Press 626 Wine Bar

Press 626 occupies a converted house on West Olney Road in Ghent, Norfolk's most walkable neighbourhood, and trades as a wine bar and cafe with a garden. Wine bars are among the hardest rooms for a non-drinker, because unlike a cocktail bar there is no technique to fall back on — the entire menu is one product, and removing it leaves very little.

Press 626's answer is a set of Garden Lemonade Spritzers in three variations: lavender rosemary, chamomile orange, and pomegranate sage. The pairings are the interesting part. Each combines a floral or herbal element with a fruit, which is how you build aromatic complexity into a drink without alcohol — lavender and rosemary in particular are strongly perfumed and slightly bitter, so they push a lemonade away from sweetness and toward something that finishes dry. That is precisely the quality wine provides and sugar destroys.

Three variations also constitutes a choice rather than a token. A single house mocktail tells a non-drinker they were an afterthought; three options in a named format tells them somebody sat down and worked on it, which in a wine bar is a more meaningful gesture than it would be in a cocktail room.

The garden is the other draw, and it makes this an easy afternoon rather than an evening-only stop — the bar opens at 11am. Hours are limited at the ends of the week: closed Sunday and Monday, to 10pm on Tuesday and Wednesday, 11pm Thursday through Saturday. It sits within a short walk of Ghent's main strip and a few minutes from Ceremony in Chelsea. For an afternoon rather than an evening, the garden here is among the most pleasant places in Norfolk to sit without a drink in hand.