About
artisan&vine opened on 21 July, 2008, and was soon after ranked within the Top Ten Wine Bars in London by Visit London. We are London's first wine bar and shop to specialise in Natural wines, as recounted in Time Out's 2010 Eating and Drinking Guide. We're also proud to stock a large range of local English wine. Primarily, we are interested in showcasing wines that have a strong Sense of Place. Just over a year after first opening, we launched the artisan&vine online wine shop on 25 September, 2009. We're proud to have had some very flattering independent articles and reviews written about us and continue to strive to provide an extraordinary wine experience for our customers.
artisan&vine is an ideal bar hire and party venue, with a 2am licence on Friday and Saturday night, and midnight the rest of the week. We host regular and custom wine tastings and a variety of other events. We're fully set up as an off licence wine shop so that you can always buy anything you taste in the bar to take home at reduced "take home" prices. We believe a great wine bar should also simply be a great place to hang out and enjoy time with your friends. That's why we created the idea of BYOF - Bring Your Own Food and Indoor Picnics.
It's a lot of work! In the section below is a little bit about some of the people who dream in a&v...
If you're interested in creating your own career at artisan & vine click here.
Kathryn O’Mara, founder and owner of artisan&vine
I’m from Sydney, Australia and have lived in the USA, Germany and England, and tasted wines in every continent (ok, not Antarctica). After twelve brilliant years of corporate life – the skills and experiences I gained at BP, IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers and BHP Billiton are invaluable - I’ve traded oil for wine and opened the wine bar that I always wanted to hang out at.
It’s a very personal approach I’ve taken to building artisan&vine and our wine list. The “edgy” painting on the walls is because my friends and I painted ourselves. The “eclectic” furniture is the result of my hurried spare time trips to antique stores. The wines... the extraordinary wines... are ones that I feel reach out and make a personal connection with the drinker. These are wines that capture the essence of a set of environment, fruit and talents at a given moment. My pleasure is in bringing these delicious wines to the crowded-by-mass-production streets of my beloved London.
I'm always keen for thoughts and feedback; you can reach me at kathryn@artisanandvine.com
or stay in conversation via:
"I heart artisan&vine" facebook group
eMailing list: join by emailing welcome@artisanandvine.com
Twitter: user id artisanandvine
Blog of our adventures creating and being artisan&vine
Image above: Me at the highest point along the Inca Trail, Peru in August 2007, where I decided to turn my hand at opening the sort of wine bar I wanted to hang out at.
Andrew Thompson, co-founder of artisan&vine online wine shop
Having grown up in Southwest England, gone on to become an expert in biodiversity and drunken my fair share of wine, it's no wonder I ended up involved in a wine shop that specialises in local and natural wines.
By trade I'm a biodiversity advisor, specialising in native plants and animals of my much cherished English countryside. I have a degree in biology and by visiting various natural and minimum-intervention vineyards across Europe and the UK, it's very evident to me the difference this style of wine making has on the natural environment. The soils are softer, the all-important pollinating insects are more prevalent, the grapes are healthier, the wine is extraordinary.
Having visited artisan&vine wine bar as a customer a good number of times, I was convinced that the appetite for this unique wine was broader than only the lucky people of Southwest London. So, Kathryn and I stuck our heads together to build the online wine shop. Our goal with the online shop is not just to make a range of bottles of wine available for you to buy, but to share the stories of the winemakers, the places and the wines that we find so fantastic. We hope you enjoy!
Feel free to drop me a line via andrew@artisanandvine.com