Returning to Wine Bars
Paul Cadmus, Bar Italia, 1953-1955
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Originally published June 22nd, 2021. Words by our Newsletter Editor, Khiara Ortiz.
Some weeks ago, I got a text from a friend who recently started working at a natural wine store in Manhattan. Her message read “i am fuuucked.” She’d spent many years working as a chef, had just begun her trajectory in natural wine, and was feeling a bit overwhelmed, to say the least. When she pleaded for a crash course syllabus on Wine for Dummies 101, I sent her a couple of book recommendations, though something didn’t feel quite right. Pretending that literature was the best way to grasp the subtle differences between two Beaujolais wines was like being naive enough to think one can inculcate a cheese connoisseurship by outlining the chemical makeup of rennet. There’s no denying that knowing the basics of winemaking is important, but it’d be impossible to know everything about a Sicilian Nerello Mascalese without the multi-sensory experience of tasting one. Before wine was ever written about, it was imbibed, which is why I texted my friend that what she should actually do is go to a wine bar, because we can finally do that again.
“Before wine was ever written about, it was imbibed . . . ”
The return to bars is an event at once comforting and thrilling. It’s a return to the things we’ve longed for since the beginning of quarantine—the titillation elicited by seeing other people, the opportunity to eavesdrop again, and, of course, the luxury of choice offered by a wine list. Though so many of us curated our own wine collections at home during the pandemic, unless you had a stash of Coravins or you quarantined with a group of wine drinkers, you were limited to tasting a single bottle at a time throughout the course of a few days (or in one sitting—no judgments here).
“Perhaps if we consider The Wine Bar a school from which we can glean a thing or two . . .”
The access to a wine-by-the-glass program is something I didn’t appreciate until I lost it for over a year, and with it, the option to order two wines at once simply to use them as foils for each other, each one making the other’s characteristics that much more pronounced. One of my favorite places for wine education in New York is Terroir, a bar in Tribeca. The plastic three-ring binder that is the wine list may conjure memories of classroom torment or pride, depending on what kind of student you were, but it won’t fail to evoke a little bit of curiosity in anyone who thumbs through its sheet-protected, college-ruled pages. The list is long, with 83 wines by the glass, and necessitates the intervention and guidance of a sommelier; at Terroir, all the bartenders are approachable sommeliers dressed casually in jeans and t-shirts. And if you share in their “disease” to “commit to a single path,” as humbly stated in a disclaimer about the breadth of the list, you can indulge in a weakness for quantity by ordering tastes (three-ounce pours) of different wines.
“. . . will we approach the stool with more productive intentions and more reverence for the people pouring our drinks?”
Shorter pours, however, don’t guarantee that we’ll pace ourselves. As we return to our favorite and beloved watering holes, can we avoid acting out the scene from which the idiom is derived? After a year of gaining the type of perspective on life that most people don’t acquire in decades, will we approach the stool with more productive intentions and more reverence for the people pouring our drinks? Perhaps if we consider The Wine Bar a school from which we can glean a thing or two about what we chugged for the past fifteen months, a place where we have the privilege to simultaneously drink wines from vineyards on different continents, we can enlighten ourselves and start molding a new dining culture—one that will demonstrate gratitude and respect towards those who are serving us and may even become a foil for the way we used to drink at bars before we knew how much we needed them.