The founder
Twenty years of pouring for people who didn't know why it was good.
I've worked in hospitality my entire career — twenty years in operations, starting as a kitchen porter and finishing as general manager of a five-star hotel in Knightsbridge. Great service isn't about price point. It's about how you make someone feel.
In my final year at university, I became convinced that wine apps didn't reflect how people actually buy wine. They started with the bottle, not the occasion. I had no technical skills in 2014, so I went back to hospitality — but the idea stayed, through a decade of hotel operations, until I eventually moved into technology to build it.
The best wine shops already know their regulars well enough to have that conversation. Coalescence is for the customers who walked in without one.
