Lakewood's Times Ten Cellars Celebrates 20 Years

Times Ten Cellars turns 20 in August. This Lakewood neighborhood winery (formerly a post office, a university placement office and a storage building) stands as a keystone of the community, but it is not an unchanging one.

“It’s more of a communal space … instead of being, I guess, a winery where people come to congregate, now it’s a place where people congregate to drink wine,” co-founder Rob Wilson says.

What started as — as they describe it — the ill-advised brainchild of pharmaceutical industry alums Rob Wilson and Kert Platner, Times Ten Cellars soon became a fixture of the Lakewood neighborhood.

“I was at a neighborhood function here in East Dallas one night, and there was this guy talking to me about wine,” co-founder Platner says. “He said he made wine in his garage, and I was like, 'Oh, that's intriguing.’ So we kind of conceptualized the idea of maybe doing a winery in Dallas and a wine bar in Dallas. I wanted a partner in it … and so Rob was a big time corporate guy and anyway, I asked him about maybe jumping in and doing this, and he told me I was completely crazy.”
In 2003, Texas voters approved a ballot measure that essentially cleared the way for wineries in Texas to sell wine by the glass and in bottles for on- and off-premise consumption.

“You could sell tastings and you could sell bottles to go,” Wilson said. “And I don't know if you could even drink or sell bottles on site. It was mostly set up for just tastings. Definitely, you couldn’t sell to restaurants and bars.”

After buying the building and renovating it themselves (and inhaling a problematic amount of dust that Wilson and Platner laugh about today), they had created what was then essentially a three-room operation: a tasting counter, a retail bottle shop and storage and production.

It didn’t last long.

“We were thinking, you know, it’s like every other winery: people come in, you know, do a tasting, maybe have a glass, buy their wine and just leave,” Platner said. “We didn't have servers or anything. The concept of just sitting down … that’s what they wanted. The very first day, everybody wanted to sit and they wanted to be waited on, and they wanted to hang around.”

The concept of sitting down — how revolutionary.

“In the first couple of days, Kert said: ‘Oh, my God, we own a bar!” Wilson laughed.

Since then, Times Ten has become a venue of choice for Lakewood. As Platner and Wilson tell it, whether it’s birthdays, anniversaries, weddings or Mahjong Tuesdays, Times Ten is a place to gather, and to be gathered.

That gathering stopped, however, during one of the biggest challenges to their business in the last 20 years: COVID-19.

“It was eerie, just eerie,” Platner said. “And I'm sure anybody in business like this would say that, but it was just very strange. I mean, Rob and I would come in, sit here and people would call up or email us, and they’d drive their cars up, open the back of their trunks, they’re wearing masks, we’re wearing masks and we’re putting wine in the back of their car … and it was very strange. Business just dropped dramatically. I was like, ‘OK, I think I’ve got something that I can do for the rest of my life, [and then] like, 'Oh, I could easily go broke.' That’s got to be obviously the lowest of the low.”

Adapting to change has always been a cornerstone of Times Ten’s success. Whether it’s owning a vineyard in Alpine (and, as Wilson and Platner said, knowing when to walk away from that vineyard) or crushing and fermenting their wine in-house (something they are very happy to not do anymore — don’t even get them started on the fruit flies), or experimenting with new varietals (an infamous Alsatian riesling comes to mind for Wilson), they’ve always been winging it and listening to their neighbors for what they want.

For Wilson and Platner, 20 more years of winging with their best friend at their side seems perfectly fine.