a friend and I put together called Running Stories . All our profits go to The Running Charity who work with homeless young people.”
Jerry is now a Director of Positive News, an initiative that focuses on constructive journalism, aiming to highlight positive events and solutions in the world. Unlike traditional media, it provides a morale boost by showing positive and constructive responses to global issues, encouraging individual contributions and proactive solutions.
“Positive News was founded by Shauna Crockett-Burroughs. She started it because she felt that the mainstream media was so negative and depressing and overlooked a lot of the very positive stuff that wasn’t getting coverage. She produced a free broadsheet newspaper, which she was giving away. She died in 2012 and left a legacy to help keep it going. The current CEO took it over and transformed it into a paid-for magazine, which is published four times a year and costs £30 for an annual subscription. It’s a beautifully produced magazine with a free website. He realised that eventually the money would run out so he launched a crowdfunding campaign that raised a quarter of a million pounds. Everybody who contributed to the crowdfunding became a shareholder of the business so today it is a Community Benefit Society, a form of social enterprise.
“Positive News adds one more constructive question to the end of the story and that is: What next?”
I got involved on the board in a pro-bono role to help them with the strategy to grow the business to reach break even then begin to make a small profit – and after five years, that’s where we are. The mission is to show people that although there are many terrible things going on in the world, that isn’t the only side of the story – there’s an awful lot of good stuff going on. I think that is important.
Thousands of people have sent in emails, text messages, Instagram messages, and letters saying how much difference Positive News makes to their mental health, how it lifts them and their view of themselves in the world, increasing their optimism about what they as individuals can do, rather than listening to the repetitive negativity of the mainstream media. Positive News doesn’t take a political stance. However, it is broadly aligned with a progressive point of view; it is pro sustainability. It focuses on stories about how we can combat inequality; contribute to social justice; aid efforts to mitigate and deal with climate change
Positive News reaches about 3 million people, which is huge for an organisation with just seven employees. Many people sign up to receive the free weekly emails, they look at the website, they buy the magazine, they donate money as a regular monthly supporter, and everyone says how much they value it. No one has ever said to me, ‘I don’t like it.’ We had a real boost under COVID, our subscriptions shot up because people were feeling so miserable they wanted to get another view of things that could boost their morale, and we’ve retained those subscriptions. We gave away 9,000 free copies to NHS workers during the pandemic.
“The world is a small place and the more people who live in countries which have a strong civil society with the rule of law, freedom of speech, equality of people regardless of race, sex, gender, the safer we all are.”
Normal journalism asks: Who? What? Where? When? Why? These are the five questions to cover a story if you’re a journalist and if you’re reporting about things like the Ukraine or the Sudan crisis. But Positive News adds one more constructive question to the end of the story and that is: What next? What is the solution to this? We want to find positive solutions, for example reporting on people in the Amazon Forest or Ukraine and addressing finding solutions themselves. Last year we won an award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Solutions Journalism Award. We’ve used the money to pay for a number of articles around mental health in the developing world. We recently launched a limited series podcast on the same issue . We’re also growing our marketing into a much bigger part of what we do so we can spread the word.
I think the tone of the news is a difficult one to balance because it is obviously important that everybody realises how hugely threatening issues like climate change are for how we all live. Recent information in the press that top climate scientists think we’re going to get up to three degrees higher warming and the consequences of that for mass migrations, famines and flooding is vital – we need to know this is coming down the line, and not just pretend we can all carry on as normal, without getting depressed about it. We need to move rapidly into relaying the message: it’s already happening so how do we mitigate it? How do we stop doing all the things to avoid it getting even worse? We can make life good, but only if we all wake up and act quickly. Individuals can and should do their bit, but we absolutely need the leaders of government and large corporations to take the lead on this because that’s how large-scale change happens. It’s incredibly easy to turn the news off after a while because it can make you feel really depressed. Honestly, reading Positive News makes you feel the opposite.
I first came across the Centre for Applied Human Rights many years ago, and gave some money because I think that protecting human rights defenders who are active on the frontline is both the moral thing to do and in our own self-interest. We could be next to be under threat. The world is a small place and the more people who live in countries which have a strong civil society with the rule of law, freedom of speech, equality of people regardless of race, sex, gender, the safer we all are. I try to imagine what it would be like if we had to live without those basic rights, and I feel in awe of those who are fighting for them under incredibly difficult conditions in their own country. I feel we are protected by what they’re doing.
It is a way those with the means – time or money – can make a positive influence on the community we live in. Everyone has different values and different interests, and each of us can have an effect by giving money to something that strikes us as important. Our donations can have a wave or snowball effect. By giving money to a charity, university or social enterprise that you feel conforms with your values, you’re helping them achieve their mission, so you’re being a catalyst to make more happen. That feels good. Philanthropists can be enablers, directly helping people and things they think matter. It is a way of giving back, and of recognising that we are all part of a wide community where some of us are better placed than others.”
Together, with your support, we can make a difference. Find out more and how you can support the York Sanctuary Fund to help individuals who are fleeing conflict, war or persecution.
