Quaff Fine Wine Merchant was founded in 2005 as the brainchild of Toby Peirce.  Toby’s early adulthood was spent playing professional cricket, and this took him to Stellenbosch in South Africa in the English winters.  Here he played cricket, coached schoolchildren, met his wife, and drank an intemperate amount of wine with the sporting sons of local producers and growers.  This inevitably led to a career in wine when cricket finished, and Toby worked for a UK-based agent for a leading Champagne house, selling to the likes of everyone from Gordon Ramsay to Tesco.  Having gleaned enough from this experience to set out on his own, he opened the first Quaff in Portland Road, Hove in 2005.  The second shop was opened in early 2010 in partnership with Ronnie Janssen who has been immersed in the wine trade since he turned 18, having worked for the likes of Moet et Chandon, Lanson, Penfolds, and Lapostolle where he currently works.

Nowadays we supply our customers with wines, mostly from small producers, that they won’t find in other shops.  We don’t have a regional specialty.  We don’t try to be overtly organic or biodynamic, although we find that a lot of our wines by coincidence tend to be made with less intervention in the winemaking process, and are thus more ‘natural’.  Our aim is that regardless of style, region, colour or price point, we are offering you the best product available.  We taste hard and often to ensure this is so.  Each wine should be an archetype of that style; typical of the region, the vintage and showing the passion of the producer. We offer what we consider to be benchmark examples so that you are safe in the knowledge that what you are drinking is as it should be.  The vast majority of our work is done by listening carefully to you, the customer, and making a recommendation accordingly, and we take this skill as seriously as selecting the wines themselves.

Come and try us out.

Toby Peirce

It’s all his idea. If you have an issue with anything at Quaff, please complain to [email protected]. He will listen carefully and then most likely pass it smoothly on to Matt to fix.

Matt Smith

Matt joined us in the summer of 2013 having previously spent a couple of years at the mighty Hedonism wine shop in London, and another London-based wholesaler.  Matt’s our resident lifelong B&H Albion fan, meaning that a North Stand Chat page can usually be found open at all times on one or other of the screens at the shop.

Sam Denyer

Sam arrived with us in the Fiveways store during the period around lockdown, as a helpful part-timer. With a background in retail management, much of what we do came naturally to him anyway. Over the years Sam has worked more and more for us, in between his regular trips to Brighton Boulder to sustain his rock-climbing habit. Sam’s wine knowledge has improved with regular visits to London tasting events, as well as doing his WSET exams, and when Sarah left after a decade with us, Sam was the obvious choice to take over as manager.

Felix Lehmann

Felix is something of a wine trade lifer, having been in the trade since the early 2000s when he was in the vanguard of the best managers at Majestic. This was back in the days when Majestic trained their staff properly, so he knows his stuff. Originally an Aussie, he’s settled here now and when he moved from London to Brighton in 2018 we employed him in part-time.  He left for a full-time role elsewhere, but as soon as a job became available with us recently, he jumped at the chance to rejoin and we were delighted to have him back! Felix also works closely with Sam, mostly at Fiveways.

Jamie Addison

Jamie is a part-timer at Fiveways; he’s helping us at evenings and weekends, and we’re helping him get through his PHD in English Lit at Sussex University!  However it turns out he is also pretty knowledgeable about wine; his family are fanatics. When his PhD finishes, a career in the trade beckons…

Maxim Taite-Ellis

Maxim is a recent joiner, mostly to our Portland Road shop, coming from the Brighton on-trade where the hours are long and the pay irregular! As is a bit of a must for us, though, he arrives with all his WSET exams in place and is already finding his way around our wine selection very quickly. He isn’t full-time yet, as he spends many evenings and weekends roaming across the UK and Europe with his band, but when he’s here, he’s a regular font of knowledge. It looks as if Maxim will become our main wine tasting host as well, so expect to meet him there if you ever attend.