An award-winning wine and spirits shop in the South End is closing its doors effective immediately, shutting down after more than a decade of operation.
The Urban Grape, a fixture on Columbus Avenue since 2012, announced the closure in a social media post Wednesday. The store’s owners, TJ and Hadley Douglas, wrote that they were unable to reach an agreement to extend the store’s Small Business Administration loan.
“TJ and I, along with our family and a group of wonderful investors, have worked tirelessly to reach an agreement with our local SBA lender, Cambridge Savings Bank, with the hope of saving and rebuilding the store to its former inventory and success,” the owners wrote. “Unfortunately, negotiations with our lender deteriorated over the past week, and we are being forced to close The Urban Grape’s Boston location immediately.”
A spokesperson for Cambridge Savings Bank said in a statement Thursday that the bank is bound by federal guidelines to “ensure the safety and soundness of this important lending program and protect the financial health of our institution and customers.”
The store’s owners did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday afternoon.
The Urban Grape received local and national recognition, including a 2021 Small Business of the Year award from the US Chamber of Commerce. It was also known as a prominent Black-owned business in the predominantly white wine industry, sponsoring a wine education award for students of color.
Originally based in Chestnut Hill, The Urban Grape was designed around a large communal tasting table and a proprietary tasting scale that gave the store its tagline, “drink progressively” — a phrase that mirrored the store’s social consciousness and commitment to, as the owners put it, “build[ing] community through beverage.”
“In a city like Boston, where too often we all retreat to our corners, our legacy was bringing everyone together around one table,” the owners wrote in the post. “We succeeded in building a new kind of wine store that meant so much to so many.”
Loyal customers and business partners expressed appreciation for the store on social media. Culture Wine, a distributor of South African spirits, said on its Instagram page the closure was “unbelievably sad,” adding that The Urban Grape had “built something so remarkable, truly inclusive, and quite frankly, entirely lacking in the wine world.”
“For immediately, we have to celebrate their achievement and mourn the loss of a real one,” wrote the California-based importer. “The Urban Grape was, hands down, the best bottle shop on the east coast.”
Bordeaux, the downtown charcuterie bar on High Street, also said on social media that it had enjoyed three years of partnership with The Urban Grape, celebrating “countless events and so much cheese and wine.”
As recently as two years ago, The Urban Grape’s owners had their eyes on expansion, opening a store in Washington, D.C., in 2023 with the help of a $2 million small business loan from Cambridge Savings Bank, as well as a $350,000 revolving line of credit. At the time, the owners planned to use the D.C. store as the company’s main e-commerce shipping hub, and floated eventually expanding to other cities and states.
The D.C. location closed at the end of August, according to a social media post.
“The wine industry is going through a tremendous transformation, and we all must rise to the challenge,” the post read. “Sometimes you have to take a step back to make a leap forward.”
In Wednesday’s post, the owners suggested that the store would explore options to reopen.
“Is this the end of our legacy? The answer is no,” the owners wrote. “We will gather around our tasting table again, Boston. You can count on it.”
Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports.
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