No booze, no lose: Meet the founders drinking to an alcohol-free future

0:11Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. On today's programme, we're looking at the booming non-alcoholic drinks market. First, we'll hear from the co-founder of a new house out of Edinburgh, making alcohol-free sparkling cuvee with an entirely new production process.

0:33Lucy Isles:We came to market when we perfected what we needed to perfect and when we'd created something that we knew that you couldn't find anywhere else.

0:42Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:And later we'll head to Murano to meet the founder of a non-alcoholic craft brewery in the beautiful Italian Alps. A lot of producers here in South Tyrol are producing great wines, great beers, great grappas. It's just the same for us. We just love producing nice drinks. Just ours do not have alcohol in it. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:12Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Lucy Isles is the co-founder of Sablier, an independent house creating 0 % sparkling cuvées, which launched earlier this year. After a career in finance, Lucy left the corporate world to pursue a lifelong entrepreneurial ambition, inspired by a dream of one day owning a vineyard. She founded the business alongside Kim Wilson, a sort of drinks alchemist, whose background in beverage development includes helping to create brands like Seedlib and Malfi Gin. Lucy stopped by Midori House for her taste testing and to discuss what it takes to launch a luxury drinks business with very global ambitions.

1:53Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:Lucy began by telling me about her passion for bubbles.

1:57Lucy Isles:Champagne has always been my drink of choice. I guess my dream from the very beginning was to build a vineyard. That was always what I wanted. I think it comes from trips as a kid with my family going to Tuscany in France and experiencing the magic that is a vineyard from a young age. life took me somewhere very different. I ended up studying international relations at St. Andrews and I literally fell into finance. I guess there's no other way to describe it than that. But looking back, I think it was a fabulous, almost apprenticeship for building a company to experience that world. I found myself meeting some extraordinary minds, CEOs, astronauts, authors.

2:42Lucy Isles:And I think this was part of the reason in forming Sabley Air is that I noticed there was a theme in all of these people when I met them. They all chose not to drink. And I think it made me start thinking, what do they know that I don't? And I'm a highly competitive person. So I really delved into that. And it started me reflecting on my own relationship with alcohol, and then also kind of spotting trends globally, thinking about where the world is moving. And ultimately, what I saw was that while everyone was focusing on removing alcohol, no one was thinking about building emotion, building artistry, building essentially creation into the 0 % space.

3:24Lucy Isles:So that was really the seed of a sampler.

3:28Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:And I think that's a really important distinction to make, because there's something different about the craft and obviously about the process, but about the intentionality of not saying, OK, we've got a product we like, how do we get it from A to B? But to bring that intention right to the beginning. This sounds, Lucy, like one of those conversations with skilled winemakers where straight from the bat they'd say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely. It's impossible. Or maybe someone could do it, but it won't be me, etc., etc. Were those the kind of conversations that you had?

4:00Lucy Isles:Yeah, I mean, I don't think we ever wanted to take something that was perfect in a wine and strip it of the essence and then pump it full of something else. That never excited me. That didn't feel like creation. And that's ultimately what I really wanted to do. I think it's one thing to kind of have this idea, right, to be like, why don't we just start with a blank sheet of paper and then reimagine the whole thing? It's another thing entirely to find somebody to actually help you do it, because I am not a technical person, even though I would love to be. And it was really finding my co-founder, Kim Wilson, who is our maker, who was willing to take the risk with me and to look at that blank sheet of paper and literally try and reimagine what it could look like.

4:47Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:now we've spoken to some of the great english uh sparkling wine makers obviously their story goes back to these blind tests and suddenly and obviously i guess the changes in climate are kind of helping and so on and so forth and there's more brands now in norfolk where i spend a lot of time which wouldn't even have been plausible maybe even like 20 years ago possibly this is a house born in scotland not necessarily what people where people would go right if they're thinking about sparkling wine. Is it also a, I don't know, particularly a necessarily Scottish brand, would you say?

5:22Lucy Isles:No, and I'm very, I'm a proud Scot, although... I only know that kind. Well, I'm a first generation Scot. Yeah, I mean, my family are all English and I grew up in Scotland, I went to school in Scotland, I went to university in Scotland, paid all my taxes in Scotland, and my co-founder is Scottish. We are building our cuvées and our cuvery in Edinburgh, and that is extremely important to us. And contributing back to the Scottish economy is absolutely a key reason and drive for me as well to start a business. However, I think that's really the limit of our Scottishness. We are wanting to create a global business and we are almost predetermined to create that from the start.

6:05Lucy Isles:We will get onto, I guess, the details of our cuvées, but we're not working with grapes. We deliberately chose, I think grapes are predestined to make alcohol, right? So why would you then think to take something that powers alcohol is going to power zero percent? We start with very different foundations, tea, apples, honey and verjus. Tea, you cannot necessarily source in the UK. There is one fabulous tea estate in Scotland, in Perthshire, who we hope to collaborate with longer term. It's driven by the terroir and that plays a huge influence, as is the case with grapes, in terms of its flavour and the way it's processed and harvested, etc.

6:41Lucy Isles:So, yeah, there was just no way in which we could make that fully Scottish. Equally the same is the case within one of our other ingredients, verjus. There's only one real supplier of that currently in the UK who we're collaborating with. And equally as well, the specific varietals that we wanted to achieve with apples, which is another one of our ingredients, again, restricted in terms of the terroir. So, yeah, it's always been in terms of both the provenance of the ingredients as well as also, I guess, who we are seeking to attract in terms of our customers and clients, a global business from the beginning.

7:16Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:Well, what I think we should do, I want to ask you a bit more about the brand because, again, Sablier doesn't scream Scotland. So the clues were there about its internationalism. While I ask you about that, I think we're going to do a little bit of tasting. You can open the bottle, Lucy, literally right whilst we speak. It's lovely to have these beautiful sounds. One of my favourite sounds, indeed, the popping of corks while we chat. So talk to me about this brand, because, of course, it takes its name from this sort of Parisian salon culture, which speaks not only, I guess, to the influence of French sparkling, but also to that same thing about the international grounding of the business.

7:53Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:Ah, beautiful. Tell us about the brand identity, if you like.

7:57Lucy Isles:Absolutely.

7:57Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:And do feel free to pour me a glass of tea.

8:00Lucy Isles:Here we are.

8:01Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:That's a thing of beauty.

8:02Lucy Isles:So, Sablier came from my research into one of our key ingredients, tea being the phenolic backbone of our cuvées. I was reading a history of tea and came upon Madame de la Sablier there. She's this 17th century salinaire who brought so many minds from different disciplines together to create new ideas and push society forward. And was actually known for tea innovation, hence why she was in a book about history about tea. In the 17th century, they used to put salt and saffron in tea instead of milk, and she started that trend. And so there were multiple things that kind of reflecting the multidisciplinary kind of nature of her and the salons that she hosted that really reflected the very deep research and development process of Sableir.

8:46Lucy Isles:So we went all across the world and spoke to so many different people from a winemaker, Bruce Jack in South Africa, a microbiologist in Denmark, a tea master in Nepal who's been extraordinarily helpful for us. And we even were at one stage in talking with people in California about nanobubble technology. So it's literally been a fusing. Didn't make it easy for yourself?

9:07Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:No, didn't.

9:08Lucy Isles:Really didn't. Didn't want that at all. So, yeah, it really reflected that nature of how we've went about creating these cuvées. and then I guess perhaps as significantly as the fact that it's named after a woman and this is an all-female-founded, funded and run company. So it felt like a nice nod to that as well.

9:29Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:Okay, well, I have my guess. I've been getting some no's. Tell me what I'm looking for here because I think there's definitely that sort of, I don't know how to describe it, there is that tea note, that kind of dryness. There's definitely apples. it has that slight nose of the you know with the sort of there's very unfiltered ciders almost but let's have a little taste i'm going to sort of sluice it around forgive me listeners it may

9:54Lucy Isles:be disgusting to listen to but you've got to do it what we started with was the sensory map of the great sparkling wine so we looked at a runar blanc blanc and a charles eidzique rosé in order to map out our first two cuvées. And we really wanted to understand, you know, the sensory experience, the aroma, the acidity, the length, the fine carbonation, and how in which we could go about recreating those, but from the ground up, rather than starting with something and having to strip it back. So tea in this cuvée, this is a blend of white teas that we source from Nepal and China. And they give that really delicate note, but also that length.

10:34Lucy Isles:A lot of non-alcoholic beverages are very flash in the pan, you get the taste and then it's gone. Whereas this lingers in the mouth kind of like a fine wine does, which the tea is allowing us to contribute there. Then the mid palate is contributed from the verjus and that allows for a delicate acidity. The body is contributed by fermented apple. In this case it's a Cox apple. In the Rosé we use Kentish Kiss apples, which are very beautiful and allow for the blushness. And then it's finished with this very delicate aroma that you get from honey, which we distill. So it allows for sweetness, but without a sugary weight, which again, I think is quite unique.

11:11Lucy Isles:We wanted to create a dry product, which is unusual, I think, in non-alc, because most are stripping alcohol out and putting sugar in. And then the hardest part, if any of that wasn't hard enough, is these bubbles. We do everything in-house, the research and development, production, the bottling, and this bubble creation, which, you know, we worked enormously hard to achieve. It's very difficult to do when you're not doing secondary fermentation because this is a zero zero product we had many explosions in the lab and but we've been able to achieve the same carbonation as the champagne which were huge

11:45Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:it's very good it's on the tongue it's very very sparkling whiny and there's a lovely i think as you said that sort of mid palette it's like poached a poached pear pudding coming through and it but it's it's kind of refreshing lethal i could well imagine polishing off a few of those And it has that incredible effect. I don't know what the association is, but I feel instantly a little flush of face, which just goes to show what a good job it does at sort of bringing that sparkling wine celebratory kind of mood in a glass. And a very fine glass, I should say. Good choices. Thank you.

12:20Lucy Isles:Well, I mean, I think every little detail is important, right? It's the priming of the experience to give you the feeling like you're having something that is, you know, worthy. I feel like the amount of detail and effort that we've gone into, you know, from embossing of our foils with our house motto in Ritinovo to, you know, the symbol of the mark being the embroidery of Madame de la Sablier's dress. It's every little thing, you know, to the cork having her emblem. It's all these little moments that make you feel special.

12:51Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:And I think, look, Mishnah accomplished. Talk to me a little bit about the process because it was funny. We were actually chatting before we started taping. And a thing I consistently marvel at with entrepreneurial folk, particularly those we speak to on the Entrepreneurs' Programme, is even once you've found, I don't know whether it's a gap in the market or an area where you see potential, what is the process by which you believe you can kind of insert yourself into that realm to good effect? Is it a mix of, I guess, confidence, curiosity, bloody-mindedness, stubbornness? Because I think often people identify possible avenues of opportunity, but something holds them back.

13:31Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:Reluctance, maybe a lack of confidence, whatever it might be. You took the plunge with Kim. Why? What was, I don't know, how did you get over the line and get started on the journey?

13:42Lucy Isles:It helped that I had it etched into my skin. I got a tattoo on my foot before I joined Bailey Efford, where I was investment manager there. because I knew that I always wanted to do something like this and I didn't want to get trapped in the golden cage. It wasn't entirely effective stopping me from getting trapped.

14:03Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:But you decided to brand yourself early. I branded myself. Just so you could not...

14:07Lucy Isles:Exactly, because I knew that it just wasn't going to satisfy me and it didn't satisfy me. But I was promoted to director of a multi-billion pound asset management company but it didn't make me happy in any way, shape or form. I started to draw the blueprint of Sablier in COVID, when I think a lot of people were dreaming about what life could be. I drove my husband mad with just thinking about, like, I need to make this leap. How do I do it? And ultimately, the market turned, the performance turned, and I was caught up in restructuring. And I was then, I guess, gifted the funds to be able to do this myself.

14:45Lucy Isles:And I think at the time, it didn't feel like a gift. but now I really I am so unbelievably grateful because I've been able to be our sole angel investor and to have that freedom that creative freedom to take time to fail to take time to iterate to take time to get to know one another you know Kim was not a friend Kim was introduced to me by a friend of a friend of a friend and going into business with someone is the deepest I think relationship you could ever seek to have in your life. And, you know, it was really valuable to be able to be building this for what I see to be a legacy. Like we want to create a house of 0%.

15:23Lucy Isles:We want this to go beyond us in years to come. We're not doing this for a short term gain in a quick turnaround. So not having myopic timelines or external investors say, in three years time, I need X or you need to come to market now. We came to market when we were, we had perfected what we needed to perfect and when we'd created something that we knew that you couldn't find anywhere else. And I guess arguably, you know, one of the biggest factors in this was also meeting Kim. I mean, as soon as I met her, I was completely captivated. You know, she is the yin to my yang. What she does, I couldn't do and vice versa.

15:58Lucy Isles:I'd describe her as the alchemist because she just has a really kind of scarily mystical, intuitive understanding of flavor and sensory compositions of things that can go together because so many people ask us like how did you get how did you know these four ingredients would come together to create this and a lot of it was science but so much of it was her leaning on her experience and me giving her the space and to create essentially it's beautiful um talk about

16:29Maria-Elisabeth Laimer:just maybe finally sort of then that process of coming to market you're in i guess what sort of hand-picked places that reflect the same values that same interest in every detail in the curatorial process in valuing those moments those very specific moments and again maybe because of the structure of business and your setup you can afford to be more discriminating about that but tell me about that journey and how you want this product its product in the end to find its market and to find its consumers.

17:00Lucy Isles:Absolutely. So we were very fortunate early on that the Roqueforte hotel group in Ross Sneddon, who's an executive pastry chef, took an interest in us. I met him very early in the journey when we were still imagining potentially my mum turning the champagne bottles in one of the outbuildings of her house, which is a crazy thing to think that that was even a possibility at that stage. But he believed in us. And then he believed in us so much that he introduced us to the wider Rock 48 team and Adam Byatt and Adam Sawyer and Andrew Sawyer and Vitica Temeppa. And these are the leading minds and palettes in the industry.