When ChatGPT launched at the end of November, 2022, restaurants were in high gear for the holiday rush. After years of relative stability, the sudden closure of dining rooms in March, 2020, and the chaos in the restaurant industry that followed, this past holiday season felt like it was almost normal. Except it wasn’t. Prices for food were continuing to rise in challenging, sometimes unexpected ways. The cost of dining out shot up—90 percent of respondents to our Annual Restaurant Poll raised the prices of entrées, the highest percentage in the 34 years since our first survey. The mean change in entrée pricing reported was an 11.3 percent increase—as for wine, the mean change was a 7 percent increase. It’s not surprising; you might be able to find that kind of info by asking ChatGPT.
Rather than asking a robot about what we decide to put into our bodies, we prefer to ask people we trust. One of those people, Aldo Sohm, the Wine Director at Le Bernardin in New York City, told us that Chef Eric Ripert did a cost analysis last year: “He compared May 2022 prices with October 2021. A case of limes was something like $34 in October 2021, then $139 in May 2022. Avocados, it was even worse. He started laughing, ‘Now I’m telling people not to order avocado; caviar is cheaper.’”
Diners may have come back, eager for the kind of dining experience that had evaporated during the pandemic, but the connections between chefs and their food suppliers were still frayed, and extreme climate events were disrupting supplies at their source. It was a similar story with wine, as frost, shipping delays and inflation all conspired to drive the wine team at Le Bernardin to list a glass of Chablis for $25.“Are you out of your mind?” Sohm recalls asking his sommeliers. “$25 for a glass of Chablis? You can’t be serious.” So he conducted his own competitive research. “I saw the cheapest glass of Chablis was $20 at Balthazar; everything else was $25, $27 or $30. I was officially old.”
We heard—and felt—a lot of that same resignation this year: the acceptance of a new reality. No, the world was not coming to an end over the price of a glass of Chablis, but the price of that glass might tell you something about the world.
Jim Rollston, who helmed the wine program at Manresa, in Los Gatos, experienced the frenzy of 2022 when Chef David Kinch reopened the restaurant with a prix-fixe menu price of $325. “We did a jump to $365 six months later. Then David made his announcement that we were closing, and we went to $425. Then, for the last month, we went to $595.” The tables were booked solid, and a lot of rare, crazy-expensive wine flowed until the doors closed at the end of December.
For this journalist whose career may soon be eclipsed by armies of chatbots, their artificial intelligence nurtured by many of those late-season diners at Manresa, $595 for dinner is out of my league. But many of the rich have gotten richer during the pandemic. Diners with money to burn were reported in New York, trawling lists for DRC or Roumier or Coche-Dury, along with the produce of other Burgundy growers-turned-legends, even as supplies of recent Côte d’Or vintages have been severely reduced by extreme weather.
So, what are the rest of us drinking? We retooled our restaurant poll this year to find out. Rather than asking wine directors to list their ten best-selling wines of the last quarter of the year, we asked them to list three new wines that were the most successful additions to their lists, and another three that were staff favorites at their restaurant. Then we asked what kind of wine guests were most requesting, and what three wines sommeliers offered in response.
POLL PROTOCOL:
We surveyed top restaurants around the country, asking wine directors about sales in the fourth quarter of 2022. By our deadline, 97 answered our questions about their most successful new additions to their wine lists, naming staff favorites and the wines they recommend in response to queries from their guests. We followed up with many of them to gain insight into their wine programs and the trends they see on the horizon.
A computer program can easily source what ten wines sold best (though restaurants at this level don’t often share that kind of information). In any case, that information has become increasingly irrelevant to restaurant wine directors, as most can’t get enough of an allocation of any one wine that they might want to see on that top-selling list. The business has changed completely since 1989 when we started the poll—and diners have changed. Let the masters and mistresses of the universe drink Coche. For the rest of us, there are thousands of choices, many relative unknowns, waiting to be discovered and enjoyed. Call me old-fashioned, but I love learning about these wines from a fellow human, whom I have come to trust for their knowledge, for the level of consciousness brought about by years of sensory training, for their professionalism as sommeliers. I want to turn off my phone in a restaurant and talk, receive their advice, having witnessed their astonishing ability to taste and parse the great from the good. Artificial intelligence will, no doubt, provide some equally astonishing new ways to approach choosing between one bottle and another, but whatever magic it can offer is not the numinous kind you might find in the wine inside.
So, this year, our poll focused on the tastes of sommeliers at top restaurants around the country. It’s not about sales, but about explorations. As Seth Corr of Greens in San Francisco looked back over the year, he told us, “Sales were good, people were drinking for sure, and it was all very confusing.” That rudderless confusion may well be the reality for diners scanning a wine list today, and well into the future. But honestly, we don’t really mind, as long as we can trust in the intelligence and friendship of our guides.
Joshua Greene is the editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits magazine.
This story appears in the print issue of Spring 2023.
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