Leven Supply’s New Club Pours Out Wine Appreciation

In the United States, wine is often considered either a high-priced luxury item or a bargain basement buzz. Leven Supply offers a third approach: wine as a grocery item, in a nod to the more European view of wine as a staple component of even weeknight meals.

Leven Supply, an offshoot of Leven Deli that opened in January just north of Washington Park, is a hybrid food market and restaurant where diners can sit down to enjoy a sandwich or pizza with a glass of wine and then leave with an armful of gourmet supplies like fresh bread, cheeses, meats, pastas...and bottles of wine.

Not the mass-produced, corporate-label wine you’d find on the shelves of your local King Soopers. We're talking thoughtfully chosen, reasonably priced, food-friendly selections that run from the familiar (pinot noir, rosé, chardonnay) to the less so (pét nat, grüner veltliner, orange wine), with many leaning to the organic and biodynamic side, from independent producers.

Since most are priced in the very reasonable $20-a-bottle range, grabbing an unfamiliar wine from Leven Supply’s highly curated collection offers a very low-risk way to experience something new and level up your wine game. Those looking for more of a toe-dipping experience can opt first for the $5 wine pours on Tuesdays, or the $10 wine-pairing option on Mondays.

And now, the Leven team is making it even easier to expand your wine appreciation and education with its newly launched wine club. For an $85 membership, you get two bottles hand-picked by Leven proprietor and sommelier Anthony Lygizos, four times a year. For an extra $25, you can also attend exclusive tasting events with each distribution, led by a representative from the featured winemaker, along with a Leven-provided spread of cheeses, meats, breads and more.
By launch this summer, the Leven wine club had about 25 members, while the seven-month-old Supplies & Provisions club — a $75/month subscription box of both deli-made and retail food items like meatballs, sauces, breads, spices and so on — has about 155 members.

According to Lygizos, starting a wine club was a goal even before the original Leven Deli opened at 123 West 12th Avenue seven years ago. But making it a reality wasn't easy. Few associate wine programs with a neighborhood deli, including the landlords he spoke with.

“I was banging my head against a wall for three years trying to pitch the concept to every landlord in town,” he recalls. “I wanted to open a deli that serves wine, and they were like, ‘You can’t do that. That doesn’t exist.' Coining what we were going for was very, very difficult… and naming it a deli in the first place was definitely a double-edged sword.”

Technically, Leven Supply is more like an Italian gastronomia or salumeria, a place where you can not only buy a sandwich, but also pick up supplies and ingredients for cooking at home, including prepared foods, meats and cheeses, and, wine, of course.

Given Lygizos’ work experience, the idea of a wine club was inevitable. He came up in the hospitality business at the Little Nell in Aspen, which has an award-winning wine program, and was forced to study wine despite his aversion to it at the time. But he quickly realized that the wine business isn't all white tablecloths and suits, and emerged from his studies with a more relaxed sensibility that he took to Leven Deli and now Leven Supply.

“It’s not about the pomp and circumstance of wine, but just about delivering great value and hopefully great flavor and a great experience and bringing people together,” Lygizos says. “There’s this beautiful component to wine that is about experience. You don’t have to break the bank to have this unbelievable, memorable, impactful experience with food and wine.”
And so the wine club was finally born. The first distribution event, featuring Soter Wines from Oregon's Willamette Valley, took place July 21, when some fifty members and guests took over the Leven Supply dining room. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder at long tables, sampling wine, discussing wine and listening to the winemaker’s rep discuss the impact that things like “maritime influences” and “diurnal temperatures” can have on the flavor of wine.

As Lygizos and his team prepare to open a Leven fine-dining restaurant at 1520 California Street (that's now been pushed to mid-2026, but they teased some menu items at the Big Eat last month), he plans to hold additional wine-club tasting events on a quarterly basis, when members can not only pick up their next installment but chat about wine with other members ranging from novice wine drinkers to veteran oenophiles.

“I love getting a group together, pulling up a chair with zero stuffiness and turning people onto something new,” he says. “Hopefully, they feel a little more engaged, enthusiastic, interested, or knowledgeable about wine.”

Leven Supply is open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekends at 300 East Alameda Avenue; learn more at www.eatleven.com/supply.