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The Fladgate Partnership, owner of the port houses Taylor's, Croft, Fonseca and Krohn, buys the holding company Ideal Drinks and with it wineries in three important Portuguese wine regions. Ideal Drinks, founded in 2010 by Carlos Dias, owns the Quinta da Pedra and Paço da Palmeira wineries in the Minho region, which is known for Vinho Verde. In the Dão, Quinta da Bella and in Bairrada, Quinta Colinas de São Lorenço belong to the group. A total of 200 hectares of vineyards change hands. Dias is the founder of the luxury watch brand Roger Dubuis, which he sold 14 years ago to enter the wine business. He is now giving it up because his daughter and sole heir is not interested in it.
The president and owner of The Fladgate Partnership, Adrian Bridge, who had declared for many years to want to concentrate on port wine production and not to enter wine production, said the opportunity that had arisen by the takeover of Ideal Drinks had been too big to pass it up. Ideal Drinks owns "great brands with exceptional packaging". Moreover, he could take over the stocks, including the Bordeaux blend Principal from Bairrada, which is only released after ten years of storage. As Ideal Drinks does not operate in the Douro, where The Fladgate Partnership owns 500ha of vineyards, there is no internal competition either. Bridge says: "We need all the grapes we have in the Douro to meet the demand for port. That's why we haven't made any Douro table wine." However, he says he has been considering Portuguese wines for some time, as demand from customers is increasing and the many visitors to the warehouses and the World of Wine he founded in Porto also like to drink still wines.
The wines of Ideal Drinks are still hardly known outside Portugal, but could become so with the international distribution network of Taylor Fladgate. About the purchase price, Bridge said only: "The purchase of 200 hectares of prime vineyards and a considerable amount of stock require a good investment."
(al / source: drinksbusiness)