Steve’s Wine Bar in downtown Denton will celebrate 10 years in business Aug. 5, owners Steve and Karen Severance said. The wine bar hosts live jazz and has offered nearly 200 different wines since it opened in 2016.
Karen Severance said the wine bar’s goal is to bring people together and use wine as a way to foster community.
“We realized early on that it was more than just the wine, that it was the community, the wine and the ability for people to come in, socialize and connect with each other,” she said.
On the menu
The wine bar offers about 50 wines by the glass and roughly 200 wines by the bottle, Steve Severance said. The business also has a bar, where guests can sit and be served, but most of the space is dedicated to table service.
While the venue does not offer food, there are several restaurants nearby and guests can bring in their own food.
Steve’s Wine Bar also has a bottle room, where patrons can shop for bottles of wine in a retail space, and a lounge available for rentals.
In addition to wine, the bar also keeps about six North Texas beers on tap and stocks mead, cider and sake. However, the business does not serve liquor.
What is there to do?
Steve’s Wine Bar offers different wine club tiers, where guests can pay a monthly fee to taste different bottles of wine and take bottles home with them once a month.
In addition to tastings, the wine club occasionally organizes international trips and wine tours. The venue also hosts several live music events, with an emphasis on jazz.
To celebrate the anniversary, Steve’s Wine Bar is hosting a “Swine Hunt.” The name is an honor of a piece of mail the bar once received that was addressed to “Steve Swine Bar.”
Several pig-themed items, like pig paintings and statuettes, are scattered throughout the bar. Guests can search for all the pig pieces and submit the number of items they found to the Severances. Guests who are the closest to finding the correct number of pigs will be entered into a raffle to win a free bottle of wine on the bar's anniversary Aug. 5.
Some background
Steve and Karen Severance had hosted wine dinners with friends at their house for years before opening the wine bar. At the dinners, the Severances would prepare the main course and pair the food with one of the 100-plus bottles of wine they had on hand.
“By that time, we had gotten into having several wine club memberships from Washington wineries and California wineries and even some Texas wineries,” Steve Severance said. “We really had fallen into that hole of having a lot of wine around the house.”
Before opening the bar, Steve Severance worked in sales and business development for different technology companies. He lost his job in tech in March 2016, and friends from the Denton Rotary Club encouraged him to “do something with wine.”
The business opened that August on East Hickory Street. The wine bar relocated to its current location on Industrial Street in 2019 after the business outgrew the space due to hosting live music, Steve Severance said.
Yellow Dog Art Bar and Gallery now occupies their original space.
