At the time, I wasn’t working and I had no clear plan.
I was in that suspended phase of life when you keep saying you are looking for inspiration, although what it often really means is that you still have no idea where to begin.
I wasn’t completely unhappy.
I wasn’t at peace either.
I was waiting for something.
The problem was, I didn’t know what.
About three months earlier, I had met the man who would become my partner for several years through an app.
It began in the least romantic way possible, scrolling through photographs on a screen, and somehow became something very real.
One weekend, we decided to visit a couple who were close friends of his in a small medieval town in Kent.
On Saturday afternoon, they took us for a walk around the centre.
It was one of those English places capable of convincing you, at least for a few hours, that life might be simpler elsewhere: old houses, narrow streets, discreet signs and enough history to make even a car park look picturesque.
As we walked along the high street, I noticed a shop for rent.
It wasn’t the sign in the window that stopped me.
It was the place itself.
I looked through the glass and stood there open-mouthed.
I had never seen anything like it.
It was a protected historic building, originally a grocery store from the 1920s, preserved in extraordinary condition.
Inside were the original wooden counters, a large display cabinet with a clock at its centre, weighing scales, tea bins with their scoops and a long marble counter where meat and cold cuts had once been served.
There was even an old wooden till, with the original system for writing receipts by hand.
Everything seemed to belong to another era.
And yet it did not have the sad atmosphere of an abandoned shop or a museum piece.
It felt alive.
As though someone had continued to protect it, waiting for the right moment to allow it to begin again.
I fell in love with it immediately.
My partner, who worked as an interior designer and had a far more trained eye than mine, agreed that it was an extraordinary space.
“How much do you think the rent on a place like this could be?” I asked him.
Next door was a garage specialising in the restoration of classic cars.
Inside were magnificent vehicles: some already restored and ready to be returned to their owners, others still waiting for attention.
It did not look like a workshop.
It looked like a private clinic for aristocratic cars.
Everything was spotless, ordered and arranged with almost obsessive precision. The tools were perfectly positioned, and the polished bodywork reflected the light.
Even the cars awaiting repair looked as though they already belonged in a museum.
The owner noticed us looking through the windows and overheard some of our comments.
He approached us politely and asked whether we needed any help.
My partner seized the opportunity at once. He complimented him on the building and asked for some information.
The man briefly explained its history.
The shop and garage had once formed part of the same property and had retained the original family name through the generations. Over time, part of the old grocery had become a workshop, but the identity of the place had never been erased.
That continuity fascinated me.
The building wasn’t merely beautiful.
It had a memory.
Then he told us the rent.
Six hundred pounds a month.
I nearly jumped.
Six hundred pounds.
For a place like that.
I was speechless.
And then something happened inside my head.
It wasn’t a calculation.
I didn’t make a list of expenses. I didn’t work out how many customers I would need to cover the rent. I didn’t think about taxes, suppliers or licences.
I simply saw the place transformed.
The shelves filled with perfectly aligned bottles of wine.
Tables, chairs and small sofas appeared.
The large room became a drawing room, a parlour where people could drink, talk and stay longer than they had planned.
The image was so clear that it felt less like an idea and more like a memory.
I kept looking at the shop, but in my mind it was no longer empty.
I turned to my partner.
“I want it.”
He stared at me.
“What for?”
The answer came out before I had time to consider whether it made any sense.
“A wine bar.”
He did what competent people do when someone suddenly falls in love with a project.
He began listing every reason why it might be impossible.
I could already see the bottles on the shelves.
He could see the licences.
The premises were approved for retail use.
Turning them into a wine bar would require a change of use, permission to sell and serve alcohol, training, paperwork and a series of procedures that I barely understood at the time.
Then there was the historic building itself.
Because it was protected, any alteration would have to respect its structure, original fittings and character.
You could not simply walk in with a drill and the enthusiasm of a television renovation programme.
“We could apply,” he explained. “But it will be complicated. And there’s no guarantee they’ll approve it.”
It was a sensible answer.
I, however, was no longer in a sensible condition.
“If they don’t give us the licence, never mind. For six hundred pounds a month, I could always open a shop. Interiors, antiques, something like that.”
That was my plan B.
I don’t know how solid it really was, but it had one essential quality: it made plan A sound considerably less dangerous.
Suddenly, the risk no longer seemed absolute.
In the worst-case scenario, I would not have a wine bar. I would have a beautiful shop inside a historic building, with wood, marble, mirrors and a clock that already seemed to know my future.
My partner began to come round.
I don’t think it was only my commercial logic that convinced him.
As an interior designer, he had probably fallen in love with the place almost as much as I had, although he had enough professional discipline to hide it behind words such as “feasibility” and “change of use”.
We contacted the agency managing the property.
Naturally, the agency was not moved by my enthusiasm.
They asked for references as though they were expecting a monsoon, along with documents, guarantees and a full year’s rent in advance.
The romance of the window display quickly gave way to bureaucracy, which has always had a very efficient way of bringing dreams back down to earth.
Throughout all of this, my partner was essential.
Not just as a companion, but as my support.
He helped me understand procedures that were completely new to me, dealt with many of the bureaucratic details and, later, transformed the interior with the talent and sensitivity of a genuine interior designer.
His presence gave me strength.
But The Vinarium was my business.
I was the one investing, studying, making decisions and accepting the risk that everything might fail.
I was the one who would have to face the customers, understand the wines, carry the costs and live every day with the consequences of that decision.
I was not alone.
But the responsibility was mine.
Years later, I would repay that support by helping him establish a business of his own.
Perhaps relationships work like that when they truly work: for a while, one person supports the other’s dream, and later their roles are reversed.
About two months passed.
In the meantime, we made an even bigger decision.
We left London.
We moved to a village not far from the premises.
It wasn’t simply a practical choice.
For several reasons, we had both begun to feel that London, at that point in our lives, was not giving us the chance to build something that truly belonged to us.
He would be able to develop his own interior design business.
I would build The Vinarium.
Even though I still did not know exactly what I was becoming.
A wine merchant?
A wine bar owner?
A cellar man, perhaps.
The phrase made me smile, but there was something serious beneath it.
For the first time in a long while, I was not simply searching for an idea.
I had a direction.
It was fragile, expensive and surrounded by paperwork.
But it existed.
In April, we finally received the keys.
I still remember the feeling of entering the premises from the inside, no longer as a curious stranger peering through the window, but knowing that this place was about to become the centre of my life.
The shop was empty, but it was not bare.
The counters, marble, scales, tea bins and large wooden till were still there.
The display cabinet dominated the room, with mirrors and a clock positioned above its central section.
Everything was perfect.
It felt as though time had stopped there with remarkable elegance.
During the previous months, we had already begun the procedures required for the change of use.
That was when I truly understood how difficult obtaining approval would be.
It was not simply a matter of filling in a few forms.
The proposal would be made public, and local residents could submit letters of support or lodge objections if they believed the business might disturb the peace of the town or harm the community.
For me, this was almost a shock.
On one side, there was considerable enthusiasm.
On the other, someone living nearby had already begun to complain. There were concerns about noise, increased footfall and possible problems with public order.
It was, after all, a very quiet town.
For some people, the arrival of anything new already looked suspiciously like disorder.
It frightened me.
For the first time, the project stopped being something merely beautiful and became something exposed.
It was no longer enough that I loved it.
It had to be accepted by others.
And yet, alongside the fear, I felt an even stronger conviction growing.
I don’t know whether it was recklessness, optimism or instinct.
I only knew that I wanted to see it through.
While we waited for the committee’s decision, we began fitting out the premises.
We could have waited.
We could have limited the spending and started work only after receiving formal approval.
Naturally, we did the opposite.
My partner designed the interior magnificently.
Tables, chairs, sofas, lighting and equipment arrived, along with everything required to transform the old grocery store into a wine bar.
The idea was that the place would have several lives during the course of a single day.
In the morning, we would serve tea, coffee and light breakfasts.
At lunchtime, soups, sharing boards and simple dishes.
From the afternoon onwards, the menu would change: wine, bruschetta, olives, pizza, cured meats, cheeses and food designed to be shared.
A café in the morning.
A quiet place for lunch.
A drawing room in the evening.
There was, however, one detail that nobody looking in from outside could have imagined.
I had never managed a place of my own.
And until the day I looked through that window, I had never once considered opening a wine bar.
I liked wine.
I liked drinking it, discovering it and sharing it.
But enjoying a good glass is one thing.
Standing in front of a customer prepared to spend three hundred pounds on a bottle and expecting, quite rightly, to be told exactly what they are buying is something else entirely.
I could not simply point at a label and say the wine was excellent.
I needed to understand grape varieties, regions, vintages, producers, methods of production and the differences between one bottle and another.
I had to be able to describe a wine without sounding as though I were reciting a paragraph I had memorised five minutes earlier.
So during the three months of waiting, I studied.
I read, took notes, tasted and tried to understand.
Someone with experience in the wine trade helped me, teaching me as much as could reasonably be condensed into such a short period.
I tried to absorb everything.
I knew the beauty of the premises might bring customers through the door once.
Only knowledge, quality and hospitality would bring them back.
For the welcome itself, I followed a much simpler rule.
I asked myself:
“If I were the customer, what would I want after choosing to spend my money and an evening of my life here?”
The answer was not only about wine.
I would want to feel welcomed without being crowded.
Looked after without unnecessary formality.
I would want good music, flattering light, quality products and someone able to offer advice without making me feel ignorant.
Above all, I would want to sense that my enjoyment mattered more than the final bill.
That does not mean ignoring profit.
A business has to make money, otherwise it becomes an extremely expensive hobby.
It means finding the right balance between quality, sustainability and respect for the customer, without placing profit ahead of every decision.
I had no experience.
What I had was passion, curiosity and a willingness to learn.
I had put my soul into that place.
And sometimes experience begins exactly like that: doing something for the first time with enough seriousness not to treat it as an improvisation.
By the time the committee date approached, the place was almost entirely ready.
Not merely furnished.
The bottles were already arranged on the shelves.
That, perhaps, is the clearest measure of how much I believed in it.
I had filled a wine bar before knowing whether I would be legally allowed to open one.
The room looked as though it had come from a film.
The old wood, the marble, the mirrors, the clock and the perfectly aligned bottles.
Everything was ready.
Except the permission to exist.
The fear was enormous.
I didn’t show it, or at least I tried not to.
I continued working, speaking to suppliers and arranging the final details as though I were certain everything would be approved.
I was not certain at all.
If the committee rejected the application, I would be left with a fully completed wine bar that could not operate as a wine bar.
An elegant monument to enthusiasm without authorisation.
My decision to begin work before the verdict caused considerable discussion.
Many local people considered it reckless.
And, to be fair, they were partly right.
I was investing time, energy and money into something whose future had not yet been decided.
But at that moment, I felt like a real entrepreneur.
And in my own admittedly questionable interpretation of entrepreneurship, an entrepreneur also had to be willing to take risks.
I have always liked risk.
Or perhaps what I have always liked is that strange energy that appears when you realise something could go very well or very badly, but either way it will force you to become braver than you were before.
During the wait, however, something happened that we had not anticipated.
People began to visit us.
We were not yet open, but local residents would stop outside, watch the work and ask to come in.
Many were enthusiastic.
They said the place would be the touch of class the town had been missing.
It was an affluent community, attentive to quality and appearances, but it lacked an elegant and safe place to meet outside the traditional pub environment.
Many women in particular told us they would finally have somewhere to invite friends, drink a glass of wine and spend an evening without feeling out of place.
The English pub is theoretically open to everyone.
In practice, especially at that time and in a small community, it often retained a predominantly male atmosphere.
A woman entering alone might not feel entirely comfortable.
The Vinarium promised something different.
Elegant but not stiff.
Welcoming but not loud.
And, a detail that caused a certain amount of curiosity, created by an Italian with an English partner at his side.
Before long, we became known as “the Italian and the Englishman from London”.
It was a flawless marketing strategy, particularly because we had never planned it and it cost us nothing.
The town was talking about us.
Local newspapers covered the work and followed the progress of the licence application.
Some articles openly supported the project.
Others suggested I might be mad.
Both interpretations probably contained an element of truth.
Many letters of support were sent to the local authority.
People I had not yet met chose to defend The Vinarium, explaining that it would enrich the community rather than damage it.
Those letters gave me courage.
They did not remove the fear, but they made it less lonely.
At last, the day of the committee arrived.
We entered the council chamber and sat in a circle.
The atmosphere felt like a trial.
There was me, my partner, my brother and a friend.
In front of us sat the people who would decide whether the months of work, the move, the money invested and all those bottles already arranged on the shelves had a future.
When our turn came, the documents we had submitted appeared on a large screen.
Someone began presenting the project, discussing the paperwork, plans and conditions.
I could not listen.
The words reached me, but I could not hold on to them.
I was confused, tense, almost dazed.
All I could hear was my heart beating and the weight of everything I had done before knowing whether it would be allowed to exist.
Then came the sentence.
“The licence is granted.”
For a moment, I did not understand.
I remained completely still, as though the words had been spoken in a language I did not know.
Then I saw the faces around me.
My partner was smiling.
My brother was smiling.
Our friend was smiling.
And finally, I understood.
I had done it.
I collapsed back into my chair for a few seconds, overwhelmed by an emotion I could not control.
The fear, the objections, the forms, the money and all the work carried out without guarantees dissolved at once.
I was no longer a man imagining a wine bar through a window.
I was the owner of one.
News of the approval travelled through the town with extraordinary speed.
I announced on social media that I would open that very evening.
I had just received permission.
The place was ready.
I had no intention of waiting any longer.
That evening, a queue formed outside the door.
Some people came to drink.
Others came simply to see what had become of the old historic shop that everyone had been discussing for months.
They walked in and stopped to look around.
The transformation was complete, but nothing had been erased.
The marble, wood, mirrors and clock were still there.
The history of the place had not been covered over.
It had become part of the experience.
Jazz played in the background, loud enough to create an atmosphere but never loud enough to force people to shout.
The lighting was low, but not dark.
A large Chesterfield sofa dominated the centre of the room, surrounded by tables and seating.
Cage-shaped chandeliers hung from the ceiling.
The bottles filled the shelves and looked as though they had always belonged there.
It was elegant without being formal.
Theatrical without feeling artificial.
The real protagonist, however, was Italian wine.
I had created a cellar representing every region of Italy, from simple and accessible bottles to labels costing three hundred pounds.
I did not want Italian wine to be reduced to the handful of familiar names generally known abroad.
I wanted to show its variety.
Every region had something to say.
Every bottle represented a landscape, a climate and a tradition.
The wine was accompanied by sharing boards, olives, cured meats, mozzarella and carefully selected Italian products.
I did not want to imitate Italy using generic ingredients.
The quality had to be real.
That evening, the place filled.
And it continued to fill in the days that followed.
Then the weeks.
Then the months.
From that first night onwards, The Vinarium was almost always full.
People booked well in advance, sometimes months ahead, simply to guarantee themselves an evening there.
Customers came from other cities.
Some spent an entire weekend in the area partly because they wanted to visit us.
Once, people even came from Paris.
The name began to travel much further than I had ever imagined.
During one conversation, a customer told me that the place had even been discussed in New York.
Someone who knew the town also knew The Vinarium.
Or perhaps, by then, it had become the other way around.
I never quite understood whether the bar became known because of the town or whether, for some people, the town became known because of the bar.
Probably both.
Traces of what I built are still there.
They remain in reviews, newspaper articles, photographs and in the memories of people who entered The Vinarium intending to stay for one glass and ended up spending the entire evening.
Even today, under different owners, the premises retain the identity created during those first years.
The change of use, the work carried out and the reputation built also transformed the value of the property itself.
The owner of the building was left with a more valuable, recognised and easier-to-let commercial space, without having personally faced the fear, risk, study and uncertainty required to transform it.
But the walls were his.
The second life of those walls, at least in the beginning, was mine.
What I do know is that only a few months earlier, I had been a man without work, searching for an idea.
Then I saw a window.
I said two words.
“I want it.”
I had no experience of running a venue.
I did not yet know enough about wine to describe every bottle with confidence.
I did not understand British bureaucracy.
I had no perfect business plan, and I had begun the work before knowing whether I would ever be allowed to open.
But I had studied.
I had asked for help.
I had listened to people who knew more than I did.
And above all, I had tried to create not the place I thought would make the most money, but the place where I myself would want to spend an evening.
Some people thought I was brave.
Others thought I was completely mad.
The truth was probably somewhere in the middle, sitting on a Chesterfield sofa with a glass of wine in its hand.
Even now, I do not know whether that place was a coincidence, an act of madness or destiny trying to point me towards a road.
Perhaps this is what destiny does.
It does not decide for us.
It does not provide precise instructions.
It leaves signs.
Recognising them, however, requires a particular kind of sensitivity.
You have to be able to look beyond what is already visible, without remaining completely trapped by practical conventions, bureaucratic difficulties or all the reasons why something should not work.
That does not mean ignoring reality.
It means refusing to allow present reality to decide, on its own, what may exist in the future.
It takes imagination.
It takes freedom of thought.
And it also takes a certain amount of madness, because the most important opportunities rarely arrive with a completed business plan and every box neatly ticked.
For a long time, I believed that I had found that place.
Perhaps I had always been looking at the story from the wrong direction.
The place had found me.
It had remained there, perfectly preserved, with its marble, wood, mirrors and old clock, waiting for someone capable of imagining it in a new form without erasing its identity.
I did not turn it into something it was not.
I allowed it to live again.
I thought I had found a shop for rent.
In reality, it had been waiting for me.
Destiny had shown me a door.
Madness had allowed me to open it.