Lady of the Grapes Opens Second Location in Borough Market
April 30th. Lady of the Grapes announced a second site, this one in Borough Market, bigger than the original Covent Garden spot that's been quietly doing something most London wine bars don't bother with: stocking almost exclusively wine made by women.
That's not a gimmick. There are now enough female winemakers producing serious bottles across enough regions that you can build a genuinely interesting list around them. Lady of the Grapes proved that. The Covent Garden bar has been running since 2019 and the shelves have never felt thin or tokenistic. The Borough Market location, from what's been reported via Hot Dinners and Time Out, will be larger, which suggests they're not hedging. They think the demand is there. I think they're right.
Why This Expansion Is Worth Paying Attention To
Borough Market is a funny choice in the best way. It gets a lot of foot traffic from people who are already thinking about food and drink, but it's also brutally competitive. Businesses there have to earn their place. The fact that Lady of the Grapes chose Borough over, say, Shoreditch or Peckham tells you something about how they're positioning themselves: not as a destination bar for the already-converted, but as a place someone wanders into on a Saturday after buying too much bread and ends up spending two hours.
That's a harder sell than it sounds. The converted already know about female winemakers. Domaine Weinbach in Alsace, Château Pichon Baron's second label under Françoise de Boissezon, the Tondonia sisters in Rioja, Elisabetta Foradori in Trentino. These are names that appear in tasting notes written by people who read tasting notes. But the person holding a Borough Market sourdough and looking for somewhere to sit? They might not know any of that. Getting that person to try a skin-contact Ribolla from a small producer in Friuli, made by a woman they've never heard of, and leaving thinking "I'd like more of that" is genuinely hard to do.
If the Borough Market site pulls it off, it matters for the wider UK wine scene. Not because female winemakers need a London wine bar to validate them, they don't. But because getting good, specific bottles in front of people who wouldn't normally seek them out is how drinking habits actually change.
What Female Winemaker Wine Actually Means Right Now
The framing "wine made by women" still makes some people uncomfortable, as if it implies the wine is being sorted by the winemaker's biography rather than what's in the glass. That discomfort is understandable but slightly misses the point.
The more useful way to read it: female winemakers have been systematically underrepresented in the parts of the wine trade that get talked about. Head winemaker roles at big estates, the producers that get column inches in Decanter, the bottles that end up on by-the-glass lists at restaurants with Michelin stars. There are structural reasons for that, some of them fading, some of them not. A bar that deliberately centres those producers isn't making a political statement so much as correcting for a filter that most lists apply without noticing.
And the wine itself? Genuinely good. Which is the only thing that matters in the long run. You're not doing anyone a favour by stocking mediocre bottles and calling it representation.
Finding Tastings and Events That Go Beyond the Label
The Borough Market opening is a good prompt to think about where else you can find this kind of thing, because Lady of the Grapes isn't the only one doing it. There's a growing number of independent bottle shops, importers, and educators around the UK who run tastings focused on specific producers, regions, or approaches, and some of them have been quietly centring female winemakers for years without making a big song and dance about it.
The problem is those events are hard to find if you don't already know where to look. They're not on Eventbrite. They get announced via Instagram stories and email lists that you have to know to sign up for. If you're in Manchester or Bristol or Edinburgh and you want to find a tasting that goes beyond the standard "here are six wines from six regions" format, you're largely on your own.
That's the gap Sommly sits in. Wine events run by independent bars, importers, bottle shops, and educators, in one place, searchable by location. If you're curious about what's happening near you, it's worth checking.
What To Do With This Information
If you're in London and you've never been to Lady of the Grapes, the Covent Garden site is worth visiting before the Borough Market one opens, just to get a baseline. Ask whoever's pouring about producers you don't know. That's the point of going.
If you're outside London, look for the equivalent in your city. The independent wine bar that does a Thursday evening tasting for £18 and pours things you can't get at Majestic. The importer who brings in bottles from Georgia or the Jura and holds occasional open evenings. They exist in more places than you'd think. You just have to find them.
The Borough Market expansion is good news. But the more interesting version of this story is everything that's already happening outside the capital that nobody's written a Hot Dinners piece about yet.