VinBar Poured Only Michigan Wine at 111 West Liberty. Nothing Has Replaced It.

VinBar closed at 111 West Liberty Street after about five years. Current Magazine reported the closing in March 2019, describing the room as a west side fixture for five years and a stop for wine drinkers. The notice carried no reason and no statement from the owners, and no later reporting has supplied either.

The three-license room

Three wineries from the Leelanau Peninsula built the place together. The Ann Arbor Observer's December 2014 piece on it named them as Good Harbor, L. Mawby, and Black Star Farms, and explained the structure that made VinBar unusual: legally it was not a bar at all. It was three tasting rooms sharing a floor, because each winery had to hold its own tasting-room license. Kate Nordby managed it.

That structure set the menu, and the menu is the reason the room mattered. VinBar could pour only what its three owners made, and it could not cook. Cheese and crackers were the food. What it lost in range it gained in focus: one downtown Ann Arbor room where the entire pour list came from a single Michigan peninsula.

The Observer's account also shows what the license structure meant at the bar: half glasses alongside full ones, happy hour pricing, and cocktails that existed only because Black Star Farms happened to make eau-de-vie and hard cider. A half glass is a small thing that matters a lot in a room where the point is tasting across producers instead of settling in with one bottle. A September 2014 write-up on the Ann Arbor blog Meg Goes Nom Nom lists the range on offer: sparkling wine from MAWBY, plus whites, reds, and dessert wines from Good Harbor and Black Star Farms, sold by the half glass, the full glass, and the bottle to carry out.

The lineup widened later. DBusiness reported in October 2017 that VinBar seated up to 40, sold Black Star wine by the glass, flight, and bottle, ran craft cocktails on Grand Traverse Distillery spirits, and was going through licensing to add two more northern Michigan wineries. Sherri Campbell Fenton of Black Star Farms told the magazine the goal was to "give people in the Ann Arbor market more of a taste of what we and other wineries offer."

What the city lost

Ann Arbor is not short of wine. Spencer has the natural and low-intervention depth. Vinology runs the broadest by-the-glass list. York on Packard is the sole local outlet for Kermit Lynch imports. All three are covered in our wine bar guide, and none of them is a Michigan room.

That gap is the specific loss. No downtown address makes a Leelanau flight the default order rather than a curiosity buried among French and Italian bottles. Michigan wine is easy enough to buy in this city and hard to sit down with.

Rebuilding VinBar would take what built it in the first place: wineries willing to share a floor and stack three licenses on it. The format was strange, and the strangeness was the value.

One correction to our own record. Two earlier Plate & Press articles date VinBar's closing to late 2025. The contemporaneous report is from March 2019, and it is the only date consistent with a five-year run at a room documented in operation in December 2014.

VinBar operated at 111 W Liberty St, Ann Arbor. Current Magazine reported the closing in March 2019.