Celebrating 200 years of Ellis Wines at the Royal Opera House
Last Wednesday marked a special day for us here at Ellis Wines. We brought together over 80 producers from all over the world, to the Royal Opera House, in the heart of London’s Covent Garden.
Here, we celebrated a momentous achievement of 200 years of our family business. After a two-year hiatus, it was wonderful to bring our staff, producer partners and customers together to celebrate with us at our portfolio tasting. We had 1264 bottles (give or take) of wine in the room being poured into almost 6,000 glasses; tasted and enjoyed by all.
Over 300 hours of planning went into the day, with all department’s hands on to make it a success. From organising the venue, catering, designing invites and a tasting booklet with a whopping 108 pages, to booking out, loading, delivering, and unloading over 4 tonnes of wine and equipment. We packed over 700 goody bags, which included a miniature Badachro gin and a bottle of olive oil from Susanna Crociani – we hand labelled 750 bottles!
Our lovely customers were greeted in the stunning 1858 hall of the Royal Opera House, handed a goody bag, and sent on their way to taste the huge selection of wines available in the Paul Hamlyn Hall. Smiling producers proudly showcased their wines, a mixture of old favourites but also numerous new wines which we’ve recently added to our portfolio. The weather was on our side, thanks to Kai Schubert who told us he’d booked the sun last year, so it was perfect to enjoy lunch with a glass of Chateau d’Esclans Rock Angel on the terrace, overlooking Covent Garden Square.
Having welcomed just over 550 of our wonderful customers throughout the day, it was then time to move on to the second part of our celebration. Our staff and producers enjoyed a well-deserved glass of Chapel Down Vintage Reserve 2019 with a selection of canapés, to the sound of the Weddington Strings, a string quartet - the perfect soundtrack for the Royal Opera House.
Whilst we enjoyed that, an impressive reset of the Paul Hamlyn Hall was taking place. All hands-on deck to set 150 place settings, which included 200 bud vases, an in-house designed menu and 150 hand-written place cards. We then enjoyed four delicious courses, where the poached halibut, girolles, grelot onions, Bluebell Hindleap Classic Cuvée cream seemed to be the evenings’ winner! Our food was perfectly accompanied by Chateau d’Esclans Estate Rosé 2020, Domaine Jean Dauvissat Chablis 2019, Mt Difficulty Pinot Noir 2019 and magnums of Chateau Grand Puy Lacoste 2011. James Ellis made a fabulous speech, which left us feeling extremely proud, along with a few sets of teary eyes. After lots of delicious food, wine and chatter, the night was not over and many of us were excited to hit the dancefloor, so we headed on over to 3 Henrietta Street for our ‘after party’! Let’s just say, we have some dancefloor videos that we’ll keep to ourselves 😉.
To all our producers and customers, thank you for coming along. We had the best time celebrating and we couldn’t be prouder of all our partnerships.
If you have any pictures of the day, we would love you to share them with us via our social media using the #EllisWines200.
