3 Best Wine Bars in Montreal
The best wine bars in Montreal — Le Vin Papillon, La Buvette Chez Simone, and Bar Henrietta, reviewed by TastyPals editors.
The best wine bars in Montreal are Le Vin Papillon, La Buvette Chez Simone, Bar Henrietta. Start with Le Vin Papillon if you want the strongest overall first pick.
How we picked: We weight bottle/glass selection, staff guidance, food strength (snacks vs. a real menu), and whether the room rewards a 2-hour stay.
Top picks at a glance
Practical notes
What to plan for before you book — spend, reservation strategy, and who should skip this guide entirely.
- Expected spend
- $18–28 per glass at the top tier; bottles start around $80. Two glasses and a snack lands around $70–90 per person.
- Booking strategy
- Most of these are walk-in friendly before 6:30 and after 9:30. Weekend 7–9 windows fill — reserve a high-top or bar seat if available.
- What to order
- Ask staff for a 'one classic, one weird' pour. Wine bars reward the conversation; cellar depth doesn't show up in the by-glass list.
- Skip if
- you want a full dinner with multiple courses. The food here supports the drinking, not the other way around.
Who this guide is for
The best wine bars in Montreal treat the list as the main event without letting the food fall behind. These picks reward the diner who wants to explore a glass and stay a while.
Quick picks
On this page
How the restaurants compare
How we chose
We looked for restaurants that feel like a strong fit for the guide topic, not just the most obvious names in the city. The shortlist favors rooms with clear mood, dependable pacing, and enough distinction to help someone decide faster. Read our full methodology →
Lighting, pace, and general energy all need to support the reason someone clicked this guide.
We favored restaurants that feel best suited for the moment, not just restaurants with broad reputation.
The final list tries to give readers enough variation in neighborhood, price, and style to compare real options.
3 ranked picks
Le Vin Papillon is the wine bar sibling of Joe Beef, occupying a room in Little Burgundy that has built a reputation as one of Canada's most serious natural wine destinations — not through hype, but through a list that observers consistently describe as assembled by people who have been paying close attention to small producers across Europe and Quebec for long enough that the selections feel inevitable rather than calculated. The room is deliberately casual: communal tables, natural light, the kind of pacing that suggests the space knows exactly what it wants to be and has been doing it long enough to stop trying to prove it.
The food program is vegetable-forward by design, and that design appears to be a philosophical position rather than a trend. The menu centers on preparations built around what wine needs from food — acidity, restraint, a willingness to stay out of the way. The seasonal beet salad is regularly cited for its thinking around sweetness and acidity in balance. The fried artichokes are reportedly among the kitchen's most discussed preparations, known for the kind of result that proper frying technique produces. The rotisserie cauliflower and charred allium plate round out a short menu that diners consistently describe as punching above its modest price point — dishes that exist, by all accounts, to make what's in the glass taste better, which is a more demanding brief than it sounds.
The room books out on weekends; walk-ins are reportedly more viable on weeknights. Reservations in advance are the only reliable approach if you're planning around a specific evening. Le Vin Papillon is widely regarded as one of Montreal's most consequential wine stops — bring a list of questions for whoever is pouring.
There's a particular kind of Montreal room that doesn't perform for you, and Chez Simone has been that room since 2008. Zébulon Perron's early design — this was one of his first — still does the quiet work: a space that wraps around two people without crowding them, holding its shape from the 4 p.m. opening straight through to closing at 1 a.m. The pencil-and-order-slip ritual is genuinely charming, the kind of small task that gives a date something to do with its hands in the first awkward ten minutes. The kitchen runs until midnight, which makes this one of the better late-night perches in the city when you want wine and charcuterie instead of a verdict. About that wine — and the food — expect to pay. Gnocchi at $28 for six pieces is a number you feel. The gravlax and cod fritters earn their keep; the roasted chicken comes out juicy. In summer, the terrace is among the most coveted in town. Come for a second date, not a budget one. The room will carry the evening even when the bill doesn't flatter it.
Bar Henrietta is an easy yes when you want somewhere that feels considered rather than fussy. It also holds a 9.0 rating across 1,412 Google reviews.
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