We’ve teamed up with Good Energy customer Vintage Roots, the organic wine people, to offer you a free bottle of Giol Prosecco. Available to anyone spending a minimum of £60 with them online or over the phone. Quote GOODFIZZ at the checkout to claim. Offer valid until August 31st.

It was thanks to just £40 a week – the equivalent of state benefit at the time – given to young entrepreneurs under Maggie Thatcher’s ‘Enterprise Allowance Scheme’ that three reggae-loving lads from Reading got Vintage Roots off the ground in the 1980s.

Known today as “the organic wine people”, it all began when some young adventurers, keen for some free booze, and a good tan took a bus, pumping with heavy dub sounds, to the vineyards of France in 1983. Here, the Vintage Roots founders, Pete (who has since moved on), Lance and Neil, met Pierre and Francoise – “quite alternative types, already into ‘organic living’ and belonging to an organic cooperative” – who gave them the names of a few organic vineyards and planted the seeds of a future business.



In 1985, after plans to open a wholefood restaurant in Reading failed, Pete, Lance and Neil packed their bags and their reggae sounds once again, this time into Neil’s old Citroen, and headed for those organic wine producers they’d been told about two summers before. “We certainly weren’t experts,” says Neil. “We’d set up camp, visit growers, taste the wine and bring back samples of what we liked. As we’ve grown we’ve taken on expert tasters, but back then it was just us deciding what did and didn’t work.”



“We’ve now branched out into ciders, spirits, beers and juices but everything’s always been 100% organic and biodynamic. We started out when it was a very fresh concept – ‘is it made from carrots?’ and ‘has it got any alcohol in it?’ were by far the two most commonly asked questions – but we stuck to it because it’s what we believed in and we knew that organic farms made some of the best wines. That first year it was just 15 wines that we flogged to our friends and family from the front room of our terrace in east Reading. We barely made a bean of profit for at least the first five years, but from the mid 1990s sales started to flourish as the organic movement gathered pace.”

Fast forward to today and Vintage Roots is celebrating 25 years in the business with 350 wines on its books. Winning the Specialist Independent Merchant of the Year at the Decanter World Wine Award in 2008 “proved,” says Neil “that organic wines aren’t just better for the environment, they’re better on your dinner table too! It was really important for us to be recognised as more than just an organic wine merchant. Winning that award illustrated what we have known from the beginning – that organic wines really are some of the best there are.” Head to the Vintage Roots Environment page to see what else they’re doing.

With the Vintage Roots summer sale running alongside the Good Energy offer, why not try some of their beverages for yourself? And it wouldn’t be right to not ask a man who spends his days wine tasting for a recommendation. “The Brau Viognier from the Domaine de Brau is a fantastic food wine,” says Neil, “perfect with light salads and quiche. It’s got a classic peachy flavour and an opulent oily mouth feel to it, backed up by a lively, uplifting finish, which keeps you coming back for more.” See their full wine list or order a catalogue.