From the outside, Stable Wines – a small glass box tucked just off Essex Road – looks like a modest, modern bottle shop. Step inside, though, and the space reveals its real party trick: a staircase that drops down into a vast, vaulted cellar, once a 19th-century bank vault used to store gold ingots, now reimagined as a sultry, subterranean low-intervention wine bar.
Stable Wines is the latest opening from Alex Young and George de Vos, the team behind De Beauvoir favourites Goodbye Horses (a wine bar) Day Trip Coffee (a specialty coffee shop inside Goodbye Horses) and The Dreamery (an ice cream and wine bar). According to Young, the project began less as a grand vision and more as a practical necessity. “Stable actually grew out of the labyrinthine offsite cellar of Goodbye Horses,” he tells Broadsheet. “Our wine list had outmanoeuvred the Horses basement … When this mad spot came up a few minutes’ walk away we jumped on it.”
Originally, the plan was simply to stash bottles, but the building itself changed the brief. “The last thing I expected walking into a tiny glass cuboid off Essex Road was to descend into this massive cavernous maze of a cellar,” Young says. “The architecture was inherently surprising and our ambition was to let it breathe. The arches and the vault rooms were there waiting. We just added wine – and a lot of it.”
Up top, that glass-wrapped street-level space functions as a wine shop, with an ever-changing edit of bottles displayed across the counter and shelving. The selection is overseen by wine director Nathalie Nelles alongside general manager Fred Clelland, and promises progressive, low-intervention producers, with a particular focus on so-called “zero-zero” wines (bottles made without additives and with minimal interference from vineyard to cellar).
Downstairs, the mood shifts into a different dimension, where the stripped-back cellar’s winding corridors open into hidden corners and vaulted rooms where stone arches frame pockets of seating. Bare, textured walls and a distressed concrete floor are softened by just enough candlelight to make sense of the menu, while custom glassware illustrated with elegant Grecian figureheads is designed to let you know when it's time for a top-up.
And you’re going to need many of those, because that extra cellar space has unlocked seemingly limitless possibilities for the group’s wine lists. Alongside popular low-intervention bottles, Stable Wines will focus on cellaring, ageing and pouring verticals – something the team’s other venues don’t have room for. Nelles is already building multi-vintage runs from both emerging producers and beloved stalwarts, with the aim of helping guests “get to know producers the way we do and build a deeper understanding of their work,” says Young. “We’re already five vintages deep with newcomer producers – Lambert Spielmann for instance – and the same for natural wine OGs like JC Garnier.”
Chef Jack Coggins’s concise, ever-changing sharing menu is built to support such finds. Alongside a rotating selection of cured meats and cheeses, and Carlingford oysters topped with chilli mignonette or wasabi vinaigrette, are small plates designed for sharing, including dishes of eggs mayonnaise, crisp potato pavé topped with steak tartare, and silken chocolate mousse.
Thick-cut and unapologetically indulgent, the toasties that have followed the team from venue to venue are here too. The showstopper, though, is the deep-fried wheel of Mont d’Or. Served molten with garlic-buttered baguette, it is, in Young’s words, “an ungodly delight”.
With Stable Wines, the group’s De Beauvoir universe now includes a restaurant and wine bar, a coffee shop, an ice-cream-and-wine bar, and a dedicated wine cellar and shop. But whether it’s the final piece of the puzzle? That remains to be seen. “I do love spawning little worlds,” Young admits. “Maybe I’ll open London’s [version of] Erewhon” (the Los Angeles organic grocery chain, favoured by A-listers).
Stable Wines
344a Essex Rd, N1 3PD
Hours:
Mon midday–11pm
Tue & Wed midday–8pm
Thu to Sat midday–11pm
Sun midday–10pm
