Mural City Cellars’ new winery opens Friday in Fishtown

For years, Fishtown has claimed every kind of bar you can think of: beer bars, whiskey bars, cocktail bars, wine bars, tiki bars, seltzer bars, arcade bars, you name it. It even had an post-apocalypse-themed bar for a few years. Come Friday, Fishtown gets something new — a winery.

That’s when Mural City Cellars’ new, permanent home opens at 1831 Frankford Ave., at the corner of Berks Street and the edge of the Fishtown-Kensington border. The winery will offer 13 of Mural City’s wines by the glass plus beers and guest wines from fellow Pennsylvania makers. Glasses go for $10 to $15. Bottles range from $40 to $68, with guest bottles from Galen Glen, Vox Vineti, Karamoor, Binah, and Camuna Cellars running higher.

There’s no hard booze here. “I think it’s important to stay in your lane,” says co-owner Francesca Galarus. “Post Haste is a couple blocks away, they have an incredible cocktail program. I really want to do what we do very well.” She said simple wine-driven mixed drinks like vermouth and soda may be coming as the bar gets settled into the neighborhood.

Customers can grab local cheeses (Birchrun Hills, Perrystead Dairy, and Bandit), tinned fish, meats, crackers, and Fishtown Pickle Projects’ giardiniera from the fridge and give it to the bartender to plate while they find a seat amid an eclectic smattering of thrifted living room furniture.

This is the urban winery’s third or fourth space, depending on how you look at it, since it got off the ground in 2020. When they signed a lease on a 1,200-square-foot garage on Amber Street in Kensington, Galarus and partner Nicholas Ducos knew it was smaller than what they envisioned. They made it work, clearing their production space to host tastings and tours on evenings and weekends, but it was a challenge.

“On Thursday sometimes we would be cleaning up and mopping up wine and building a back bar at 3:30 p.m. to open at 4 o’clock,” Galarus remembered. “We were like, ‘This is not sustainable.’”

They began looking for new spaces as early as summer 2021, when the couple first approached the landlord of the Frankford Avenue building. He agreed to rent to them a year later. But the 3,000-square-foot former auto-body shop needed a lot of work, including about a year’s worth of soil testing and remediation.

In June 2022, the couple landed a seasonal residency at 2211 Frankford Ave., a large community lot owned by the New Kensington Community Development Corporation. Mural City’s wine garden was an instant hit — it repeated in spring/summer 2023 — with neighbors and families coming to hang out and listen to live music over plastic cups of wine, sold from a retired SEPTA streetcar. (The wine garden won’t return to 2111 Frankford Ave. this summer, but Galarus said Mural City will announce another outdoor space soon.)

The remote location allowed Ducos and Galarus to shift all customer-facing events out of the Amber Street garage, but once their wine-making equipment spread out, they were never able to reign it back in. They operated out of a pop-up location at 2146 E. Susquehanna Ave. for several months between 2022 and 2023. When last year’s wine garden wound down, they relied on retail partners like Martha and Jet Wine Bar and BYOB residencies at places like Vientiane Bistro and Stina Pizzeria to keep in contact with customers.

Meanwhile, they overhauled the 1831 Frankford Ave. space, pouring new cement floors, whitewashing the cinder block walls, redoing the bathrooms, replacing the metal garage door, and installing a glass wall to separate the winery’s bar area from its production space in the rear. They sourced sofas and chairs for lounging from Modern Republic, Thunderbird Salvage, and Jinxed. They commissioned communal tables and shelving from a Baltimore woodshop. And they moved in several barrels and tanks, which are currently holding Mural City’s 2023 vintages — enough to make 3,000 cases.

From its inception, Mural City has been a homecoming of sorts for Galarus and Ducos, who grew up in Malvern and the Lehigh Valley, respectively. They met while working in the Miami restaurant industry in 2016, when Ducos, then a sommelier, pitched Galarus on his idea of opening an urban winery. Ducos did wine-making stints in Napa, New Zealand, and New Jersey before the couple opened Mural City, sourcing grapes from within a 300-mile radius of Philly.

Their wines have an offbeat but approachable through-line: think sparkling chardonnay, skin-contact pinot gris, and pet-nat blanc. While Ducos has made variations on the same theme, he frequently changes up the formula — putting semillon grapes in the sauvignon blanc one year, say, and excluding them the next. It’s a strategy that’ll come in handy when faced with Fishtown’s novelty-seekers.

“We’re in a city and people demand variety,” Galarus said. “They’re used to breweries that are releasing a new beer every month. And even with all this variety, people still ask us what’s new.”

Starting March 22, Mural City Cellars at 1831 Frankford Ave. is open 4-10 p.m. Monday and Thursday, 4-11 p.m. Friday, noon-11 p.m. Saturday, noon-10 p.m. Sunday.