About Us

“Lanchester Wine Cellars Ltd initially took 85,000 sq ft of warehouse space…”

The Lanchester Group comprises three companies, each with very different specialities, but constantly working together providing a truly unique service for our customers.

The first company to be started and incorporated was Lanchester Wine Cellars Ltd in 1980. It imported and sold wines from Europe to businesses in the north of England. This soon grew to importing wines from all over the world and we now specialise in New World wines. As the company grew the customer base grew to all over Great Britain and we now export to countries as far apart as China and Sweden. We have moved from being a pure wine importer to a totally vertical supply chain operator.

To house the expansion in business we opened our first bonded warehouse in 1990, a 40,000 sq ft unit in Philadelphia, near Washington, Tyne and Wear. At the same time we bought The Old Court House, the largest building in Lanchester, which still holds the village Library to this day, and moved into the office suites on the first floor. This wasn’t an ideal scenario, with our warehouse and offices 15 miles apart. We continued to grow and so decided to look for a new home in 1999, where our whole business could operate on the same site. In 2000, we found Greencroft Industrial Estate. It was far too big for our needs at 450,000 sq ft site but it was in the area where we wanted to operate from being only 1½ miles from Lanchester. This meant that our office staff didn’t need to travel too far.

Greencroft Site

Sitting on 25 acres, the Greencroft site is in rural County Durham and is split into 24 units. There were some short term tenants when we made the purchase.

As we wanted to keep the site running and to facilitate the purchase Lanchester Properties Ltd was set up. We see this very much as an investment company which we have set up to run the site.

We now have only two units available to lease and have used income from the site to make improvements. Since we moved we have upgraded the roads and completely re-roofed all of the warehouse space.

More importantly we have a home for Lanchester Wine Cellars where the company is all under one roof and a lot easier to manage.

Lanchester Wine Cellars Ltd initially took 85,000 sq ft of warehouse space. Even this seemed far bigger than we needed but as time went on we grew into it with continued growth.

In 2001 Lanchester bought Parverre Marketing from David Batten, an entrepreneur and innovator who we were very pleased decided to stay on and run the bag in box operation. This business supplied mainly on trade with 10 litre bag in box wines for sale by the glass. It was a very successful company and under our umbrella gained advantages of storage, transportation and sales and marketing. In 2008 we incorporated it into Lanchester when David decided to retire.

Moving Forward

Two years later we bought the small bottle business of H&A Ltd. of Preston and the same year began one of our major new companies, Greencroft Bottling Company Ltd. This worked perfectly as we now had the facilities to bottle our own 187ml bottles for the business we just bought.

Greencroft has moved from strength to strength. A classic J curve business i.e. lots of funding going in at the start, breaking even and now moving strongly into profitable territory in the last 18 months.

Greencroft has been a huge success and is still expanding with new equipment and staff all the time. As we had control of the space on the site we were able to allocate a separate unit to Greencroft Bottling Company and we now, as a group, occupy the 3 largest units on the site. It is mainly bonded space, totalling 240,000 sq ft.

In 2008 we built our state of the art new office block as a headquarters to all Lanchester Group. It was constructed with green issues in mind, using an air source heat pump and high spec lighting and heating, all designed to conserve energy. Fully equipped with a tasting room, kitchen, meeting rooms and board room as well as a welcoming reception atrium displaying many of our products, the space is used by all Lanchester Group businesses and employees. It was designed to enable us to entertain customers and suppliers in surroundings that are bright and comfortable with some of the most amazing views in the county.

After 30 years in business, Lanchester has developed in huge strides from its beginnings and we are all very proud of the progress and accomplishments made over those years.