Carole Bryon was running a top London wine shop when she noticed a frustrating pattern. Customers looking for advice would routinely bypass her in favour of her male colleagues, even when she was the most senior person in the room.
It happened when she switched over to restaurants too, with many – typically male – guests assuming that as a young woman she didn’t know her Pouilly-Fumé from her Pouilly-Fuissé.
As she became more immersed in the wine world, Bryon realised the problem extended far beyond the point of sale. Women were also marginalised and underrepresented further up the supply chain, with their contribution even more likely to go unrecognised in vineyards and wineries.
Rather than simply accept the status quo, she decided to challenge it. The result was Lady of the Grapes, the natural wine bar she launched in Covent Garden in 2018 and which today sources its entire wine list from female producers.
“Akin to slavery”
“In France, a lot of vineyards are run by a husband and wife, but the man tends to get most of the attention while the woman works unpaid and raises the kids. In some extreme cases, it’s akin to slavery. It’s a very traditional industry,” says Bryon, who grew up in a small countryside village between Paris and Normandy.
Bryon came to hospitality relatively late. Having loved art and painting from a young age, she initially pursued a career in advertising, working for eight years as an art director, first in Paris and latterly in London for McCann.
“I went into advertising in order to monetise my interest in art. It was an exciting industry in the 1990s, with people doing artistic work, but by the time I started my career it had become very commercial. I decided to jack it all in and fulfil my dream of opening a wine bar.”
Already knowledgeable about wine, Bryon studied WSET up to Diploma level while building up her practical experience. She worked at an organic-focused wine shop in Shoreditch and at Terroirs, the now-closed Covent Garden restaurant that was among the pioneers of natural wine in London.
“This was about 15 years ago. It was a very exciting time for natural wine in London because it was just beginning. It was really only Terroirs and Sager + Wilde that were serving it,” Bryon explains.
“It was a very challenging product to build a business around back then, so I have a huge amount of respect for them. It was difficult to import natural wine into the UK, and I remember pouring cloudy sauvignon blanc for people and getting some very funny looks.”
A key role in shaping what the wine is like
It took Bryon nearly five years from leaving advertising to opening Lady of the Grapes. The original 72sq m site was deliberately modest, allowing her to keep close control of the business as she established the concept.
To make the list at Lady of the Grapes, a woman must have an influence over the liquid itself. This doesn’t preclude a husband-and-wife-run operation, Bryon explains. “The woman must have a key role in shaping what the wine is like. It wouldn’t be someone who is perhaps working in exports or communications. That’s not to say those roles aren’t important, though. And it’s not necessarily about ownership; it could be a domaine that employs a female winemaker, for example.”
Do female winemakers approach their craft differently to men? “They are more likely to take an organic or natural approach. They care more about the planet and its future,” she says. “But other than that, I don’t think women make wine any differently to men. Some people say women make wines that are more feminine, but I’m not sure what that means. I don’t think it’s a helpful term, especially when there is so much other vocabulary available to describe wine.”
Bryon says things are slowly improving. Wine made by women can now be found everywhere, with her Covent Garden restaurant’s 600-reference list featuring wines from 20 different countries, ranging from the obvious to the much less so.
Interestingly, the areas in which great female-made wines are most likely to be found include former communist countries such as Georgia, Armenia, Moldova and Ukraine, where women have a long history of working alongside men in vineyards and wineries, even if they were not necessarily the people whose names appeared on the bottle. As independent wine industries have re-emerged, that established female participation has helped create a relatively deep pool of women producers.
Conversely, the regions where female winemakers are least well represented tend to be the more traditionally minded ones, with Bryon pointing to Rioja as an obvious example.
Crossing the river
Earlier this summer, Bryon launched a second, far larger Lady of the Grapes site just south of Borough Market on Southwark Street. At 300 sqm compared to the original’s 72 sqm, the two-storey, Grade II-listed Victorian building within the Menier Chocolate Factory is effectively two venues in one. Upstairs is a 60-cover restaurant with a 20-seat terrace, while the basement is home to Forbidden Fruit, a speakeasy-style 45-cover wine bar offering charcuterie alongside the broader Lady of the Grapes wine list.
With so much more space, Bryon has been able to double down on the food side of the business.
“The original site has a very small kitchen, so the menu is tiny, but I really wanted to serve food because in France it’s very unusual to drink wine without food. I was the chef for a long time at Covent Garden but I knew I needed someone else overseeing that side of things if I wanted to expand.”
Around a year ago, she employed Matyáš Plzák, who has an impressive CV having previously worked at a string of Michelin-starred London restaurants including Frog by Adam Handling and Mãos.
The menu takes a modern French bistro approach, combining classical French techniques and dishes with seasonal British produce. Snacks and starters include gougères with Époisses béchamel and pissaladière on toasted sourdough with caramelised onions, olives and Cantabrian anchovies, while larger dishes include Gloucester pork chop with boudin noir and roasted flat white peach.
There is also a focus on larger dishes for the table, including whole barbecued turbot with béarnaise sauce and whole Sladesdown duck ‘aux olives’ with cherries and spring greens.
Working with small vineyards
The wine list at the new site is currently shorter than the original Lady of the Grapes due to cash-flow constraints, at around 400 references, but Bryon intends for it eventually to surpass the 600-reference list in Covent Garden.
“At both our places, a little less than half the list is French, mostly because I’m French and it is the country I know best. We have a little New World, but it’s mostly Old World. We work mainly with small vineyards, so when a cuvée is finished, it’s finished, and sometimes we need to wait for the next vintage.”
Lady of the Grapes also imports directly from 10 domaines, wholesales wine to other restaurants and operates its own direct-to-consumer online sales channel.
The Southwark opening is a significant step up for Bryon, but she acknowledges that its location presents a different set of challenges to Covent Garden.
“It’s a very different location to Covent Garden. Lunch is quite quiet at the moment. We get custom from the theatre in the evening. Saturdays and Sundays are quiet, and Fridays too. We hope we eventually get the pull from Borough Market; that is the plan. We’re encouraged by the good places that have opened close to us, including Pyro and Oudh 1722.”
Lady of the Grapes was always intended to become a multi-site business, but those ambitions were slowed by the pandemic and its impact on Bryon’s cash reserves. It then became a question of finding the right site and rebuilding sufficient cash flow to make another opening possible.
For now, however, the focus is firmly on establishing Southwark. “It’s going well, but I won’t be opening another restaurant any time soon.”