Bob Kocher: Once Upon A Time

by Charles McGuigan 05.2005

This cover story about Bob Kocher was originally published in NORTH of JAMES magazine in May of 2005, a little over a year after he opened Once Upon a Vine, the city’s premier wine and beer shop.

Once upon a time, well before Once Upon A Vine was even a seed of an idea, Bob Kocher grew up in Baltimore, and on many warm evenings he would wander over to 33rd Street and take a seat in the bleachers at Memorial Stadium to watch his home team, the Orioles, these boys of summer, round an eternity of bases, their hopeful eyes trained on a distant pennant. 

“I used to eat, sleep and drink baseball,” he tells me. He played sandlot ball as a kid and in high school played for the Orioles farm team. It was just for two months, but Bob got a chance to play in Charleston, Syracuse, Toledo. He was a competent hitter, could spray a ball anywhere, infield or outfield, and his team manager, Earl Weaver, who would later take the Orioles to the World Series, thought Bob had a real talent for the game. 

But Bob’s father thought differently. “My father wouldn’t let me play any more,” says Bob. “He said there were too many older guys running around chasing women and drinking and stuff and he said I was loosing my youth.”

Earl Weaver actually visited the Kocher household. “Weaver told my father that he thought I was a good ball player,” Bob remembers. “Weaver told my father that I might make it in the majors.” 

Bob’s dad had his doubts. The Orioles already had the best third basemen to ever play, and third base was Bob’s position. “My father said I would never make the team because of that line up,” Bob says. 

Weaver suggested that Bob Kocher could play for the Yankees. Bob’s father shook his head. “I believe I’d cut my son’s legs off before I’d see him in pinstripes,” his father said. 

“He hated the Yankees,” Bob says of his father. “I just hung it up. My father and mother really did think that I was losing my youth. I was disappointed, but my father was a good judge of talent and he didn’t think I’d make it in the biggies.”

Bob’s father had attempted at least one venture of his own that ended in near financial ruin. He and his brother decided to raise chickens on the Eastern Shore of Delaware, between Bishopsville and Selbyville. They had about 300,000 chickens and things were going along pretty smoothly until the hurricane hit. The rivers and tidal creeks swelled with rain, overflowing their low banks, inundating the surrounding farmland. 

“We were in waist high water throwing chickens up on the roof,” Bob recalls. “And as soon as we threw them up they’d fly right back down into the water. They’re the dumbest animals in the world.” A couple days later the water subsided, and the stench of rotting chicken rose from the earth. Only 8, 000 chickens had survived. “He lost a lot of money on that venture,” says Bob of his father. 

When Bob graduated high school he attended University of Maryland in College Park where he studied sociology. But after a year he left school, and went to work for Macy’s and Turnbaugh, a food distributing company.

He literally started his professional career cleaning toilets. “I went to work for them as a janitor,” Bob says. “And I worked for them for the next seventeen years.” He worked his way steadily up from the very bottom. He became a warehouse stocker, an order puller, a warehouse supervisor, an extra driver, a delivery man. And then, when he was 21, Bob was made a salesman. At about the same time, Uncle Sam decided he wanted Bob, too.

He was drafted in the U.S. Army, did his basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and advanced training out in Oklahoma. He was an artillery surveyor and reconnaissance specialist. He did a 13-month tour in Vietnam, and then finished his stint stateside at Fort Holibird, where he worked in the commissary.

When he returned to civilian life, Bob again went to work as a salesman at Macys and Turnbaugh. This is where he received his education. He learned everything there was to know about business directly from Mr. Turnbaugh. 

“He was like my second father,” says Bob. “He’s ninety-some years old today living in Florida, but I still talk to him about three times a year. He taught me all my work ethics.”

Mr. Turnbaugh was an old school businessman who worked with his men in the trenches. “He owned this huge company and he’d be out there with a raggedy old sweater with holes in it helping us load trucks at night,” Bob recalls. “He’d be on the forklift and do anything else. Mr. Turnbaugh taught me the ropes of the food business.”

Turnbaugh gave Bob one of the least productive sales territories the company worked. Within six months, that territory was third from the top, and by the by, under Bob’s watchful eye, it became the top sales route. He was soon promoted to supervisor of sales and then manager, and began opening new territories. Under Bob’s supervision, the company expanded into southern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, the Delmarva Peninsula, West Virginia and Fredericksburg. He also opened up military base commissaries from Maine to Florida. It was all very lucrative.

“We were the world’s largest distributor of Borden’s products and Hellman’s products,” says Bob. “We were the second largest food distributor in the entire country.”

When Bob started with the company they had six 16-foot refrigerated trucks and three vans. By the time he left, Mays and Turnbaugh had a fleet of 52 trucks and nine tractor-trailers.

As Mr. Turnbaugh edged toward retirement, he devised a plan that would eventually allow Bob to buy the business. But it never panned out. The other partner had a son who wasn’t crazy about the idea. So Bob uprooted his family (by that time he had three kids—Kelly, Holly and Robbie) and headed to Richmond for a job with a food distributor that had a facility on Arthur Ashe Boulevard, right across from the Diamond. That didn’t last long, though. There was something a little shady about the business.

But Bob had his eye on a small mom and pop grocery store in the heart of the Fan. Called Price’s Market, it was a small space and not very well stocked. And it was antiquated, with fixtures pre-dating the Second World War, a very small walk-in refrigerator, and belt-driven compressors. 

 Bob saw potential there. He rented the space and moved in new stock. Over the next two years he completely upgraded the space. During a three-week period he worked after the store closed until it reopened the next morning. “I redid the whole inside,” he says. It was the birth of a Fan institution, an amazing store, one-of-a-kind, with a smattering of just about everything under the sun. 

“We believed that if you wanted it we would have it,” says Bob. “I had one guy who would throw a challenge out to me. He’d call me once every six weeks and say I need this or that. He called me on a Sunday and said, ‘I got you this time. I was working on my car today and I broke my radiator hose clamp, you don’t have one?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got one. What size you need? Two inch, one inch?’ He said, ‘You’re lying.’ I said, ‘No I’m not.’”

 If you were fortunate enough to have lived in the Fan between 1980 and 2000 chances are you visited Price’s on a fairly regular basis. There was even a coffee club there, where a group of people would come in each morning, pour coffee, jape and jaw, discuss current events. They’d pay a fixed weekly fee for their coffee. They could pick up a copy of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, even the Times-Dispatch. And they could do it 363 and a half days a year, for Price’s was closed only on Christmas Day and open half a day on Thanksgiving.

Price’s had a substantial deli section and sold fresh cut steaks and other meats. Different days of the week they offered different lunch specials. It was meat ball subs on Fridays and Philly cheese steaks on Thursdays. “I’d slice the round, take Bermuda onions, cook them all up and fry them up and make steak and cheese subs with hot peppers, lettuce tomato, mayonnaise,” says Bob. “We sold anywhere from 45 to 50 to Universal Ford on West Broad every Thursday. We had other places. We’d sell 150 meatball subs on Friday.”

And throughout the store, Price’s sold novelty items that simply couldn’t be found anywhere else. There were whipper snappers that would make a small firecracker report when you threw them on the sidewalk, and champagne poppers that shower strands of colored paper like confetti.

But Price’s was best known for its selection of wine. There were open cases lining the aisles, scores of varieties to choose from, and they were very easy on the wallet. “I would buy out wines that were to be closed out or found stock reduction deals, and then put them on sale,” Bob says. At one point he bought 13,000 cases from Kronhiem out of Baltimore, another time he bought 17,000 cases of wine from another distributor. He had to rent three garages in the alley to store the wine, but he sold it cheap and he sold it fast. In less than six months it was all gone.

Word of his wine and the pricing spread across Virginia. “We were famous for doing a lot of this kind of quantity buying,” says Bob. “I had people come in from Tappahannock, had a lot of people from Fredericksburg, Charlottesville, Williamsburg.”

And just as suddenly as it had all started 20 years before, it was over. The landlord of the property decided not to renew the lease. “It was very hard,” Bob says.

On May 1, 2000, with the stock cleared out, Bob Kocher sat on a milk crate in the middle of the store, staring at the empty shelves and the bare walls. He thought about the employees, some of whom had worked with him for seventeen years. He remembered Bruce Cooper and Carolyn Jones, and Marie Louise—the blue-eyed blonde woman with the thick German accent. As these images played through his mind, Bob Kocher began to cry. He wept, sitting on the milk crate, for nearly an hour.  “It was like losing a child,” he remembers. “We were open seven to midnight, seven days a week, for twenty years, and then we were closed forever. It was hard to get over.”

He took the summer off and the following fall began selling wines, with the prospect of eventually owning a good portion of the distributorship. But for one reason or other things didn’t work out. 

For quite some time Bob had been toying with the idea of opening a wine and beer shop of his own. After all, he knew as much about wine as anyone in Richmond. It had become one of his primary fields of study. 

Bob considered opening a shop in different areas of the city, but eventually chose Bellevue. Every Wednesday for about a month, he would park his car on MacArthur Avenue and walk ten blocks in every direction. He chose Wednesday because it was trash day and the recycling bins were lined up at curbside. He rooted through the discarded cans and bottles, taking notes. “I wanted to see if people were buying wines, and if they were, what kinds of wine they were buying,” he says. “That’s how I made my decision to come over here. That was a lot of it.”

He purchased the building on December 15, 2003 and started a complete renovation two weeks later. Steve Herndon laid the ceramic tile floor. Billy Fisher did the carpentry. “I worked like a dog to get it open,” according to Bob. On May 6, 2004 Once Upon a Vine opened its doors to the public for the first time. 

Just a little over a year after opening, the shop has already exceeded the third year projection. “We made an impact,” says Bob. “Thank God for the community. It’s been absolutely spectacular. Ninety-nine percent of the customers have come back and told me they like the wines I suggest.”

He considers his success for a moment. He tells me that unlike some of the “big box” wine stores, he doesn’t push expensive wines on people, wines that can command a $15 or $20 mark up. Instead, he helps his customers understand that some wines that cost seven dollars are every bit as good as a $30 bottle of wine. 

And his mark ups tend to be modest. He understands people are looking for a deal and that’s what he gives them and they come back for more. “I don’t put a fifty percent mark up on a bottle,” he says. “I look for volume. I’d rather have a fast nickel than a slow dime. That’s my philosophy.”

A philosophy that seems to be working very well. The shop hops at the Friday night wine tastings and throughout the week and over the weekends. 

We walk down the aisles of wine, the colored glass of the bottles—green, blue, brown, amber—catching the light like rare jewels. He tells me that the name Once Upon A Vine was the name of a short-lived shop over on Main Street. It was owned by Bob’s long-time friend Patrick Miffleton. “When I approached him about it, he got all teary-eyed,” says Bob. “He’s a good friend and I wanted to do it in his honor.”

And the name works well for the shop. “Beer is made from hops that grow on vines,” Bob Kocher says. “Wine is made from grapes which grow on vines. So, everything we have in here was once upon a vine.” 

Across the alleyway from his building, vines entwine a fence, and clusters of grapes, green as sandblasted bottle glass, ripening and thickening for the plucking, dangle from the tendrils in a tantalizing manner, announcing what is just across the way.