New Yorkers of a certain age will remember the city’s wine bars of yore. The dimly lit spots that smelled of bloomy rinds and charcuterie and served their red wines just a hair too warm under lights that were a hair too bright.
This template was at least partially upended when The Ten Bells opened on the Lower East Side in 2008. Barely bright enough to make out the color of the wine in your glass and effortlessly cool, Ten Bells introduced the city to the natural wine bar, a place where you didn’t need to sit down and study a list, that wine could just be there to accompany a good time. And if the wine was good, all the better.
That same year, Paul Grieco opened Terroir in the East Village, using kids’ alphabet magnets and playful wine descriptions to dress down the whole notion of “wine bar”; he set the whole thing to a punk playlist. From there, the new wine bar unfurled at a breakneck pace, introducing umpteen variations on the idea, blurring the line between wine bar and restaurant and giving us some of the most exciting cooking of the last decade at places like Wildair and The Four Horsemen. Today, there are so many places that define themselves as wine bars, so many iterations, that it’s hard to actually define what qualifies as one.
“To me, if I can’t go in, throw back a glass of wine, not ordering food, and then go about my day, that’s not a wine bar,” says Grant Reynolds, owner of Parcelle on the Lower East Side. In other words, a place where you can go just for the wine, without ruffling feathers, that’s a wine bar—and that’s true of all of the places we’ve called out below. These are the bars we deem essential, each with their own singular identity.
P.S. There are a handful of new and not-yet-opened wine bars that couldn’t be included on this list, such as Whoopsie Daisy in Crown Heights as well as the forthcoming Strange Delight in Fort Greene and Plus de Vin in Williamsburg. To them we say: See you soon.
