A Properly Successful Oddity
By 2002, worldwide annual sales of Maynards Wine Gums had reportedly reached forty million pounds sterling, which is a strong showing for a sweet whose central joke is still half the appeal. The wine and spirit names are part of the identity, not a hidden ingredient list, and Maynards has long used names such as port, sherry, burgundy and claret on the sweets. The Maynards story itself begins much earlier, in 1880, when Charles Riley Maynard and his brother Tom began making sweets in their kitchen in Stamford Hill, Hackney, in north-east London.
The Teetotal Problem
The best-known Wine Gums origin story has Charles Gordon Maynard, Charles Riley Maynard’s son, proposing the sweets in 1909. His father was a strict Methodist and teetotaller, which made the idea of “wine” gums a slightly awkward family meeting. The account usually told is that Charles Gordon had to persuade him that the sweets contained no wine. It is a tidy story, but a useful one, because it explains why Wine Gums have always had that faintly comic tension: respectable, sober, and labelled as though they have just come from a cellar.
From Kitchen To Factory
Maynards did not begin as a boardroom brand with a heritage department and a tasteful archive photograph. It began with the Maynard brothers making sweets and Sarah Ann Maynard, Charles’s wife, selling them through a nearby sweet shop to the Stamford Hill community. The company was formally formed in 1896, and a purpose-built factory followed on Vale Road, Harringay, in 1906. North London matters here, not because every sweet needs a postcode, but because Wine Gums came out of that late Victorian and Edwardian world of local sweet making, family enterprise, chapel manners and practical commercial instinct.
Why The Packet Says Maynards Bassetts
The modern name on the bag has a bit of British confectionery tidying behind it. Maynards was acquired by Cadbury in 1988, and in the early 1990s the Maynards, Bassett’s and Trebor operations were brought closer together, with manufacturing associated with Sheffield. Cadbury later became part of Mondelez International, and in 2016 the Maynards and Bassett’s names were combined as Maynards Bassetts. That is why this familiar bag carries a double-barrelled name, though the Wine Gums themselves still belong very clearly to the Maynards side of the family.
The Sweet That Takes Its Time
Wine Gums are not impatient sweets. They are chewy enough to slow you down, unless you are the sort of person who sees a 165g bag as a personal challenge, in which case no historical essay can help you. For many British shoppers, they belong to newsagent shelves, glove compartments, cinema bags, grandparents’ sideboards and that slightly stern instruction to “make them last”. They rarely did. The colours, the firmness, the tiny stamped names, all of it adds up to a very specific memory.
A Small Taste Of Home In Canada
For British expats in Canada, Maynards Bassetts Wine Gums are not just fruit gums in a bag. They are the sweet you knew before you knew what burgundy was, and probably before you cared. They sit neatly in parcels from home, cupboard raids, shared office snacks and quiet moments when only a proper British sweet will do. The Great British Shop keeps that familiar bag within reach, which is a useful thing when nostalgia has decided it wants something chewy.
