London's new hip wine events

It is often expensive, its labels are unintelligible and it is only really enjoyed in smart, snooty cellars by those in the know. Or so I thought. Yet suddenly wine is the main fuel at rooftop pop-ups, for breakfast bashes, and in vans at festivals. Hip wine events are on everybody’s lips.

Come for “weird grapes and a barbecue in the Climpson & Sons arch near London Fields,” said a recent invitation to a weekly Flight Club — like a wine-tasting tour but in this case with an injection of fun. Wine shop Bottle Apostle chooses a different theme every Thursday; coming soon is Speed Dial Wines, where you can learn about reliable bottles to have on hand.

Meanwhile, on the roof of the Princess Alice pub in Shoreditch, Wine by Simon has begun hosting “wine silliness” events every Saturday — a “sit-down tasting of quirky, awesome, interesting wines with a rocking wine guru”. Also coming soon is Ruth Spivey’s Wine Car Boot tasting on September 1 at a car park in Hackney, and “extreme” Wednesday wine pop-ups hosted by Grape Night on the roof of Skyroom by London Bridge. “Want to get that adrenaline pumping? Get a buzz from danger? Then join us for a selection of wines and small plates that like to live life on the edge,” reads its tagline.

Camden-based DropWines, which according to one of its buyers, Sophie McLean, is “the Innocent Smoothies of the wine world”, has begun hosting special tastings and events in new pop-up spaces.

Tom Harrow, co-founder of WineChap, an online “repository for tips and suggestions on all things vinous”, says that it is partly on the back of London’s thriving food scene that wine has come into focus: “The key difference today is context and humour — taking wine out of traditional, stuffy environments. It’s now about making fine wine accessible — presenting it in a lighter, cooler, more engaging format.”

He argues that the next generation of wine consumers has access to “more opinions, greater product choice and are already better informed and more confident in trusting their own taste”.

Oeno-vans are changing the way wine is drunk at public events. Nick Gardner, 26-year-old co-founder of Vin du Vin, is planning his next London pop-up which he hopes “will educate, entertain and enlighten London wine consumers in the same way some really exciting young chefs and bartenders have done in recent years”. Meanwhile the transient wine bar Street Vin is appearing every Saturday at Street Feast night markets and The Wondering Wine Company, the cooler younger sister of the fine wine supplier Bibendum, will appear this summer at the Real Street Food Festival on the South Bank and at Jamie Oliver’s Big Feastival on August 31.

You heard it through the grapevine.