In Vino Veritas by J. M. Gregson Page A

firmly. ‘I know they like ribbing you, but those two lads will be as proud as Punch to see you get your degree.’
    Gerry Davies was happy to see the Abbey Vineyards shop crowded with people on a Saturday morning. Weekends were usually their busiest time, as you would expect, but it was good to see that there was as yet little sign that the recession was affecting either the number of visitors or their rate of spending.
    There had been almost from the start a pleasing mutual support between the shop and the restaurant, which now carried two AA Rosettes. People who bought wines and other offerings in the shop became aware of the restaurant, with its pleasantly spacious rooms and its splendid outlook over the slopes of vines and the wilder and more dramatic outlines of the Malvern Hills in the distance. It was difficult to imagine dining anywhere in the area with a better view, a point emphasized by the colour postcards they displayed and sold in the shop.
    Equally, there was now substantial evidence that those who enjoyed their meal and its accompanying wines in the restaurant often returned to the shop in the weeks which followed, keen to buy the wines they had sampled and enjoyed with their excellent food. Gerry Davies had no culinary skills himself, but that made him only more appreciative of those of Jason Knight. They were two very different men, but they had worked well together from the outset. And, to Gerry’s secret surprise, they not only respected each other but enjoyed each other’s company.
    Gerry’s father had been a Welsh miner in the Rhondda Valley in the years before Thatcher’s government had decided that Britain no longer needed its pits. Gerry had enjoyed the mixed benefits of a comprehensive education, then left school at sixteen to work in a steel works which had closed down when he was thirty-two. The closure had proved a blessing in disguise. After six weeks of the misery of unemployment and supporting a wife and two children on social security, he had obtained employment in a supermarket.
    Initially he earned little more than he had been paid ‘on the social’. But Gerry had not only recovered his self-respect but revealed a talent for the retail trade hitherto unsuspected by himself as well as the world at large. Tesco had recognized this swiftly, and he had enjoyed three promotions before becoming manager of one of its new smaller outlets on a garage site. When thirteen years ago Martin Beaumont had been looking for a manager to expand the sales and the range of activities at the shop at Abbey Vineyards, he had shrewdly recognized in Davies a man of forty-four who had both achievement and further potential.
    The entrepreneur who was the driving force behind Abbey Vineyards and the man who felt he still had something to prove had struck up an immediate, instinctive and productive relationship. Each was anxious to prove to a sceptical world that English wine had a bright and exciting future. In their different ways, both men were proving themselves. Both were therefore prepared not to count the hours they spent in pursuit of the development of the company into a more profitable enterprise.
    There had been no destructive rivalry between them. Beaumont had been the entrepreneur content to make his savings, his working hours, his whole life dependent upon the success and prosperity of this enterprise. Davies had never aspired to be more than a trusted employee. He had devoted his loyalty and all of his newly discovered and newly recognized retail talents towards the commercial exploitation of British wine. Gerry Davies relished his confounding of a job market which had once deemed him unfit for employment. It gave him additional satisfaction to be making a successful career by steadily expanding the distribution of English wine. This was a product which more distinguished business heads than his had once dismissed as frivolous and thus unsaleable.
    In a different way from