Surprisingly, Majestic Wine’s boss, Rowan Gormley, is no oenophile. “I can’t taste a wine and go, ‘Oh yeah, limestone versus clay soil’,” he admitted to The Sunday Times three years ago.
The former chief executive of Virgin Wines is, however, a master salesman. In 2015, Gormley, 56, clinched the sale of a lifetime, flogging Naked Wines, his loss-making online business, to Majestic for £70m and becoming boss of the enlarged group.
That deal has left him as Majestic’s third-biggest shareholder. The stock has ricocheted about since 2015, but it has staged a minor recovery over the past year, ending last week at 415p. That values Majestic, founded in 1981, at £291.5m.
A few things have given the retailer a boost: one is that analysts at