I went on a long wine-bar crawl there last month (see Nick’s report on a couple of Manchester restaurants) and came away amazed by how much youthful enthusiasm for wine there is in what this northern conurbation’s mayor Andy Burnham points out is the UK’s fastest-growing city region.
The acknowledged leader of the wine-bar pack is spacious but grungy Ad Hoc in the Northern Quarter, now run by 25-year-old Callum Love (below). He was turned on to wine by his predecessor, former chef, ex-Oddbins Miles Burke, who transformed what had been an empty stockroom into a wine shop, then wine bar. Ad Hoc’s shelves are currently crammed with 507 lovingly assembled wines. Love insisted I try a Polish Solaris and confidently gave me tips on the best Polish producers.
The place is open seven days a week, until 1 am at weekends, and is so popular that they don’t take bookings. In one corner, the Ad Hoc team (all under 30) were being given an educational tasting by a wine importer. At another table a young couple were playing cards while sharing a bottle (this was teatime). The brigade from Skof chose to celebrate their recent Michelin star at Ad Hoc. And it was here that the young woman charged with buying smart white burgundy and red bordeaux to see Paul McCartney through his shows at the Arena last December came to buy.
Love has already reached the top level currently possible in Manchester of the all-important Wine & Spirit Education Trust exams, as has 24-year-old Fiona Boulton (main image and below), who runs Kerb in Ancoats. She’s a fully paid-up member of the natural wine movement working in a subtly lit cocoon of grey, steel and polished wood that looks like a cross between an avant-garde art gallery and a Scandi hotel lobby. She admitted that ‘it looks so stylish, some people are afraid to come in’, but it has proved the perfect setting for arty events. She's seen below with a notice aimed at under-25s – like her.
Ancoats, described by some as ‘the Hackney of Manchester’, has been transformed from dodgy enclave of rundown textile warehouses to a gastronomic hub with London-level rents and a choice of natty wine bars. Flawd is owned by the same well-travelled trio as Higher Ground restaurant in the city centre, whose wine list is just one of Manchester’s many that is truly titillating. The vast Blossom Street Social belongs to Ben Stephenson, who once ran the innovative wine shop Hanging Ditch, now closed.
But this is all very recent. When Burke moved to Manchester in 2019, he says, there was no restaurant with a wine list to set a wine lover’s heart racing, and only one real wine bar. Sara Saunby opened Salut near St Peter’s Square in 2014 to welcome those who were intimidated by Hanging Ditch, then the only hangout in the city for wine geeks. She installed a card-operated Enomatic machine that allows customers to serve themselves small portions of whatever they choose. The place, described by its supervisor, former personal trainer Andy Burgess (above) as ‘wet-led’, obviously still answers a need, to judge by how busy it was on a Thursday afternoon. Of the eight places I visited, this was the only one stuffed with bottles I immediately recognised.
All the other places had opened post Covid. My enthusiastic guide was Kelly Bishop, a college dropout turned freelance food, drink and travel writer and indie punk bassist, with bright pink hair, turquoise tights, a print minidress, checked overcoat and leopard-print lace-ups. She needed sensible shoes for our whistle-stop tour of the city, and for her weekend job, hosting Manchester Wine Tours.
An avid foodie, she signed up for all the WSET courses and read voraciously but realised that the classroom is not ideal for learning about wine. ‘What wine needs is the context of drinking it’, she believes. So now she sells her wine tours online and offers one each Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 3 pm to about 7 pm. She can accommodate up to a dozen people who pay £75 each and marches them between four different locations, at each of which they find a table set with glasses, wines and a little snack.
The wine bars on her tours change all the time, ‘which is perhaps not the most sensible business plan, but I like variety’. She was keen to stress that the tour she gave me was far from exhaustive, and that a good proportion of the Manchester suburbs also now have excellent wine bars, and restaurants with interesting wine lists. Perhaps it’s these places that cater to Manchester’s famously well-paid footballers as I heard little evidence of them in the bars I visited – although Anna Tutton of The Beeswing by The Gay Village claimed she kept her list of smart Spanish wines primed ‘in case Pep drops in’.
Pep Guardiola, manager of Manchester City, has his own restaurant, Tast Catala, while former Manchester United player Gary Neville is now a local hotelier. Award-winning cocktail-bar owners the Schofield brothers have a wine bar dedicated to ‘affordable luxury’ in Neville’s Stock Exchange Hotel, as well as two branches of their smart Atomeca wine bars.
At the end of their four hours, Bishop’s wine tourists will have been offered about two-thirds of a bottle in total but she’s keen to stress that her tours are not meant to be boozy. Her aim is to ‘show people wine that’s a bit fancier than usual and sneakily teach them stuff’. Hugh Johnson’s Story of Wine is a favourite source of material. ‘You’ve got to be quite funny’, she added, but in all our dealings I found her exceptionally efficient, too.
I was impressed that at every wine bar I visited, a glass of water appeared on the table immediately. This healthy phenomenon is not de rigueur elsewhere. Virtually all these places serve food to absorb the alcohol, too, even if sometimes it’s no more than a cheese or charcuterie platter brought in from next door.
All those operating wine bars and interesting wine lists such as at the smart rooftop Climat, or at Reserve Wines, a wine bar and shop in the corner of the arena-sized food hall in the former meat market shown above that is Mackie Mayor, are clearly keen to do their best to make wine as approachable as possible. A very different vibe from the cliché of connoisseurship.
It’s this and the casual exuberance that is so infectious about the Manchester wine scene.
Just some of Manchester’s wine bars
Ad Hoc Northern Quarter
Kerb Ancoats
Flawd Ancoats
Blossom Street Social Ancoats
Salut Wines near St Peter’s Square
The Beeswing Kampus
Atomeca Spinningfields
Climat city centre
Reserve Wines at Mackie Mayor Northern Quarter
