The Wine Loft

The Wine Loft is an upscale wine bar at 2201 South Boulevard, Suite 120, in South End, open since around 2009 and bought in late 2019 by the Menagerie Hospitality Group from longtime owner Sam Kalioby on his retirement. It pours more than fifty wines by the glass alongside a tapas menu — meatballs and burrata, bang bang shrimp, charcuterie slates, and flatbreads including a prosciutto and fig — and it programmes live music from local and national artists every Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening at 7pm, which is what distinguishes it from the other wine rooms in the neighbourhood. It trades Tuesday through Saturday, opening at 4pm midweek and as early as 2pm on Saturdays, with Mondays and Sundays reserved for private events.

The bar keeps a section headed "Mocktails", introduced on its own menu as zero-proof sips crafted with the same care, balance and vibe as the cocktails. There are four: an Orange Maple Old Fashioned, a Paloma Squeeze, an Italian Spritz and a Blood Orange Mule. Two things are worth setting out honestly. First, the venue publishes no ingredients and no prices for any drink on its site — alcoholic or otherwise — so the four names above are all that is documented, and what goes into them has to be asked at the bar. Second, and more surprising for a room built on wine: there is no non-alcoholic wine on the list at all. A wine bar with fifty wines by the glass and no zero-proof bottle is a real gap, and it means a non-drinker here is choosing from four mixed drinks rather than from the thing the venue actually specialises in. Older listings for this bar, including earlier versions of this page, have named several other zero-proof drinks that do not appear on the current menu; treat those as historical.