A 13-year-old Denver butcher shop just expanded next door into the wine business, opening a walk-in-only bar that pours roughly 50 bottles and sources its food straight from the meat counter on the other side of the wall. Western Daughters Wine Bar now occupies Suite 102 at 3326 Tejon St. in the Highland neighborhood, right beside Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe, the shop that founders Josh Curtiss and Kate Kavanaugh opened in 2013.
The pairing is intentional rather than incidental, according to Westword, which got a first look at the new bar. Curtiss told the publication that the wine bar is an extension of the butcher shop's identity, and he said wine producers can be just as intentional about growing and processing wine as the butcher shop is about its animals and suppliers. The butcher shop itself provides meat from small local regenerative farms to the Highland neighborhood, and that same meat now flows directly into the wine bar's kitchen next door.
The space has some history of its own. Before Western Daughters expanded into it, the storefront was home to Mr. Lucky's Sandwich Shop, a fast-casual spot known for French dips and reubens that Hoodline covered as a Highland newcomer back in 2019. Per Westword's reporting, Mr. Lucky's went out of business before Western Daughters Wine Bar moved in, and it was Noah Heaney — who has Denver bar-scene experience and now curates the wine bar's list — who recommended opening a wine bar in the vacated space.
A Cellar Stocked From Austria to Uruguay
The wine list itself leans into the same philosophy driving the meat counter: small producers, minimal intervention, and a wide geographic net. The bar focuses on natural, organic and biodynamic wines drawn from Italy, France, Spain, California, Uruguay, Georgia, Slovenia and Hungary, with every bottle on the list also poured by the glass. Prices run from $9 to $25, keeping most selections accessible for a casual weeknight glass.
Specific pours highlighted in the seed reporting include a $16 Weniger Blaufränkisch from Austria, a $10 Barone di Villagrande Etna Rosso from Sicily, and a $16 Stein Himmelreich Riesling. Heaney described a lightly chilled red as summer in a glass and a real patio pounder, according to the same Westword account. Also on the list is the Castel Pujol Folklore Naranja, a $16 orange wine from Uruguay blending trebbiano and petit manseng, alongside a Scar of the Sea Pinot Noir from California's Central Coast, also priced at $16.
Steaks, Chops and a Beef-Tallow Burger
Food at the wine bar is built around the same regenerative, grass-fed sourcing that has defined the butcher shop since 2013, when Curtiss and Kavanaugh set out to build a bridge between rural and urban communities. The menu's centerpiece is a 50-day dry-aged ribeye priced at $125, alongside a Cottonwood Creek Farm double pork chop served with chicharron gremolata for $48. A build-your-own option called the Daily Carne offers a choice of steak with chimichurri, horseradish sauce and smoked cowboy butter.
More casual options include the WD Burger, a third-pound beef patty with bacon, beef-tallow aioli and tobacco onion for $20, plus optional beef-tallow shoestring fries at $10. The kitchen also serves a mixed charcuterie plate with cured meats, cheese, house pickles, jam, crackers and nuts for $25 or $50, a seasonal peach-and-tomato salad for $15, and a miso-braised cabbage vegan side, also $15.
No Reservations, and a Bigger Culinary Track Record
Unlike many of the neighborhood's wine bars, Western Daughters doesn't take reservations, positioning itself as a spot for local walk-in customers rather than a destination requiring planning. That model puts it in company with — and stylistically apart from — an established cluster of Highland-area wine bars, a landscape Hoodline previously surveyed in its rundown of Denver's top wine bars that included nearby Postino.
The wine bar is the latest chapter in a business that has repeatedly reshaped its footprint since 2013. Western Daughters briefly ran a second butcher counter at The Source market hall in RiNo starting in 2014 before consolidating back to Tejon Street in 2018, according to background reporting cited in Westword's coverage. More recently, Western Daughters Kitchen operated inside the Hydro building at the CSU Spur campus at the National Western Complex starting in 2023, a location that closed last September. Founders Curtiss and Kavanaugh have said the broader goal behind all of it is to help future generations enjoy flavorful, nutritious food and healthy land, and Western Daughters has framed its work as supporting producers who care about their products, production methods and the land — a mission now poured, quite literally, into a glass next door to the butcher counter.
