Indies battening down the hatches

Faced with rising costs, several independents are cutting their cloth accordingly.

The Old Garage Wine Shop & Deli in Cornwall has consolidated by closing its second site in Nansledan to concentrate on the original flagship store in Roseland.

Owner Lucy Chenoweth, who started the business in 2019, is taking the added step of closing The Old Garage for a “month or so”, just to “wait out the quiet Cornish winter”. She will use the time to “revamp and get some energy back”.

Tim Watson, owner of The Grape to Glass Wine Shop & Tasting Room in Rhos-on-Sea, north Wales, was running two premises, but at the end of January decided to focus on just the one.

“At the moment, having two lots of overheads and two rotas, and with the demands of my children, I just want to get a little bit more balanced,” he says. “When things stabilise financially outside in the normal world, we might possibly relocate.”

As the owner of the premises he has just vacated, Watson says there are several businesses who are interested in leasing it, which he says will help out financially too.

In Cheltenham, David Dodd of Tivoli Wines has weighed up his options and cut down on hospitality, resulting in the temporary closure of The Wine Library on the first floor.

“I fully expect to reopen The Wine Library in the autumn,” says Dodd, “and we all get to have our evenings back over the summer, which the team deserve, having worked relentlessly since the beginning of 2020.

“We’re only just starting to see price rises come through on everything from website hosting (10%) to wastage fees (13%), so I thought it prudent to close the room during our quieter months, assess consumer behaviour once the inevitable wine price increase hits, and examine the impact of increased back-of-house costs on the profit and loss,” he adds.

Wine shop opens next to restaurant

Jane and Steve Turner launched their eponymous wine shop in November in Colne, Lancashire.

Turners is next door to the couple’s restaurant, Tubbs of Colne, which they established in the town six years ago.

Jane says this latest development has brought the couple full circle. “We’ve spent a lot of time evolving,” she says. “We originally started in Barrowford as a wine shop and we did French and local cheeses. But Booths opened in our small village and we had to quickly develop from being just a retail shop.

“When we moved to Colne we became a full restaurant and bar, but now it feels the right time to have a wine shop and deli again. We’ve got the restaurant to a point where the manager and head chef are more than capable of running the business themselves, and over the period of the next five years they will own 50% of the business between them. If at that point they want to buy us out, they can.”

The premises adjacent to the restaurant came on the market, and the Turners decided to take the plunge despite the economic climate. The top floor is being run as an Airbnb.

Jane says: “The offering will be, come and stay, you can get a nice cheese platter in your fridge when you arrive, a bottle of Champagne from the shop downstairs as well as local charcuterie, or you can just nip in the restaurant next door for breakfast, lunch or dinner. It all works really well together.”

The Turners buy from Liberty Wines and Thorman Hunt. “The wines are all great quality and we know we have the best wines that we have tasted from that region at that price point,” says Jane.

“From our experience in the on and offtrade over the past 12 years we know that, rather than having 10 different Malbecs, for example, we can say ‘this is the best one’, and it’s the same with the deli items.

“We get our charcuterie from Porcus: it’s a rare breed pig farm just over the hill in Todmorden. We’ve used them for years and we will get all their charcuterie and that’s the only one we’ll stock.”

Most of the wine sold is in the £10 to £15 range, which Jane says is the magic number for them. “Customers are going to supermarkets and probably spending about 10 quid on a bottle of wine that’s nowhere near as good, so to spend an extra couple of quid and get something so much better – our customers immediately notice the difference.”