“In ten or twenty years, people will think nothing of travelling to the English countryside to indulge in some vinotherapy.”
It’s a bold statement of faith in the constantly-burgeoning British wine scene, but Jerome Moisan – visionary entrepreneur and leading light of Pelegrims, a rapidly-ascending skincare brand with a seriously impressive array of products – has never shied away from making an impact.
Indeed, Jerome is perhaps the only Frenchman alive who is a diehard champion of the English wine industry (or at least, the only one willing to admit it in public), but Pelegrims and the wineries of England’s South East hillscapes have a symbiotic relationship that has resulted in no shortage of success. The wineries provide many of the key ingredients used in the brand’s offerings, which include beautifully-crafted cleansers, exfoliants, balms, face oils, hand creams and gift sets, and Jerome and his crew contribute to a reduction in winery wastage while flying the flag high for a fast-developing homegrown industry.
Key to their rise to prominence and central to the aforementioned flag-flying is the company that the brand keeps, and their insistence of doing things their own way along their journey. Ferociously independent and free from major business pressures (notably, their counterparts Aesop and Le Labo were bought by L’Oreal and Estee Lauder respectively), Pelegrims has forged a winning relationship with a growing number of Michelin-starred restaurants and other hospitality businesses, providing those all-important luxury touches that elevate a washroom or spa to an encounter with excellence.
It isn’t hard to see why chefs and proprietors of businesses as renowned as Edinburgh’s Heron, London’s Carousel and The Sportsman in Seasalter, Kent (among a growing list of Michelin starred restaurants enamoured with the products and brand mythos) have been so impressed: Pelegrims bring a bespoke approach to skincare and toiletries, eking out the remarkable properties of vine leaves and grape must to produce fantastic results. Regional, seasonal, nomadic in their approach and eager to explore completely tailor-made iterations of their creations, they tick a hell of a lot of boxes that resonate with their collaborating hospitality trendsetters.
Beyond the restaurant sector, examples of their custom approach to creativity also include a collaboration with Cornish surfwear brand Finisterre, for whom Pelegrims crafted a bespoke run of products utilising sea buckthorn harvested in St Agnes. The aforementioned vinotherapy ambitions finally began to take flight recently, too – the South Lodge hotel in Sussex (one of only three hotels in England with their own vineyard) let Jerome and his crew gather young Pinot Noir grapes from their estate, from which they imagineered all the products used in the hotel’s luxury spa. It’s inspirational stuff, and one that beckons in a sea change in both British skincare and oenology that few would have seen coming.
For Jerome, speaking much like the Michelin-starred chefs on his client roster, it all comes down to ingredients.
“I’m happy to be guided by our exploration of possibilities from ingredients, seeking out collaborations and opportunities for creativity over following any kind of marketing playbook. For example, right now we’re exploring the anti-breakout properties of vine sap, and in the near future we’ll be researching vines from overseas.”
Breaking free from the confines of the British Isles doesn’t mean reverting back to the produce of Jerome’s homeland, however – he’s something far more fascinating in mind.
“There’s vineyard on the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily that escaped the phylloxera epidemic (which wiped out most of Europe’s native vines in the early 20th century), and we’re keen to see how the concentration of polyphenols plays out in vines that are over a century old”.
Despite such international aspirations, Pelegrims’ heartland remains firmly in England’s garden county of Kent. With a homegrown lab and creative atelier a mere 20 minutes from the vineyards, they’re able to make full use of a hyper-local and vertically-integrated supply chain. This not only ensures unfettered access to some increasingly impressive British terroir, it allows the Pelegrims team to control quality each and every step of the way. With yet another parallel to the world of viticulture, the brand works exclusively in small batches and seeks out opportunities for unique and expressive creations, many of which are precisely tailored to the brands they’ve partnered with.
There’s something deeply exciting and satisfying about a skincare brand exploring the potential of single vineyard and single vintage approaches – it’s a truly unique way of creating a high quality and distinctive run of products, and one which speaks of a profound love and appreciation for those all-important raw ingredients. The single vineyard releases explore the properties of Pinot Noir and Ortega vines grown in an individual plot, and the single vintage releases celebrate the romance of vintage variations; including slight imperfections from year to year, rallying against the uniformity that typifies absolutely every other brand in the skincare sector.
Having recently celebrated a jubilant milestone of 1000 days in business, in some ways Pelegrim’s growth has exceeded the vines whose extracts they work with. The budding plant needs three years before its first fruit, but in this time, the brand has flourished. However, their growth mimics the vine in other ways when one looks at their portfolio and timeline of releases. Periods of quiet growth behind the scenes, below the soil, expansion with the warmth of the spring sun, the fruitful summer, then a hunkering for winter. The eternal ebb and flow, wax and wane.
The discussion of winemaking on the British Isles is no new topic, after all, even the Domesday Book recorded 38 vineyards in England, but as we’ve already shared, it’s only in the last two decades that Britain has begun to establish a prosperous wine industry, now home to over 700 individual plantations, with more applications than ever before.
2021 saw the Pelegrims initial launch, working with the plentiful harvest of the 2020 vintage, driven by the exceptional weather of the year. Their still-hero products, the facial balm and oil, and hand cleanser, balm and pomade (the hand cleanser of course, having disappeared from the washrooms of many a Michelin star restaurant led to their burgeoning collection of private labels, and with it, their great hookups for a wonderful table), and their exploration set with travel-sized minis, made up the initial five-strong range.
Each formulation holds a signature scent, dictated by their naturally derived ingredients, whilst carrying a tune with the grounding earthiness of the grape plant extracts. Vitis vinifera, or pinot noir, be that fruit skins or skin, vine or leaf, takes centre stage in every formulation, a powerhouse ingredient packed with polyphenols, a compound with powerful antioxidant properties.
2022 saw three new releases, of which their vitamin boost facial cleanser took centre stage, a low-foaming gel, with clarifying and anti-inflammatory basil oil and witch hazel and fatty-acid-rich rosehip seed oil. However, their antioxidant bath salts should not be missed, with uplifting rosemary, ylang-ylang, and citrus oil-infused magnesium-rich salts. To be enjoyed for sure with a bright glass of Westwell’s 2023 Chardonnay, their vineyard partner, to extract every aspect of the grape alongside the ambroxan tones.
The excitement I feel when reading one of Pelegrims ingredient lists is like that of viewing a tasting menu. Each element is documented without context, leaving one to experience each aspect at their own pace within the plate, or in this case formulation. Of their three 2023 releases, alongside their first collaborative projects, the clarifying exfoliant powder was an interesting one, as amongst the finely milled zeolite clay and pumice, sweet sugar cane and blueberry extract and rich pumpkin seed oil, you find fragrant pine needle, fennel and coriander seed oils. After the distraction of what might be the perfect scent profile, one might almost forget the all-natural aspect of this meditative application.
Whilst the start of 2024 passed without expansion to the line for six months, this isn’t a worry. Below the soil, roots have grown for further collaborations and private formulations. Their growth is just about to hit their fastest yet too, with three launches already this year, including their three-piece subscription box with two best sellers and an exclusive one-off product per quarter à la South West perfumers, Ffern whose quarterly subscription sees a one-off, never to be repeated seasonal fragrance for their ledger members.
The launch of their reed diffuser this July saw a push into the homewares space, capturing the charming English county summer scents of verdant tomato leaves, ripe fig fruit and tangy black peppercorn. In addition, we look forward to two new skincare products before the end of the summer, and two further launches before the year is out, including the use of a brand new grapevine extraction that hails the exciting promise of ‘sleep, bottled’ for our skin.
Vines are hardy yet may require some winter protection for the first few years. We can’t wait to see the fruits of their labour for years to come. Simply put, to buy from Pelegrims is to revel in the unique, the one-off, and the ‘never before, never again’ artistry of bespoke skincare creation… and that’s something we’ll more than happily raise a glass to.