One evening in December, Dee Kapoor noticed that Tim Atkin had started following The Wine Escape on Instagram. That same night, Atkin walked in.
“I noticed on Instagram that he started following us,” Dee says, “and then that night he walked in.” Atkin is one of Britain’s most decorated wine critics: a Master of Wine with 40 years of experience, a writer for Harpers and Decanter, and co-chairman of the International Wine Challenge. “Tim Atkin is like the Tom Cruise of the wine world,” Dee says.
Atkin had a good evening. A regular customer, it turned out, had brought him in. She happened to have around 100,000 Instagram followers of her own. “You get amazing people in Putney,” Dee says.
Before leaving, Atkin agreed to come back and host a tasting. He asked only for wine and food in return. The event sold out in 12 to 13 hours, with no paid advertising. Inquiries are still coming in.
The bar that isn’t on Google
The Wine Escape has been operating since December 2025, on Wednesday through Saturday evenings from 5pm, in the rear space of Ground Coffee Society on Lower Richmond Road. “Not one advert. Few leaflets. You can’t even find us on Google,” Dee says. Instagram is the only channel.
It is a deliberate model. Dee, along with Croatian sommelier, Maja Vehovcic, runs a wine bar in the evenings inside a coffee shop that closes at the end of the afternoon. The coffee shop owner gets a supplementary income. Dee keeps his fixed overheads controlled.
“I didn’t want to have the stresses of having a lease round my neck and I wanted a bit more freedom,” he says. “So the idea behind the Wine Escape was born.”
The roots of that decision go back to a health scare last year. But they go further back than that. Dee opened Ma Goa on Upper Richmond Road as a family restaurant in 1993. “By the time we closed, my kids were working there with me,” he says. He ran Glug, the wine bar next door, before being headhunted as head of wine at Selfridges. Wine Escape is the next chapter.
“We use spaces that are closed in the evening,” he says, “helping the coffee shop owner by a residual income that they can put towards bloody rent increases, rates increases and all the problems they’re experiencing.”
The ambition is to run two or three spaces across the borough, moving between them over the course of an evening. “I don’t see why we can’t take it elsewhere,” Dee says.
Off the beaten track
Wednesday evenings are set aside for collaborations with local artists, chefs, or speakers. Thursday through Saturday is the wine bar. The list is rotating, the bottles are sometimes one-offs bought at auction, and Dee will open a single bottle and sell it by the glass.
“Fed up of supermarkets dictating what we drink and everybody going for a Malbec or a Sauvignon Blanc,” he says. The house focus is on lesser-known regions: Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, Georgia.
On 30 April, Wine Escape hosts a six-course supper club with Putney-based private chef Maximillian Green, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu and has worked in Michelin-star restaurants. That event is sold out too, at £40 a head, with wine pairing available at an additional £27.
Future events are announced via Instagram at @the.wineescape. If you want to know when tickets go on sale, that is the place to follow.
