A toast to the Wine Society

Ask any group of consumers to name the UK’s most enduringly successful mutual enterprise and they will probably point to the Co-op or the Nationwide building society. But there’s a cognoscenti who will come up with a different answer: a business that operates from giant sheds beside a railway track at Stevenage. It is the Wine Society, now celebrating its 150th year.

Back in 1874, a quantity of Portuguese wine lay in the cellars of the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington, shipped there for an International Exhibition but overlooked and unsold. After the Portuguese shippers complained, a series of tasting lunches was organised – by Major General Henry Scott, one of the architects of the hall and the secretary to its commissioners, and Brudenell Carter, an ophthalmic surgeon – with a view to shifting the stock. From there grew the idea of the International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society, founded to import good wines direct from growers and sell them to members at the lowest possible prices.

A co-operative is an association through which a common economic need is satisfied by a jointly owned enterprise with no third-party shareholders; mutual societies, mostly engaged in lending and insurance, do the same thing.