[Alan Nordberg, picture outside the Great Wine Company]
It may not have ended up with a kerbside presence, but generations of Bathonians knew exactly where the Great Wine Company was based over the years, on its journey from Wood Street to the Wells Road.
Earlier this month, it closed its physical doors for good – though it will retain an online operation.
On this very subject, I received an email from a young man who had worked at the shop alongside Alan Nordberg, the well-known manager who was also retiring after 30 years behind the counter.
Gus Isherwood has written his own tribute to Alan and asked me to publish it.
I am happy to do that.
“A small photograph clung to the wall of the Great Wine Company (Great Western Wine to most of us), just above the shop’s tasting station. It’s one of the first things Alan showed me when I began working there: a picture of his father, uncle and grandparents, the Nordbergs, all four of them blowing into saxophones.
On the adjacent wall, that same name was printed onto the deck of a skateboard, branded after Alan’s son, the professional skateboarder and fashion model, Ben Nordberg. A leather couch lined the wall beneath it, and there was a French wireless on a shelf by the sweet wines. This was a man showing me around his home.
Alan started working at Great Western Wine in 1989, and Friday, 5th June, 2026, was his last shift. He was there under the railway arches on Wood Street after the shop outgrew the farm property on which it was conceived by Philip Addis in 1983. He was there when it moved to London Road some years later. He was there to the very end on Wells Road, where the shop closed its doors for good.
In the two years that I worked with him, I never saw Alan arrive at the shop, and I never saw him leave. It was only in the last month that I learned which car was his after he pointed it out through the window, eclipsed by a customer’s Land Rover Defender.
Alan’s wheels were among the more modest to have graced the shop carpark. The wines, after all, were not cheap. It was the kind of place where customers might spend a grand or two on a whim. If you could, you would, because the quality was excellent.
Some regulars stuck to firm favourites, often with nothing said before Alan or a colleague had placed the bottles on the counter. Itchier palates tapped into the kind of knowledge that’s becoming perilously scarce. The minds of the shop’s veteran core would not leap to some page of a book or a website, but to a time and a place.
Alan and colleagues could tell you as much as any oenophile about where the grapes are from and what’s done to them, but they could also describe the views from a vineyard, the smell of a cellar, the strength of a wine-maker’s handshake and the shape of his accent. With these chaps, it was never textbook.
But most customers, you sensed, were not there for the wine alone, and some not for the wine at all. There was not a single day in my time at the shop when a visitor did not spend more time talking to Alan than they did choosing their bottles. And usually, it was not even wine talk.
Listening from behind the counter, I learned as much about viniculture as I did about rugby and cricket, about family histories and war, the art of fishing and parenting. Alan himself is no big talker, but something about him put people at ease. Many of his customers, after all, had known him for decades.
It’s no exaggeration to say that people had found in that shop a kind of sanctuary. How many shops do you know where the retailer feeds biscuits to his customers’ dogs and lollipops to their children? Where a couch and drawing set keep the toddlers calm while their parents kick back with the shop manager? The music was always gentle, never intended to make you buy fast and leave fast. The message was clear: wine is about time, and there was a world of it here.
The shop’s closure comes a year after parent company Enotria was acquired by Majestic Wine. A new site could not be found when the landlord declared that the Wells Road address would be redeveloped. Its existence will remain only online.
‘The end of an era.’ I heard that a few times as Alan boxed up his friends’ bottles for the last time.”
Thanks, Gus. I am sure Alan and all his customers over the years will appreciate that.
I remember and often made use of the discount you used to get if you bought an assorted box of several bottles – sadly something which disappeared after Oenotria took over. And the row of ‘outsize’ wine bottles behind the counter – right up to a Methuselah if I remember rightly!
Wine is all about time. Online forums are all well and good. A bottle of decent wine is a considerable investment for many. Wise counsel from a well-informed proprietor can send the wine buying novice home confident he has a bottle suited to the occasion and more comfortable buying the next one. Shops like this made wine buying an event rather than a transaction.