Nothing Missing: Charles Davies, founder of Freed From

At the pioneering trade tasting he hosted at The Belvedere in Holland Park, the producers were conspicuous by their absence. Charles Davies had invited the trade to taste drinks from 42 of them, then deliberately kept every founder away from the tables.The omission was not hostility. It was control. Davies wanted sommeliers, restaurateurs, bartenders and hoteliers to encounter each liquid without somebody hovering behind it, selling a dream or awaiting praise. Downstairs were wine alternatives and The Liquid Edit®, his lavish 12-drink answer to the moribund hotel minibar. Upstairs, Andre Falcao built cocktails from spirit alternatives and elixirs while a classical guitarist played. Italian canapés circulated. Guests could be guided, questioned or left in peace.‘It’s not an exhibition,’ Davies had insisted. ‘It’s not a trade show. It’s not meet the producers.’It was curation made physical, and a fitting first public act for Freed From®, the business Davies created after a three-year search involving more than 9,000 drinks, over 2,300 producers and 57 countries. Fewer than four per cent achieved its Made The Grade® classification.Davies is equally economical about the mission. ‘We’re not here to replace alcohol,’ he says. ‘We’re here to join the party.’He introduces himself through what he calls ‘ruthless transparency’. He is 56, gay and a single father to Leo, three, while co-parenting Jake, six. Fatherhood, begun comparatively late, is among his greatest happinesses, even if he qualifies that with the realism of any parent: not always, but most of the time.He grew up in Shropshire, driving tractors and combines on the family farm. His father was ‘a bit of a posh farmer, like Jeremy Clarkson’, although the family preferred landowner. There was privilege, but also labour. Davies wants his sons to understand that the former does not cancel the latter.While other boys discovered football, Davies began trading shares at about 13. At 17 he made £50,000, concluded he was the cleverest boy alive, and used the winnings to take friends on an absurdly grand Interrailing tour of Europe, punctuated by five-star Parisian palaces.Then came the 1987 crash. Davies had been writing options, despite being too young to do so legally, and tried to close positions while sitting his A-levels. The £50,000 vanished. Humble pie arrived with compound interest.After a law degree at Durham, he entered the City. During his first week at Cargill, he was hospitalised after somebody struck him over the head with a telephone. Eleven months later he was fired, effectively by popular vote, for being too posh. ‘Who wants to fire Charlie Davies?’ he recalls. The hands went up.Read MoreIt was not an environment designed to diminish his urge to prove people wrong.In 1998 he founded Link, an equity derivatives brokerage which broke even on its third day. He hired for instinct rather than certificates. One recruit was his hairdresser from Toni & Guy. Another was somebody he encountered on a beach in Thailand. They did not need to be graduates, he says. They needed to be natural brokers.Davies trained them, expanded through Europe, cracked America, built Hong Kong and made Link formidable. When Michael Spencer asked why he would sell it to ICAP, Davies replied, ‘Because I want your job, Michael, when you retire.’Freed From eventPRESS HANDOUTThe nine-figure deal made him extremely wealthy. For a while, he says, he ‘acted like a rich person’. There were private jets, a racehorse and the costume jewellery of sudden wealth. Then the noise stopped.Davies recalls Gary Barlow describing life after Take That on Desert Island Discs: wandering around a mansion with money, success and no idea what to do next. Nobody, particularly during a financial crisis, wishes to hear that being very rich can also be depressing. Davies understood the emotional geometry.Link chairman John Booth advised him to endure the emptiness. ‘Boredom equals creativity,’ Davies recalls. Let the brain begin firing again.He is not naturally adapted to inertia. He fly-fishes, rock-climbs, bungee-jumps and has flown in jump jets. ‘I need a project,’ he says, as though rest were a clerical error.Projects followed. In southern Africa he invested in businesses, then built one in Mozambique. It became what he calls ‘professional suicide’, financially and emotionally. One episode captures the collision between metropolitan confidence and local ingenuity.His company acquired land, negotiated with residents and obtained government permission. Afterwards, locals announced that the site contained a Christian cemetery to which they required Sunday access. Money was agreed to relocate the deconsecrated remains. According to Davies, a man loaded the bones into a Hilux, dumped them by a river and announced: ‘The white guys gave us 15 grand.’Davies tells the story with admiration and unease. At its height the business employed about 400 people and absorbed some $46 million. His mother supplied the cleanest post-mortem: you went to Mozambique, did not speak the language, were very rich, everybody stole from you, and you are surprised?The experience gave him ‘a kick in the teeth’. It adjusted a reality previously shaped by startling success.There was also Aura, his Ibiza nightclub and restaurant. Kylie Minogue, Jude Law and David Cameron came. After three years, Davies decided it was no way to grow older.Later came sobriety. He stopped drinking because he decided alcohol was better removed from his own equation. He slept better and felt better. Yet something important disappeared.Not intoxication. Socialisation.At the pub, while other people received interesting glasses, Davies found himself with dark cola or an apologetic mocktail. Alcohol is not only ethanol. It is bottle, cork, temperature, aroma, theatre, generosity and permission to linger. Remove it and, historically, too much of the ceremony vanished too.The revelation arrived in Franschhoek through Norah’s Valley. It was not grape juice in evening dress. It tasted grown up. Davies calls it his ‘holy shit moment’. If this existed, what else had been missed?He telephoned friends worldwide. Had they found anything good? What began as curiosity expanded during and after Covid into research on a near-financial scale. Researchers were recruited, databases built, samples bought rather than begged, and tasting stations established. Most candidates disappeared down the sink.Davies’s home now resembles, he jokes, the house of an alcoholic, except the bottles contain no alcohol. There is a tasting station in the garden and further stock in bond. He sometimes drinks a bottle of non-alcoholic ‘wine’ at breakfast because, he says, all he feels afterwards is healthy.Leo provides another checkpoint. Davies allows his three-year-old to taste many of the drinks, although not the whisky-style expressions. His reasoning is characteristically personal: he will not approve ingredients he would be unwilling to give his child.Patrick Dempsey, Giovani Ferlito, Charles DaviesPRESS HANDOUTCuration without consolationFreed From’s answer to a chaotic category is curation bordering on brutality. The most promising discoveries went before an independent panel of Master Sommeliers and mixologists. Davies’s internal scoring separates Q, quality, from V, value. Cheapness cannot retrospectively improve the quality of a drink. ‘The quality is the quality.’He also demands a reason for existence. Corporate line extensions conceived because a strategist noticed an empty square in a brand matrix do not interest him. He wants drinks made because somebody was curious, obsessive or mad enough to make them.‘Sometimes the best story is the drink,’ he says. ‘Sometimes it is the person and the drink together.’The bottles he shared with me made the principle tangible. Jörg Geiger’s Grande Réserve, which Geiger calls his life’s work, came from ancient orchards I had previously walked with him. It was mineral, finely bubbled and complete, a drink which did not spend its life apologising for an absent ingredient.ALP Drinks Premium Grüner Veltliner was fresh and gastronomically useful. Bergdolt-Reif & Nett’s Breakaway Merlot had texture and prompted thoughts of game. JOY’s Island Spice Sorrel, made by John Morris on a scale far smaller than the thousands of litres Davies envisages, was vivid, warming and hugely generous.Then came KAHOL Maggie Bailey. Its East London creator, Mustafa, is described by Davies as an obsessive botanist and alchemist who spent a decade pursuing spirit-like force without alcohol. The bourbon alternative had such attack that I checked again whether it contained any. Mixed roughly with South Carolina producer Bittermilk’s Bourbon Barrel Aged Old Fashioned, it retained balance, complexity and enough heat to make me sweat.These were not drinks requiring charitable judgement. They required glassware, ice, food, sommeliers, bartenders and attention.The Liquid Edit may prove Davies’s most disruptive commercial idea. Twelve complementary drinks sit in a customisable box intended for hotel rooms, retail and other channels. The hotel version replaces the sad soft-drink afterthought with a serious adult selection. Put it into thousands of rooms, replenish what guests consume, and small producers gain access to a scale they could never build alone.Again, the broker’s mind appears.Find overlooked value. Aggregate it. Establish confidence. Create a market. Move it.Only this time the derivatives are drinkable.The name Freed From® could have carried the chill of prohibition. Davies resists that absolutely. He is not telling people what they must surrender. He is expanding what they may choose: a round, an evening, a month, a year, forever.Alcohol is not ordered from the room. It simply loses its automatic monopoly over sophistication.Davies has taken risks since adolescence, in markets, continents, companies, nightclubs and fatherhood. Some made fortunes. Others drew blood. Freed From is his latest wager, backed by money, appetite and formidable energy.The freedom, in the end, is not freedom from alcohol.It is freedom from having nothing worth drinking.