Categories: Finances

Want to feel good about the wine world? Go to Manchester

One of the most common laments in the wine world today is that young people are not interested in wine. Send the lamenters to Manchester, I say.

I went on a long wine-bar crawl there last month and came away amazed by how much youthful enthusiasm for wine there is in what 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. He was turned on to wine by his predecessor, ex-chef and formerly of Oddbins, Miles Burke, who transformed what had been an empty stockroom into a wine shop, then wine bar. Ad Hoc’s shelves are crammed with more than 500 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 1am at weekends, and is so popular that they don’t take bookings. When I visited around teatime, the Ad Hoc team (all aged under 30) were being given an educational tasting by a wine importer in one corner. At another table, a young couple were sharing a bottle while playing cards. 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 Co-op Live arena last December came to buy.

Love has already reached the top level possible in Manchester of the all-important Wine & Spirit Education Trust exams (the organisation no longer offers level-four qualifications in the city), as has 24-year-old Fiona Boulton, who runs Kerb in Manchester’s Ancoats district. She’s a fully paid-up member of the natural-wine movement and works 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. She admitted that, “It looks so stylish, some people are afraid to come in.” But it has proved the perfect setting for arty events.

Ancoats 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. Its wine list is just one of many in Manchester that are truly titillating. The vast Blossom Street Social belongs to Ben Stephenson, who once ran the innovative, but now closed, wine shop Hanging Ditch.

But this is all very recent. When Burke moved to Manchester in 2019, he said 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 spot 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. It is “wet-led”, as ex-personal trainer supervisor Andy Burgess termed it, focusing on wine rather than food, and, to judge by how busy it was on a Thursday afternoon, obviously still answers a need . 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 lockdowns. 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 comfortable 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 the classroom was not ideal for learning about wine. “What wine needs is the context of drinking it,” she said. So now she sells her wine tours, offering one each Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 3pm to about 7pm. She can accommodate up to a dozen people who pay £75 each to be marched between four different locations, at each of which they may well find a table set with glasses, two wines and a 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 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 ex-Manchester United captain 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 was 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 The Story of Wine is a favourite source of material. “You’ve got to be quite funny,” she added, but 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 from next door.

All those operating wine bars and interesting wine lists, such as at the smart rooftop Climat and Reserve wine shop in the corner of the arena-sized food hall in an ex-meat market 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 Manchester’s wine scene.