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Celladora owner Megan Lee Hopkins
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The mural at Celladora was completed by local baker and artist Olivia Wilson.
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The kitchen at Celladora is under the direction of Ben Burakoff, formerly of Barrel Thief wine shop, Sub Rosa Bakery and Rappahannock Restaurant.
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Celladora is located at 111 N. Lombardy St.
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Celladora focuses on showcasing and sharing low-intervention wines.
During its soft launch this past weekend, Celladora Wines, a low-intervention wine shop at 111 N. Lombardy St., looked not like a business in its first few minutes of existence, but like a neighborhood fixture, with patrons perusing shelves full of wine and each of the shop’s four marble-topped tables occupied by wine and hospitality industry insiders who had been awaiting this opening with bated breath.
Gloucester native Megan Lee Hopkins, 38, is the force behind the shop, which will open on Wednesday, Jan. 19, and she, too, had been waiting. Following a June 2021 Richmond BizSense article that characterized Celladora in part as a “bar,” Hopkins’ plans were met with some specific and vocal resistance from a small number of nearby residents. What followed was a dizzying six months navigating the complexities of City Hall and gaining the approval of the neighborhood, going door to door with flyers outlining Celladora’s business plan with surprising transparency.
Eventually, Hopkins received the special use permit that would allow her to achieve her vision — bottle sales, sips on site and a mini kitchen providing small bites — and the race to open reached its final leg. Hopkins assembled her lean opening team, including Ben Burakoff, formerly of Barrel Thief wine shop, Sub Rosa Bakery and Rappahannock Restaurant, in the kitchen and industry vet Danny McDermott, formerly behind the bar at Acacia and Longoven, to assist with wine sales.
A veteran of the industry herself since the age of 13, when she started working in a sandwich and gourmet food shop, Hopkins understands the hours she’ll be logging at the shop, which is within walking distance of the home she shares with her husband and 4-year-old daughter, Imogen. The 700-square-foot shop will sell wine by the bottle, and a small kitchen outfitted with an induction burner and a toaster oven will provide wine-friendly snacks and pre-dinner bites such as smoked trout spread with Grandma Utz potato chips and a cheese and charcuterie board with rotating selections listed on a central chalkboard.
“It’s the fresh things you really remember,” says Hopkins, who drew inspiration for Celladora’s food menu from one of her favorite wine shops/cafes, Four Horsemen in Brooklyn, New York. After meeting Burakoff at Pizza Bones, Hopkins says, she was impressed by the chef’s command of flavors and knew he was the right person for the job. Burakoff and Hopkins put their heads together for the 12-item menu, which includes a beef tartare built around the flavors of tabbouleh, with warm spices, toasted pine nuts, pickled turnips and a tangy yogurt sauce. It’s the kind of dish that epitomizes the dining experience at Celladora — playful, both familiar and unexpected, and most importantly, built on trust.
Hopkins says the wine buying experience should be like that of building trust in a chef at a restaurant. “You build up trust, and then you’re like, 'Bring it on, I trust you, and I’m going to let you push my boundaries,' ” Hopkins explains. “It’s a relationship that has to be maintained, and you have to know when you’ve pushed a boundary too far.”
“I want this to be a place of discovery and discussion,” Hopkins adds. “I wanted to open a wine shop because I rarely want to drink a whole bottle. I want a taste of five bottles.” To further emphasize the spirit of adventure, you won’t find tasting note cards on the bottles at Celladora. Instead, you’re invited to ask questions and explore varietals and places of origin that you might not already know. “I don’t want to tell you to taste strawberries because maybe you taste pomegranate,” Hopkins says. “I don’t want you to stop thinking about it because I’ve already given you my answer. It needs to be an open adventure.
“I think people are very uncomfortable talking about wine because of that somm[elier] language,” Hopkins continues. “I want people to feel really comfortable. It doesn’t have to be this language. It can be any language that you’re comfortable with, that you can relate to.”
Maybe that approach comes from Hopkins’ own circuitous route to the world of wine. After leaving Gloucester to study photography at the Parsons School of Design in New York, she became disillusioned with the gallery scene and, thanks to a love of talking to people, found herself pulled toward the hospitality industry, including 12 years behind the bar at a Scotch-Irish pub where she worked her way from barback to manager, eventually creating a craft cocktail program to supplement the pints of Guinness that the pub was known for.
It was that experience, coupled with a growing appreciation for natural wines, that led Hopkins to Stranger Wines, where she worked for a short time before landing a role as manager and wine buyer for Diner and Marlow & Sons — a gig that was supposed to begin on March 23, 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic derailed those plans, and after a busy weekend of New York shoppers panic-buying wine before the city shuttered into a kind of ghost town, Hopkins and her husband, Tom, drove overnight with their daughter to Hopkins’ parents house in Gloucester.
Faced with the reality of bringing a 3-year-old back to New York to quarantine in a 400-square-foot apartment, the family made the decision to stay in Virginia, and they found both a house and the location for Celladora in the Fan. Hopkins has taken her knack for maximizing small spaces, born of her 18 years in Brooklyn, to her layout for Celladora, designing a central structure that works as a wine display on one side and as the wall of a makeshift kitchen on the other. The effect, accented by a vibrant mural courtesy of Olivia Wilson, is one of a cozy, meticulously curated shop that’s bright and welcoming. The light-flooded space is fronted by four picture windows along which marble-topped tables look out onto Lombardy.
The tables, which Hopkins designed with her father, are on casters, allowing her to rearrange the seating as necessary, versatility she’ll be thankful for on Feb. 3, when Celladora hosts its first ticketed event, a dinner for 15 people featuring pairings from Troddenvale Cider, as a tie-in to the national industry-wide event CiderCon that will descend on downtown Richmond that week.
Celladora joins a growing movement toward appreciating low-intervention (aka “natural,” though that fraught term is falling out of vogue, replaced by more specific adjectives) wines that’s gaining traction in Richmond, with peers including the online retailer RichWine, Church Hill’s Second Bottle and the recently opened Jardin just a few blocks away.
The name Celladora is a euphonious portmanteau of the phrase “cellar door,” described by Drew Barrymore’s character in the film "Donnie Darko" as the most beautiful phrase in the English language, and though the word is a product of invention, Dictionary.com relates it to serendipity, “an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident,” which is precisely what this particular wine shop is all about.
Celladora Wines will be open Monday to Thursday from 1 to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 1 to 10 p.m., and Sunday from 1 to 7 p.m.
