I Tried It: Philly’s New Wine Tour

Tiny Table Tours founder Maddy Sweitzer-Lammé on her new Philly wine tour. / Photography by Neal Santos

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When most people think about wine regions, they likely conjure the rolling hills of Tuscany, the diverse microclimates of Napa Valley, and Oregon’s charming Willamette Valley.

Probably not top of mind? Pennsylvania — and yet, wine has been part of the Commonwealth’s personality since the late 1600s, when William Penn planted what’s thought to be the first vineyard in Philadelphia, in Fairmount Park. While many of the region’s vineyards are out in the ‘burbs, the city itself is home to winemakers producing some seriously good wine.

It’s why Maddy Sweitzer-Lammé, who has been writing about Philly’s food and beverage scene for nearly a decade (at many publications, including Philly Mag!), decided to expand the offerings of her three-year-old small-group tour company, Tiny Table Tours. Her biz has been guiding folks through the lesser-trekked parts of South Philly with a “Beyond the Italian Market” tour — stops include Ba Le Bakery for a bánh mì sandwich and Plaza Garibaldi Mezcaleria for tacos — and now, she’s helping people become more familiar with the city’s urban winery boom.

Launched last month, Tiny Table Tours’ “Fishtown Wine and Drinks” — currently Philly’s only wine-focused walking tour — travels to two urban wineries, plus a cidery, where you get to sip, socialize, and learn a thing or two about what goes into making great-tasting vino and cider.

I joined the first official jaunt through Fishtown and Kensington. Here’s what you can expect on Philly’s newest winery (and cidery!) tour.

The fun begins at Mural City Cellars, Philly’s first urban winery that originally opened in Kensington in 2021. The neighborhood spot moved to its current home on Frankford Avenue two years ago, and features a bar and bottle shop, plus a garden across the street.

Our group of about 12 people gather in the Tank Room, the private, back section that houses Mural City’s fermentation tanks. While we chat over some charcuterie and our first wine of the day — Mural City’s Pet-Nat Blanc, a sparkling wine made with Vidal Blanc from the Finger Lakes — Sweitzer-Lammé kicks things off with a brief lesson of Philly’s wine history. “At the end of Prohibition in 1933, the governor of Pennsylvania was very anti-alcohol, and he wanted to make it as difficult as possible for people in Pennsylvania to drink at all,” she says. “So, he set up the state system, which controls a lot of what is available to drink in Philly,” including our complicated alcohol laws. But, Sweitzer-Lammé adds, those wonky restrictions have also created “a wine scene that is populated by people who believe that what’s possible here is singular and special and delicious.”

And it’s true: Nicholas Ducos and Francesca Galarus, the founders of Mural City, focus on crafting easy-drinking, low-intervention wines, all from grapes sourced within a 300-mile radius of Philly. You can taste that ethos in other bottles like the rosé made from Malbec grapes from western Maryland and the house white featuring vidal blanc goodness from the Lehigh Valley. (Both are so crushable!)

Spirits high, we walk about 15 minutes to our second stop: Pray Tell. (A good reminder to wear comfortable shoes!) Aside from another small group, our tour essentially has the place to ourselves. Corn nuts are the only snack option here — Pray Tell doesn’t currently allow outside food — so I suggest not being shy with the charcuterie on offer at Mural City or bringing something in your bag for the walk.

We find ourselves at one long table, a three-wine flight set up at each seat, and learning about Pray Tell’s full-circle Philly-rooted history: Co-owner Tom Caruso got his start during adolescence, when he’d help his grandfather make wine with a hand-cranked destemmer and basket press in his family’s South Philly yard. Caruso eventually found himself out west, and in 2017, founded Pray Tell in the Willamette Valley. Seven years later, Caruso, with his partner Sydney Adams, brought Pray Tell home, to a 3,000-square-foot tasting room and production facility in Kensington. Their goal? Showcase Pennsylvania viticulture.

Some of their wines, though, like Orange Popsicle, still feature Oregon-grown grapes. “It was cool to have Albariño that was grown in Oregon fermenting next to Chardonnay that was grown here in Pennsylvania,” Adams says of the vibrant skin-contact wine, which is the first sip of the flight. “And we thought, ‘No better way to honor that move than by making a bicoastal blend.’ So, you have our journey and our story together in a glass.”

Wines at Pray Tell

The tasting continues with Fruit Snacks, a playful red blend (made from all Pennsylvania-grown grapes) whose name is a nod to those flavor-gushing gummy candies from childhood — the wine is way better, of course; the wine is actually on the drier side, which I personally love — and Memory Lane, the very first red blend that Pray Tell created back in 2018, in their original Oregon cellar. Sweitzer-Lammé tells us Caruso and Adams once described the latter as their ideal table red: delicious, simple yet complex, and something that’ll never fail to satisfy company.

At this point, many of us are buzzed as we venture about another half-mile to the third and final stop. (Water is provided at every location — drink it!) During our 10-ish-minute walk, I talk to two older women, on the tour with a group of girlfriends for a “fun Saturday afternoon out!” Both women, I find out, live just four streets up from me, and we give Grad Hospital all the accolades it deserves as we walk and laugh.

Before we know it, we arrive at Pip’s, a lively cider bar that just opened this past November on North Lee Street between Frankford Avenue and Front Street. It’s from the team behind Ploughman Cider out in Adams County, who sources all their apples from Three Springs Fruit Farm. (You can find the seventh-generation farm represented at Headhouse Square Farmers’ Market every Sunday.)

Most of the people on our tour — myself included — are a bit surprised to find ourselves at a cider bar … on a wine tour. (Okay, “wine and drinks.”) But Ploughman owner Ben Wenk says it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, even though cider is indeed in its own beverage category.

“We approach cider very similarly to the way the wineries approach their product: Take the best fruit, give the beverage time to mature into something beautiful, and blend to help bring out the best characteristics of that fruit,” he says. “And while people kind of understand that when it comes to wine, tour attendees might leave with a deeper appreciation for cider when they [learn] that it’s often made with the same time and attention as the [wine at the] wineries they visit.”

Cider at Pip’s

And so, we dive into two ciders: Arkansas Black, which has a light carbonation, and a dry, but still fruit-forward flavor; and Churchyard, a rich eight-percenter made from bittersweet apples. The tartness of both pairs amazingly well with the pieces of Liberty Kitchen’s tomato pie waiting for us at a central table. We leave no crumbs, and linger over a game of pool and relax on the couches as the tour comes to an end.

Over the course of about three hours, our group has done a lot: tried five different wines and two ciders, walked over a mile, and got a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to make wine in the middle of Philly. It’s clear from the afternoon that the scene, though young, is thriving. And in a city with a huge emphasis on eating and sourcing food locally, the tour shows that drinking locally is also possible.

Tickets for Tiny Table Tours’ Fishtown Wine and Drinks Tour are $130 per person. You can schedule your tour here.