The speed in the collapse of WaverleyTBS should rightly send shockwaves around the industry. It is worrying enough that one of our biggest on-trade suppliers has gone bust, that no-one in the trade saw it coming until hours before it happened only goes to demonstrate the dangerous financial times we all live in. The fact it still thought to have had a credit rating for several hundreds of thousands of pounds on the day it went in to administration shows how quickly the axe can fall.

WaverleyTBS joins Stratford Wine Agencies as two big names to blame their inability to acquire re-financing as the main factor in their collapse. When the banks won't help businesses can hardly go cap in hand to the Treasury for a bail out.

We can all learn a great deal from these business failures. The need for the wine trade to drastically re-invent itself has never been clearer.

But there are positive steps being taken across the trade.

Far away at last month's Cape Wine in South Africa all the major international wine producers and distributors were noticeably talking a different language. Less about their wines per se, but more what they can offer as excellence in supply chain distribution and cost management efficiency.

The UK may have lost its position as the most important wine market, but it leads the world in expertise in managing wine from grape to glass.

If you can work with the best, most efficient supermarkets in the world in the UK then your lnowledge, your systems, your cost efficiencies makes you competitive around the world.

Closer to home, and on a smaller scale, it is hugely encouraging to see the number of suppliers that attended our recent debate in how to work better with the independent sector. And how many of the undecided suppliers appear now ready to sign up to the Best Practice Guidelines on how to trade with independents.

Small steps but by working together amd learning from each others successes as well as mistakes will make the trade as a whole robust enough to see out the recession. You can find a list of the suppliers that have signed up and their reasons for doing so in our Top Merchants section or through this link.