Dr Vino's wine blog

New York City has the most top wine lists in the world according to a new ranking from the World of Fine Wine. London is second, San Francisco third, and Chicago fourth according to the British publication, which rolled out the annual awards for best wine lists for the first time this year.

Instead of taking the measure of a wine list’s length, the panel of experts looked at quality. Here’s how Neil Beckett, the magazine’s editor put it in a press release, “As we were judging, we had in mind the wise words of our fellow judge Francis Percival about the difference between ‘a great wine list and a mere list with great wines on it’.” More about the wine list judging methods can be found on the WFW site. It is not immediately clear if the restaurants had to pay a fee in the nomination process. And it’s not clear if value/markups played a role in the deliberations.

In all, 224 restaurants achieved the top grade, a three-star rating. The list of New York’s 36 restaurants follows after the jump. Read more…

A few weeks ago, Wylie Dufresne announced that he had been forced to close his pioneering restaurant WD-50 on the Lower East Side as of 11/30. The reason is that the building will be razed and a new apartment building will go on the site; and said he hoped to reopen elsewhere soon. Then Rouge Tomate announced they will be leaving their spacious locale next to Barney’s as of August 9, citing rent. They will be relocating to an unspecified location “downtown” later this year.

Now, the monstrous Rentmageddon sweeping the NYC restaurants has claimed another scalp: Union Square Cafe. The iconic restaurant that opened 30 years ago on East 16th street and contributed to revitalizing the Union Square has fallen victim to rising rents and will close at the end of next year. USQ also hopes to move to a new location, though one has not been announced. Julia Moskin has a good, if sad, story on the trend in the NYT that is today’s must-read. She says that USQ paid $8/sf or $48,000/yr back when it opened; now the rent may be as high as $650,000 as international retailers, banks, and pharmacies have driven up rents. She also mentions that Marco Canora and partners at Hearth restaurant have been hit with a 65% increase in rent–this year.

Moskin asks Danny Meyer, whose other restaurants include Gramercy Tavern and The Modern as well as Shake Shack, why he doesn’t just pay for a renovation and the increased rent out of his own pocket? Because it doesn’t make financial sense, he says, making the analogy that it would be like doing a million-dollar renovation on a studio apartment.

In twisting the knife for fine dining, the landlord is quoted as saying that he thinks a Shake Shack would do well in the space.

When I was in Chicago a few months ago, I met up with Alpana Singh at her new restaurant, The Boarding House. Alpna has reinvented herself, stepping down as host of “Check, please!” and from a corporate job at Lettuce Entertain You to open her own restaurant. Stretched vertically over three public floors, the main floor bar area at The Boarding House serves wine and pizzas made to pair with wines under the arttistic installation of 9,000+ wineglasses (only takes about 36 person hours to clean!). Although I didn’t eat there, I checked the availability of a table for two in the vaulted dining room: they were booking 10 weeks out. I think that officially makes it a hot spot.

She told me about how she got into wine, what she’s doing to resolve the dearth of sommelier jobs, wither Chicago wine is restaurant-driven or shop-driven, and which wines make people say “wow.” Oh, and which is the greatest country in the world to be in as a wine consumer. Check out my interview with her over on wine-searcher.com.

My wife and I recently had a couple of friends over who, somewhat to our surprise, were not drinking any alcohol that evening. This can happen since a whole family might be taking antibiotics, or maybe you didn’t know the people as well as you thought. Whatever the reason, the issue of guests who abstain, especially if it is unexpected, does raise a question of etiquette for wine enthusiasts: should you also abstain?

In our case, we asked if they would mind and then went ahead and indulged in some Ar. Pe Pe, a 2009 Nebbiolo from the vertiginous slopes of Valtellina (find this wine). I poured the wine in the kitchen, brought the glasses to where we were sitting and, although it was drinking well, spared them my wine snob’s impression of yammering on about the wine.

Since we may all be entertaining more at this time of year, what are your strategies if you have found yourself in this situation? Would you be more likely to join friends in abstaining in a restaurant because of complications in splitting the bill?

After visiting a Philly BYOB, Robert Parker once let an apparent deep-seated contempt for sommeliers flow free, dubbing them defenders of “vinofreakism.”

Perhaps trying to atone for his equivalent to a Howard Dean howl, Parker posted to his web site that he enjoyed his recent meal to A16, a pizza specialist in San Francisco with a long list of wines from Campania and the Mezzogiorno more generally. Even though he admits that after seeing the wine list he wished for a lifeline phone call to his Italian critic Galloni, Parker says the sommelier, Emily, was “very knowledgeable about the wines.”

So which wines did he then have? A Champagne and two 2007 Chateauneufs (one in magnum) that aren’t on the wine list. Oh, and perhaps the best-known wine from Campania, a Montevetrano, which he said was extremely closed. Chew on that…

Shelley Lindgren, wine director and one of the owners, wrote in her book A16: Food + Wine that a wine list based on Southern Italian wines was a tough sell when she opened the restaurant. But soon enough, she writes, “we had a dining room full of curious customers interested in expanding their wine horizons.”

Related: Pizza: a forbidden food-wine pairing?!?
“Help Steve Cuozzo navigate a wine list“

The latest tumblr to break out is Rich Kids of Instagram. If you’re on the fence about whether to repeal the estate tax at the highest levels, just surf on over to the site. Wine features quite prominently in the douchebaggery, such as the photo of a girl clad in a polo shirt, pouring Dom Perignon off a dock into the open mouth of a boy in the water while someone does a naked swan dive in the background.

And there’s this bill for 16 people who consumed 90,000 euros worth of wine at dinner in St. Tropez. (Dom Perignon again! If you’re spending an unconscionable amount on wine, there has to be some DRC in the mix, right?!?). This is a glaring example of how wine can boost a check at a restaurant in a way that beer or cocktails (or food though the caviar is certainly doing its best) never could. Do they tip on that? Well, in Europe, service is included in the bill. And, in this case, so is about $20,000 of VAT.

Steve Cuozzo, restaurant critic for the NY Post, has a rant about wine lists today (“Sour Grapes“). He complains about “esoteric or pretentious” wine lists, filled with Greek wines and grapes he’s never heard of and producers he doesn’t know. Such lists leave him stumped and “at the mercy of a sommelier determined to teach you a thing or two, when all you want is a nice, affordable Bordeaux to go with chicken and summer greens.”

He sure plays a good curmudgeon! But he does have a point: wine can be overwhelming and it’s common to feel swamped when trying to navigate a wine list. Some diners may feel overwhelmed with any list while others, like Cuozzo, may have taken the training wheels off and feel comfortable with certain regions (though pairing Bordeaux with chicken and mixed greens does make the reader wonder about his palate–really, try the assyrtiko.).

All the places that Cuozzo describes in his column sound like they have serious wine programs with someone on staff who has created a wine list with some wines he or she is really excited about. Rather than feeling at the “mercy” of said person, Cuozzo would be best advised to engage that person in discussion about what’s good and what they would recommend with chicken and mixed greens, hear a bit of the story of those who made the wine or how it was made. Who knows, if he did that a few times, he might even learn a thing or two about them there “esoteric” varieties, and feel more comfortable ordering wine off of such lists himself. Then the grapes would not be sour to him, and he could offer advice to his readers about how sweet it is to be armed with a bit more wine knowledge.

What do you do when you encounter a wine list dominated by wines you don’t know much about?

Daniel Boulud’s various restaurants have attracted wine geeks not just for the thoughtful food preparations to pair with the fruits of the vine but also for the gems in the cellar. Michael Madrigale at Boulud Sud and Bar Boulud has been offering glass pours from rare big bottles for a while.

Now Caleb Ganzer, the new sommelier at DB Bistro Modern in midtown, and Daniel Johnnes, Corporate Wine Director for the Boulud restaurants, have started public bidding for wines on Twitter that prospective diners can enjoy in the restaurant. Each Monday at noon, he lists a wine’s starting bid, tags it with #DBwinebid, and, via Twitter, the can bid it up during the following 24 hours or so (highest bid at 5 PM each Tuesday wins). Recent offerings included a 2011 Turley white zinfandel starting at $10, a 1988 Gruaud Larose that was won for $80, and Coche-Dury Meursault 2008 for $160. The current offering is a G. Roumier, Chambolle-Musigny, 2009 with a bid of $100, cheaper than many retailers list the wine. Don’t forget that in a timed online auction, sniping can often lead to success.