The Wine Cellar is turning 20. Will it live to see 21?

The way things are going, owner Rohan Evans doesn't know.

The last time I spoke to Rohan Evans, things weren’t looking good. “The cost of living has gone up, people are getting sick at different times and taking it easy and not coming out,” he told me at the end of 2022. “The last couple of months have been like, ‘Uh, what on earth is happening?'”

Evans owns The Wine Cellar, a grungy, dimly-lit music venue in St Kevin’s Arcade. In 2004, he’d been teaching English in South Korea when he came home to set up the kind of quirky neighbourhood bar he’d frequented on his travels through Asia. He stumbled inside the former doss house, fell in love and persuaded the landlord to rent it to him.

At a time when most Auckland bars served Red Bull and Coke, he offered wine, craft beers and coffee, and made the most of the space’s shady past. “When we first opened, a lot of people came in and said, ‘Oh, it’s this place, my bed used to be over there.’” After six months, Evans pivoted to offer regular live music to about 100 punters at a time.

Entry Point: The Wine Cellar is a vital cog in Auckland’s live music scene.

Ever since, The Wine Cellar’s been a vital cog in Auckland’s music scene, a place for rising artists to find their feet, and for established acts to play to diehards in a small, intimate space. “A young Marlon Williams played here,” says Evans. “His high school teacher was on drums.” (There’s more on the venue’s history here.)

When we spoke back then, Evans was finding the post-Covid landscape tough to navigate. Despite having many fans, his venue had fallen behind on rent, gotten itself into debt and was struggling to entice people through the doors. A Give-a-Little page had been set up, and multiple TradeMe auctions were running to help save it.

To make matters worse, his landlord, Paul Reid, was trying to put his rent up. If that happened, “it would snuff us out,” Evans told me. “This year has been the first year where it’s … a bit like, ‘God, I have to think about my plan B?’ But planning ahead is difficult when you’re in this sort of financial hole.”

Rough and Ready: Inside The Wine Cellar. (Photo: Mason Fairey)

Eighteen months later, over a coffee in St Kevin’s Arcade, Evans seems a little more relaxed, a touch more positive. The Wine Cellar managed to find a way through. Unlike other small music venues around the country, its doors remain open. It survived. “Last year wasn’t great,” he says. “This year feels a little bit better.”

Better yet, Evan’s made it to a major milestone. This week, against all odds, The Wine Cellar turns 20. To celebrate, shows run every night of this week, featuring familiar faces from over the years, culminating in a weekend with a line-up so stacked it could almost be a miniature music festival.

On Friday, DC Maxwell, Pony Baby, Broken Heartbreakers, Blood Bags and Phoebe Rings perform on a bill that also takes over neighbouring venue Backroom; on Saturday, there’s room for Dick Move, Dad Jokes, Sulfate, Echo Ohs and Mokotron, among others.

Evans has spent 12 months planning for his big birthday and says it’s a chance to celebrate what The Wine Cellar has achieved over the past two decades. It’s a lot. On a recent tour of Auckland’s remaining music venues, Audioculture writer Gareth Shute described Evan’s venue, and the nearby Whammy Bar, as “the hearts of Auckland’s live scene”.

So, things seem to be looking up. Are they? Don’t call it a comeback just yet. “Money’s always a problem,” says Evans. “Collectively the whole live music scene, and venues, and hospitality in general, has had a bit of a shock. We’re at the point where things need to evolve and change.”

He confirms what others have already told me: that the country’s huge run of festival and stadium shows across summer sucked in everyone’s spare cash, meaning there’s not a lot left over for smaller local shows. “People are still coming to things. They’re not drinking as much … Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday drinks are less of a thing,” says Evans.

Making matters worse is another rent negotiation with Reid coming up, something Evans isn’t looking forward to. It could tilt things in the wrong direction. “We’re still coping with the increases from last year,” he says. He rolls his eyes. “We’ve just got to [suck it up].”

Will The Wine Cellar make it to its 21st? “We’ll find out in October,” says Evans. “That’s when our rent review is due.”

The Wine Cellar’s 20th birthday events run until Jun 1; tickets can be found here.

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Everything you need to know…

• Drum n bass shows are packing out venues around the country. Why? “There's George FM and a lot of really good promoters that have been pushing this sort of sound for more than 20 years … every year there's almost a completely new crowd,” Markus Wagner from Camo and Krooked tells RNZ.

• The Rolling Stones are back on the road, but, like, how? This fascinating New York Times ($$) review of the group’s recent Manhattan show finds they’re the same group they’ve always been: playing for two hours, swinging their hips, an “evolutionary marvel that is aging in the 21st century”.

• Ahead of a three-date winter tour that’s nearly sold out, Shapeshifter is revealing the secret to their 25-year success story. “Like any relationship, just try and listen. If you don't get your own way it's not gonna all fall down. And don't quit the band,” founder Sam Trevethick tells RNZ.

• Why do we clap? Great question! The BBC tries to find out in this story in which a journalist attempts to clap for 22 straight minutes and discovers that after just 10 “the sound becomes something alien and abstract. It's like my hands belong to someone else.”

• The Aotearoa Music Awards kick off tomorrow and RNZ has everything you need to know. No, you can’t go, sorry, but you can watch events unfold through a livestream beginning at 6pm. (Will one act win everything?)

• Finally, I am very much enjoying Rubricator, the second album from Sam Bambery, the Christchurch-based singer-songwriter who morphs from folk-country to alt-rock with ease. His vibes conjure up long treks across the Canterbury plains, so pack your headphones and let this one unfold across your next long walk…