Wolf will bounce back after blaze Graft focuses on Mother Vine bar

Wolf Wine’s shop in Bath, The Cabin, and its adjacent bar, The Shrine, were destroyed by a fire in late April.

The wooden trader cabins at the Green Park Station site remain unsafe for the team to return and salvage anything. The company’s Angus Perkins says: “At the moment, police and fire services have ruled it an accident. With a normal building fire you would be able to find evidence of an accelerant very quickly, but with a wooden structure, it’s much harder because the whole lot is so flammable.”

Happily, the business continues to trade. “We’re a wholesaler first and foremost,” Perkins says, “and we’ve got some subterranean warehousing where we keep the majority of our stock, and we can send wine out and operate online from there.

“We have also been offered a small retail space by one of our local accounts, so we will be doing a pop up about three days a week, which is just lovely.”

Perkins says that definitive answers on insurance matters are tricky, due to the slightly complicated hierarchy of landlords. Wolf Wine is a tenant of Ethical Property which sublets the trader cabins on behalf of Sainsbury’s, the leaseholder of the wider Green Park Station site.

While they wait for the information to filter through, the team remain positive and have established a fundraiser page to help get the business back on track. They swiftly relocated their scheduled tastings and events, and retail pop-ups are in the bag.

“No one was hurt, and we’re lucky because we have other revenue streams and we’ve all still got our jobs,” says Perkins. “I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think we’re sort of cautiously optimistic. The support has been insane, which is marvellous.”

The Fire Fund is at gofundme.com.

The Graft Wine Co has closed its Pip of Manor Farm shop at Seale, near Farnham in Surrey, which it opened in November 2020.

The rural site, which also provided some office space for the team, served its last customer at the end of March.

Graft director Nik Darlington says the company will continue to support its Mother Vine bar and shop in Chelsea.

“It’s really just a matter of pooling resources under one retail brand, which for us going forward is Mother Vine,” he explains. “The ceiling for Pip is very low no matter how much attention and resources one throws at it, whereas we feel the ceiling is very high for Mother Vine.”

• After almost three years at Bradmoor Farm near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, Kevin Durrant is closing BeerGinVino. The decision is partly due to family relocation, and Durrant has plans to return to bricksand-mortar retail in the autumn if he finds a suitable premises. Meanwhile he will continue to sell online.