Hi folks,

The team at Bridges is up to something really special. (To be fair, I’m not alone in thinking so.) I’ve been able to see them at work over the last four months, on their way to the restaurant’s first birthday — the party was earlier this week. I spent the summer back in service in a unique extended cameo as interim wine director there for the length of a dear friend’s maternity leave.

Service: you remember service? Saying hi to the kitchen when you come in, before you start your admin; lineup show-and-tells about pepper varieties or how to break down a Dover sole; service bartender stacking up 6 different martini variants in seating position order (position 1 is far left corner closest to the kitchen, except on tables 33 and 34, when it’s the seat facing the pass); many thousands of pieces of glassware polished; spacing out your by-the-glass changes so that it’s not too overwhelming for the Wednesday crew coming from their weekends; getting to the anniversary on 44 just before the squid drops because they want to do two bottles and it’s time to start talking about the red — silky, or with a little bit of grip? rose garden in a rainstorm or dirt and smoke?; doing a coordinated drop on a large party with no other communication aside from sustained eye contact…

Have you been somewhere, recently, where you were one part of a team full of people who were very, very accomplished in their respective roles and who were taking point on projects and initiatives in totally different spheres from yours, and you could look around at a boulder moving uphill without your feeling like you were pushing, at all?

I can’t tell if this is simply the wonderment of a person who’s been largely self-employed for the last half decade being back in an organizational setting for a moment. But it was certainly a feeling. (And one that keeps you going a little longer on hour ten or eleven of a twelve hour day.)

All of this is largely preamble — me trying to explain where I’ve been, what I’ve been up to, how it feels — to what I thought would be a fun little piece of service journalism. Having just moonlit as a wine director at a restaurant that has been credibly described by, say, New York magazine, as “Manhattan’s hottest”: what are folks drinking these days?

I can confidently claim a total lack of statistical significance. We’re talking about drops in the bucket: 90–125 people per night — out for a certain degree of occasion — roughly 12,500 diners over my time there — in a very particular place to drink wine from almost anywhere in the world, at almost any price. (By volume, meanwhile — 90 million bottles or so a year — everyone else is drinking Josh.)

It’s not representative, in other words, but maybe you’ll find it interesting.

I’ve largely gone with gut feeling here (although I do pull a couple of numbers near the end), and I’ve organized things along a series of big headlines, more or less in the order that I’d drink them:

I remember as a busboy at Corkbuzz in 20xx (basically the 19th century) offering every table a choice between flutes and AP white wine glasses for their champagne. It’s been years since anybody asked. (Beyond requesting a Burgundy bowl and/or decanter for their Cedric Bouchard, say, which is a whole other conversation.) If there are flutes onsite at Bridges I still don’t know where they’re stored.

Moreover, the grower champagne conversation seems to have fully penetrated and become normcore (this is going to be a recurring theme). Guests were basically unflustered by the lack of recognizable houses on the list, although there were marked preferences in order-fires for 1) blanc de blancs 2) blanc de noirs 3) vintage. Growers? Fine. Wine glasses? Sure. But there’s still new frontiers in champagne ideology left to unpack.

Meanwhile, chablis has a stranglehold on the minds and tastes of my diners. As a reference point, comfort, and aspiration, there are very few things like it. If I start dwelling on history this may be an always thing — it explains the 1970s, for one? (Some of this is going to be a result of my months at Bridges being between May and September, but it’s a seafood-heavy menu and I think will always be a magnet for What Certain People Think Fancy White Wine Is.)

Anyway, I was struck by 1) the omnipresence of Chablis as a reference point, totally peeled away from the grape variety “chardonnay”, for mineral-driven, savory, lighter white wine 2) honestly the willingness of guests spending around $100 to give me the wheel as long as I understood what was meant by Chablis (that thing I wrote above, mineral-driven without aromas of fruit and flowers, and on the lighter side).

This was, I have to underline, a totally different person from the people asking me for white Burgundy. And they were largely geographically adventurous but style- (and price-) conservative, often looking for $100 to be a ceiling, not a neighborhood. (Which ruled out some of the fancier Chablis proper.)

The easiest answer here (my go-to, in fact) was Muscadet (usually trying to avoid the word tableside because of its homophonic confusion with moscato and saying “melon b” or “Pay Nantais” instead). In fact, it was most often a specific Muscadet: the gorgeous (and, incidentally, zero-zero) Guillaume Lavie “Clisson” 2021. But depending on the conversation, Good Txakoli, Finger Lakes tocai friulano, Upper Mosel elbling / chardonnay, Savoie jacquere, etc. also did good work.

What can I say, except that chenin is no longer (was it ever? who can remember?) an alternative grape variety. Probably you could have this conversation around cru Beaujolais, for example — although I’d argue that chenin is much more complicated, varied, and harder to wrap one’s head around relative to gamay.

The point being: friction levels are exceptionally low these days. A $23 glass of chenin from the Joussets (beautiful wine, tbf) was my top-selling BTG for the first half the summer. Frustrated white Burghounds barely blinked at being led to Saumur. Chenin, in other words, has become a shortcut — not just for wine geeks, but for wine’s luxurious normcore — in a way that feels like the inevitable dialectical response to chardonnay and Sancerre.

Bartenders, have you found this, too? The fact that it’s easy to say can’t hurt.

‘Luxurious normcore’ aside, and taking for granted this is a fancy space in a city that is (vote for Mamdani) far too unaffordable, one of the biggest interactions I fielded was a reaction somewhere between surprise and relief at our wine list pricing.

It’s not even that low, folks! But Keara and I do try hard to keep a bunch of delicious things under $100 on the list, and I made a point of having at least one bottle around $50 in each category. I heard a lot of people happy to see this, and I cannot blame them. Pricing in this city feels extractive and unmanageable a lot of the time, and I think the restaurant squeeze is getting particularly tricky.

I’m trying not to dwell too much on how the world I used to know has receded as I’ve aged, but things like the objective cost of ambitious tasting menus or wine list markups as recently as a decade ago (even adjusted for inflation etc) make it very hard for me not to spiral into doom-y millennial nonsense. It used to be very easy as an early 20-something to participate in food and drink culture at a high level in this city! The Contra tasting menu was $49! Pearl & Ash’s markups were less than 2.5x!

These days, the affordable and interesting is disappearing, and the only room for growth is at the top. The high-end market for wine seems to have no ceiling, because its clientele appear to be untethered from reality. The separation between professionals who are only training themselves to service people who think Burgundy pricing is normal and wine people who are trying to be regular has never been deeper.

I can’t help but feel that these fractures, already present, are going to continue to spread in ways I’m not equipped to imagine as someone who could come up doing both. If this sounds like a political allegory well, shit, would you believe it?!

This is a quick one and something that gives me no happiness. As somebody who came up during the age of peak rosé all day (breaking my rule twice in a row of Being Old On the Internet), the total withdrawal in these kinds of trendy spaces isn’t surprising. High tide is inevitably followed by reversal, withdrawal, rejection. That said, even as somebody who was victimized by peak rosé in service settings, it still makes me sad! Fancy, beautiful pink wine: very few things make me feel more pampered.

Currently, guests are very happily drinking 200+ year old vines in the Cyclades that make a peach-colored wine, and a ramato style pinot grigio from Alto Adige that is dark pink. Both of these are arguably “orange wine” — and both of these could be rosé, if you’re asking for it. After Labor Day, the number of requests I've gotten for anything else has dropped to effectively zero. (If you’re wondering, all of that energy has migrated to “chilled red”.)

This is partly the inevitable result of the menu: what do you do when the longfin grilled squid stuffed with a squid boudin noir and accompanied by confit tomatillos and a kind of squid ink pomodoro is hitting the table at the same time as the sweetbreads glazed with chicken jus with tropea onions?

What about when they want to move to red, but their main is the Dover sole for two with pil-pil sauce and clam rice?

The answer, from a food pairing point of view, is silk, infusion, a light touch — not too much rasp or chew. Honestly, it’d be a great moment for a fancy rosé, but as we’ve just seen, that’s largely out of the question.

It’s not quite glou glou, which may be dead, but it’s not back to elaborate, architectural tannic structure either. (Guests aside, the younger wine buyers I’m seeing recoil at old-school tannin in tastings.) We’re beyond the strictly dry-ice carbonic juicy juice that seemed to be everywhere in the teens (and was almost impossible to differentiate). This is more likely to be the kind of layered infusion winegrowers call mille-feuille or ‘lasagna’ depending on where they are and what kind of food they like. Or it’s whole clusters floated in press juice. Or it’s macerations that only last a handful of days before pressing and the completion of fermentation.

There’s a lot of potential detail to the approach — but mechanics aside, the feeling was one that almost everybody seemed to be chasing.

I think orange wine might be becoming white wine.

What I mean is, I think as Orange Wine (TM) narrows into something like the other side of the glou-glou red coin, retail-priced, cute label, take it to the park — call it Gulp Hablo-fication — space has opened up in restaurant settings for wines that are white or white-ish but have texture, dimension, and maybe a discrete (or not so discrete) degree of maceration. Especially above $100 on the list, I found very few people asking for “orange wine” — but plenty of people looking for a bottle of white with a profile that could support a little bit of something. (These were not the same people as the people looking for Chablis.)

And sometimes it’s about producer intention, too. I don’t think someone like Collecapretta thinks of any of their wines made from white grapes are orange, really — whether or not there’s 10 days of maceration or a direct press.

The IG story post at the header, with its lineup of three bottles I picked for some wine friends, is a good example of how this played out. All three were listed in the white section: the grauburgunder from Saalwächter in the northern Rheinhessen; Les Flâneurs’ lightly pressed Côte d’Or pinot noir blended with marsanne and roussanne from the bottom of Beaujolais; the Sierra de Gredos albillo real topped (like CVNE!) with a little bit of manzanilla sherry. All three, undeniably, are sporting a little bit of color.

I almost never actually want the martini that I’ve ordered (probably a 50/50 with a twist, for the record). I certainly didn’t need the second one.

There’s an undeniable allure to the idea of a martini, though: the steely austerity of it, the cold and the brine, a clean, ice-colored column, and martini as idea is usually what I’m actually ordering when I order the cocktail.

Did I actually want a daquiri? Actually, I should have just been drinking wine.

I suspect many people are in this boat, whether or not they know it or parse it in exactly these terms. (Whether they are making the distinction, maybe a fine one, between wanting something and wanting an idea of something.)

We’re undoubtably at peak martini in the city, with some really thoughtful, lovely martini builds, often batched and icebox: manzanilla used as seasoning, Amalfi lemon oil, pickled gooseberries, etc etc. They’ll be over $20. I don’t know when it ends, or what comes next. I know we weren’t at peak martini yet when I moved to the city, but it nonetheless feels like we’ve been at peak martini for my entire life.

Martinis are sexy, they’re chic, they don’t stain. They’re clean. (Unless they’re dirty.) A round of martinis is a vibe. Bridges is a vibe-y room. People love to be drinking a martini in a room.

(A “splash” is a little something complimentary poured to regulars, industry folks, friends of the house, or by way of apology.)

Folks often splash on arrival, and while that has a place it can also feel a little perfunctory. I prefer when possible to thread it in as a bonus somewhere during or near the end of the meal: a little pairing moment with a mid course before their second bottle, or to carry a couple of raw dishes at the beginning, or because they ran out of wine but still had some of their mains left, or because they needed a bridge between their cheese course and dessert, or as a compare/contrast to what they’re drinking.

The other part of splashing on arrival, though, is that you don’t yet necessarily know what the energy of their night is. Are they going hard? Starting with cocktails, or champagne? Are they drinking alcohol at all?

No surprise that a lot of your guests these days will be sober, or sober-curious, or mixing low- and no-ABV options with alcohol, or just not drinking that night. I found myself this summer approaching tables to splash on arrival with two bottles in hand: whatever sparkling wine we were using and something like Muri’s “Passing Clouds”, a sparkling N/A wine alternative based on gooseberries, jasmine, and quince. “Are you all drinking wine tonight?”

If you’re a two-top and you order a bottle of wine, I’m almost always pouring each of you a taste after presentation and opening. (This goes over especially well on dates.) If you’re a four-top, I am about 50-50 on pouring a taste for all of you, depending on how invested everybody was in the interaction.

This isn’t so much a trend as it is something that I recommend thinking about as a way to defuse some of the more pretentious, condescending, or power-encoded elements of service. (I will make an exceptions to this approach, for example to avoid undercutting someone in a professional setting.)

The NYT review of Bridges dropped the week or two before I started, and had this to say about the wine program: “The wine list, by Keara Driscoll, is broad and eclectic, skewing natural, with many off-the-beaten-track options at reasonable price points.”

Both Keara and I came up in slightly more classic wine spaces before getting finding natural wine (and at a time when there wasn’t necessarily a hard distinction between the two). I can only speak for myself, but as a movement and community it was crucial to shaping my thinking about what matters in terms of farming, labor, and ethos, and for keeping me in love with wine. (The people were also, in my experience, more fun.)

That said, both of us are kind of tired of talking about it all of the time.

Bridges has a natural wine list, not in a flex-y way, but as a matter of course. In terms of style, the wines on it range widely from quite polished and knit together to wilder and more boundary-pushing. In terms of ethos, they’re all on the same side. The only people worried about it seem to be the people who read “skewing natural” in the review and are eager to tell me “no natural wine! I can’t stand the stuff”.

To which: I smile, nod, and pour them, say, biodynamic unfiltered chenin aged partly in amphora from Lise & Bertrand Jousset with roughly 15ppm SO2. And they say Yes, just like that.

There’s an incipient glee I can feel coming from some quarters at the prospect of natural wine having been a fad whose day is finally passing. Now, the attitude seems to be, we can finally return to serious, real wine. The kids were wrong. Nothing needed to change. The weirdos are out. The counter-culture is dead. “Those fucked-up natural wines,” trained pin-wearing sommeliers say out loud in venues across the country, looking over at me for affirmation.

I don’t really have a response to this other than to look at some data together:

I ran 50 or so different wines by the glass over those 4 months. Among the top-selling: a zero-zero field blend of over a dozen head-trained red, white, and pink varieties planted in a small site in the Languedoc by Jeff Coutelou’s father (190 glasses poured); a sauvignon blanc / sauvignon rose / menu pineau / chardonnay from Hervé Villemade in the Lore et Cher aged 55% in amphora (317 glasses, also zero-zero); and a direct-press blend of grolleau gris, cabernet franc, and chenin from a young couple in Saumur (433 glasses, also zero-zero).

Six of the top ten wines BTG this summer by volume and revenue, in fact had zero added sulfur. They weren’t not just natural in the “organic at minimum farming / native yeast fermentation / bottled without filtration” sense (that’s the whole program) but in the hardest-core zero-zero sense.

I say this not because I set out to write a majority zero-zero BTG list. (I don’t even care that much about sulfur.) I set out to pour beautiful, delicious wines made by producers doing meaningful work that were expressive, complemented the food, and made people happy. If that’s the way it shook out, maybe that says something about the impact and legacy of the natural wine movement? Maybe reports of its death have been exaggerated?

One more quick one!

Maybe it’s the menu design, the way the space feels, or people’s approach to it (for better or worse, Bridges is an occasion restaurant), but I was shocked at how many after-dinner beverages I saw going out — in particular things like vintage amari, old port, sherry, and fortified wine, vin jaune from the early ‘90s, etc.

Something about celebrating that is drawing people to a little glass of time. So many of these styles can carry decades of age with grace: a Rivesaltes from 1969, a grower armagnac from 1988. And dessert wine is such an unfashionable category that there are all kinds of delicious little oddities to truffle up: a late-harvest xinomavro from 2008, a decade and a half old Burgenland eiswein made from rotburger, a ratafia from a legendary Champagne grower.

Apart from the age of it all, maybe it’s simply that, at the end of many of the meals I’ve seen play out in the space, people’s curiosity and trust have been sufficiently rewarded that they’re willing to try one last surprising, special thing before it’s all over.

Thanks for letting me do a little unpacking after what was a rewarding but intense summer spent away from the project. Lots more to chat about this fall as I return to teaching, mapping, and writing.

Happy end of harvest if you’ve just wrapped, and talk soon,

<3,
grape kid