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.
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. ‘This is a six-bed hotel by the sea orbiting the most kindly priced wine cellar in the UK, if I do say so myself,’ opens Tom.
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.
The property was, as Tom puts it, ‘more haunted than hosted’ – 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.
‘After this it all went a bit bucket and spade,’ he recalls. They bought it in 2021 as both home and platform – ‘our conduit for bringing quality wine to an island previously denied it.’
Ventnor, with more sunshine hours than anywhere else in Britain, is, in part thanks to the Faheys, quietly resurgent. ‘It’s emerged from the cheap-flight hell of the late twentieth century as a hub for quality food and alternative culture by the sea,’ 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.
Wine First, Then Food
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 – ‘literally nothing from the mainland other than salt, oil, and sugar’ – and pairs each dish with bottles he sources, pours, and explains. ‘I also host nightly wine edutainment-style tastings for our guests, and act as GM of our restaurant, The Terrace, in Yarmouth,’ he says. ‘This leaves me perpetually overworked, but fortunately I have a very supportive boss in my wife.’
His route here was anything but straight. ‘In 2007 I went on a speed date in Reading covered by the entertainments editor of the Bracknell News,’ he recalls. ‘In our three minute “date” I managed to convince her to let me write a restaurant review for the paper which eventually led to a regular slot for multiple local titles, and from there, via over seventy stages in pro-kitchens, into the world of guidebooks.’ At one point, Tom was eating out more than three hundred times a year while also running a company teaching tech firms how to build teams. Unfortunately, ‘most of them didn’t listen and ended up with far less money.’
Now he builds a business around integrity and generosity. The wine list is not there to posture – it is there to be enjoyed. ‘We stock what we like to drink at prices we can afford. To price ourselves out would defeat the entire object, hence we created a business that supports it.’ That ethos runs deep. ‘I am barely tipping 50% margin on my drink-in. I’ve made it a huge part of my buying to keep 95% of the list under £100 a bottle – the bulk of it is in fact below £50. My target consumer is the budding wine lover, not the long-converted oenophile. Hence accessibility and deliciousness are my key buying drivers over intellectualism, ego-massaging, or Insta hits.’
Pairing in Reverse
Tom’s dishes do not find their wines – they are born from them. ‘I am lucky enough to be both wine buyer and chef,’ he says. ‘It’s an opportunity I use to create dishes around wines.’ A tartare-style sauce of salted gooseberries and asparagus pickled in elderflower vinegar – served with scallop meets rested, New World Sauvignon Blanc. ‘It works particularly well with barrel-fermented wines like Mahi’s Alias 2018, or my last remaining bottles of Dog Point Section 94 2008.’ The latter, ‘broadens every element, adding layers and breadth of texture and flavour that meld seamlessly.’
Other combinations are no less ambitious. Smoked venison bones, beetroot, cherry, and rhubarb – lengthened with truffle and mushroom thanks to a newly trained local truffle hound – shift a dish from ‘a light, slightly funky Marsannay by Sylvain Pataille, to the earthy depth of mature Otago Pinot from Two Paddocks’. An elderberry, roast green pepper and eucalyptus sauce for nine-year-old dairy beef encounters Geoff Merrill Reserve 2015 Coonawarra Cabernet. And crab, swede, brown butter crouton and apple peel purée mirrors the rhythm of Hundred Hills’ Dreaming Spires traditional method rosé from Oxfordshire.
Meanwhile, Gewurztraminer from Matawhero in Gisborne lifts scallop in Thai green curry sauce. Pfalz Grauburgunder meets edamame in Togarashi butter. Listán Blanco from Borja Pérez snaps with bass, sherry, and clam. ‘On the night of the passing of [Brutto’s] Russell Norman, I served an impromptu sage and venison liver crostini for which I broke a cardinal rule of never pairing with sherry on the grounds the Isle of Wight isn’t ready for it yet.’
A Cellar with Teeth
Tom’s sourcing is not just gustatory – it is emotional. The Pinson family in Chablis made the wines the Faheys drank at their wedding ‘and welcomed me to their home following my first finish in the Chablis Marathon,’ says Tom. ‘I’ve followed these wines since the 2008 vintage and absolutely love the purity and immediacy of the style which is resolutely classic.’ He now imports them direct. He is also working with the senior arm of the Vocoret family – whose vines are in organic conversion under the next generation, Edouard and Eleni.
For Tom, sustainability is not an add-on – it is the base layer. ‘I recently attended the Sommit programme in New Zealand – a three-week tour of the country alongside seven other sommeliers from around the world. To say it was transformative is probably an understatement.’ He adds: ‘Once you hit the 15% of New Zealand wine that isn’t Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, you reach this incredible patchwork of tiny growers united both by making great wine but also protecting the environment. This concept is deeply embedded in Maori culture – you are your land, to not protect it would be self-harm – and is pervasive in the sector.’
Known for being a forthright communicator, Tom is unsparing on hypocrisy. ‘As a wine buyer, if you are not delisting based on unsustainable growing practises then you are a significant part of the problem. Worse, if you run a large, high-profile wine event that involves promoting a huge amount of cheap, unsustainable wine, you have no place in penalising award nominees for not having a sustainability policy.’
He’s Not Wrong About Rosé
Tom has garnered critical praise for his rosé selection, which goes far beyond the pale. ‘Big wine has absolutely trashed rosé in the UK. What an utter scandal it is that consumer choice has been boiled down to pale equates to dry, and dark signals revoltingly sweet piss from the Californian desert.’ His counterattack comes via Tavels, Rosatos and ‘Jeff Carrel’s Les Grenadines’ from the Languedoc. He is not averse to a touch of mischief. ‘I did this purely to mess with them but actually I think they all liked it – a painful thing for many somms to admit so it really must have been good.’ The ‘this’ in question? Serving New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc to twenty of London’s top sommeliers at a Coravin paulée.
Ask him about a fantasy lunch companion and he doesn’t hesitate. ‘I am still a guidebook inspector at heart and would love to sit down with the entire staff of the Michelin Guide. I’d pour them a particularly sour and underripe Côtes de Gascogne blend – the kind of wine that might make the entry point to a UK pub list – because I’m fairly sure they know as little about good wine as they do about good cooking.’
It’s a telling choice of enemy – and an even more telling choice of weapon. Tom isn’t trying to be difficult. He’s just not willing to pretend. He wants better standards, better assumptions, and better wine.
‘I actually have a superpower,’ he concludes. ‘I can taste any wine and instantly create a dish from scratch that will pair with it impactfully. I can then buy the ingredients at under 30% of sale price and hire, train and motivate the team needed to prepare them. But I’d say the latter part of that claim is actually the true superpower…’
