CHICAGO — Three years ago, Chrishon Lampley was on top of her world as a respected wine connoisseur and co-owner of a booming lounge in the South Loop. Lampley, then 35, spent her days working behind the bar at Three Pea’s Art Lounge, formerly at 75 E. 16th St., bombarded with questions from curious customers desperate to hear her latest recommendations. “People always asked my opinions on things: which wine for which event, basically wine 101 or what I thought was hot in the city,” she said. But that all changed on Christmas Day 2011, when her bar was ruined because of a sewage backup. Something in Lampley’s “spirit” told her to stop by the lounge that day before she visited her family in the suburbs for the holiday. There was no sunlight as she entered and a rancid odor hit her before she could turn on the lights. Her heart dropped as she flipped the light switch revealing three years of hard work down the drain. “It was devastating. Everything was floating in sewage,” she said. “Everything you work so hard for just gone. Something you built from the ground up floating in sewer water.
The insurance company said the flood was caused by baby wipes flushed down the toilet from a condo above the bar. The company said the incident wasn’t covered and refused to pay Lampley and her business partner, leaving them on financially shaky ground. “It was pretty pivotal on our relationship. We saw our money floating in the garbage and there’s nothing we could do about it,” she said. “I went dark for a while. I wasn’t sure what to do.” Eventually Lampley returned to working full-time in the fashion industry, but she couldn’t shake her passion for wine. Three years after the bar was trashed, she found herself “rededicated” to her passion, spending hours writing her blog, Love Cork Screw, after working her day job. “It was my outlet just to tell people where to go and what to drink,” she said adding the blog landed her radio appearances that turned into her own podcast but didn’t pay her anything. That’s when Lampley was introduced to Tiffany Taylor, who had an idea to turn the blog and podcast, which now had more than 8,000 listeners, into a profitable brand. (Click here to read more)
