Uncorked: A Potted History, 30 years and counting
Uncorked first opened its doors one day in autumn 1994, in what was then a new premises in Bishopsgate’s Exchange Arcade. The exact date is lost to the mists of time, but we do know that it was later than planned, with our original opening date pushed back thanks to the shop flooding. (Then as now, we found ourselves at the mercy of upstairs plumbing). Things continued to go not according to plan; our original business plan of 12 different bottles on tasting every day didn’t survive contact with reality. Adaptability has been in our DNA from the beginning.
Jim Griffen was in the shop from the start, and after six months he was joined by Andrew Rae, still fresh from picking grapes at Léoville Barton. For the next 22 years, the partnership of Jim and Andrew would define Uncorked. Other figures passed in and out of the picture, and in the background there were two backers (ship brokers and race horse breeders) who’d put their money on the table to found the business. They mostly kept themselves out of the picture, except to periodically complain there was too much stock and cashflow wasn’t good enough. The woes of a wine shop never change. In 2002, these co-owners decided they’d had enough, and asked if their employees wanted to buy them out. They did, and Jim and Andrew became business owners.
It was quiet in the early days. Jim recalled sometimes posing as a browsing customer to make it look like the shop wasn’t deserted. Uncorked got its first (painfully slow, dial up) website in 1998. The shop didn’t really sell enough to pay its way, so Jim and Andrew started casting around for other ways to bring in revenue. This led to them branching out into offering wines en primeur; Uncorked’s first trip to taste Bordeaux en primeur was for the 2003 vintage. The business has never looked back. We discovered there was a real appetite in the City for en primeur, and we also discovered that you can’t really do en primeur without also doing storage at the same time. After all, who wants to keep their vertical of Chateau Batailley in the garage? Innovation followed innovation, and we were well ahead of the curve in having a new website that could talk to the till and provide live stock figures.
Over the years there have been some 30 or so different employees staffing the shop. Some didn't stay long. Others of us are still here after many years, apparently having mislaid our life plans. Edward Eastwood joined to help with the IT, but has ended up doing mostly everything else as well. Zoë Ayling has brought a focus to the sales side of the business that mere men can’t manage. And Colin Wills deserves a special mention. He was a stalwart of the front counter for 20 years, from 2002 till his retiral in 2022. For many people he was the public face of Uncorked, through his tastings and his retail engagement. The first time I stepped into Uncorked, Colin’s air of unwarranted authority led me into assuming he was the owner of the business (I later learned they were in fact hiding in the office).
In 2017, Jim retired; Andrew bought out his share and became sole owner of the company. We owe a debt of thanks to one of our best customers who stepped in voluntarily to help smooth the sale. Since then, Andrew has (usually) worn the financial burden of being sole owner with great grace.
2020 and all that
I was walking to work on the first day of lockdown in March 2020, when Andrew phoned me. He told me that if a policeman stopped me and asked where I was going, I should say that I worked in a warehouse, not a shop. With non-essential shops instructed to close, we were planning on running Uncorked as a closed-door packing and delivery hub. The very next day, the Government clarified that off-licences were an essential business, and thus allowed to remain open. But for the first months of the pandemic, we chose to keep our front door locked and stick to a delivery/click-and-collect model. With restaurants and pubs closed, there was huge public demand for home deliveries of wine, and I remember the first months of lockdown as a blur of packing like it was the week before Christmas whilst getting annoyed with my colleagues over the new remote-working communications platforms. We’d allowed it to get quite untidy in the shop, and had to have a deep clean before allowing the public back inside.
Changing places
The City has a habit of knocking down and rebuilding. In 2021, we were given marching orders on Exchange Arcade, which was slated for redevelopment. Andrew became increasingly frustrated in his search for new premises (I think at a low point someone mentioned a vacant unit next to Pentonville Prison), before eventually landing on our current premises in Copthall Avenue. It was an empty shell when we took it on. For some months, Andrew spent huge amounts of energy and focus thinking through the details of the custom-made fixtures and fittings. (It’s still a touchy subject; please don’t tell him you preferred it when it was easier to see the labels on the bottles back in the old shop). As the day of the move approached, the rest of us enjoyed watching the ding-dong between Andrew and our new South-African specialist Jabu about how many boxes we were going to need. We got the worst of the job done one Saturday; I still have poignant memories of the empty, derelict, stripped down interior of Exchange Arcade, before builders moved in. But we’re very proud of our new Copthall Avenue store. Some customers report missing the ‘wine cave’ aspect of Exchange Arcade, but for us it’s nice to see daylight outside. None of us really enjoy working under the fearsome air-conditioning in Copthall Avenue, but it keeps the shop at a bottle-friendly temperature.
Former co-owner Jim Griffen died in 2023. The email tribute we sent out received far more effusive responses than any wine offer we have ever sent. He is fondly remembered.
Today Uncorked is a thriving City wine merchant. We haven’t used the slogan ‘the City’s finest’ for a few years, but it’s as true now as when we coined it. We’re still a bottleshop, but email offers, en primeur and managing customer reserves consume more of our time than bottle sales. 2024 saw our 30th anniversary. Where next? At the time of writing, the next generation of our website is being built behind the scenes. We’re looking forward to new en primeur campaigns, and always on the lookout for new ways to do things, and new wines worth getting behind.
