An Oddbins education

With the news that Oddbins has gone bankrupt, again, I thought it was the perfect time to write an appreciation of this peculiar institution that gave me my first proper job.

One of the most common questions asked of wine people is, how did you get into wine? It’s a measure of how odd it is to take an interest in wine rather than just drink it. Nobody asks footballers how they got into football or doctors how they go into medicine. Being a wine writer is a particularly strange calling.

Some in the business have that totemic bottle where it all started. For Steven Spurrier it was a 1908 Cockburn port. I wasn’t brought up in that kind of household. My parents both drank wine, they were of that generation who drank Bergerac and Muscadet and rejected the spirits drinking of their parents, but they didn’t know anything about it. 

Rather than learn from my parents, I took my first steps at Oddbins, a chain of wine merchants that finally seems to have gone out of business after a turbulent few years. As a student in Leeds in the 1990s, I was probably slightly more interested in wine than my friends but this only meant I bought awful cornershop Corbieres instead of the much nicer Hardys Stamp of Australia shiraz that everyone else was drinking. If I was pushing the boat out, I might buy a £4.99 Rioja. Oddbins opened my eyes to a world of delicious wines for under a £5. You could buy some really quite palatable bottles for £2.99 which barely sounds believable these days. 

Oddbins price list from 1990 with illustrations by Ralph Steadman

The firm was founded in the 1960s London by a British man of Indian extraction called Ahmed Pochee selling randomly acquired bits of stock, odd bins. By 1973 it went into receivership, something of a theme for the company, but it was acquired by two men who built the Oddbins that I came to know and love, Nick Baile and Dennis Ing. In 1984 they sold up to Seagram, a Canadian drinks multinational that had Mumm champagne, Sandeman port and Glenlivet whisky in its vast portfolio of brands. Somehow it managed to leave Oddbins alone and let it develop its quirky personality. This involved dusty, somewhat cave-like shops with wooden floorboards. It meant letting the buyers, like Steve Daniel, follow their noses first with wines from Australia and Chile, and then later with Greece. 

Wine was having a moment in Britain. There were series by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson that were watched by millions. Newspapers columns by Jane MacQuitty in The Times or Malcolm Gluck in the Guardian could shift thousands of cases. Publishers like Faber and Mitchell Beazley published dozens of wine books and aimed them at the general reader. Then there was Oz Clarke and Jilly Goolden camping it up on Food & Drink on BBC 2. Wine was fun, wine was democratic and not necessarily French. And bringing all this to the high street was Oddbins. Over and over again, it won Wine Merchant of the Year. It was such an institution that it even cropped up in Absolutely Fabulous, Patsy lived in one of the branches in London. 

Watching that video brings back memories, it’s all the handpainted signs and window displays. That was the thing about Oddbins, every shop was different, the staff had a lot of say in what they stocked. Even more than the wines, it was the shops that drew me in. The staff looked like they were having so much fun. There were posters on the wall by cartoonist Ralph Steadman who worked with the company during its heyday. It felt like a club that I wanted to join so after graduating in 1999 with a degree in English and classical literature and not a clue in the world, I got a job at the Headingley shop managed by David Archibald. Despite only being about 26, Dave had had a varied career with the company managing big London shops. He would regale us with stories about serving celebrities in Covent Garden. You didn’t get celebrities in Leeds apart from people who were once in Emmerdale Farm. He was a massive reggae fan and I still can’t hear ‘Chase the Devil’ by Max Romeo without being transported back to summer in Headingley.

Oddbins Headingley, oooh the glamour

The shop was rather down-at-heel rather like our customers, a mixture of students, lecturers and often quite amiable drunks. The average spend must have been about £3.  And yet Dave treated each one as a potential big spender and somehow managed to make the shop beat its budget nearly every week. He ran a tight ship with very little drinking on the job. It was a different story in the town centre branch where I really wanted to work. Sherry sharpeners at 11 were de rigueur. The clientele was largely professionals from Leeds financial district plus local bars and clubs. I’d never seen people just buy a case of champagne without thinking of it. The manager Martin was not only a brilliant salesman but also knew an extraordinary amount about wine, it was like having our very own Oz Clarke in the shops. I can still remember his enthusiasm selling Bleasdale Frank Potts. Almost every branch had someone like Martin. 

Intoxicated with wine and Oddbins, in 2000 I moved down to London to become assistant manager of the Portobello Road shop. It was awful. Working long hours and being paid nothing was a lot less fun in London than it was in Yorkshire. While Leeds was still living the ‘80s and ‘90s glory years, Oddbins in London seemed like a tired institution with demoralised, underpaid and generally fed up staff. I was very glad to get out in 2001 with a job in publishing. It paid £17,500 which felt like a fortune and I didn’t have to work weekends. 

Oddbins was sold shortly after, nothing to do with me leaving I hasten to add. The Seagram empire collapsed and most of the drink side went to Pernod Ricard while Oddbins was bought by Castel, owners of comedy wine chain Nicolas. Soon the shops were full of mediocre French wine and prices were upped by what felt like 20%. Suddenly Majestic or mail order like The Wine Society seemed much better options. 

The Oddbins of Ralph Steadman, maverick Californian winemaker Randall Grahm and Steve Daniel was gone forever (I highly recommend reading this article in Meininger’s by Robert Joseph) though the brand survived and soldiered on for another two decades. There were many further collapses followed by false dawns after that but there was only one way the chain was going with an ever-decreasing amount of shops. Going into my old shop in Portobello Road earlier this year, you could see the chain was in desperate trouble, there was almost no stock because, as the staff cheerfully admitted, it couldn’t pay its bills. I was reminded of that line from Hemingway about going bankrupt two ways, ‘gradually, then suddenly’. 

It was a bittersweet moment. Despite only working for the company for two years and never rising higher than assistant manager, my time with Oddbins proved a formative experience. It ignited in me a love of wine and, perhaps just as importantly, a love of talking about wine. When I changed my career into publishing, a part of me always knew that my business was really in wine. I started going to tastings with my father and eventually started a blog because I didn’t just want to drink the stuff, I wanted to share my thoughts about it. That was the Oddbins effect. The British wine trade is full of people like me who got their start in the same way. 

Au revoir Oddbins and thank you for all the wine and memories both good and not so good. Without you I might have grown up and got a proper job.