John Harvey & Sons
wine and sherry blending and merchant business

John Harvey & Sons is a brand (trading name) of a wine and sherry blending and merchant business founded by William Perry in Bristol, England in 1796. The business within 60 years of John Harvey joining had blended the first dessert sherry, dubbed 'cream sherry', which has changed little since 1880 and is known as Harveys Bristol Cream. The brand changed ownership several times, in 2015 bought by a subsidiary of Alliance Global Group of the Philippines.
History
In 1796, the first iteration of Harvey's wine-trading business was established in Denmark Street in Bristol. This was owned by William Perry, who went into partnership with Thomas Urch. In 1822, Urch's nephew (John Harvey I) joined the firm as an apprentice. By 1839, John Harvey was senior partner in the Bristol branch of the family business and by 1871, the whole business was known as John Harvey & Sons.
Bristol Cream sherry exports to America boomed from 1928 onwards with Jack Harvey making trips there as often as he could. From 1962, the business was known as Harveys of Bristol Ltd. In 1966 the firm, including all subsidiaries, was bought out by Showerings, Vine Products & Whiteways Ltd.
“John Harvey & Sons” enters the record as wine and sherry blending and merchant business. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Harvey and Sons can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6238108. VIAF identifies the subject as 140970322. The Library of Congress control number is nb2004308267. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1796, 1880, 2015 and 1822.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Harvey & Sons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.