Sip and savor locally produced wines
Downtown Easton’s Cellar 159 is a 37-seat tasting room serving Old World-style wines and ciders
Whether you’re looking to spoil mom on Mother’s Day, celebrate a recent college graduate or just catch up with friends over drinks, a new downtown Easton wine bar is open for all of life’s better-with-vino moments.
Cellar 159, offering Old World-style wines and ciders, opened April 1 at 159 Northampton St. The 37-seat tasting room is the first satellite location of Cellar Beast Winehouse ,a winery and cidery that opened in May 2021 in the Andreas section of West Penn Township, Schuylkill County.
The business is operated by four partners with decades of winemaking experience: Matthew Check, co-founder and head winemaker; Karin Kozlowski, co-founder, hospitality manager and cider maker; Brian Crew, winemaker; and Erika Assise, associate winemaker and Cellar 159 tasting room manager.
The group’s winemaking philosophy revolves around interfering as little as possible with the fruit and allowing nature to transform the juice into wine.
For the wine, they source West Coast grapes from Washington, Oregon and California. For the cider, they use local apples and other fruit from Scholl Orchards in Bethlehem, Hardball Cider in Upper Mount Bethel Township and Solebury Orchards in Solebury Township, Bucks County.
“We make French-inspired, Old World-style wine, which means minimal intervention,” Crew said. “No additives make it varietal-correct and more traditional.”
The Easton tasting room, featuring an industrial look with concrete flooring, ash banquette seating and a Caesarstone bar top, offers seven to 13 types of wine at any given time, including popular varieties such as cabernet sauvignon, merlot, pinot noir, pinot gris, cabernet franc rosé and jeune bête (60% Syrah and 40% Grenache).
There are also around a half dozen ciders, including lemon, lavender and “Gloves Off” (dry-hopped cider fermented with grilled pineapple using a tropical IPA yeast), and local draft beer and cocktails crafted with local spirits.
The wines are available by the glass, bottle or guided tasting, with the latter ($20) featuring one of the winemakers — who are all trained sommeliers — taking you through an educational wine experience that allows you taste a variety of Cellar Beast’s wines.
“We all trained at the Wine School of Philadelphia, and so we can help customers figure out what they’d like and also give reasons for why they may or may not like certain wines such as the acidity levels. At some wineries, their winemakers are hidden in the back, but we like to be out front and interacting with our guests.”
Cellar 159, which also offers snacks such as hummus and a charcuterie board, is named after the tasting room’s street address, while Cellar Beast is a nod to the partners’ journey of forming their own business.
“In the wine industry, everyone starts at the bottom, or in the cellar as we like to call it,” Crew said. “So, that’s where we started — doing grunt work, and it was important for us to reflect that. As far as the beast aspect goes, we’re a motley crew of human beings, but we came together with the same passion. It makes us a unique beast, or sea goat as we’ve nicknamed it thanks to our logo.”
Cellar 159, which also features outdoor seating, is open 4-9 p.m. Fridays, 1-9 p.m. Saturdays and 1-7 p.m. Sundays. Info: 484-5492159; cellarbeastwine.com.
More in Easton area
Also in Easton, Takkii Ramen, a modern casual restaurant specializing in Japanese comfort food, is planning to open two more Lehigh Valley locations — including one with robotic servers and hosts — in the coming months.
The new outposts will be at the Slatington Farmers Market, 8281 Route 873, Washington Township, Lehigh County, and is expected to debut in early summer; and 36 N. Third St. in downtown Easton, which is expected to open in late summer or early fall, chef and owner Marco Lu said.
Takkii Ramen, which opened its first location in November 2020 at 1042 Mill Creek Road in Lower Macungie Township, is a sister brand to Rakkii Ramen, which debuted in December
county and local-owned bridges — a huge and growing need.
But those numbers also give you the sense of why it’s just a start. For one, the $1.2 trillion IIJA was actually a continuation of formula funding we were already scheduled to get. Roughly $650 billion was to continue that funding nationwide. The remaining $550 billion is “new” funding that also includes new, future-thinking priorities, such as infrastructure for broadband, sewer and water systems and climate actions such as electric car charging.
Of that, we’re expected to get at least $80 million over the next four years. That’s helped bump our TIP to the $484.7 million. Again, thank you, thank you, thank you, Congress for your bipartisan action, and thanks to the
U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), because we really need it. But in reality, it doesn’t even fully restore what we lost in 2019, when USDOT requirements, stripped $380 million — or an average of $31 million a year — from our 12-year transportation plan to funnel more money into the deteriorated federal interstate network in other portions of Pennsylvania.
That brings us back to the question of how far $80 million will go. With our region growing by 4,000 people a year and our transportation-intensive industrial sector booming, while most of Pennsylvania shrinks, our needs are great. We have a great transportation network that includes more than 4,100 miles of roads, 300 miles of trails and 913 local, state and county bridges that are expensive to maintain, even before we invest to enhance the network to accommodate managed growth.
For example, the total cost of that Hill to Hill Bridge rehab is $83 million over the next two TIPs. One big project and the IIJA money would be gone.
I mention all of this not to criticize the IIJA, but rather to drive home that it is a part of the solution for today but alone is not the answer. The answer is a sustained realization that maintaining our infrastructure is key to maintaining our economy. The answer is pressuring our civic leaders at all levels of government to continue to make it a priority.
See you at the TIP meetings.