Our diminutive natural wine bar and shop in the Chapel Allerton suburb of Leeds is where it all started, in 2017. This was the space we opened to give a home to the vast and varied rainbow of natural, low intervention, organic and biodynamic wines from Italy, France, Spain and beyond that we had spent the previous five years discovering, hunting and avidly learning about.
We were thrilled to find out how many people appreciated being able to swing by and pick up an obscure bottle or two that had, until now, proved somewhat elusive. For us, being able to taste the wine was key - it’s the essence of the thing, and it was how, on our early travels to the wine bars of London, Paris, Barcelona, Palermo, et al, that we got the bug ourselves.
When we started to import wine of our own, for wholesale as well as retail, directly from the growers in France, Italy & Spain, it quickly became clear that the space in our shop was going to be woefully insufficient - so we found ourselves a railway arch in the centre of Leeds to store it instead.
As the list of natural wines that Wayward stocks continues to grow, the archway provides us with all the space we need to store the wine and keep it all at the right temperature. With a bit of space outside in the yard, we will also host some events down here on a bigger scale to those at the shop.
