Although regular wine markup in restaurants is 300 percent of the wholesale cost, many wine lists have hidden deals. There are any number of reasons why they exist: Perhaps the sommelier has a soft spot for an unheralded grape and slips it on the list with a low markup or maybe there is a closeout item and the restaurant passes on the savings.

Today’s such gem comes from Bar Boulud. To accompany the restaurant’s extensive charcuterie menu, wine director Michael Madrigale runs an innovative program that focuses largely on wines from the Rhone and Burgundy. One of the exciting things he does is feature a different large format bottle, often a rare mature wine, open it and pour it by the glass. (Follow on Twitter to see which wines are being poured.)

But one deal that he doesn’t telegraph is what he calls “the nugget.” On the wine list at any given moment is a wine that Madrigale puts on for the wholesale cost (that is to say, even below retail). He doesn’t highlight the item and it’s often an obscure, wine geek’s wine and his stock can be quickly depleted. Diners have to spot the wine on the list as being an outrageous value, and then order it and accept it. At that point Madrigale lets them know the value they have uncorked. “Usually, they are quite happy about their choice,” he says. Previous such wines have included Chapoutier’s ‘04 Cornas “Les Arenes” for $55 and the Chateau Grillet 2004.

So order wine like an insider when next at Bar Boulud. The current nugget is…Eric Texier, 2000 Hermitage rouge for $69.

Bar Boulud
1900 Broadway (between 63rd & 64th) New York, NY 10023
(212) 595-0303

Well, if you’ve ever thought that then you will like Governor Paterson’s latest proposal to allow wine sales in food stores. He tried it last year but the measure was poorly thought out since it just focused on the grocery stores selling wine and not what would happen to current wine and spirits stores. Ultimately, it met resistance, and was dropped.

But it has been re-animated this budgetary year and this time the governor is trying to mollify the opposition by allowing wine stores to also sell “non-alcoholic beverages, food products, newspapers, cigars, gift packaging, glassware and storage items for wine and spirits.” (Note: no beer.) Licensees could also have more than one store, buy with other shops in a consortium, sell wine to restaurants and bars, have 60 days to pay for suppliers wine instead of 30 and, yes, have ATMs!

Such concessions constitute an admission that the proposed reform will hurt the business of existing wine stores. Indeed, the group opposing the reform, The Last Store on Main Street, claims it will cause the closing of almost 40 percent of New York State’s 2,400 wine stores. The group also claims that liberalizing wine retail laws would lead to an increase in underage drinking. It’s too bad they played the underage card since it always seems to be stooping to fear-mongering. Is there more underage drinking in the 35 states that do allow wine purchases at grocery stores? I doubt it.

While the New York laws are in many ways absurd, the best pro-consumer argument in support of them is that the there are so many great wine shops (particularly in and around the City). The protectionist laws have contributed to the building of an incredible wine culture. Retailer Jeff Zacharia commented that he thinks the number of fine wines available in the NY market would shrink if the proposal passes. Unfortunately, he did not elaborate on this point.

Will that culture remain without the laws? Probably, almost entirely; there are great wine cultures in San Francisco and Chicago to name a couple of cities where supermarkets sell wine. But it will be less profitable for good wine merchants as some wine consumers opt for the convenience of throwing a wine in their grocery cart, hence the governor’s concession to allow sell food and knickknacks. (For the boring shops trading on location–last year we called these the wine & liqu–they will have to rely on spirits sales and ATMs. Or step up their service or selection.)

New York budget politics are uncertain but this proposal seems better designed for passage than last year. But if it is going to happen, why not sweep away the remaining restrictions and allow wine stores to sell beer, as grocery stores will be able to sell both, and allow them to open at 9 AM on Sunday. Stay tuned for the log-rolling between now and April 1.

SPIT: bling champagne
The economic downturn has started a bull market in columns about the bear market in Champagne! Alice Feiring got a jump on the competition with her WSJ. magazine piece from September (“Bubbles takes a bath”), a WSJ Europe reporter followed up with another piece this month (“All That Fizzes Is Gold“), and the wine columnists at the NYT and the more spendy Slate.com join the fray with recommendations, with nonvintage bargains under $40 and overall bargains under $100 respectively.

SIPPED: solitude
Ray Isle of F&W escapes the holiday madness of midtown at the Garden Wine Bar at the Four Seasons hotel. There he finds solitude and some more-intriguing-than-usual hotel bar selections. [Tasting Room]

SPIT: business as usual
Eric Asimov serves up a meaty post on the shuffling of the Bordeaux wine trade. [The Pour]

SIPPED: Bordeaux
Driven by sales of red Bordeaux, which country saw a fifteen-fold increase in imports from France during 2002 – 2008? Okay, it’s China. But you’ll need to click through for the importer stock pick in the story! [WSJ]

SIPPED: looking back
Good Grape and La Otra Botella review memorable moments in wine blogging from the past year.

Manhattan is the smallest of the five boroughs of New York City at 14,478 acres (22.6 sq. mi.; all sources appear after the jump.)
* Romanee-Conti (DRC) vineyard: 4.4 acres, about half of Bryant Park
* Burgundy: 70,470 acres or about five Manhattans
* Champagne: 86,500 acres or about six Manhattans
* Bordeaux: 300,000 acres or about 21 Manhattans
* Barossa (Australia): 13,256 acres planted or about Manhattan minus Inwood
* Napa (California): 44,000 acres planted, or about three Manhattans
* Mendoza (Argentina): 360,972 acres or about 25 Manhattans
* Maipo (Chile): 30,000 acres or about two Manhattans (or, the Bronx)
* Languedoc-Rousillon (France): 528,000 acres or about 37 Manhattans

All vineyard sources are from the Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition with the exception of Barossa which was here. The Burgundy figure includes Chablis, the Maconnais, and the Cote Chalonnaise; sadly, no quick acreage was available on the Cote D’Or (or Barolo) so feel free to add it in the comments. The Manhattan acres came from: Manhattan: Long, Luman H.(ed). The World Almanac and Book of Facts: 1967. New York, NY: Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc., 1966: 305.

* The just-fired coach of the New Jersey Nets will make a guest appearance to give a brief talk on winning.

* Being able to know which end of the bottle to open the only prior wine knowledge needed!

* Tareq and Michaele Salahi will crash the event.

* Find some excellent wines to give as gifts to your friends and co-workers.

* Get a gilt-edged, collectors’ edition of Dr. Vino’s holiday wine survival guide!

* Discover undervalued gems to pour at your holiday party!

* Meet fellow wine enthusiasts!

* Vigneron Brad Pitt will stop by and discuss what he has learned about wine grape growing in Provence. And goatee growing.

* Find out which wine is the perfect match for roaring fires and chestnuts!

* Learn essential wine miscellany that you can use to impress people over eggnog at holiday parties!

All right, some of these may be true and some may be totally made up. Stop by and find out the truth for yourself!

Buy tickets in advance here
Thursday, Dec 10, 6:30 – 8:00 PM, on E. 29th Street

I’ll be pouring seven great wines-–red, white and bubbly (including one tasty kosher wine!). We’ll talk party strategies, how to impress the boss with a gift wine, and good food pairings. NO prior wine education is necessary, just a willingness to try something new!

The session will be held at the White Wood House, a historic property on E. 29th St in New York City where the first floor is a space dedicated to wine education. Copies of my books will be available for purchase and I’d be happy to sign them–also good gifts!

So I hope to see you there on Thursday 12/10!
6:30 – 8:00 PM. Registration and details
(image)

I stopped by SD26 on a recent weeknight and things were hopping. The restaurant, opened on Madison Square in September to the tune of $7 million, boasts a wine bar in the front. Tony May, who previously owned the traditional San Domenico, told the New York Times that with SD26 “We aim for the cutting edge.”

Thus behold the 24 bottles in Enomatic, self-service dispensers. And no matter where you are in the large space, the wine list only comes in one form and–paper-be-damned–it’s digital.

It awaits on the bar, propped up by a little kick stand in the back, beckoning you with “SD26″ on the screen. The hostess said that if there were a paper edition it would be “too big” given the amount of wines available. I couldn’t resist and picked up the 9×5 tablet and started tapping the touch screen. First fields: red, white or bubbly? Then drill down: glass, half bottle or bottle? Then drill down again: a list of producers, regions and vintages.

Drill, baby, drill! But this tablet system is a dry hole. When you eventually arrive on a page you want, there is the option to sort by price or alphabetically. Despite having interactive capability, the digitized wine list remains merely a list. There are no descriptions of the wines. No ability to sort by style. Few images. No suggestions for pairings with items on the menu. No interactions such as the ability to rate the wine that you had after you tried it and then coming up with a short list of popular picks or sorting by user-generated rankings. No internet access. So you’re pretty much left where you were with a paper list: talking with the sommelier for a suggestion.

Although the inventory could be instantly updated, the wines probably don’t change too often: the server I spoke with in the front said that the 24 wines in the Enomatic machines have been there since the opening and will likely be there through the new year.

So, really, the substance of the wine list doesn’t appear to benefit form the style of the tablet. It seems to have been done just for the tech of it.

The enthusiastic, 26 year old proprietor of Le Vigne in Greenwich Village opened the door to his tiny wine store in late July. But that was the culmination of the lengthy license application process, which lasted almost a year. Before applying for the license, he had to have a lease on a space, which he signed last August. Despite having a backlog of 3,000 applications, Carlo said that the State Liquor Authority told him that the application process would take about six weeks and if there were no existing liquor store within 500 feet, the process would be smooth. Instead, the process dragged on and the space sat vacant, eating his rent. Since he had quit his job, he tried to find another but had difficulty: he couldn’t even get a job as a server at some BYOB restaurants in New Jersey where he had worked growing up. He relied on loans from friends and family.

In April, the SLA gave him a license so he had to set about designing the space. The 400 sq ft store housed a travel agency (remember those?) for much of the past three decades. Confronted with shag carpet and drab walls, Carlo knew that he had a design emergency. The only thing was that especially after the license application process, he didn’t have much of a budget: when he first contacted the design firm MADLAB, he said they all but hung up on him.

A couple of weeks later, however, they did get back to him with a proposal of furniture sourced entirely from the Salvation Army in Newark, NJ. Their plan included painting the furniture white, stacking the pieces in a jumble, and then stripping the walls and floors back to the brick and boards.

The shop stocks exclusively Italian wines and Carlo has laid out the shop by region on the furniture with the northern end of the peninsula near the door and Sicily at the rear. The 200 wines are from small producers and importers. He says the wines range in price from $12 to $184 for a mature Barolo.

Carlo worked in several restaurants growing up, but mostly BYOBs. He ate at Babbo when he was 21 and had such a great experience that he wrote David Lynch, then the wine director, a letter asking if he could work there hauling boxes. Much to Carlo’s surprise, he says that Lynch called him back. But seeing his admittedly featherweight wine resume, Lynch sent him to cut his teeth at Lupa first. He bounced around a few places including Italian Wine Merchants, Babbo and Inoteca North and briefly at sales for a wine importer.

At Le Vigne, he said that people in the neighborhood have a pretty good knowledge of wine; it’s not uncommon to have someone come in and request a vernaccia nera or something else from off the beaten path. (He attributes this knowledge to the high density of Italian restaurants in the neighborhood.) And people often want to experiment and pair wine with with non-traditional foods, such as watermelon soup, so he has to think creatively. He’ll give you a 10% discount for a case purchase and even store it in the back for you to drop in and collect a few bottles as necessary.

Although he still has debts, things are looking up now that the store is actually in business. “Every week gets better,” he says.

35 Greenwich Ave
(bet. 10th and Charles Streets)
(212) 255-0222
See it on the map of NYC wine shops

SIPPED: more nudity and wine
In Burgundy, 713 people take off their clothes to be photographed among the vines–all in the name of demonstrating against global warming. Randall Grahm had the bon mot on twitter: “Cotes de nue-its?” [greenpeace.fr]

SIPPED: Hong Kong
Hong Kong surpasses London and NYC as the largest wine auction market according to a story on Reuters. The Asian market for wine is “in danger of overheating” while the US is “weak” according to David Elswood, Christie’s international head of wine.

RIP: Gourmet magazine
After a review by McKinsey consultants, Conde Nast has decided to close Gourmet, the venerable food magazine. But if BusinessWeek, which lost $43 million last year, has attracted many bidders, why isn’t Conde putting Gourmet up for sale? Or making Anna Wintour stay at an EconoLodge?

SIPPED: changes in NYC dining
The new Michelin guide NYC comes out tomorrow; Daniel has been promoted to three stars, Alto rises to two stars and Corton debuts with two. Why Eleven Madison Park only gets one star is anyone’s guess. [Bloomberg]

Also in NYC dining, Chanterelle will now be closed permanently. Their long-time sommelier, Roger Dagorn, will now join Porter House according to Off the Presses.

And in NYS, the State Liquor Authority has a backlog of 3,000 applications; a report suggests a bureaucratic overhaul that may include making BOYB easier for new restaurants. [NYP]

With restaurant markups commonly 300 or 400 percent you could be forgiven for answering, “never.” But right now, there’s a restaurant in NYC where the head sommelier is clearing out his inventory. Unfortunately, he’s already blown through most of the wines that cost him less than $300. But for all (both?) the high rollers out there, the wines that he bought for north of $300 and he has multiple bottles of, he’s happy to part with them for as little as $100 above his cost. As silly as it sounds, that means that a wine that costs $750 a bottle in a store might only cost $600 at the restaurant!

Consider another example. The sommelier told me that one patron wanted to spend $900 on the Domaine Romanee Conti, Grands Echezaux, 2005. But the sommelier asked him if he would like a better wine that’s drinking better now, the DRC, La Tache, 2006 for $750. The diner readily accepted. Fancy that, a downsell! (is that even a word?)

The price reductions are indicated not on the wine list, however. The somm told me that he gives them mainly to regulars or “people who seem nice.” So if you have an anniversary, marriage proposal, big birthday, or other celebratory event coming up no matter which fine restaurant you’re in, it might not hurt to indicate your (high) price point and ask if that’s the most exciting thing in that vein (cough**cough**price) on the wine list.

Unfortunately, the sommelier requested anonymity since he said that there is no across-the-board policy. But in other NYC deals, Veritas, the wine shrine on 20th St., is offering 25% off all wines on the list. And Bar Boulud is offering a “Pannier du jour,” wherein a magnum, jerobaum, imperial or Methusalem is hauled up from the cellar, uncorked and sold by the glass for between $19 and $29 a glass. It may sound like a lot but some recent selections have included the 04 Jadot Bonnes-Mares (3L) and the 1978 Ducru Beaucaillou (mag). Maybe if you get the last glass you could take the bottle home?

At the lower-priced value end, Perry Street, Jojo, and Vong each offers a red and a white bottle of wine for $20 at lunch time as well as a $5 wine by the glass.

Hit the comments with other deals you know about!

SIPPED: lobbying
The Village Voice looks at the jockeying behind the legislative initiative to allow supermarkets to sell wine.

SIPPED and SPIT: growth (of the viticultural kind)
The AP offers more reporting on the coming harvest “under economic cloud.”

SIPPED: a second life for those OWCs
Wine crates as serving trays.

SIPPED: tree planting
An Australian winery will attempt to offset its carbon emissions by planting up to 10,000 trees worldwide. Let’s hope the trees fare better than those planted for Coldplay! [Perth Now]

SPIT: a tip of the hat
In the recent double issue, NY mag ran a long piece about ethical eating that included a mention of the carbon footprint of wine. Ditto Newsweek in their current double issue.

SPIT: bottled water
Mother Jones has a long article on the making of FIJI bottled water.

They can be really a fun and informative aspect of wine life in the city. They’re free because stores can’t (easily) charge for tastings on their premises with the off-premises retail license. Many stores have regular free tastings, check out my NYC wine shop map for my favorite stores. Here’s what’s happening at a few of them:

Chambers Street Wines: Italian white wines, Friday, 5-7; Summer favorites from local distributor, Polaner, Saturday, 4-7.
Crush Wine & Spirits: Free tastings Thursday, 5-7; annual “War of the Rosés” June 11, (session one 5–6pm, session two 6:30–7:30pm; R.S.V.P. to events@crushwineco.com)
Moore Brothers: there’s always something open in the back.

Hit the comments with some other worthwhile ones you know about!

I was fortunate enough to have been able to give a talk there last year for my other book, Wine Politics, and the turnout was great and the discussion was excellent. Because A Year of Wine dovetails on the seasonal food movement by suggesting varying the wines you drink with the seasons, I’m thrilled to be heading to this gastronomic institution for this discussion. Hope to see you there!

Wednesday, June 10, Noon – 1 PM
167 W. 12th Street
Suggested donation: $20; students free. Event page on their site.

SIPPED: wine as a tax revenue source
New York State will raise the excise tax on wine sold or made in New York from $0.18 a gallon to $0.30 a gallon, effective May 1. This rate increase of roughly two cents a bottle may be too little to pass on to consumers thus may fall to producers or wholesalers. In order to avoid channel stuffing, there will be a “floor tax” levy imposed on warehouse inventory as of May 1. So will there be mega sales in NY wine stores between now and then to draw down said inventory? [NYT]

SIPPED: fraud
Fraudsters posing as buyers for British wine retailers have bilked French producers out of an apparently large amount of wine. Sad. [Decanter]

SIPPED, surprisingly: Bordeaux 2008
If in 2008 grapes were, in the words of Jancis Robinson, “swollen with summer rain,” vineyards are “ravaged by mildew and threatened by rot,” would that make for a good vintage in Bordeaux? Despite all odds, Robinson in the FT and Elin McCoy on Bloomberg attest to finding some surprisingly good wines. McCoy asks the money question: “But dropping prices dramatically in a good vintage? It’s not in the Bordelais DNA.” But some have gotten the message as she quotes Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou, owner Bruno Borie: “We have to go back to basics, go back to the consumer, instead of the speculators.” Subsequently, Decanter reports several releases down 20 – 40% from last year’s prices. What will happen ultimately to the weak and expensive 2007 vintage? A caution against buying wine as futures…

In an op-ed in yesterday’s NYT, wine shop owner Marco Pasanella makes the case that he and other independent shops should be allowed to expand to have more than one location and be able to sell bread, cheese, microbrews, and, yes, recyclable bags, which they are not allowed to currently sell. I’ll drink to that! In fact, it is absurd that this corollary is not in the proposed reform legislation and should be corrected immediately.

I stopped by Pasanella & Son last week for a book signing. It is a handsome shop with an antique Fiat on the floor; the wine selection is excellent. The staff did a fantastic job setting up the event and it was great to see so many people, particularly from the neighborhood turn out. In his op-ed, Marco says that the staff at a local shop will remember a customer’s name. In fact, one woman there that evening told me that the staff member actually remembered which wine she had bought on her previous visit when she couldn’t. Bet that won’t happen at D’Agostino.

Also check out their clever and popular free wine and movie nights, Sip ‘n Cinema!

“If You Sell Wine, Then Let Me Sell Cheese” -NYT op-ed
New York City wine shops, a map