The Big Interview: Adrian Bridge

In tough times, leading a business with 333 years of history lends perspective – and Adrian Bridge, CEO of port producer The Fladgate Partnership, retains a positive, ‘can do’ attitude. Arabella Mileham reports.

As the indefatigable head of Port, table wine, hotel and tourism group The Fladgate Partnership for the last 30 years, Adrian Bridge is responsible for some of the greatest names in Port, including Taylor’s, Fonseca, Croft and Krohn, alongside The Yeatman – the vast luxury hotel and spa on the Douro’s south bank, and the impressive World of Wine in Vila Nova de Gaia.

Bridge is, by his own admission, optimistic by nature and, despite the many challenges in the market today, he sees the silver lining many might miss. “You have to embrace the change and the opportunities to come,” he says. “[The alternative is to] sit right in the middle of the road, wondering which way to jump – and that’s going to be tougher.”

And Bridge has proved that he is more than prepared to put his money where his mouth is. It is now five years since he opened the impressive World of Wine (WOW), a mecca for all things vinous occupying more than 55,000sq m in Vila Nova de Gaia (a city and a municipality of the Porto district), where Port houses historically kept their warehouses for ageing wines.

The site is a neighbour to The Yeatman itself, connected by a two-minute descent down a granite staircase. However, by a stroke of incredibly bad luck, it was ready to open in July 2020, amid the first Covid-19 lockdowns. Five years on (although only three in operational terms, as Bridge points out), has the project delivered on its promise to be “the biggest urban regeneration project in Portugal, if not Europe”?

Regeneration and renewal

According to Bridge, it is well on the way to doing so. The €110 million investment spent on WOW, “which was obviously a very big number”, has stimulated in the region of €750m–€800m of further investment in the historic centre of Gaia, he says.

“That is manifesting itself as new hotels, luxury housing, new restaurants and some degree of new infrastructures,” Bridge explains. This combination will make a big difference to Gaia and its integration with the historic centre of Porto on the other side of the river, as historically, tourists and visitors have been accommodated in hotels on the north side, visiting the Port houses during the daytime, but leaving its restaurants empty at night.

“They might have lunch here, but then they go back to their hotels, get ready for dinner and eat locally. So the World of Wine has always had a bit of a challenge in terms of filling its restaurants at night,” Bridge explains. However, new hotels popping up in Nova de Gaia are helping to address this – for example, the 150-bed Tivoli Kopke Porto Gaia Hotel which opened earlier this year, with more planned.

“In the last five years, you’ve gone from zero to five, and now you’ve got all the major hotel brands looking to get involved in the market,” he explains. Even if only 10%–15% of hotel guests decide to go out to dinner in Gaia, that already boosts the number of customers in each of the seven restaurants inside the World of Wine, driving business while stimulating further investment in the area.

“I wouldn’t want to mislead on the fact that it’s been tough and remains tough, despite having what’s considered the best wine museum in the world at the moment,” Bridge says – emphasising that the project is still very much “in the development phase”.

“We’re still putting the whole space on the map. But the investment in the area is now bearing fruit, and that is bringing customers, so it is a virtuous circle.” Thanks to a new computer system installed in March, it is now possible for tourists to book their tickets to the World of Wine before they arrive in the city.

“Rather than wait until they’ve arrived, we want to get them thinking about coming here in advance, so they can plan it into their programme,” he explains. “It’s getting the word out and getting those tickets sold, and then creating the events and moments that we are doing.”

There has also been a shift in the vintage portfolio, Bridge explains, with the creation in 2024 of Taylors Sentinels Vintage Port, a blended wine sourced from a parcel selection of the firm’s four Pinhão Valley estates: Terra Feita, Junco, Casa Nova and Eira Velha.

Like Taylor’s Single Quinta Vintage Ports, Sentinels is only crafted in years that do not produce a classic Taylor’s Vintage, and this is partly a response to the limits imposed by the beneficio, the quota system that tells each vineyard owner how much of their crop can be used to make Port from each parcel in the Douro Valley. The beneficio is based on a complex rating system and takes into account current stock levels and the predicted quality of the harvest. As Port’s volume sales decline, the beneficio is “getting smaller and smaller, and properties are seeing the amount that can be made into Port reduced, as well as the amount that you can sell using a single designation or quinta”, says Bridge.

“In years when we don’t do a classic, and we want to do a single quinta, the legislation is restricting how much we can sell – not the quality of the wines. So we’ve gone to a new concept whereby, instead of using the designation of the single property, we’re using Sentinels,” he explains. This special blended vintage Port, effectively the equivalent to Fonseca’s historic Guimaraens Vintage Port project, is giving Taylor’s “a lot of flexibility”, Bridge explains.

Partner Content

JGC’S González: ‘Our philosophy is simple common sense’

Champagne Tsarine to launch first zero dosage cuvée to mark 30th year

Why you should add Barcelona Wine Week to your calendar

Michelle Brampton: ‘WSET is not just education, but also connecting the trade’

“We did it in 2022, we did it in 2023 and I’m sure we’ll be doing it in 2024, given the high quality of last year’s harvest. So here we are adapting to the realities – and that’s what businesses have to do; not necessarily fight it, but absorb what’s happening and adapt.”

And this, in a nutshell, summarises Bridge’s attitude, which he admits harks back to his career in the Army and especially his Sandhurst training. “If you’ve got a situation, you deal with it. You may not have perfect data to make the right choice, but you make the choice based on the available data,” he says. “One of the issues that is probably true in the world today is that everyone’s waiting for all the perfect data in order to make the perfect decision. But that’s virtually impossible, and that tends to lead to paralysis.”

Daily Bombardment

There’s no room for being a rabbit in the headlights, despite the daily bombardment of woe from news media. “One of the things about running a company that’s 333 years old is you might be up in the middle of the night thinking: ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got this problem.’ But then you think: ‘Well, hang on. Over the last 333 years, this company has faced all sorts of geopolitical issues, including being invaded by a foreign nation. And yet we have come through that.’ And we probably managed that because we’ve been focused on what we’re trying to do and getting on with it. “

Indeed, getting on with it is something at which Bridge is a master. In the US, a key market for Fladgate, “inflation and discretionary spend are key issues”, and the uncertainty over tariffs has undeniably been disruptive. But Bridge argues that the main impact has already occurred in terms of the decline of the dollar by around 10% so far this year, and he remains committed to the US market. “We’ve already seen the decline in the dollar, and that itself is changing the profitability of the market,” he explains.

“Even if one’s selling the same amount, and even if the consumers over there are going to consume the same amount, it’s not as profitable. The reality is that you have shock and adjustment, and then you reach a sort of equilibrium – and I think that we are going to see that new equilibrium start to be reached. I don’t think we’re going to see a substantial decline in volume sold to the US.” And there are even silver linings to be found here. One upside of the US tariff position is the strengthening of opportunities in Canada on the back of some provinces’ decisions to ban both US table wine and Bourbon from their shelves, leaving clear gaps in the market.

“In Canada, where we have a strong market share of our Port, the fact that they’ve removed a lot of American products from shelf means that they’re looking for alternative products,” Bridge explains, noting the increase in Croft brandy in Canada, and space for further expansion of European brandies. “We’re also seeing good interest in our Port, and are looking for further opportunities to expand in table wine in Canada, because they’re not selling American wine, which was a big part of that market.

With “de-dollarisation” looking likely in the medium term, “all of us are rethinking the high dependence we’ve had on the United States market, and what we can do to expand and look to grow another market”, Bridge says.

New markets with potential are likely to come from the Middle East and Asia, where Fladgate has recently expanded its team, with some indication that there may be a downward adjustment of the high duty rates in India, which would make it easier for those operating in that market.

Porto Protocol

Another potential challenge to be faced is environmental changes, which Fladgate has been heavily involved with via The Porto Protocol, a global initiative aimed at promoting sustainability and climate action throughout the wine industry. “We can clearly learn from what other people are doing around the world, and we’ve been very active in that,” Bridge says. Through The Porto Protocol, Fladgate has rolled out a project called Living Vineyards. The experimental regenerative viticulture initiative, currently in operation in 14 countries across 40 different vineyards, is looking to restore ecosystems, promote biodiversity and conserve water in the industry via a “more holistic approach”.

“The idea behind it is that, with much of climate change, one tends to look at singular aspects,” Bridge explains – be that water management, soil health or erosion. “But this looks at all these things simultaneously in a vineyard, because there’s a good understanding that there’s no one solution to this if we just simply focus on water management, and we forget soil health, or we deal with erosion and not the others. All of these things are important.”

Distribution is set to be the next big challenge for the industry, “and one that we’ve got to watch quite carefully”, he warns. “If I look across the planet, the choices available and the challenges of distributing wine are such that the distribution of partnerships is going to be a much more crucial issue in the next decade. Making those right choices, getting those right partners is a challenge, and it’s not going to be easy.”

With access to market limited, those who are partnered with strong distribution companies will sell their products, but those who aren’t will have to adapt their business model to try to sell.

“I think the point is, it’s not easy anywhere in the world. There is good business to be done, but it’s a challenge.” And Bridge is all for rising to that challenge.