Pelegrims co-founder Jérôme Moisan tells Joe Bill how Kentish wine has helped create a burgeoning skincare brand that’s garnering international attention

Next time you’re at a restaurant and you need the restroom, just have a quick look at the hand soap. If it has its own vintage year – like a bottle of wine – then you are almost certainly about to use Pelegrims.
Duo Jérôme Moisan and alchemist Alex Verier have co-founded a skincare range that harnesses the success of the English wine industry, particularly here in Kent.
Working with boutique vineyard Westwell Wines near Lenham, Alex – formerly of Haeckels in Margate – and Jérôme are using grape extracts to create skincare products that are turning the heads of national media and high-end customers alike.
It turns out that the polyphenols in the seeds, skins and stems of the crushed grapes contain amazing antioxidant properties.
Former software expert and self-confessed wine enthusiast Jérôme came up with the business having been fascinated about the rise of the local wine scene – though Pelegrims isn’t the first to explore the properties of waste grapes.
“I was aware of a French company who, 20 years ago, realised there were real treasures in the residue after harvest, which up to then was considered waste,” he says. “Also, there’s a company in California, in Napa Valley, also using wine residue. And so I always thought it’d be cool if somebody did that in the UK. And nobody did.”
Teaming up with Alex, founder of Kent fragrance brand Ortum Products, Jérôme set about finding the right grape supplier.
“Westwell vineyard, which by luck is halfway between Maidstone where I am and Alex’s lab near Ashford, was perfect,” says Jérôme. “We were really keen to work with one of the smaller producers in England and also doing some interesting cuvée and, for us crucially, low-intervention methods, you know, because we wanted really clean, natural, raw ingredients. They’re inspired by organic winemaking methods and they really care about the soil and regenerative principles.”

After the harvest in 2020, Alex took just under a year to try a multitude of different formulations before launching in September 2021 with the first couple of facial products.
Named after the old English word for pilgrims and the Pilgrims’ Way, which runs along the North Downs past Westwell’s vineyard, Pelegrims spent two years testing and is now in its first official year… and you could say it has gone quite well.
Not only has the press attention seen them featured in GQ magazine, there are stockists hailing from all over – from Rye to Sweden and Folkestone to Taiwan. Direct orders have come in from high-end hotels and restaurants – including a couple of Michelin-starred locations – to specifically have Pelegrims in their washrooms, while they are also in the midst of creating a body wash and shampoo and conditioner.
Pilgrims is currently creating products in batches of 1,000, with the newest being a facial cleanser using morello cherries from an orchard in Lynsted near Faversham.
“We went to pick it up last summer during the harvest. Morello cherries have got an amazing concentration of Vitamin C – it’s like off the scale, which is great for preventing skin breakouts,” says Jerome.

“We are bringing the wine concept of vintage variation into skincare, which as far as we’re aware nobody’s ever done before”

“We always look for local first because the provenance of ingredients is important to us. We can pinpoint [where the product comes from] to 100 yards.”

As restaurants continue to be hot on info, the added touch of Pelegrims is that each batch of products comes with its own vintage – just like a wine.

“We are bringing the wine concept of vintage variation into skincare, which as far as we’re aware nobody’s ever done before,” says Jerome. “You couldn’t keep it for 20 years like wine because you’d have to throw in loads of artificial stuff. But what we are doing is keeping a kind of a library of the residue, which Alex keeps frozen, so that in 10 years’ time we could release a 2020 Vintage. We’re exploring with different methods at the moment.”

As you can imagine, detail is very important to the pair and the packaging represents this with the hand-drawn illustration of microscopic Pinot Noir vines, which the wife of the winemaker created.

With an eye on potentially having a shop in Maidstone or Canterbury in the next year or so, Jérôme and Alex – who was named in the Hiut Denim Co Makers & Mavericks Top 100 earlier this year – continue to experiment with new products, including vineyard nettles (which are good for the skin and hair), but they are doing it at their own pace.

“The key message is that just like you don’t need to go to Champagne to drink world-class sparkling wine, you don’t need to go to Milan, Paris or New York to create great skincare. We’re proud to do it from the heart of rural England in the North Downs.”

INSTA: @pelegrims

INFO: pelegrims.com