February 18, 2023
ABOUT US: Who we are and why we are here
MORE Natural Wine, that’s us: Anika, Chris, Wojtek & Sabrina
Anika & Chris came up with the idea for MORE Natural Wine in Summer 2018, and we launched our online shop in November 2019. You often see our faces on our social media, as we're not shy about showing ourselves, but besides running the socials, we also set up all the operations of MORE and everything that comes with running an online and physical natural wine shop, ensuring new wines show up on the website, your wines get send out weekly, and all the boring admin stuff no one likes talking about is being done.
Wojtek is our stockroom manager and has been with us since Summer 2021. He has all wines fully under control and makes sure we always have enough boxes to send out. He ensures palettes of wines are received safely and packed away properly. On top of that he is also a badass bike courier and ensures our Berlin store is always nicely stocked with all the tasty juice. If you’re lucky, you might even catch him selling you some dope wines in our Berlin bottleshop.
Sabrina is a customer service legend and since Summer 2022 rocks the office and back of house admin with us. When you reach out via email, it’s very likely she’ll be the one replying to you and helping you with your queries. She also has our weekly send-outs firmly under control and makes sure all the fabulous wines reach their new homes safely. We also call her the “label”-queen of our bottleshop, where you’ll often find her giving recommendations too.
How did we get here?
For five years we, Chris & Anika, used to make a living by recommending our favourite restaurants, shops, cafes & bars in the different boroughs of Berlin. We printed our tips on area maps, called Oooh, Berlin! and personally distributed 315.000 of them yearly - in our very cool granny trolleys ;)
As big food & drink lovers, we adored doing this and it’s actually what got us more and more interested in natural wine over the years, as we worked with many of Berlin’s natural wine importers back then already. Loving their different tastes and specialisations in wine, we came up with the idea for MORE Natural Wine in summer 2018, planning to create a platform where we would represent all of their wines together, making it easier for customers to get a mix of all their wines - something that hadn’t been done before back then.
As we already had a full time business, it took us over a year to set everything up - we’ll never forget how we decided on the name whilst sitting under a tree in Sicily in January 2019 - and after a lot of work and sleepless nights, in November 2019 MORE Natural Wine was officially ready and launched with 700+ wines.
A couple of months later Covid hit and as in most other cities around the world, the places we loved & respected so much in Berlin were forced to close up indefinitely - lockdown was here. It was a scary time for many small business owners and for us it also meant the sudden death of our beloved Oooh, Berlin! guides.
Our small online natural wine shop on the other hand continued growing, as people’s need for wines at home had exponentially grown over night, and today we have more than 1000+ wines on our site for you to get lost in.
The way up to now has not always been easy and as with any new idea, we instantly attracted lovers, as well as haters. Some of the latter tried to destroy our reputation with winemakers and desperately wanted to convince people that we are the “Amazon of natural wine”, out there to destroy the scene with our big company. In the end, most people figured out that those were lies, MORE Natural Wine was always us, Anika & Chris, with less than a handful of people helping out.
In summer 2022 we stumbled upon an unexpected opportunity to open a physical store on our home turf and so in October 2022 we opened our bottleshop in Berlin Neukölln.
You’ll find us there most days, together with our dog Bacon, and we always love to give you some yummy recommendations- after all that’s what we’ve been doing for the last eight years!
So whether you’ve seen our faces around on guides before, started ordering from us during lockdown or only just found out about us, thank you so much for your support - and if you’re ever in Berlin, come by and say hello at our bottleshop or at one of the fun events we put up with some of our favourite restaurants around town. :)
Cheers
Anika, Chris, Wojtek & Sabrina xx