Négociants · Fine & Rare Wine
The wine the world hasn’t found yet.
From overlooked vineyards to the world’s finest tables. Bought at the barrel from growers who sell to almost no one, proven blind, and placed quietly with private clients and serious hospitality.
There are wines being made today whose quality is years ahead of their reputation and their reach.
We do not fight for scraps in Bordeaux, Burgundy or Tuscany. We go where quality has outgrown recognition: the old vinelands of Central and Eastern Europe (Moldova, Romania, Serbia, North Macedonia), places that were making profound wine when much of the famous world was still forest.
History interrupted these regions; it did not diminish them. The vines stayed in the ground, the varieties stayed distinct, and a generation of obsessive small growers is now making wines of a precision the international market has simply not caught up with.
Thompson & Jones exists in the gap between two worlds: exceptional producers who cannot easily reach global luxury hospitality, and global luxury hospitality that does not have time to drive around Moldova tasting barrels. We are the bridge: discovery, trust and access.
And to be clear about what this is not: a hunt for bargains. These are wines of the same calibre as the celebrated names they stand beside, simply rarer, harder to find, and made in batches too small ever to be mass market. Our work is to give them the table they deserve, and to send the recognition, and its rewards, back to the growers and countries that earn it.
We discover in one. We place in the other.
The sourcing territories lie east, in countries the fine wine trade has never had to learn. The tables lie west. This house is the line drawn between them.
Depth without noise.
Burgundy’s parallel, and five thousand years of vine. Black blends poured at royal tables long before the world stopped paying attention.
Scale, kept quiet.
The fifth largest vineyard in Europe and twenty seven centuries of practice. Almost none of it ever leaves the country.
Structure, maturity, restraint.
A Roman emperor planted Fruška Gora. Župa still farms bush vines a century old. The estates are the size of gardens.
Power, cut with mountain air.
The Douro’s parallel, and vines since the Macedonian kings. Two hundred and seventy days of sun, and nights cold enough to hold the acidity.
Selected at the cask. Carried by hand.
Switzerland first, for its concentration of serious hospitality. Then Paris, Monaco, Milan, Como and London. The route is deliberately short: fewer hands, better provenance.
Found in quiet places. Selected with intent. Placed in the right rooms.
That is the whole of it. No warehouse, no catalogue, no volume. A short book of wines, carried carefully from a cellar most buyers will never visit to a table most growers will never see.
How access worksWe travel where few look, building relationships with families, not factories.
Old vines, small parcels and no interest in volume. We work with growers who farm with patience: indigenous varieties, low yields, and holdings measured in hectares rather than hundreds of hectares.
We taste with intent, not influence.
Tasting happens at source, cask by cask, and we buy the specific barrel rather than the catalogue. Most of what we taste we do not take.
The right wines, in the right rooms, quietly.
Wines reach sommeliers, hoteliers and private cellars by hand and by appointment, in numbers small enough that every bottle can be accounted for.
Each chosen for the same reason: indigenous grapes, ancient production, serious growers, and batches so small the wider world has never been given the chance.
“Would we confidently pour this blind beside the greatest names in wine? If not, we don’t sell it.”
We never say “you should try Moldovan wine.” We pour it blind, reveal it afterwards, and let disbelief do the talking.
We are not a wholesaler and never will be. We carry a deliberately small book: a handful of growers per territory, a handful of wines per grower, every one tasted at source, barrel by barrel and plot by plot. Several of these estates have never had an international distributor, and much of what we take is the part of the cellar that never goes on sale at all.
The most interesting model isn’t distributing bottles anybody else can buy. It’s buying the barrel: securing exclusive lots, commissioning private cuvées, and bottling wines that exist nowhere else, selected from cask, individually numbered, and gone when they’re gone.
Eventually we commission winemakers with a single instruction: make the best wine you possibly can. No brief but excellence. Best grapes, best plots, low yields, long maturation, tiny production. That is how genuine cult wines emerge from overlooked regions.
The wines that introduce a territory, poured blind beside far more famous names and remembered long after the reveal.
Small production, serious wines with ageing potential, provenance and exact winemaking, from growers the world will soon know by name.
Extremely limited lots: library vintages, exceptional single barrels, exclusive cuvées. Scarcity with a reason.
The estates we work with are not looking for a distributor. Most sell out at the cellar door, to a handful of names they trust. Getting in is a matter of years, not orders.
Where we hold sole territorial representation for a grower, there is exactly one route to those bottles, and it runs through this house.
We taste through the cellar and buy specific barrels outright: the one plot, the one cask, the experiment the winemaker never intended to bottle. Numbered, and finite by definition.
Wines commissioned to our brief and released under our label. They have never existed before and will not exist again. No merchant, auction house or search engine can find them.
Older vintages held back by the growers themselves, released in dozens of bottles rather than thousands, with provenance that never left the estate.
Every allocation is finite and spoken for quickly. We would rather tell a client a wine is gone than dilute what made it worth pouring.
Selected at the estate.
Allocated through Thompson & Jones.
Private Clients · Trade · Hospitality
From private cellars to celebrated restaurants, we work with people who value provenance, discretion and the genuinely rare: sommeliers and F&B directors, hoteliers and private chefs, collectors and the families who buy for them.
Relationships, not transactions. The people who taste with us early tend to get the allocation first.
The wine is the interesting part. This is the part that decides whether you can actually list it. Everything between the cellar and your pass is handled by us.
Nothing goes on a list unsampled. We bring the bottles to you and pour them at your pass, or sit down with you and a flight of them blind. If a wine does not earn its place, we would rather you told us so early.
Once you commit, the allocation is reserved by vintage rather than released to whoever orders first. You are not competing for your own stock every time you reorder, and you will know well before a wine runs out.
Import, duty, bonded storage and documentation run through established partners in each market. Wine arrives correctly papered and ready to list, and you deal with one invoice rather than a customs file.
These are wines made in hundreds of bottles, and we sell them at the scale they are made. Delivery is to the cellar door, in quantities that suit a list rather than a warehouse.
The person who poured the wine is the person who takes the order, chases the shipment and picks up the phone. No account managers, no queue, no reintroductions.
Terms, minimums and sample arrangements are agreed directly with a partner. Start that conversation.
Private client and trade enquiries are handled personally by the founding partners.
Jeremy handles the western end of the route: sommeliers, buyers and private cellars, and the logistics that carry a numbered bottle from a cellar most buyers will never visit to a table in Zürich. He is the person a client deals with from first sample to delivery.
jeremy@thompsonandjones.com +1 (617) 803-7252Ross covers the territories: the visits, the cellar tastings, the growers and the negotiations that secure an allocation. He decides what the house buys, and he answers for every bottle in the book.
ross@thompsonandjones.com +33 6 42 67 32 77Both partners work every part of this personally. Nothing is brokered and nothing is delegated, which is the only reason a book this small can be this good.
Our route to market, in order of arrival
Zürich Geneva Gstaad St Moritz Paris Monaco Milan London