Our Visit to the Cellars

Friday 5 February 2010

The Story Begins

In 1790 George Sandeman, an ambitious young Scotsman from Perth, founded a wine business in London. With a £300 loan he bought his first wine cellar and started trading in Porto and Sherry from Tom’s Coffee House.
By 1795, he had established an agency in Cadiz, Spain and in 1811 he purchased an ageing cellar in V.N. Gaia in Portugal. In the early 1800s Sandeman wines were shipped to countries within Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia and even as far as New Zealand.
Sandeman was the first company to brand a cask. In 1805, Sandeman started fire branding their trademark GSC (George Sandeman & Co.) in a crow’s foot design on all pipes they sold, thus giving the wine a name that assured quality. At the end of the nineteenth century “brand” names were largely unheard of but Sandeman wanted to give their customers a guarantee of quality, so in 1880 they became the first Porto House to export bottled and labelled wines. The Sandeman brand was registered as a trademark in 1877 (First Trademark Registrations Act) making it one of the oldest in the world.