The Wines are Alive at Fishtown Social
Under-$30 picks from Philly's natural wine pioneer
Yesterday I hopped in the car and drove down a long stretch of Broad Street. As you head south along that main artery from North Philly, street preachers, faded churches, and smoke shops give way to the condominium facades, construction trucks, and the shad-adorned address signs of Fishtown.
In a departure from the usual Special Order programming, I’d come to visit Fishtown Social, a bar/restaurant and bottle shop that bills itself as Fishtown’s OG spot for natural wine. It is decidedly not a state store. As you walk in, there is a bar with a dozen or so stools illuminated by globe pendant lamps. On the right, along street side windows and two-tops, are racks of wine organized by light, medium, and heavy reds, each bottle annotated with a detailed shelf talker.
They are invariably wines of place. They are natural, organic, biodynamic, sustainable—choose your adjective. They come from 70-year-old vines, unpronounceable, obscure grapes, small family producers, or tiny appellations that have only recently come to prominence on the global wine map.
For someone like me, who spends a lot of time trawling the shelves of Fine Wine & Good Spirits stores looking for special, standout bottles, there was a kind of sugar rush sensation of finding so many interesting wines gathered in one place. Like going from Blockbusters to TLA Video (RIP).
In this newsletter, I plan to continue to focus on the good bottles you can find at state stores, but I’d like to open the aperture of coverage to also write about the independent bottle shops that have blossomed across the city.
As Michael Madrigale, whose import business supplies wine to many of Philly’s top restaurants, told me, these stores and their selections are shaped by the personalities of their owners, and that’s something that I always find interesting.
To the left of the entrance is a little nook hung with string lights and a glowing chandelier, where the selection expands to include white, orange, and sparkling wines. On an overcast Tuesday at 1pm, I had the place to myself, making for a meditative, library-like environment for browsing, but at night the little tables and seats fill up with locals, buzzing with music and conversation.
Vanessa Wong opened the spot in 2016—the same year that PA allowed restaurants and other non-state venues to begin selling wine bottles. A lawyer by trade, she bought the location thinking she would rent it out to a business like a nail salon. But after mulling it over, she decided that what Fishtown was really lacking was a wine bar with modern tastes. Seven years later, it’s a staple of the neighborhood and an anchor point for Philly’s thriving natural wine scene.
Three Under-$30 Picks from Fishtown Social
I’d unscientifically estimate that the average bottle price at the store hovers around $30 to $40, but there was also good diversity in the $20 range, which is where I concentrated my picks.
At $20 on the nose, the Mary Taylor “Pascal Biotteau” Anjou Blanc is a pert, glossy charmer fashioned by fourth-generation winemaker Pascal Biotteau. Creamy with lithe acidity, loaded with fleshy pear, peach, and lemon oil, it closes with subtle bitterness on a note of grapefruit pith. An outstanding warm-weather pour.
The 2021 Château d’Oupia Les Heretiques Pays d’Hérault ($22) has that clean, green, fresh nose that marks a wine of natural/biodynamic tilt. Deliciously drinkable, round, and juicy—Robert Parker once called this cuvée “the ideal bistro wine.” Mostly composed of Carignan from gnarly old vines in Minervois, half the juice is vinified conventionally, while the other half undergoes carbonic maceration. Over time, the nose grows deeper, darker, and more sensuous, with tones of black cherry.
The 2020 Gioventu Sangiovese Nell’Anima ($27) is one of the most interesting and surprising wines I have tasted in some time—and a decent value for a liter bottling. It’s 100% Sangiovese, basically declassified Chianti Classico. Ok, you think to yourself—I know what Chianti Classico tastes like: tense red cherry aromatics, earthy, lots of acidity, etc.
And then you pour this wild, weird, and engrossing thing, with its notes of shoe leather and camphor and eucalyptus—extremely herbal, like some kind of mystical drug. On the palate there’s grippy tannins and a swirl of dark fruit and savory notes, with a Fernet-like menthol edge. After finishing a sample at home, I kept adding extra little pours to my glass out of fascination—was that note really there? What comes next?
These particular wines are also a nice bridge to the natural wine world if what you drink is classic Old World styles. The grapes and locales are familiar, but the wines buzz with energy and crackle with character. The same might be said of Philly bottle shops like Fishtown Social, which seem to burn with a special intensity precisely because they flourish in a state that challenges their existence.