Tag Archives: wine

Give Ladie Chablis a boost by helping fund new Capitol Hill shop La Cha-Bliss Wines

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Want Ladie Chablis to pour you a glass?

The Seattle drag queen is making plans to open a Capitol Hill wine shop and could use a boost.

“This will be my first retail business and I am extremely excited. As we all know starting a business involves many steps. Developing a business idea, researching for the right location and securing funding. So far I have come up with a business plan to create a retail wine store. I have decided on a legal structure to become an LLC. I have applied for my license and applied for business insurance as well. I found an incredible location on a busy street in Capitol Hill in Seattle,” Howard Russell writes in the community fundraising pitch for La Cha-Bliss Wines, a new 12th Ave wine shop being planned by the drag performer and longtime Seattleite who has been busy around the Capitol Hill community serving on the boards at GenPride, the YMCA, Imperial Sovereign Court of Seattle, and Emerald City Softball Association.

Lady Chablis is still busy in the neighborhood

You can join the fundraiser here.

Russell says La Cha-Bliss Wines will be a retail boutique store that sells domestic and international wines from Washington, Oregon, California France, Italy and Germany. According to permits, the plan is for the shop to join the 1400-block of 12th Ave next to the former Barrio which is also lined up for the new Mint and Martini to fill the large restaurant space.

In the fundraising pitch, Russell says it hasn’t been easy securing funding for the project as he is ready to sink $10,000 from his 401k to reach the $30,000 launch inventory cost.

You can learn more about helping to support Russell’s effort here.

 

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Otherworld Wine Bar brings new life to revival of 114-year-old Pike/Pine building

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After two years of permitting and construction, Otherworld Wine Bar is opening its doors on Capitol Hill and helping to bring new life to this corner of upper Pike/Pine.

With a successful soft opening over the weekend behind them, owners Matt Lucas and Ben Chaykin are more than ready to start popping corks for Capitol Hill customers. Tired of the process, but happy to be open, Lucas tells CHS, “it’s been a really good reception.”

This is the first business for the partners Lucas and Chaykin, but thanks to their Juice Club pop-up events, they already have a following.

“We were able to kind of like, take what we did at those clubs and create somewhat of a small community through those events,” Lucas said. “And now we’re lucky to open up an entire space.”

Both call Capitol Hill home, so they were happy to accidentally stumble across the opportunity. CHS reported here way back in December of 2021 on the early plans for Otherworld as part of an overhaul and revival of an old commercial building where 14th Ave meets Pike and Madison. The new Otherworld space is part of an afterlife, indeed, for the 114-year-old building home to plenty of neighborhood ghosts. The project from Coldwell Banker Bain Capitol Hill turned the one-time auto row-era grocery into new offices for the real estate firm and a space for the wine bar. Continue reading →

‘A labor of love,’ Capitol Hill’s European Vine Selections marks 50 years of bringing fine wines to Seattle — and tasting every single one

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The wine world of the 1970’s was a wild time. The rising cost of imported wine was affecting American consumers and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms import laws around specific labeling for French and Spanish wine was cost prohibitive for small vintners. In 1972, to help counter these frustrations, four Seattle friends decided to open their own wine business, lessening the damage done to their own bank accounts, and in return starting a legacy of knowledge, passion, and decades of experience tasting wine that continues to this day on Capitol Hill.

European Vine Selections opened for four hours a week during the first two years at its original Fremont location, and in 1974, expanded hours and according to part-owner Tarik Burney, “they started expanding their hours and running it like a proper business”. On Valentine’s Day 1987 they opened the Capitol Hill shop in the same location it is now.

What Seattle benefits from a tiny shop along 15th Ave E on Capitol Hill is 50 years of a carefully crafted selection of wines from around the globe. Continue reading →

Eaglemount finds Seattle home for taproom on Capitol Hill — UPDATE

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Eaglemount’s Port Townsend tasting room (Image: Eaglemount)

By Hannah Saunders

There are no vineyards on Capitol Hill but the neighborhood’s wine scene continues to grow. There are no apples orchards up here, either. But a new tasting room from Eaglemount Wine and Cider will move into the Zephyr mixed-use apartment building, located at 1656 E Olive Way, with plans to open August 1st.

“I am personally really excited for the tasting room to open as I myself live in the area and hope to use the space to not only provide our neighbors with wonderful products but to also provide a an inclusive and safe environment for the local Capitol Hill community,” Dayna Usa of Port Townsend-based Eaglemount tells CHS.

The winery and cidery has “has been producing hard ciders and meads sourced from heirloom apple trees in our homestead orchard planted in 1883 and from other homestead orchards on the Olympic Peninsula” for more than 20 years. Continue reading →

Something to look forward to in 2022? Juice Club making plans for Otherworld Wine Bar on Capitol Hill

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“LEASED” (Image: CHS)

Another happy Juice Club customer (Image: @juice__club)

The overhauled building once home to legendary Capitol Hill hangout the Electric Tea Garden — and its daytime, downstairs neighbor, the equally legendary Artificial Limb Co. — will have new life in the new year.

CHS has learned that the duo behind the popular Juice Club pop-up series is making brick and mortar plans for the upgraded 1909-built building at the intersection of 14th and Pike just off E Madison.

Details on the Otherworld Wine Bar are still to be announced but the project from Juice Club partners Matt Lucas and Ben Chaykin has applied for a liquor license for the space and registered a new business with the state for the address for a venue offering beer and wine, plus off-premises sales. Continue reading →

Checking in: Light Sleeper and Wide Eyed Wines

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Capitol Hill has a new wine bar but you can’t yet sit at it and it’s only open for lunch.

That’s how things go during the strange times of COVID-19.

For now, Light Sleeper and its sibling shop Wide Eyed Wines are open for daytime takeout and your bottle shopping needs inside Pike/Pine’s Chophouse Row.

Eventually you can sit at that bar and enjoy a glass of natural and biodynamic wine or a cocktail while eating a pizza from the wood-fired oven and some bar snacks while you toast the researchers and front-line medical workers who got us through all of this.

The bar and oven might feel familiar. CHS reported here on the Bar Ferdinand employees taking over the restaurant as chef Matt Dillon cut his last ties with the neighborhood in early 2020.

Sommelier Ezra Wick and chef Eli Dahlin got the keys just as the pandemic first hit. But by the end of 2020, Light Sleeper was born and ready to roll with the pandemic’s punches. Continue reading →

Return of the Capitol Hill newsstand: Big Little News planned for Pike/Pine

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It’s been a decade since Capitol Hill last had a newsstand. The news? Well, it’s changed a bit in the meantime but the appetite for newspapers and magazines has somehow survived the explosive growth of online information and smartphones.

CHS has learned a new project coming to Pike/Pine from some familiar faces in the neighborhood will celebrate that appetite for the printed page — and the bottleshop. Continue reading →

Bar Ferdinand employees to take over with new wine and bottle shop project as chef Dillon cuts ties with Capitol Hill restaurant scene

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Upper Bar Ferdinand when it debuted in 2015

It is time to turn over the dirt and grow new things inside Capitol Hill’s Chophouse Row. Chef Matt Dillon’s last Capitol Hill connection has been severed. Bar Ferdinand is no more. But a new wine-focused project is already being lined up to take its place. The group of food and drink experts taking on the venture include two of the now dearly departed wine bar’s staff. They are ready for new things moving beyond hand wringing over the state of the city’s dining scene.

“As far as speaking eloquently about how Seattle is changing, that has been litigated,” chef Eli Dahlin tells CHS.

“We’re not trying to change Capitol Hill,” he said. Continue reading →

Juice Club planning a ‘natural wine party’ on E Denny Way

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Organic, low intervention, simply complex, imbued with possible health benefits, it is no surprise that natural wine is becoming the official beverage of our times — or, at least, the official beverage of Capitol Hill, Seattle circa 2020.

Juice Club, a popular pop-up project that has grown into a Seattle phenomenon around the city’s bar scene, is making plans for its first rooted investment with a new joint on E Denny Way on the ground level of the Saint Florence.

The E Denny facing space in the 1914-built masonry apartment building just up from the E Olive Way intersection underwent a recent overhaul and is awaiting a new tenant. A state liquor license application shows the Club lining up to create a new “beer/wine specialty shop” in the space indicating a project leaning more toward the event and retail end of the natural wine spectrum. Continue reading →

La Dive — dark and cozy and comfortable and pink — now open on E Pike

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Opatz, Custer, and Gurwitz

La Dive, a new natural wine bar and hangout from one of the creative forces behind Montana and Nacho Borracho, is ready for its new pink bar top to add a new layer to Pike/Pine nightlife.

“Sometimes I want to have a glass of wine,” Kate Opatz said at a friends and family debut for the new E Pike venue. “It’s still dark and cozy and comfortable but, yeah, a little more grown up.”

CHS reported this summer on the plans for Opatz to team up with first time owners Ani Custer and David Gurwitz on the transformation of the former Other Coast sandwich shop into a new bar with a minimalist approach to great wines — and some more outrageous elements like champagne bong “chambongs” and frozen wine slushies like friesling and frojolais.

The trio’s match-up is a good pairing. Custer grew her knowledge with the Garbage People Love Wine pop-ups, while Gurwitz built on his experience at Lark and Spinasse to build La Dive’s menu of bar toasts and dumplings. Opatz, meanwhile, has been part of creating successful neighborhood bars outside of the Pike/Pine core. Montana and Nacho are, affectionately, labeled dive bars. Continue reading →