Supply Chain-ges

At Los Angeles’s **Dunsmoor**, a side door leads to this clandestine wine bar behind the restaurant proper. (Photo: Philip Rodriquez)

“Supply Chain Issues” entered common parlance in 2020 as COVID-19 seemed to impact the presence of everything, from bread flour to Martini olives. Even now, one sees sparser shelves at grocery stores—but what about wine lists? This time last year, wines sat in port for weeks as container ships couldn’t dock and unload. That delay is still having ripple effects—as June Rodil, MS, has found at Houston’s March. “The wine no longer comes to you. You have to search for it and really know your shit to be able to find what you want. You need to have great relationships, and you need to know your timing.” The prix-fixe menu theme at March shifts to a new Mediterranean region every six months, and the wine team collaborates on orders early on, taking a deep dive into the local wines. “If you’re putting together a container in Europe, it’s not coming in a month,” Rodil says.

Beyond the shipping issues, new challenges to the status quo are pinching supplies of well-known appellations. The severity of frosts after earlier spring weather in Burgundy and the Loire have slashed supplies on new vintages. Stir-crazy drinkers coming out of isolation may be looking to shake things up. And vines once at the margins are growing better wines due to shifts in the climate. Those are just a few of the factors driving buyers to look elsewhere as they fulfill guest requests for Sancerre or Saint-Aubin—and they are finding diners eager to follow them down the rabbit hole.

The shortages on recognizable appellations are opening new conversations with guests at The Waverly Inn in NYC’s Greenwich Village. If Sancerre is not on the list, says wine director Jeff Harding, people are asking what they might order, “whereas, if Sancerre is on the list, they just order Sancerre.” He’s ready to push his guests west—either a few miles to Quincy and Domaine Chevilly, or farther, down river to Domaine Guiberteau Saumur Blanc. He also takes them to Bordeaux. “It’s interesting that the Sauternes producers are all making dry wine now,” Harding said, citing Lions de Suduiraut Bordeaux Blanc as a staff favorite.

At Cassia in Santa Monica, Marianna Caldwell told us, “As the climate is getting warmer, I’m finding that I prefer albariño to sauvignon blanc as a food-pairing wine.” Her go-to is the Manuel Moldes Rías Baixas A Capela de Aios for when “people throw ‘Sancerre’ around as an adjective… It’s fun so see people go, ‘Oh wow. This is the one.’” For Tonya Pitts of One Market in San Francisco, demand for the classics remains steady even as the vintages get shorter. “I’m curious—because of things getting warmer—if Sancerre is replacing white Burgundy in that way; it’s going to be drier, more citrus and more stone fruit—what you would traditionally find in Bourgogne and Mâcon.”

Aldo Sohm of NYC’s Le Bernardin might agree. Before the pandemic, he had listed Tement Vinothek Reserve Sauvignon Blanc from Austria’s Sudsteiermark at $380. “That wine has the energy of a high-end grand cru Burgundy, but it’s not loud or in your face.” Given the price, his team of sommeliers was skeptical until he poured it for them all at a Thanksgiving dinner alongside striped-bass tartare with black truffle. Once the somms returned to the floor, “all of a sudden, it was gone.”It’s not just shortages driving people to unexpected places—sometimes the unexpected is baked into the restaurant’s concept. Robin Wright was told to “focus on nerdy and indigenous Italian varieties” as she put together the list at Ci Siamo, in Manhattan. “It’s been fun to seek out varieties like baratuciat [a white Piemontese grape]. The name means “cat balls” because that’s what the grapes look like, and the wine is salty and mineral [she pours a baratuciat from Iuli, a producer in the Monferrato hills]. Piedmont has so many fun and esoteric varieties, and they all have their own personalities. I’ve listed wines made from slarina, freisa, ruché, grignolino, to name just a few.” She has the staff play Wine Jeopardy! to get to know these Italian arcana, or she preps them with “laterals” (“if a customer likes pinot noir, offer them this”). Those lateral moves are also encouraged in Aspen, at The Little Nell, where Chris Dunaway uses a similar tactic picked up from a coworker at a past retail job. “I asked how he sold Etna Rosso back when Sicily was taking off. He said, ‘I make it easy. If you like pinot, this is pinot with barbecue sauce.’”

At NYC’s Gramercy Tavern, Erin Healy finds that the price of white Burgundy made from chardonnay has broken through her by-the-glass ceiling. Instead, she’s put on Nicolas Rossignol’s aligoté, “a great Burgundy for $24 a glass [instead of $35 or $40]. It’s super leesy, and it has the richness, reduction and acid in the background. If you close your eyes, you feel like you’re in Burgundy.”

Then, of course, there is the growing number of guests coming in looking for something funky or weird. At L’Accolade, a natural wine bar in NYC’s West Village, Clément Lapeyssonnie says that up to 80 percent of his list comes from “lesser-known” regions, some of them close by. When a guest asks for a skin-contact white, he reaches for Erik Longabardi’s chardonnay from the biodynamic Macari vineyard on Long Island’s North Fork. This focus on local growers has him reaching beyond the confines of Vitis vinifera. “If you source locally from the [Northeast], it has to be hybrid. I love wine from Vermont and Quebec, like Domaine du Nival’s Matière à Discussion (100 percent vidal), or Les Pervenches Seyval Chardo, or Pinard & Filles’ Frangine, a maceration of La Crescent. La Garagista’s Damejeanne is one of my favorite Marquettes. That grape is starting to make really stunning wines that are close to the best pinot noirs that I’ve tried, to be honest.”

“If you source locally from the [Northeast], it has to be hybrid. I love wine from Vermont and Quebec. [Marquette] is starting to make really stunning wines that are close to the best pinot noirs that I’ve tried, to be honest.” —Clement Lapeyssonnie, L’Accolade (NYC)

Justin Vann of Houston’s Nancy’s Hustle has also found his guests ready to talk hybrids. His staff sold a lot of Modern Optimism from the American Wine Project in Wisconsin—a skin-macerated saint pepin Erin Rasmussen makes from fruit grown in the Upper Midwest. “It tastes very classic and easy to love,” says Vann. “It’s an opportunity to talk about how we’ve ignored hybrids and native grapes.”

Though a few restaurants reported decreasing listings of these oddities, most of their cuts were relatively small. The mean change for this category among our respondents came out to a 5.6 percent increase.

John Aranza started running a wine club out of his Chicago-area restaurant, Autre Monde, that included monthly tastings. Participation continues to climb even as they broach regions like the Balkans. “If you have something that’s experiential, or they know that there is a uniqueness to what you’re putting out there, people are open to it. People are not holding back in that sense.”

For so many, the draw of wine is the chance for discovery—perhaps rediscovery—of things like esoteric Italian varieties. As marquee appellations seem to be caught in a maelstrom of limited supply, climbing prices and changing climate, buyers are building more “laterals,” as Wright put it, into their lists, and guests are coming ready to jump into the chaos regardless of where it will take them.