Three decades ago, George Bovill fell in love with Portsmouth’s beachside enclave of Southsea. Since 2022, locals have fallen in love with Crushed & Cured, the wine shop and bar that he’s created there. Graham Holter pays a visit

Southsea feels like an archetypal south coast resort; from some angles it could be mistaken for Worthing or Bexhill. Yet zoom out of the map and you’ll see that it’s in the heart of Portsmouth, just not particularly near the warships, flyovers and postwar sprawl that the city conjures in the mind’s eye.

Southsea’s charms include the Clarence Pier amusement park, a canoe lake and a model village. Crushed & Cured joined the list of attractions in 2022: an inviting, double-fronted wine shop and bar, owned by George Bovill, who’s originally from Reading but has called this part of Hampshire home for almost three decades.

“I just fell in love with the place,” he says. “I love being by the sea. When the sun is shining, it’s a fantastic place to be, and there’s always lots going on. It’s got a great feel and it doesn’t seem like a big city.

“People here are really supportive of local businesses and local products.”

The premises aren’t on the seafront, but on one of Southsea’s main north-south roads, on the corner of a shopping street where independents seem to thrive. It’s spacious and inviting, with abundant natural light from the large east-facing windows. It’s hard to imagine a better canvas for a hybrid wine merchant – even though that wasn’t originally what this was going to be.

Bovill spent “20 years running restaurants for other people, at site level, and then at regional manager level,” he explains. Covid brought that to an abrupt halt, and he took a job running marinas. “Which was a similar role, but I didn’t really enjoy it,” he says. “So I decided I was going to do something for myself. This was it.”

Wine had been an important element of Bovill’s early career, but had faded into the background as his seniority grew. He was keen to get back to his roots with his new venture.

Was wine always going to be the focus here?
Yes. And initially we were just going to be a shop, so for the first, I guess, six months, we were just retail. And then I realised two things: that we had a lot of space; and making money off retail is quite difficult.

So the hybrid bit just came about organically, really. I put the tables in and wanted to keep everything really simple in terms of the food offering: just cheese, charcuterie, with a couple of Spanish bits, but really just focusing on British producers and things that we can put together quickly and easily.

As we’ve got busier, and the venue’s evolved, I wanted to bring in some fresh elements. We’re looking at another revamp, just to keep things new and fresh. We change it every four months, I suppose – not fully, but just tweaking things. We have a lot of regulars so when they come in, there’s new things for them to explore.

What sort of team do you need to put that together?
Up until April, it was just me full time, and then I took Tansy on, who’s my first employee. She joined just doing weekends. And as we got busier, she joined the team full time. We’ve got three or four part-timers that do weekends and days when we need them.

It’s a decent-sized space. It feels like it wouldn’t feel too cramped even when it’s full.
No, it’s not. I looked at trying to get a couple more tables in, but it became too tight. You want a bit of privacy and to enjoy the conversation without feeling like you’re sitting on top of somebody else. When it’s full it’s a great atmosphere, great vibes. It’s good fun, but very relaxed at the same time. People seem to have really bought into it. We can seat about 40 people and there are a couple of tables we can pull out if we need to.

What’s your crowd here?
We get all generations: young couples, a few students from time to time, and then people my age and older. People just want somewhere they can go where they know they’re going to get really good product and have a really, really good glass of wine – which is hard to come by, which sounds weird. But around here, there are a lot of pubs, and it’s pretty average stuff that they’re offering.

How do you get the balance right with the wine?
I just wanted to be really accessible and approachable to people. I’m trying to break down that barrier: there is a thing around wine, with people not understanding it. We get lots of people saying, ‘we don’t know anything about wine’, but I tell them you don’t need to. You just need to know what you like and what you don’t like.

I guess there’s a lack of understanding around wine, especially old world stuff, where you’ve got grapes that aren’t on the label. People don’t want to feel like they’re being silly. And so we work really hard to break that down, just being really down to earth with people and trying to work out what they enjoy or don’t enjoy.

A lot of people just come in and go, ‘can you recommend something?’ You obviously get people knowing exactly what they want, but the bulk of people are open-minded.

What if someone comes in and says, I really love Jam Shed?
That’s a difficult one! If it’s that big, fruity style of wine they like, we’ve got lots of things like that, but it tastes 10,000 times better.

How do you select your wines by the glass?
We change them every month, there’s always new things to try. We try and keep some things off there that people would default to, so that they discover new things. We’ve never put a New Zealand Sauvignon on, because that would be literally all we sold that month. We’re trying to get people discovering new grapes, new wines, new styles.

What kind of wines have you got people into?
Chardonnay was one that initially we struggled with. People were very anti it, but we’ve always put one on, and it’s generally got some oak ageing on it, just to get people into it – which has worked, because we sell a lot more than we used to, for sure.

You never really know what’s going to go. Sometimes you put something on, and it absolutely flies out. We put a South African Shiraz on at the start of July. That sold out in the first weekend. People were just going crazy for it.

We don’t do a huge amount of high-volume stuff. We tend to do one, two, three, four bottles. We don’t really get people coming in and getting cases.

Is parking tricky around here?
It’s not too bad. Southsea is quite small, and people just tend to walk places. But if people drive, the parking isn’t terrible. If they buy a dozen of something, I just say, ‘pull up outside and I’ll run it into the boot for you’.

What’s your corkage charge?
It’s £10, and nothing on a Tuesday. Just to try and drive a bit of trade. It’s quiet-ish, and it’s helped us gather some really good momentum.

What about the rest of the week?
Our flight club on Wednesdays is really strong: we do three cheeses paired with three different wines for £15. People really like that. Thursdays it’s tasting night. Generally, our first two of the month are public tastings, which are really popular. They sell really well. I had to move from one a month to two a month because they were so popular. The demand was so high.

I think people just like an event. It’s different to going out for a meal or to the pub. It’s informative, it’s fun. You get to sit around the table here and meet new people. The uptake on it has been mega. There are people who are friends now because they’ve met here.

What’s the breakdown between your sales for consumption on the premises, and sales for taking home?
It’s about 60/40 sitting in to retail. It was around 50/50 but it’s swung slightly the other way. I kind of wanted to keep it around 50/50, but it is what it is and we’ll take what we can get. Christmas goes the other way, as I’m sure it does for everybody. You get a massive amount of people coming in and buying presents.

Tell us more about the range.
It’s a mixture, I guess, of classic things from classic regions and countries, but then we try and find some more unusual stuff. So we’ve got quite a bit from Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, that part of Europe, which I think produces some brilliant wines. The quality coming out of there is amazing. And then really, if it just tastes good and it’s interesting, if it’s slightly unusual or different, off the beaten track, we’ll get that in as well.

Our sweet spot is between £15 and £20, I suppose. We try and keep things as reasonable as possible

Who are your main suppliers?
Alliance and Liberty are probably the biggest two, and we work with Hallgarten as well. Then smaller ones like Graft, Stone Vine & Sun … The Jolly Merchants for all the eastern Europeans. I think what they have in their portfolio is great. Those are the top ones.

How do you make your buying decisions? Do you get good service from reps? Do you get to many tastings?
A bit of both. Stone, Vine & Sun and Jolly Merchants bring things to me quite regularly and we taste them here. I really like that more intimate way of discovering wines. Then I go to the big portfolio tastings. It’s different, it’s quite chaotic, but it’s also good fun. I tend to write a few notes that will jog my memory and help me decide what to bring in.

Would you ever think about direct importing?
It was on the business plan when I wrote it back in 2022 so yeah, never say never. But it’s about prioritising, focusing on making things go really well, and then down the line, potentially – yeah.

I guess your prices must have jumped up a lot over the last couple of years.
The frustrating thing, I think, is trying to keep some entry-level stuff that’s around that £9-£10 mark. It gets more and more difficult all the time.
Our sweet spot is between £15 and £20, I suppose. We try and keep things as reasonable as possible.

People just don’t have as much disposable income now. There’s less money to spend on leisure.
People still want to go out, and they still want to spend money, but what they want from that is a good time and a good experience, good service, good quality. And as soon as they don’t get that, they then question it.

So if a couple come in here, and they order a bottle of wine, some charcuterie and that sort of thing, how much would they typically be spending?
Probably around £60, £70.

Now I do a lot of soial media videos in one take, and it feels a bit more natural that way. I’ve definitely got better

You seem very comfortable with your social media appearances. Do you enjoy making those videos?
It’s very out of my comfort zone, really. But I wanted to do it for a long time, and I started working with a guy who films and edits them for me. I’m more comfortable doing it now. I watch them once just to make sure I’m happy, and then I can’t watch them again.

We used to do them in various takes, but now a lot of them I just do in one take, and it feels a bit more natural that way. I’ve definitely got better and I enjoy doing them now, actually. It’s good fun.

From an outsider’s perspective, it sounds like you’re working very long hours. Is that sustainable?
For the first two and a half years I was doing six days a week, 12 hours a day, which I think I just had to do. Now I’ve got Tansy full time, I get more time off and more support. But we’ve just got the business to that point where we can afford to pay her salary and keep the business profitable.

Would you like more time off in the coming years?
That would be very nice. I just got back from holiday – we went to Tuscany for a week. You know, I love [the job]. It’s fantastic being here when it’s busy and talking to people. It’s one of the best bits of the job. But yeah, I’d like to take a step back and do some other things. Maybe.

What’s your big thing outside of work?
Not huge amounts, just family time. Going to restaurants and eating nice food.

I keep bees as a hobby, which is fun. I had a load of honey at Christmas which I sold through the shop and we used on the menu. It was just something I started doing a few years ago. It takes me, like, an hour a week in the summer, and I just go down and do an inspection, check that they’re healthy, and they’ve got enough space. It’s a nice way of getting out. It’s just you and hundreds of bees flying around.

Have you been stung?
Yeah, lots of times. You get used to it. You do swell up, but I’m not allergic, so it’s a minor inconvenience.

It sounds like everything’s going the right direction with the business. Is there anything you need to tweak or redirect?
No, it’s going in the right direction. I think it’s just about maintaining the standards of service and the way we look after people. But, yeah, I’m really happy with where it’s going.
You don’t know what’s going to come around the corner, but I’m pretty positive for the next 12 months.