Having opened in November 2025, Charlie’s Drinks Store in Stoke Newington has big plans for 2026. Owner Charlie Young talks about moving to the off -trade, trying to find balance and where he learned his love of wine

I’ve been in hospitality my whole life, but it was in my early 20s that I had a lightbulb moment with wine. I was working as a salesman in Yorkshire for Tetley’s Beer and, as part of it, we got some training on wine, since we were selling wine into working men’s clubs and pubs as well as beer. It was there that the language of wine was introduced to me – with all the people and the stories – and I fell in love instantly. After that, I planned to study with the WSET and went to France for five years and Australia for a couple of years too. When I came back to London in 2000, I met my future business partner, and we came up with the idea of Vinoteca wine bars, which was great. We opened seven or eight sites together.

At Charlie’s, because of my background, inevitably there is more of a focus on one category. You’re looking at a split of around a thousand wines, a couple of hundred beers, a hundred spirits or so, as well as soft drinks and a meaningful selection of low & no. So, proportionately wine is best represented, but it’s a shop with a significant range because I wanted it to be a place where there is something for everyone. It was also important for me to represent low & no because it’s a category that’s growing year on year, around 5–10%, which is a lot commercially speaking, but also because I think it’s a worthy sector where lots of improvements are happening.

Moving into the off-trade, I’ve always had a love for standing in a drinks shop, surrounded by bottles and talking to punters. I find it so joyful. Also, not to put a negative slant on it, but each year hospitality does get more difficult to run and make a profit. Drinks retailing isn’t easy either of course, but it’s simpler to control your costs. I do want to apply things from hospitality though. In my business plan there’s a statement which says this will be a hospitality level service in a retail environment. I want people to feel welcome and comfortable.

Turning to 2026, we’re going to be doing a lot of tastings, not dissimilar to the ones that we used to do at Vinoteca. It might be a winemaker, distiller or brewer, and we’ll follow the tastings with food. We’ll sell tickets but make it affordable. We’ve got a big communal table that we can all sit around, and we’d like to have a chef come in. We haven’t got a full kitchen, but we do have the ability to prep and reheat.

We’d also like to work with local restaurants. For the first German tasting we’ll do, for example, there’s a great restaurant down the street we’re going to collaborate with and bring loads of schnitzels in.