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New wine bar - pay £5 and taste 12 interesting wines. We like the sound of it. You can also buy bottles that take your fancy. Food served only to complement the wines.
Wheelchair friendly.
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38 South Parade, Ads by Daily Info:
  
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I feel compelled to write a review about SWC because I have had several bad experiences there. The wine is of course good and so are the cheese and meat platters, however the service is shoddy. The last time we went for a wine tasting afternoon we received no real guidance on the bottles of wine we were tasting except for where they were from and the age, when we asked to hear more the barman simply said that it was a personal thing, so couldn't really tell us.
Kath, 13/06/09 Makes a lovely place for a drink. The service is friendly and the wines interesting. Neither stuffy nor snobbish and well priced tastings. Generous glasses of Perrier-Jouet Champagne for £4 in happy hour. p, 30/03/09 They've just started Happy Hours. Every day from 5pm to 7pm. Wines from £2/glass and PJ Champagne £4/glass. Nice one. Steve, 06/11/08 I used to work in wine, went in and was disappointed to be told there was nothing from the Rhone on offer but was told the Australin Shiraz/Grenache mix was the same breed... Utterly untrue: grape varieties the same yes, but not the same sport chaps... bp, 30/10/08 We're new to Oxford and found the Summertown Wine Cafe from this website. What a wine list! They have some seriously interesting wines. Do a tasting at the bar (it's not £2 anymore, but £5 for 12 wines is still a bargain and it's free if you buy a couple of bottles, which we did). The staff are friendly and know their stuff. Then buy a bottle of your favourite - or two half-bottle carafes if you can't agree (we couldn't) - and sit down in the beautiful conservatory or garden. We got a take-away pizza from Mamma Mia (£2 "forkage"), which was perfect. And finished off with a sensational coffee. £35 for the best pizza, wine and coffee - better than anything we had in London. A great night out for 2, plus we walked home with four bottles of excellent wine. We'll be back. Natasha, 17/07/08 My husband and I have been going to the SWC since it opened. It's a fantastic little place that has really opened up Summertown for a night out....wine at the cafe, dinner at portobello....something that would have been unheard of when we first moved to the area in 2002! The wine is usually fabulous and the food platters excellent. The one grumble that I do have with this place is the skyrocketing cover charge for having a bottle of wine there. When it first opened I think the difference in price between a bottle to take home and a bottle to have there was about £2....it is now a whopping, and in my mind completely ridiculous, £7!!! I can go to a supermarket and buy another bottle of wine for that!! Admittedly, it wouldn't be as nice and the ambience in the local co-op does not compare, but jeeze £7!! Don't let the price put you off, as you can get some really good deals on some amazing, boutique wines, if you are taking a bottle home with you. I do however hope that someone from SWC reads these comments about the corkage and drops it, just a little!!! Liv, 09/01/08 Undoubtedly a lovely place, and lovely wine. 11 pounds for two glasses (thimblefulls) of wine was in my opinion over the top, however it seemed like if you were up for it bottles and half carafes were available at normalish prices. I'd say if you wanted to settle in for an evening with a bottle it looked lovely, with nice cheese boards going past etc, but it was expensive for just a couple of tiny drinks before dinner. Will come back and have a bottle of nice red and some cheese next time and make an evening of it! Lins, 16/08/07 It's impossible to find fault with the Summertown Wine Café situated just outside ( ! -ed ) the centre of Oxford. This place has it all: relaxed and cosy ambiance, friendly and extremely knowledgeable staff, and excellent range of wines at reasonable prices. Their website also has a wealth of information and includes dates for the various tasting events held in the café. This place can simply not be recommended highly enough. Lateralshoot, 08/05/07 I "discovered" SWC in January when I wandered into the wine bar for a cup of coffee (yes, I know!). The notice-board advertised a short wine course that the owner, Rob Malcom, was about to run. I paid my dues and attended. A new world opened up; bye-bye lager, hallo wine! I have been in SWC regularly ever since, primarily because of the unfailingly warm reception one encounters and the willingness on the part of everyone working there to respond patiently and cheerfully to endless questions; they really do want customers to understand wine. And where else could you taste any wine before deciding whether to buy it? Try asking to do THAT in, say, Oddbins! This place is an oasis of calm, professional and old-fashioned courteous service. I hope that the rest of Oxfordshire never discovers it because we few, we happy few, who go there now want to keep it all for ourselves. So there. David Bright, 14/03/07 This is a great place for a cosy and unusual night out. Swanky, but affordably so: £2 for 12 taster shots of wine; glasses of posh wine from £4.60; and organic herbal teas at £1.50 per tall china pot. The night we went, there were special snacks: cheesy flat things halfway between a crepe and a pizza, produced in a van out the back. A traditional Alsatian dish, apparently: they certainly went very well with the wine. They were about £2.60 each. Comforting, elegant, sofa-heavy decor and lots of little nooks where you can curl up and gossip privately to your friends. Everything, even the service, seems to have been designed with a sensible and civilised eye to your comfort. This shouldn't be as rare a thing as it is - but I feel unreasonably grateful to a place where you get courtesy marshmallows and an inch of foam on a £2 hot chocolate, and where the staff treat you with the same courtesy whether you're ordering champagne or tea, and don't constantly pop up at your elbow badgering you to see "if everything's all right". Tucked away down South Parade, it's the kind of place one might have thought would suffer through not being close enough to the centre. However, we went on a Thursday and it was prosperously full - but again, the furniture layout has been designed with rare common sense to give each group of people their own private space. Probably a bit more packed at weekends though. I shall go back and find out! Lovepuppet, 10/11/06 The most civilised place in Oxford… If you are tired of fighting your way through musak, uncomfortable chairs, over-trained staff who interrupt your meal and conversation to ask if ‘everything’s all right’ – try the Summertown Wine Café. The bar has many, many different kinds of wine, with substantial snacks and nibbles, and charming staff. They will even plate up a pizza if you collect it from Mama Mia across the road! And they turned off the background music without a murmur when asked. Customers are invited to taste the wine before ordering. Decisions made, one can choose from the bar - a secluded area with armchairs and tables - or a larger area akin to the dining room of someone’s house, only bigger. On Sunday at 2pm it had the atmosphere of a country house party, with people relaxing, reading the papers and chatting. Beyond large windows is a garden, which - given our current weather conditions - we did not explore. In a way, I wish I had not written this since the place just MIGHT become too popular – but too late now! Jessica Rose, 21/05/06
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