Oakland Wine Shops Redefine the Tasting Experience With Neighborhood Vibes + Organic Pours
(Courtesy of Ordinaire, via Instagram)

Oakland Wine Shops Redefine the Tasting Experience With Neighborhood Vibes + Organic Pours

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We're spoiled with good grapes around here, and we know a thing or two about vino. Yet, the whole wine tasting experience can sometimes make you feel like a tool. Happily, a new generation of bottle shops is popping in Oakland, where welcoming proprietors and neighborhood vibes encourage you to browse, taste, learn, open a bottle, and stay much longer than you intended.

We recently made our way around the wine shops of Oaktown and hit upon five distinct shops that are disrupting the wine buying experience. What they share in common is a focus on natural wines, highly curated selections, and owners who care about the stories behind every bottle on their shelves. We left each of these—bottle in hand—happy, informed, and with a healthy buzz, and we're sure you will, too. Treat yourself to a nice bottle—it is rosé season, after all.


​The Punchdown

Another wine bar-meets-shop, The Punchdown is a popular spot in Uptown Oakland to pick up a bottle to go, but in-store flights (try the "Cal-Exit") with tasty food pairings are reason to stick around. Owners DC Looney and Lisa Costa have traveled around the world visiting wine bars and wineries, and they met while working as harvest interns at a winery in Sonoma. "We started our own wine bar off the cuff, no strings attached," says Looney, "and we have a real identity with our new space because we had a big hand in the design." The shop stocks an ever-rotating selection of natural bottles from international producers, many of them hard to find.

Bottles du jour:

Looney's loving Opi D'Aqui "Les Cliquets." "It's a grenache from the Languedoc Roussillon in France. This wine is øø (nothing added or taken away, no SO2). It's electric—you can probably take it into a dark room and it will glow."

Costa craves Rosato from Le Coste in Lazio, Italy. "It's a fresh, alive, and interesting take on rosé from the slopes of a volcanic lake."

Coming up:

Swing by any day of the week for happy hour until 6pm.

// 1737 Broadway (Uptown), punchdownwine.com

This article has been updated since it was originally published in May 2017.

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