{"id":8633,"date":"2025-06-27T11:07:07","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T10:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sommelieredit.com\/?p=8633"},"modified":"2025-06-27T11:36:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T10:36:33","slug":"tom-fahey-terrace-rooms-wine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sommelieredit.com\/es\/tom-fahey-terrace-rooms-wine\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Fahey: Terrace Rooms & Wine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terrace Rooms & Wine presides over the Ventnor seafront like it has been waiting decades for someone to do something genuinely interesting with it. Enter Tom and Ashley Fahey, husband and wife, who did. Once a nineteenth-century rectory admired by Prince Albert – who liked its Italianate style so much he stole it for Osborne House – it is now part villa, part wine refuge, and part supper club with a mission.<\/em><\/h3>\n

Both in its cellar and kitchen, Tom Fahey is the driving force – sommelier, buyer, host, and chef – and a man with a clear idea of what wine is for. Meanwhile, Ashley Fahey runs front of house and leads the charge on marketing, giving the place its voice as well as its welcome. She is also the aesthetic mind behind the interiors and a compulsive collector of plants. \u2018This is a six-bed hotel by the sea orbiting the most kindly priced wine cellar in the UK, if I do say so myself,\u2019 opens Tom.<\/p>\n

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Before all this, Ashley ran the cookery school at Thyme in Gloucestershire – a polished rural idyll which attracts a certain stripe of London escapee. Tom, meanwhile, was deep in food writing, staging, and trying to teach team building to tech firms. Together, they traded in their old lives for a crumbling seaside rectory with ghosts in the plumbing – and turned it into a destination nobody else dared to attempt.<\/p>\n

The property was, as Tom puts it, \u2018more haunted than hosted\u2019 – a faded guest house drifting into decline. In its previous lives it had sheltered Russian revolutionary thinkers, Victorian clergy, and eventually slid into B&B irrelevance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2018After this it all went a bit bucket and spade,\u2019 he recalls. They bought it in 2021 as both home and platform – \u2018our conduit for bringing quality wine to an island previously denied it.\u2019<\/p>\n

Ventnor, with more sunshine hours than anywhere else in Britain, is, in part thanks to the Faheys, quietly resurgent. \u2018It\u2019s emerged from the cheap-flight hell of the late twentieth century as a hub for quality food and alternative culture by the sea,\u2019 says Tom. Such is his ambition, he even considered submerging wine offshore – until he discovered the currents were too strong and the waters too shallow to make it worthwhile.<\/p>\n

Wine First, Then Food<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Tom runs the kitchen solo for Wine Room dinners – communal suppers held in a space which is cellar, classroom, and dining room all in one. He cooks with Isle of Wight produce – \u2018literally nothing from the mainland other than salt, oil, and sugar\u2019 – and pairs each dish with bottles he sources, pours, and explains. \u2018I also host nightly wine edutainment-style tastings for our guests, and act as GM of our restaurant, The Terrace, in Yarmouth,\u2019 he says. \u2018This leaves me perpetually overworked, but fortunately I have a very supportive boss in my wife.\u2019<\/p>\n