Harvey's Bristol Claret

Bordeaux wine sellers, the middlemen between France's greatest vineyards and the world, acted last week as though they had just sipped sour Medoc. ";We are furious," snapped one. What they were furious about was the prospect of losing their profitable business with Chateau Latour, one of four venerable vineyards* that produce the only chateau-bottled Medoc wines rated as premier grand cru.

In highly secret negotiations, France's Beaumont family, which has owned the vineyard since 1670, is wrapping up the final details of a deal that would give co-ownership of Chateau Latour and its annual output of precious claret to Britain's Harvey's of Bristol Ltd. And as a world-girdling distributor of wine and spirits, Harvey's has no intention of sharing its cup with the middlemen of Bordeaux.

Whisky& Willowy Women. Subject to approval by the Bank of England and the French Ministry of Finance--which so far have declined any public comment on the sale--the 166-year-old British firm plans to put approximately $3,000,000 into Chateau Latour precisely in order to bypass middlemen. Under the driving leadership of George E. McWatters, 40, a fourth-generation descendant of the first John Harvey, Harvey's since World War II has been buttoning up its sources of supply. The company has taken over two prime producers of Portuguese port, has a working agreement with the Spanish sherry house of Zoilo Ruiz Mateos. Last year McWatters took Harvey's into the whisky business by buying out Stewart and Son, a Scotch blender only 35 years younger than Harvey's itself. This spring he heard that control of the 110-acre Latour vineyard on the Gironde might be ready to pick. Active Tory McWatters arranged financing through London's arch-Tory Whitehall Securities Corporation and through Lazard Freres and after a series of quiet trips to France set up his deal under the nose of Baron Elie de Rothschild, who owns the neighboring Chateau Lafite, and also covets Chateau Latour.

Such free-swinging expansion has been the rule at Harvey's since burly George McWatters became chairman in 1956. The ancient Harvey cellars at Bristol, destroyed by Nazi bombers, have been replaced by an above-ground warehouse where untraditional but highly efficient machinery fills, plugs and crates bottles. Though British vintners long considered advertising unseemly, McWatters spends lavishly on full-color ads in which his wines are surrounded with willowy women. To increase sales, he has opened wineshops in British department stores, bought up 60 small liquor shops, and opened a restaurant in Bristol with a wine card listing 1,050 choices. Harvey's of Bristol has even gone public, four years ago sold 800.000 shares to eager buyers who oversubscribed the issue by 500%.

Back to Burgundy. McWatters bases his business strategy on the hard fact that the day is past when wine merchants could live on the custom of a wealthy handful who regarded a cellar as incomplete if it did not include a pipe (126 gallons) of carefully chosen port. Now wine buyers are mostly a modest lot who purchase a few bottles at a time. But there are more of them. Harvey's today exports to 130 countries. Its Bristol Cream, Milk and Dry have one-third of the growing sherry market in the U.S. (where most people assume that Harvey's sells nothing else).

All told, McWatters has boosted Harvey's sales 117% in three years, last year increased its pre-tax profit to $2.500,000. And he has only started. In a move that really will infuriate the Bordeaux wine sellers, Harvey's is planning to move heavily into the European market, ship many of its clarets. Burgundies, hocks, Moselles and champagne right back to the countries that originally produced them.

* The other three: Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, Chateau Margaux and Chateau Haut-Brion, which is owned by the family of U.S. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon.

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