House Of Wines is a new place down Flower Road which focuses only on wine and champagne. They have a thoughtful and well-curated selection of wines with a good amount of affordable ones in the mix.
The Wines
A lot of places called wine shops just sell strong beer and arrack. House Of Wines sells only wine and champagne. It’ll all fermented grapes here.
We tried a winery called Finca Los Moras on the advice of the cafe manager at Barefoot. He told us the Chilean winery was beneath some glacier that gave it an excellent water supply. Sounds great. We tried the Syrah (cheap at Rs. 1,400) and the Malbec (Rs. 2,900). We actually haven’t tried them yet but we looked up some of the wines on snooth.com and they mostly have 4 stars or above. The prices also don’t seem ridiculously marked up.
UPDATE: We tried a Syrah and a Malbec and they were really interesting and fun wines to drink.
The wines here vary a lot in price. You can get quite a few for under Rs. 2,000 but also fancier wines (like some tasty looking desert wines) for Rs. 10,000 and up. We don’t know what’s in the premium room but we’re sure it’s premium.
The Shop
House Of Wines is a small shop on Flower Road, near the Green Path junction and Cotton Collection. As you enter there’s a room for premium wines which we didn’t go into (it was locked) and a bigger room with the regular stuff.
The main room is big, simple and freezing cold. There’s not a huge selection, which is actually nice. Choosing wine can be paralyzing but they’ve curated it down. Everything is pretty and well displayed.
Service
The place has just opened and when we went there was just a cashier. It might have been nice to have some advice on what to buy, but again we had a friend to call.
Conclusion
House Of Wines is a thoughtful addition to the Sri Lankan BOMU scene. We have shops with decent wines, but those all sell liquor as well, and they’re obviously not thinking about wine all the time. House Of Wines is fully focused on wine and it shows in a well-curated collection in an elegant shop. They also have wines for less than Rs. 2,000, so win.
