What is Wine Girl?
Most of Old Town’s wine bars assume you already know what you like. Wine Girl assumes you don’t, and that you’d like to have fun finding out. Owners Amy and Trevor Johnston opened it on Scottsdale Road in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, with a plain goal: a wine bar for their own generation of drinkers, open and unintimidating, where nobody has to pretend to know about tannins.
The room does a lot of the talking. It’s pastel pink, light and bright, with girl-centric decor, comfortable seating and corners clearly designed for photographs. A floor-to-ceiling merch wall of apparel, home decor and gifts takes up as much attention as the bar. The drinks list is built around rotating wines on tap, backed by a reserve list by the bottle and glass, local beers, spritzers and a food menu that changes.
Then there are the parties. Wine Girl hosts thousands of bachelorette parties a year, sells bridal and birthday packages, and runs a calendar of paint-and-sip nights, live podcast tapings, TV watch parties and yoga with mimosas. On a spring Saturday it’s one of the busiest stops on the bachelorette circuit; on a Tuesday afternoon it’s a quiet place to taste a few pours.
The format traveled. Wine Girl has since opened in Napa Valley and San Diego, but Scottsdale Road is where it started.
How to do Wine Girl
Decide which Wine Girl you want. Weekday afternoons and early evenings are the wine bar: room at the bar, staff with time to talk, tastes from the taps. Weekend afternoons from January through April are the party: groups in matching outfits, packages, photos. Both are fine; just don’t show up expecting one and get the other.
Use the taps. Because the wines on tap rotate, the list is never quite the same twice. Ask what just went on, try a couple, then order a glass. The reserve list by the bottle is the move for a celebration.
Book the package if you’re planning. Reservations and the bridal and birthday add-on packages are sold through Tock. For any spring weekend, and especially the weeks of the Phoenix Open and spring training, book well ahead.
Build a block crawl. Wine Girl sits on the east side of Scottsdale Road a short walk from almost everything a group needs: custom hats at Rancher Hat Bar a few doors north, breakfast and mimosas at Morning Squeeze, burgers at Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers and tacos at Loco Patron across the road, and dinner at Franco’s Italian Caffe or Bourbon & Bones. Late night, Velvet Taco is just across the road and open until 3 a.m. on weekends.
Parking. Skip Scottsdale Road. The free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and the Fifth Avenue public lots are a short walk, and groups are better off with a rideshare drop. See Old Town on foot.
Wine for a new crowd
Scottsdale has a long wine-bar history, much of it serious. Kazimierz World Wine Bar hid a deep cellar behind an unmarked door on Stetson Drive for years, and the tasting rooms covered in our wine tasting guide lean toward Arizona wine and people who already care about it. Wine Girl came at the subject from the other side. The Johnstons’ pitch, as they told local TV in 2024, was to appeal to their generation of wine drinkers and build “one of the most open and accessible wine bars around.”
The timing was strange and, as it turned out, right. Opening a bar in 2020 meant opening into closures and capacity limits, but it also meant being in place for the bachelorette trade when groups returned to Old Town. That trade had grown through the 2010s, when Scottsdale Road between Indian School and Camelback filled with group-friendly rooms like The Montauk, Bourbon & Bones and Farm & Craft. A pink, photogenic wine bar with packages and a merch wall fit that crowd exactly.
What the Johnstons built on top of it is a brand. The merch wall and the events calendar make Wine Girl as much a place to do something as a place to drink, and the format proved portable: a Napa Valley location was set to open in fall 2022, and a San Diego location followed. In the 2020s, this stretch of Scottsdale Road has become a run of experiences (hat bars, brunch parties, late-night tacos), and Wine Girl is one of the clearest examples.
Wine purists won’t find a sommelier’s cellar here, and that’s the point. Wine Girl is aimed at the people who would never have walked into one, and on a busy Saturday on Scottsdale Road there are a lot of them.