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Across the city, some of the most impressive restaurant wine lists are now on sale for retail prices. Sommeliers are fielding collector requests for rare and fine bottles, midrange wine bars are converting their former dining rooms into makeshift bottle shops, and restaurants are offering highly regarded and very limited wines from their collections on delivery platforms like Caviar.
Since Mayor Bill de Blasio’s and Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s now nearly two-week-old announcements ordering all New York restaurants to close their doors in an effort to stymie the spread of COVID-19, restaurants have been looking to eke out whatever revenue they can.
Amid it all was a bit of relief: Restaurants with liquor licenses would be allowed to sell takeout liquor and wine, and not just beer as previously allowed, if sold with food — resulting in a surge of creative desperation and overnight innovation. Some popular restaurants known for wine — like Hart’s, Cervo’s, and the Fly, as well as Fausto and LaLou — did one-day cellar sales to bring in some revenue, while others have pivoted to becoming more traditional retail shops.
“We essentially rewrote our business model and divided and conquered,” says Caleb Ganzer, a sommelier and managing partner at Nolita-based La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels, which had been preparing to close prior to the State Liquor Authority’s announcement. A plushy lounge with a book-like wine list of more than 600 bottles, Compagnie has a usual clientele that’s mostly out-of-neighborhood. As a result, it’s become an all-delivery venture, using two salaried employees’ cars to deliver wine and charcuterie to customers throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.
Most of the wine bars selling bottle lists are offering discounts from the usual markups. Sauvage restaurant in Williamsburg, whose website has been transformed into a fully stocked wine shop, is offering bottles mostly in the $20 to $30 range, a broad range of spirits and amaros, and a small selection of wines under $20. Compagnie’s list, with the exception of rare and fine auction wines, is now being offered at 25 percent off, and June Wine Bar in Cobble Hill is selling its list at 50 percent off.
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Despite the discount, many of these wines are more expensive than those found at a retail shop; most offerings from these midrange wine lists average about $30 to $35. Still, owners say buyers seem okay with the cost due to an added element of confidence in the business. These are wines coming from restaurants and bars people have frequented before, where they may have had a server or sommelier assist them with a perfect pairing or teach them a little bit about a wine region.
While getting people to purchase a $20 bottle in a retail environment is usually quite difficult, June Wine Bar is selling bottles between $30 and $40, alongside produce, according to general manager Lena Mattson. “I think it’s partially people wanting to support us in this difficult time, but on another level it’s trust,” she says. “They know they’re getting something great. It’s not a gamble, which it normally is when you’re buying from a wine shop.”
Ganzer says Compagnie had already been working on a discounted wine selection with tasting notes, and even a bit of online education — a sort of natural wine bootcamp. With the sudden pivot to delivery, the staff began curating wine packages, ranging from $195 six-packs of “Supernatural” wines to a $3,995 “blue-chip collector” pack. The bar’s sommeliers have also been interfacing with regulars who might be interested in something rare or specific.
“We wanted to keep the idea of what a wine bar is, so it involves a little bit of education and conversation,” Ganzer says. “These aren’t $10 bottles of wine from Trader Joe’s. These are real bottles of wine made by a real person that tell a cultural story.”
For dedicated wine lovers, it’s an opportunity to buy bottles that are difficult to find in retail shops. Popular Williamsburg restaurant and wine bar the Four Horsemen is offering a selection of high-end and rare bottles, which can be inquired about over email. Among their cellar selections are a 2008 bottle of Chateau Rayas Chateauneuf-du-Pape — a southern Rhône legend from a century-old secret winery — and a 2010 Auguste Clape Cornas, a classic French syrah which usually sells for around $795 (1.5 liters). At the weekend cellar sale of Park Slope Italian restaurant Fausto, some wine devotees waited more than an hour to buy 50 percent off wine from the collection. People were spotted walking out with more than a dozen bottles, including finds such as cult-favorite Emidio Pepe bottlings from 1980 and 1983, and a Giacomo Conterno “Montfortino” that normally sells for $1,450.
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Indeed, initial reports suggest that there’s demand for these new de facto wine shops, which employ workarounds to the liquor law by offering bread, snacks, or produce alongside the bottles. Rhodora, the zero-waste natural wine bar in Fort Greene, saw lots of community support in its first week selling bottles — with between 300 and 400 people coming in and leaving “generous” tips for the staff, according to employee Kasey Sluke. And Compagnie saw a big pop in delivery sales initially, according to Ganzer.
But that’s not to say it’s been an easy transition. Ganzer isn’t sure how long it will last, and as at many other restaurants and bars, sales overall are still down by about 75 percent. Rhodora’s owner Henry Rich also says that there’s uncertainty around whether the support will die off in coming weeks.
Other restaurants and bars that have switched to being bottle shops are taking things day by day, sometimes nixing aspects of the business that do not seem sustainable.
The Four Horsemen launched a Shopify website for pickup orders within days of the SLA announcement, with a mechanism where nobody needs to enter the restaurant. But while the wine part of the project has run smoothly, the restaurant will be temporarily nixing its $36 prix fixe meal takeout — slimming the menu down to snacks like Iberico ham chips, according to wine director and partner Justin Chearno.
“Our kitchen team is just exhausted,” says Chearno. “They came right into this after six straight days of regular restaurant service. We want to make sure we have a better plan going forward, so we’re taking a couple of days to regroup.”
Everybody is also thinking about the question of health and safety. Many have taken precautions such as ensuring zero contact between transactions, laminating menus, and placing gloves and disinfectants on display. Others have weighed the cost of increased exposure and ultimately decided that the risks just aren’t worth operating at all, at least for the time being.
East Village natural wine destinations Kindred, Ruffian, and Ruffian Does Dive Bar have decided to fully close, promoting only gift cards while they brainstorm longer-term solutions, according to partner and beverage director Alexis Percival. The team is wary of jumping too quickly into an entirely new business model. “We’d rather it be something that we know we can do and deliver on our promises,” says Percival. “Wine is of course well stored, so we can take some time to decide.”
Bushwick wine and pizza destination Ops decided to stay open and is offering wine delivery of six or more bottles on Tuesdays and Fridays, according to owner Mike Fadem. But he and his staff are still worried about their own safety, even if they are maintaining minimal contact with people. “I think about it all the time,” says Fadem. “It’s terrifying.”
But making the transition at all means keeping people employed, restaurateurs say, and staying open felt like a necessity to some. Rich of Rhodora started running the wine shop “just to make payroll,” he says. After laying off the majority of its staff, Ops was able to hire back about five to six employees, says Fadem. Besides wine delivery, his team is baking small loaves of bread and selling them as an add-on to the wine for $4 due to the rule around food purchase with the alcohol.
“We’re all tiny businesses,” says Fadem. “There’s no one getting rich off a 40-seat restaurant in Bushwick. It’s just a labor of love.”
The new method of business has also started sparking conversations around how liquor laws can change to ensure long-term sustainability; it’s showing the ways that the industry and its workers were already vulnerable. “Restaurants have always been struggling,” says Ganzer. “It’s not like we were thriving before this.” Changing the law so that restaurants can still sell bottles to go even after the shutdown ends could help businesses survive, Ganzer argues.
Across social media, off-premise wine and liquor sales are also being used to provide financial relief for restaurants and their workers. This Tuesday, Parcelle Wines — the Manhattan wine shop and hospitality group behind restaurants like Charlie Bird and Pasquale Jones — announced that it’s offering a bundle of six curated wines, plus four cans of Ramona canned spritzes, for $150, with all profits going to the Independent Restaurant Coalition’s efforts.
Mattson of June Wine Bar admits that she’s one of the lucky ones in that she still has a job and a lot of inventory to play around with for the time being. But it’s still a big change. “The wine list I built is irrelevant now. The world we’re living in is completely different,” she says. “We’re all wine shops now, if we’re open.”
Leah Rosenzweig writes about wine, cultural history, and books in Brooklyn, New York.