Rob Seddon, appeared on BBC 2 in a reality tv show called Second Chance Summer, and has started a wine importing business with organics and Italy being the key factors.
Second Chance Summer was about starting a new life on a farm in Tuscany. Rob loved Italy so much he felt he had to start a business which would allow him to stay in the country as much as possible. Rob started Jackson and Seddon, a UK based importer dealing in organic wines. Organic wine growth in the UK was more than five times greater than non-organic wines in 2017.
The business was started by crowd funding, he has no business partner as the name of the company might suggest. Jackson is the name of his dog. The idea originally came to him nearly five years ago, but it wasn’t until his time last year on the tv show that he decided it was possible to make it happen.
The crowd funding idea came into being as Rob wanted to give people the opportunity to pre-order from small runs of wine of outstanding quality. The funding was a huge success and the target set was easily passed.
The farms he buys wine from a small and don’t produce enough wine to be of interested to any of the big importers, they also have little or no money for marketing making running these small farms and creating such good wines very difficult. Rob sees his business as helping these small mainly family owned businesses to make the best wines they can and in turn he is able to sell them to the UK.
With the small quantity produced, the wines on offer vary, but the quality of the wines does not. Having tasted a few of the wines on offer, I have liked them all. There were two wines I particularly liked and were excellent quality.
Forgiadita - 70% Sangiovese 30% Cab Sav. Made in hills behind Siena by a called Nicola who studied to be a lawyer, then after 5 years he gave it all up and took over his grandmother farm and started to produce wines. This is his first real vintage of wines, of which he made 6000 bottles.
Capolino Perlingieri - 100% Fiano from Campania. This is produced by Alexia who now runs the family estate, which took her and her bother over 10 years to buy back, after it had been given away in a mad Italian ‘workers living on the land’ law many years ago. All of the berries are hand selected to offer only the best quality of wine.
Given the over all quality of the wines on offer from Jackson and Seddon, I can’t imagine there will be many people letting their subscriptions slip, and I would thorough recommend having a subscription, whether you already know you like Italian wines and which ones, or if you are wanting to discover something different from Italy.
By Colin -Hampden-White