Bubbles & Wines

Nes Street and the Amsterdam Wine Bar Circuit

Amsterdam's specialist wine bars have consolidated around a recognisable format over the past decade: tight lists with serious depth, rooms small enough to feel like a considered choice rather than a default stop, and a focus on a particular category or region rather than the catch-all approach that once defined the city's wine retail scene. Bubbles & Wines, at Nes 37 in the centre of Amsterdam, sits within that specialist tier. Its dual focus on sparkling wines and still bottles gives it a distinct position in a peer set that includes broader-programme bars scattered across the Jordaan and the canal ring. The Star Wine List award, earned in both 2021 and 2026, places it consistently among the Netherlands' credentialled wine bars across a five-year span — the kind of sustained recognition that separates a programme with genuine curatorial depth from one that performs well in a single cycle.

Nes itself is one of Amsterdam's older cultural corridors, a narrow street running south from the Dam that has historically housed theatres, small galleries, and the kind of ground-floor hospitality that benefits from foot traffic without depending on it. A wine bar on this street operates in a different context to one on the tourist-dense Leidseplein or the design-led Spiegelkwartier. The neighbourhood draws a mix of local regulars and visitors who have looked beyond the obvious addresses, which shapes the atmosphere in a way that a more aggressively marketed location rarely achieves.

What the Star Wine List Recognition Signals

The Star Wine List programme, which evaluates wine lists across venues globally, gives its awards based on list quality, range, and depth. Two awards separated by five years — 2021 and 2026 , indicate that the programme at Bubbles & Wines has held its standard across a period that saw significant disruption to Amsterdam's hospitality sector and broader shifts in how the city's drinking culture presents itself. For a specialist bar with a sparkling-wine emphasis, this matters: the category demands both sourcing relationships and storage discipline that a general wine list can sidestep. Holding that recognition across half a decade is a meaningful credential in the Dutch wine-bar context.

Within Amsterdam, the wine-bar field now operates across several tiers. There are natural-wine-focused rooms, cellar-style bars built around depth in Burgundy or Piedmont, and bars that treat sparkling wines as a serious category rather than an occasion supplement. Bubbles & Wines occupies the last position. The sparkling-wine category, when taken seriously at bar level, tends to attract lists that range from Champagne's established houses through to grower producers, alongside Crémant, Franciacorta, Cava, and English sparkling. Whether the list at Nes 37 covers this full range is not something available from current verified data, but the category itself sets the terms of what serious curation looks like in this format.

Planning Your Visit: What to Know Before You Go

Nes 37 is in Amsterdam's centre, walkable from both the Dam and Rokin metro station, which makes it accessible without requiring much pre-planning on transport. That accessibility also means the bar sits in a part of Amsterdam that moves differently at different hours: calmer in the afternoon, more active on weekend evenings when the theatre crowd from nearby venues fills the street. A visit earlier in the evening, or on a weekday, is generally more conducive to the kind of conversation a specialist wine list invites.

Current booking method, hours, and pricing are not available in the verified dataset for this page, so it is worth checking directly with the venue before visiting. What the Star Wine List recognition does confirm is that this is a programme worth planning around, not one to treat as a casual drop-in when other options are full. Amsterdam's better wine bars, like the city's better cocktail rooms , including Door 74 and Tales & Spirits , reward the visitor who arrives with some knowledge of what they want and a readiness to take guidance on the rest. Bringing both keeps the experience from becoming transactional.

If you are spending more than an evening in Amsterdam, the broader scene around Bubbles & Wines is worth mapping. Amsterdam Roest and Bakers & Roasters represent a different register of the city's hospitality, useful for building a visit that covers more than one mode. Our full Amsterdam restaurants guide maps these options across neighbourhoods and formats.

The Wider Dutch Wine Bar Context

The Netherlands has developed a more serious wine culture over the past fifteen years, driven partly by a younger generation of hospitality professionals who trained abroad and returned with cellar knowledge and sourcing contacts that weren't previously common in Dutch bars. Amsterdam leads that shift domestically, but cities like Utrecht, Rotterdam, The Hague, Delft, and Eindhoven each have addresses worth considering. Florin Utrecht in Utrecht and Espressobar Kopi Soesoe in Rotterdam represent the range of serious hospitality outside the capital. Further south, Café Barolo in Eindhoven takes the Italian-wine specialist approach that Bubbles & Wines addresses from a sparkling angle. Bowie in The Hague and Brasserie Lalou in Delft extend that national picture further, while Boode Foodbar in Bathmen shows how wine-serious hospitality has moved outside urban centres entirely. For a genuinely different benchmark, Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu illustrates how specialist drink programmes operate at an international level, useful context for calibrating what the Star Wine List credential means across different markets.

Within Amsterdam, Bubbles & Wines occupies the kind of position that a specialist bar earns through consistency rather than novelty. The category focus on sparkling wine and the sustained award presence across 2021 and 2026 make it a reference point for the city's wine-bar circuit rather than a peripheral option. For a visitor constructing an evening around serious wine, Nes 37 is an address to confirm rather than discover on the night.