Few coastal Alabama businesses have turned a career detour into a destination the way Randy and Sherri Williams have with Red or White. What started in 2004 as a wine shop on a quiet stretch of De La Mare Avenue in Fairhope — a store with three high-tops and a married couple doing the books themselves — has grown into a four-location institution with shops in Fairhope, Mobile, Orange Beach, and Birmingham, a national reputation, and a kitchen that has drawn James Beard attention.
The Fairhope store, now at 323 De La Mare Avenue in the town’s Fruit and Nut district, remains the mothership: half retail wine shop, half restaurant, operating as a gourmet gift shop by day and a dinner venue by night. The formula — a deep retail list, chef-driven plates, and a room built for lingering — has been copied since, but it started here, in a town the Williamses picked for family before they picked it for business.
Two careers before the store
Randy Williams came up through the wine trade the hard way, and the experience shows in the store’s buying. After growing up between California and British Columbia, he worked for Kobrand, one of the oldest wine and spirits importers in the country, then spent a decade as sales manager for Sonoma-Cutrer, the California chardonnay producer, covering the Midwest. He later ran Eastern United States sales for Chalone Wine Estates, flying out of Pensacola every Monday for a week on the road — a schedule that eventually made him, in his words, determined never to work for anyone else again.
Sherri, a West Mobile native, flew as a flight attendant for Continental Airlines, based first in Newark and later Denver, where the two had met. The Fairhope connection ran through her sisters, whose vacations on the Eastern Shore sold the couple on the town. In 2001 they bought a home in the Fruit and Nut section — the same house, as it happens, that later appeared as a filming location for the feature film “Our Friend” — and by 2004 the first Red or White was open.
Building it without borrowing
The early years were bootstrap all the way. The couple had never owned a business, did everything themselves, and plowed every dollar of profit into inventory. They never took a loan, survived year one, and turned a small profit in year two. Sherri’s degree in business management and finance from Auburn carried the back office — accounting, payroll, licenses — while Randy built the front of the house.
The second location came to midtown Mobile, first in a tiny space across from the Dew Drop Inn and later in the former Smith Bakery building on Dauphin Street, where the store operates today. The third, a franchise partnership at The Wharf in Orange Beach, put the brand on the beach. The fourth opened in 2020 in Birmingham’s Forest Park neighborhood, in the building that once housed the beloved V Richards gourmet grocery — a spot Randy seized when Western Supermarket’s long dominance of the city’s wine trade ended, with a private dining room and a mission he describes bluntly: “Our goal is to be the best wine stores in the state of Alabama.”
A restaurant hidden in a wine shop
The kitchen is what elevated Red or White from good wine store to Gulf Coast fixture. The Mobile location’s executive chef, Arwen Rice, earned a spot as a 2024 James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: South, recognition built on house-made pastas and French-leaning fare — airy gougères, chicken liver mousse, smoked brisket pâté — and the store was named the No. 2 Best Wine Shop in America in a USA Today Readers’ Choice poll. Not bad for a shop that started with antipasto boards and nightly specials.
Every location keeps a chef on staff — David Ramey in Fairhope, Greg Gamble in Birmingham — with menus that share pizza, charcuterie, and cheese boards but allow each chef room for specials and local wine dinners. The Saturday afternoon tastings that built the store’s following early on — four wines under $20 with charcuterie, served to a standing-room crowd of regulars — continue to this day, and the online business lets customers order ahead for pickup at any location.
The service philosophy is unusual and worth repeating: the staff actively discourages tipping on retail wine purchases. Buy a bottle and a pizza to go, and they will tell you to tip on the food only. It is a small thing that says a lot about how the place thinks.
Surviving, then thriving
The pandemic tested the model — full dinners to-go replaced the dining room overnight, and the packaging operation changed the business entirely — but the staff held together, and the customers stayed loyal. Post-pandemic, the Williamses describe the stores as busier than ever, with the Eastern Shore’s growth bringing a steady stream of new regulars and the gift business surging each holiday season.
Their secret, Randy says, is unglamorous: reasonable hours that keep good employees, a menu built on things the kitchen does exceptionally well, and a wine program curated by someone who spent twenty years on the supplier side before crossing to retail. The employee retention shows — ask a Fairhope regular who runs the floor, and the answer has been the same for years.
The Fairhope ritual
An evening at Red or White Fairhope follows a familiar arc: a bottle chosen from the shelf or the menu, a pizza or a cheese board ordered from the kitchen, a table that fills with friends and stays late. The room was designed for it — the early decision to stay open on De La Mare after everything else closed created the after-work gathering that still defines the store.
For visitors plotting a coastal itinerary, Red or White solves a nightly problem: somewhere between the seafood shack and the white-tablecloth dinner is a place where the wine is chosen by a professional, the food is serious without ceremony, and the bill is fair. Four locations later, the Williamses’ niche has become a Gulf Coast standard — proof that the best businesses often start with one couple, one storefront, and the willingness to do everything themselves.
More From the Williamses’ Road to Red or White
A few more chapters fill in how Randy and Sherri Williams arrived at the business they run today. The couple met in Aurora, Colorado, and have been married since 1991. Sherri, who grew up in West Mobile, was a flight attendant with Continental Airlines at the time, based in Newark, New Jersey, and keeping a crash pad for overnight layovers. Hoping to stay in Denver, Randy left Kobrand and opened a restaurant there; it closed after about a year and a half, an early lesson he carried into Fairhope.
After joining Sonoma-Cutrer, the family moved to the Chicago area and raised their sons in Barrington for 12 years. Randy then became vice president of sales for Heritage Wine Cellars, a family-owned importer and distributor, a job he remembers as all-consuming. “It was a rough job,” he says. “I was working all the time.” Five years there added to the industry connections that later led to his role with Chalone Wine Estates.
The Fairhope home the couple bought in 2001 in the Fruit and Nut district later served as a filming location for the movie Our Friend. “I baked cookies with Dakota Johnson,” Randy says.
How the Stores Keep Their Hours
- Red or White stops taking food orders at 8 p.m., a schedule Randy credits with helping the company hold on to staff. “We all want a reasonably normal schedule,” he says.
- The Saturday afternoon pairing of four wines under $20 with charcuterie, chosen at the general manager’s discretion, typically draws a group of around 40 people.
- Randy says the clientele is split fairly evenly between men and women, with many women’s groups visiting all of the locations.
- Customers can order wine online and pick it up at any of the stores.
Looking ahead, Randy keeps the goal simple. “Our goal is just to improve,” he says. “We want to get better and better at everything we do.”