henny’s Wine Bar | A Cosy, Intimate Wine Bar In Balham
For too long now, Balham has been cruelly denied a cosy, low-key minimalist wine bar serving exclusively organic, biodynamic and vegan bottles alongside pizza & nibbles.
Well, not any more.
Because now if you wander down the High Street a minute or two south of the Tube station, you’ll find an unobtrusive green awning sheltering the buzzy, wine-fueled hotspot that is henny’s. It opened earlier this year, and it’s gone from strength to strength.
The venue itself is all the work of grape obsessive Niall Penlington (his grandad was the Henny that the place is named after) who has personally cobbled the entire operation together himself with “blood, sweat and credit cards”, starting the place as a bottleshop in Tooting, before moving up the road to his own full-blown wine bar.
The space he built is a small, intimate sleeve of simple eggshell walls wearing a pine-green skirt. There’s a tile bar and half a dozen tables at the back, but the centrepieces of it all are the wine cases as you come in, which proudly parade the week’s bottles across their shelves. Those wines are all organic, biodynamic and vegan, and come in every colour of the wine-rainbow – that is white, red, rose, and orange. And although there are only a dozen or so on at a time (the selection rotates weekly), that’s because the lineup is curated so as to be entirely composed of absolute corkers. Pun intended.
To go with your glass at henny’s wine bar there are a few snacks, like truffled nuts or XL-sized olives, but the real star is the pizza. You see, it just so happens that there’s a Yard Sale Pizza down the road from henny’s, so they’ve set up a direct delivery menu of wood-fired sourdough. Simple, but brilliant.
And finally, there’s always that non-zero chance that either you or someone you’re with will want to go off-piste and not order some wine. Crazy, yes. Impossible, no. Because henny’s also has a draught beer tap, and the ability to make cocktails, including a very fancy negroni sbagliato…
…with prosecco in it.
NOTE: henny’s wine bar is open now. There are no bookings. You can find out more at the website right here.
henny’s wine bar | 195C Balham High Rd, SW12 9BE
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