First Look: Western Daughters Wine Bar defies stereotypes — starting with a butcher

Most wine bars don’t share space with a butcher shop. And while many offer food, few offer more than an obligatory charcuterie plate. Fewer, still, are open for brunch. 

But Western Daughters Wine Bar, the latest entry to Denver’s growing wine bar scene, is hardly typical, something you realize immediately upon entering the space at 3326 Tejon St.

Cattle horns and skulls adorn the walls. It’s dark, both in earth-tone color scheme and lighting. And there’s lots of leather and wood.

Compared to the beachy vibes of Society 303 on Colfax, the bright and windowed Trellis Wine Bar in Park Hill or the plant-filled Central Coast theme at Vin Rouge in Berkeley, Western Daughters is so decidedly masculine in design that you’d almost mistake it for a bourbon tasting room. Until you remember that men like wine, too. 

Behind the bar you’ll find Noah Heaney, a big, bald, bearded man boasting arm-length tattoos and a wealth of wine knowledge, pouring a guest a sample from a freshly opened bottle he’s clearly excited about. 

“This is just summer, in a glass,” he says of the lightly chilled red that’s so new to the bar it’s not even on the menu yet. “A real patio pounder.”

Just over his shoulder is an archway that leads to the Western Daughters Butchers Shoppe next door, where, from the bar, you can see customers buying packages of meat. If you listen closely, you might hear the counter staff educating customers on the health, flavor, or ethical benefits of grass-fed beef and pasture-raised pork. 

That’s when you realize that a wine bar attached to a butcher’s shop isn’t all that strange. If anything, it makes perfect sense.

The wine

“The wine bar is an extension of what we are at the butcher shop,” says Josh Curtiss, who in 2013 opened Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe with wife Kate Kavanaugh. Their goal at the time was to “build a bridge between the rural and urban community” by providing meat from small local regenerative farms to the residents of Denver’s Highland neighborhood. In 2023, they opened Western Daughters Kitchen at the CSU Spur campus within the National Western Complex, which closed in September of last year. 

Now, they’ve switched the focus to wine, but that same urban-rural connection remains.

“There are wine producers that are as intentional about how they grow their wines and how they’re processing it as we are with the animals that we bring into the butcher shop and the farmers and ranchers we work with,” Curtiss says. “It’s not just producing meat or wine, but producing it in a way that is better for the land, for them as a farmer, and better for the consumer. So, it just meshed really well.”

Western Daughters Wine Bar’s menu is focused on natural, organic and biodynamic wines, with about 50 in total, all available by the glass. Prices range from $9 to $25, and options run from the standard regions of Italy, France, Spain and California, with a few fun outliers from the likes of Uruguay, Georgia, Slovenia and Hungary. 

Highlights include a Castel Pujol Folklore Naranja orange wine, featuring a blend of trebbiano and petit manseng from Uruguay ($16), a Barone di Villagrande Etna Rosso from Sicily ($10) and a Weniger Blaufränkisch from Austria ($16). Others that stood out included a Scar of the Sea pinot noir from California’s Central Coast ($16) and a Stein “Himmelreich” riesling ($16).

The list is curated by the aforementioned Heaney, a veteran of the Denver bar scene with a resume longer than the wine list he’s built. After selling his stake in Golden’s Miners Saloon (he still owns Nosu Ramen), he came to Western Daughters first as a manager of the butcher shop. But when the former Mr. Lucky’s sandwich shop next door went out of business, the landlord offered Curtiss first shot at the space, and Heaney recommended they open a wine bar. 

But not just any wine bar.

The food

There’s a subtle but important distinction between a restaurant with a good wine list and a wine bar with good food. According to Heaney, it comes down to a planned experience versus a spontaneous one. 

“Restaurants have the connotation of reservations and a plan-ahead kind of mentality,” he says. “We want people just dropping in. We cater to our locals. We don’t take reservations. We want the person who lives in the building a block away to be able to walk here and get something quickly.”

That “something” usually involves food sourced from the butcher’s store next door. A good place to start is the mixed charcuterie plate ($25/$50) with sliced cured meats and cheese, house pickles and jam, crackers, nuts and other elements that can change by the day. While the meats are at the level you’d expect from a butcher-affiliated bar, it’s the tart-sweet house jam that sets this one over the edge. We’ll need to return to find out what’s in it.

Breaking up the protein courses with a salad is a smart move. Some of Western Daughters’ are seasonal specials, like the current salad of peaches and tomatoes. ($15). This is good, because you can’t eat at Western Daughters Wine Bar without sampling the main event: meat.

Options include the WD Burger ($20), a third-pound of beef with bacon and beef tallow aioli and tobacco onion, or a Cottonwood Creek Farm double pork chop ($48) served with a chicharron gremolata. Still, it’s the Daily Carne that really waves the flag: your choice of steak served with a trio of chimichurri, horseradish sauce and smoked cowboy butter. 

The 50-day dry-aged ribeye is the premium cut ($125), and it’s worth every cent. As tender and flavorful as the beef is, it’s the fat that projects its quality. Rather than white gristle you’d cut off and push to the side with a typical cut, the fat on this is so soft and buttery you can spread it on your optional beef tallow shoestring fries ($10). Pro-tip: order the vegan option, the miso braised cabbage ($15), as a perfectly matched side. 

The mission

While billed as a wine bar and presented like a steakhouse, Western Daughters is actually a little of both and a lot of neither at the same time. The steaks will rival those of any corporate-card steakhouse you’ll find, but without the cliché sides like creamed spinach or steamed asparagus. The wines are novel and exciting, without the pretense or the performative expense. 

Standing out above it all is the mission under which both are presented, and it all points back to Curtiss’ original vision for the butcher shop 13 years ago: to focus on products from producers who care about what they serve, and how it’s made. 

“The reason to come here is because it supports people who are doing things that will allow people to continue coming to places like this for generations,” he says. “We do things the way that we do them to support the people who are doing things the way that they’re doing them, so that our children and grandchildren can enjoy good food and enjoy food that has more flavor, more nutritional aspects, and (food) that takes care of the land so that we can continue to produce more food.”