About Us

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 speciality.  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@quaffit.com. He will listen carefully and then most likely pass it smoothly on to Fabien to fix.

Fabien Lemarchand

Fabien has a highly skilled background of a decade’s experience spent as Head Sommelier at such luminary Michelin-starred establishments as Hakkasan and Gary Rhodes’ restaurants. He eventually became worn down by the hours, especially when he moved with his wife (then girlfriend) to the coast where she’d just got a job running Jamie Oliver’s new place (more name dropping, clang). Thus he came to work with us in 2008. Fab’s foodie background means that if you are in need of a recommendation to match with your meal, he will tell you not just the wine you need, but will also lecture you on the method and temperature of serving, and what’s missing from your recipe. Fabien is French. His Gallic charms are in high demand. However, being French, his wife is younger, taller, blonder, thinner and better looking than him.

Rob Harwood

Rob is our resident musician. He writes, sings and plays rather well, and was apparently once in a band that sold 18000 singles. He’s spent most of the last decade hanging out in wine shops, the first two of which both went bust (should we be worried?), chatting to customers about music and perhaps a thing or two about wine along the way. He went to Plumpton College to learn about wine too, many years ago, so he must be quite keen. He supports Crystal Palace, but we keep that very quiet.

Richard Holloway

Richard is the manager of our Brighton shop. He’s come to us having spent eight years at another well known wine merchant. He has taken his shop and used his merchandising experience to turn it into a real Aladdin's cave, not only with the extensive wine range that we stock, but also by introducing a range of local beers and niche whiskies that have really given the Brighton store its own character this year.

Laura Winfield

Laura is our ray of sweetness and light at Brighton. Her winning smile finds her many friends. We’re delighted, on the whole, to have her; the only concern is that the friendliness might be hiding a dark secret. If she is hiding something, though, we haven’t found out and we’re not about to ask. Laura is studying Wine Business at Plumpton College in her spare time.

Ian Gaunt

Ian has worked for ever in wine shops around Brighton; however, in a moment of madness in late 2009 he signed up for the Viticulture and Vinification course at Plumpton. This presumably means that when he graduates he’ll find somewhere sunnier and drier than Brighton to go and be a winemaker. In the meantime, if he arrives for work from a shift in the vineyards, we have to brush him down and de-twig him a bit, but otherwise he’s great. Only approach this man for a recommendation if you're happy to be buried in PH levels and malolactic fermentation, though.