Hove
Phone : 01273 820 320
Email : sales@quaffwine.com
Quaff Fine Wine Merchant
139-141 Portland Road
Hove BN3 5QJ
Find us on the right (as you leave Hove towards Portslade), just after St Peter’s Church. Opening Hours: Monday-Saturday 10am-8pm / Sunday 11am-6pm
Ask for Toby or Matt
Brighton
Phone: 01273 553 353
Email: fiveways@quaffwine.com
Quaff 2 Ltd
5 King’s Parade
Ditchling Road
Brighton BN1 6JT
Find us 100 metres north of the intersection of Preston Drove and Ditchling Road (the ‘Fiveways’ junction). Opening Hours: Monday – Saturday 10am-8pm / Sunday 11am-6pm.
Ask for Sam or Felix
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 toby@quaffwine.com. 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 joined the team at the start of 2025. He has 25 years’ experience in the wine trade having started soon after arriving from his native Australia. He rose through Majestic quickly to manage some of their most prestigious stores in London, before relocating with his family to Brighton, where after a brief part-time stint with us, he left for a full-time role at another local wine shop, where he added a strong spirits base to his wine background . When we put the call out for a full time manager, he jumped at the chance and rejoined us! Felix is based at Fiveways but also works at Hove.
Maxim Taite-Ellis
Maxim arrived from a local wine bar where he ran the show, while also moonlighting as a musician. Both journeys continue with us and he has gone from a part-time to full-time role, and has also studied his WSET Diploma. In between gigs and working at Quaff, Maxim also loves to get up to London and keep his knowledge current at regular tasting events, which can only be good for us!
Ying Fan
Ying joined us last year. While she has a background in Chinese Medicine, Ying arrived in the UK in 2017 and has since had a career shift into the wine trade. During brief stint at Majestic, she started her WSET education journey and has continued while working with us. She has just completed her studies for level 3 WSET Diploma, and spends a whole lot of time in London at tastings, updating her knowledge and thus helping us stay current with changing trends in wine.
