MERCHANT PROFILE
T
here’s an inner-city grittiness
to Digbeth, with its factory and
warehouse buildings in varying
states of disrepair, renovation or graffiti
adornment. But it’s only a short hop from
the main shopping district of Birmingham, a city whose self-confidence has boomed
in direct proportion to the investment that has poured in over recent years.
Wine Freedom’s unit dates from the very
early 20th century. “It was part of the Bird’s Custard factory estate,” says owner Sam
Olive. “Our landlords own about 17 acres worth of Digbeth including pretty much
the whole of the old custard factory estate, which equates to about 25% of those 17
acres. We’ve taken on an old building built by a local engineer called William J Wild
and we have his name above the shutter.
“There’s not much to it and it costs quite
a bit of money to keep it warm in winter.
Alan Irvine, Milngavie, May 2021
But it means we can have people in the building comfortably.
“We were open about seven weeks
between both [2020] lockdowns and it
was an opportunity to show people what
it was like. We had fantastic feedback from customers saying they felt safe.
“We have a nice big airy interesting
Wine Freedom had been going for four years when Sam Olive took the plunge with its first premises, a century-old warehouse in an industrial suburb of Birmingham, once owned by Bird’s Custard. Covid threatened to derail the company’s ambitions, but as life slowly returns to normal,
venue and we are selling online to the
trade and retail, as well as doing tastings and we have a bar set-up. So it’s a multichannel business.”
Wine Freedom started out six years ago,
after Olive finished a five-year stint with Bibendum.
“Initially it was a B2C business starting
the venue’s future looks bright
with the wine club because we had some
fairly solid contacts and a small customer
THE WINE MERCHANT august 2021 26
base,” he says.
