Totnesians with their ear to the ground might already have heard that we’re taking over the Tangerine Tree on the high street. The plan is to keep it as a café through the day (with a bit of a Ben’s/Riverford twist), introduce wine off-sales and to open as a wine/tapas bar in the evenings. When I say tapas, what I really mean is a small, simple plate of food (or two) to have with a drink – quickly and reasonably cheaply. Some will be of an Iberian theme but some won’t. We’re planning on being fairly self-indulgent in that they’ll be things we really like but, somehow, don’t really fit in at the shop cafes.
I also love my wine. Fellow wine lovers are constantly surprised by the range, price and quality of wines we have in the farm shops. Despite most of it coming straight from the producers in Europe and hence fitting in with our ethos of provenance, a farm shop has never been the ideal place to sell exciting wines. We think we can sell more – hence the wine bar and wine shop. So the plan is to offer a rotating choice of about a dozen wines by the glass and a couple of hundred to sell by the bottle to take away or, with small corkage, to drink in. So a good, £10 retail bottle that would normally be £25 plus in a restaurant will be about £16 to drink in.