Dev Stewart has supplied wine to customers all over the north west for years
R&h sells wine to people all across the north west(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
Dev Stewart has been supplying his wine to customers and the hospitality industry for nearly 15 years, but more recently has transformed an Allerton Road shop into a popular destination in the city.
In recent years, Queen Avenue in the city centre has seen a rapid increase in the number of businesses opening their doors for the first time. However, one business which has been there longer than most belongs to Dev Stewart.
The dad has been running his R&H Fine Wines along the street for more than a decade, sourcing and supplying wine from across the world all over Liverpool. Born in Canada before making the move to the city as a child, Dev had originally worked at nearby Oddbins but when the wine shop closed its doors, it became the spark for him to start running his own business.
He told the ECHO: “There was an Oddbins here on Castle Street and that closed down and [R&H Fine Wines] was born out of that really. I needed a job pretty quickly and I started selling wine to some private customers just while I was pursuing some other things, to keep things tiding over.
“It just gained some momentum, so I left the other pursuits and focused on the wine. The landlords, Bruntwood, were landlords for Oddbins as well and I’d stayed in touch with them and they gave me the option on what is 12 Queen Avenue.”
Dev and his wine shop are well-known throughout the city (Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
While the early days of running any shop can bring about its challenges, Dev said the lack of businesses on the street actually proved to be a major advantage when he first opened.
He said: “I had been selling privately to a lot of customers before I had actually opened the shop, so I had a little momentum and I already had a couple of wholesale customers as well, so I sold to bars and restaurants around town.
“So, the landlords were quite helpful, it was cheap down here because what was then Toff’s Bistro, they shut at two o’clock, so we had the place to ourselves and I think the landlords were quite happy that we were down here making use of it.”
Since first opening the business 12 years ago, he has supplied wine to customers all over the north west and has built up a considerable list of suppliers from around the world.
He added: “It’s funny how the world can become quite small so quickly. You meet folks accidentally and interesting things grow out of that. My son has just been working in Argentina, he went travelling and stopped at one of the wineries that we deal with and also, there was a lovely chap in here recently who was from Portugal, he passed me a card and we got chatting and the next thing that you know we’re shipping from Lisbon every couple of months and we have a lovely relationship with them.”
In the years since he first opened R&H Fine Wines on Queens Avenue, he has expanded his presence on the street by opening Queen’s Bistro, which he co-owns with his business partner, Lucas Pires. After opening his second city centre venue in 2019, four years later he grew his R&H brand further by opening in another Oddbins site, this time on Allerton Road.
Dev opened R&H Fine Wines’ second site in 2023(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
After celebrating their third Christmas at the shop last month, Dev reflected on life at their south Liverpool branch. He said: “It’s a much different shop, it’s a neighbourhood shop, it’s been a wine shop there for 20 plus years and it had been an Oddbins for years beforehand.”
While Oddbins had been a steadfast in the community since it opened in the mid 80s, Dev said he has been eager to maintain the role it plays in the community. Since taking over a few years ago, Dev has expanded the premises to include a space for customers to enjoy the products while in the shop.
He said: “It’s a much bigger shop [than we have in city centre], it gives us much more room and we’ve since opened the bar in the back of it in the storeroom two years ago and started doing music events, there’s a piano in there, so we started doing music shows as well as running a wine bar.”
Dev believes adding the extra space has enabled the shop to become a focal point for the local community.
He said: “It’s just turned into a lovely community hub, as opposed to just a wine shop. It just made sense, the community there is lovely, the shop is lovely, the staff that we inherited have always been friends, namely Steve Williams, who had worked at the Oddbins shop years before.”
Despite having made significant changes to the shop’s layout since he took over, Dev said it was crucial to the business he retained Steve when he took over.
He said: “He’s been a pal of mine for many many years anyway and I knew that I wanted to keep him. There was another guy who didn’t stay [after he took on the premises from Oddbins], but thankfully Steve did and he has been absolutely integral to what we have done there [in Allerton], the community loves him and I think that they were all very happy that he had a job there and some really interesting wine to get his teeth into.”
They sell wines from all over the world(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
As he looked back over his years of running his venues and sharing his expertise, he said the best part of the job is forming a bond with the customers he now considers friends.
Dev said: “Sharing the knowledge is grand, it just makes going to work a pleasure when you get to meet so many different characters and just share little bits of daily life. I talk as much about football as I do about wine [to customers], you just see people and get to know them, like I say, Steve, who has been in there now for 15 years, he knows everybody and everybody knows and loves him and everybody gets along and it’s just a lovely place to be.”
While there are no immediate plans to open a new venture, Dev said it is possible he will expand the R&H brand further. At the moment, he said he is focused on the future of their Allerton Road site.
Dev added: “In Allerton the plan is to do more music shows, we have a diary full of events for the next six months, so that’ll be fun. We’ve got a piano, we’ve had folk nights, we’ve had piano recitals, we’ve had comedians come in, we had a couple of jazz heads come in recently and blow everyone away, everyone’s a music fan amongst us so we like to be involved.”