But now we add rot.

South of Graves, along the Garonne River and its small tributary, the Ciron, sits a cluster of appellations that produce some of the world’s most complex sweet wines:

• Sauternes (soh-TERN)

• Barsac (bar-SAK)

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Botrytis: When Rot Becomes an Asset

The defining force in Sauternes is Botrytis cinerea, commonly called noble rot.

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My City Guides Project just launched. You can find the Hamptons Guide here

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

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Tonight is Game 1 of the NBA Finals, Knicks vs. Spurs, and even the most fairweather Knicks fans (I’m in that category, for sure) are absolutely losing their minds. Last time the Knicks were NBA Champions was 1973! If it happens, Josh Hart has a bottle picked out: a 1995 DRC La Tâche, his birth year, gifted to him by JJ Redick as a wedding-and-thanks-for-letting-me-crash-at-your-house present. Hart has become one of the league’s most serious wine guys — he runs an Instagram account for his cellar, he’s the one who picks the bottles at team dinners, and he’s currently trying to expand Jalen Brunson’s palate, which he describes as “pretty damn cheap.” The 1995 La Tâche is earmarked for his 40th birthday, but he told Wine Enthusiast that a Knicks championship might accelerate the timeline. The broader NBA wine history piece is worth your time too — it traces the whole arc from Gregg Popovich’s team dinners in the ‘90s through the 2020 bubble (CJ McCollum brought 84 bottles and kept his hotel room in the mid-50s), and ends with the league’s recent Kendall-Jackson partnership, which is apparently the first player-driven wine sponsorship in sports. There's something charming about the NBA's wine arc running parallel to the league's broader glow-up as a culture engine. Can’t wait what Doug Berns gets up to in the next couple weeks.

Also: the TB City Guide to the Hamptons is live. If you have intel — a new spot, a sleeper wine list, a beach concession stand doing something ambitious — hit me with it.

And the real news: Montauk Lighthouse Café is back. Sean MacPherson and Celine Valensi are the new operators of the Historic Montauk Lighthouse Cafe, and Hither Hills Campground Concessions, which also includes a General Store. I helped Sean and Celine with their original application to the state to get this bid, and I’ve been watching the whole thing come together from close range. I’m stupidly excited for them, and even more curious about what these new properties will do to the business landscape of Montauk. Hither Hills concessions is already open; the Lighthouse Café soft opens tomorrow and I’ll be hanging out there in the early afternoon. If you know what they do at Crow’s Nest, you know what to expect.

Free idea for a startup wanting to activate Montauk: a free shuttle from the center of town up to the Lighthouse and down to Hither Hills. I’m sure there’s a nicotine pouch brand or engineered protein bar company who has some extra marketing dollars to blow on wrapping a Mercedes Sprinter in their AI-generated logo.

Here’s what I’m paying attention to this week.

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TASTING NOTES

• Clos Ste. Magdeleine Cassis Blanc 2021 — Cassis is Provence’s formal dissent from the region’s rosé monoculture: white-wine country terraced into limestone cliffs above the Mediterranean, an OG Kermit Lynch import of Marsanne, Clairette, Ugni Blanc, Bourboulenc.

  The thing this wine pulls off is refreshment without the performative zippiness or tart acidity of many of today’s summer wines. The texture is the argument: a wetness so total it reads less like drinking wine and more like accessing the platonic form of water — mineral-rich, weighted, persistent, direct from a spring. Now that’s what I call ‘minerality.’ I’ve poured this every summer in the Hamptons for a decade. It’s never sold especially well and I like it that way. This one is for the heads.

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Where Burgundy fragmented into ever smaller pieces, Bordeaux did the opposite. It consolidated, it branded and it created a hierarchy that the market could understand — and then exported that hierarchy to the world.

We’ve been talking about how Bordeaux works in the vineyard, this lesson is about how it works in the market.

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The 1855 Classification: A Snapshot That Stuck

The most famous system in Bordeaux is the 1855 Classification, created for the Paris Exposition under Napoleon III.

Wines from the Médoc (plus one from Graves) were ranked into five tiers:

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You can find my most recent feature here.

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The East End presents a unique challenge for the travel writer because so much of the place is already beyond parody.

Every summer, thousands of people arrive hoping to discover some secret version of the Hamptons that exists beyond the influencers, private equity executives, wellness founders, celebrities, and people who somehow manage to be all four at once. They want the hidden beach, the local coffee shop, the restaurant that hasn’t been discovered yet. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea.

The modern Hamptons is a machine for converting beauty into content. Every sunset becomes a photo opportunity. Every restaurant becomes a backdrop. Every lobster roll becomes evidence that somebody is having a better summer than you are.

The strange thing is that the underlying beauty remains completely real. The beaches are sick. The fishing culture is still here. The light that attracted generations of artists still does something unusual to the landscape. The problem isn’t that the East End is overrated. The problem is that an entire economy now exists to package and monetize the experience of being here.

As you can imagine, this guide is highly subjective. I have been working in this region for over a decade, and the places mentioned here are places I go. Some new, some old, all serve their purpose.

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Where to Stay

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You can find my most recent feature here.

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I’m writing you from the most serene third space in the world: the first floor meeting room at the Montauk Public Library. We had a rainy Memorial Day weekend, then one glorious day of sun, and now we’re back to a thick fog slowly engulfing the tip of the South Fork of Long Island. The knitting club is convening behind me with their usual selection of snacks: paper plates, homemade cookies, fresh fruit, an electric kettle for tea. Special shoutout to the one man in the knitting club, diligently working four needles on a pair of cotton socks with frilly accents — totally locked in, genuinely immune to the apparent irony of his being here. My eavesdropping tells me he was actually one of the founders of this club. He’s gabbing with the gals about classic grandparent-type stuff you’d imagine: health issues, Hamptons real estate, new babies in the neighborhood, and of course, handwork technique. I love it here.

Anyway, a new publication launched on Substack this week that I’ll be reading closely: The Hamptons Chronicle, by Rory Satran, a former WSJ columnist and editor. It covers real estate, parties, drugs, wildlife, fashion, food, local politics, and finance on the East End. There’s also a crime section. There’s a Jenna Lyons feature in their first issue, and it seems their subscribers have almost doubled since yesterday when first heard about it. The tagline — “mischievous Hamptons news for locals, weekenders, and wannabes” — is exactly what I want.

I reached out to Rory and she told me this:

I've always loved local news, and follow a lot of small newspapers around the country. I was always scouring them for stories that might work for the "A-Hed" section of The Wall Street Journal, which puts a fun little feature on the front page. I was always struck by how interested our readers were in these quote-unquote "smaller" stories— like one I wrote about the fight over topless beaches in Nantucket. As someone that spends a lot of time on the East End of Long Island, I see this type of small-but-not-small story everywhere. There's a lot of great local press already—I love the East Hampton Star and the East End Beacon—but I thought there was room for something with a bit more mischief, voice and style. It's been so fun walking around talking to people and asking questions—I feel like grown-up Harriet the Spy.

Hard same.

Here’s what I’m paying attention to this week:

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But most Bordeaux doesn’t come from those places.

Most Bordeaux lives in the space between — geographically, stylistically, and economically. This is the broad middle of the region, where scale becomes visible again and where the system reveals its practical side.

If the previous lessons were about identity, this one is about volume and everyday function.

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Entre-Deux-Mers: The Literal Middle

Between the Garonne and the Dordogne sits Entre-Deux-Mers (ahn-truh duh mehr), which translates, somewhat confusingly, to “between two seas.”

This is a large, rolling area of mixed soils — clay, limestone, sand — without the same concentration of elite vineyard sites found on either bank.

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You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

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It is Memorial Day weekend in Montauk, and it is raining. Again.

Before the crowds arrived, I went looking for what the internet thinks the internet is wearing in the Hamptons. The search results were a mood board assembled by a machine that has never been cold. At the top, above the links, a paragraph of AI-authored advice appeared with the cheerful authority of a personal shopper who has no physical body and therefore no relationship to temperature:

People in the Hamptons this spring/summer are embracing intentional elegance and relaxed coastal luxury. The vibe is intentionally effortless, featuring breathable resort wear, preppy-nautical staples, and refined, figure-skimming evening silhouettes that look great whether you are grabbing coffee in Sag Harbor or dining in Montauk.

Below this, the AI had organized its findings into categories marked by emojis:

☀️ Daytime Casual & Beach-to-Bar.

🌸 Weekend & Garden Party.

🥂 Evening Elegance.

The advice within was specific and comprehensive. Elevated neutrals. Crisp white denim. Structured raffia totes. Breezy crochet pants, which are “reigning supreme.” For the evenings, it warned, “coastal evenings can turn cool,” and recommended a lightweight blazer or a cashmere sweater tied around the shoulders. This was the AI’s sole acknowledgment that weather exists: a styling opportunity, a chance to deploy a second layer as an accessory.

And then, at the bottom, after it had catalogued every possible outfit for every possible Hamptons activity: a prompt. Could you tell me what specific events or activities you have planned out east so I can help you style a more exact outfit?

Google’s AI had appointed itself my personal stylist. It was like Clippy, but supercharged — Microsoft’s now vintage cartoon paperclip, pumped full of every aspirational image the internet has ever indexed, suddenly very confident it could dress me for a holiday weekend. The internet was consulted. The forecast was not.

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I have been watching people arrive all weekend in outfits that cannot accommodate a drizzle, let alone the sustained Atlantic damp that has hung over the town since Friday. The sandy colors are everywhere — oatmeal, bone, ecru, the kind of fakely understated neutrals that cost a lot to look like they cost nothing. These are clothes for the Hamptons of the imagination: golden hour, dry hair, a breeze that photographs well but never chills you.

The LoveShackFancy girls found out immediately what happens to ruffled cotton in a downpour. The dresses went from “effortless garden party” to “drowned Victorian ghost” in a matter of minutes. Reformation linen, which is designed to look best when it is slightly rumpled, looked not rumpled but defeated — soaked through at the shoulders, clinging in the wrong places. One woman in a full matching set the color of sand walked through the IGA parking lot and I watched the hemline darken as it wicked up water from the asphalt, a sadness slowly climbing the fabric.

The Tuluminati drug-rug contingent has also been reanimated for SS26; patterned co-ord sets from Road To Nowhere, the crunchy-luxury aesthetic that migrated north from Tulum a few summers ago and never left. The sets are made of materials that look cozy and are, in practice, extremely absorbent. I have seen several people wearing these outfits today and all of them are shivering. The circle-brim hats — which have not gone out of fashion in these spaces, season after season, for reasons no one can explain — were meant for sun protection and are now being used as tiny, failing umbrellas for men who are, most certainly, brand ambassadors for new tequila start-ups.

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What is awesome about all of this is that no one adjusts course. The outfit was chosen, the outfit is worn, the outfit will be seen. Stubbornness is too small a word for it. These people paid for the Hamptons, and the Hamptons must happen. The rain is not part of the plan, so the rain is being collectively ignored — a mass refusal, polite but absolute, to acknowledge the weather happening to them.

In a way, I admire the commitment. But, in practice, it’s very difficult to accommodate the Hampton crowd’s weekend aspirations when no one can go outside. This town is not built for indoor leisure. Every interior space in Montauk is currently occupied by someone who does not want to be inside. Everyone is drinking faster than they want to because drinking is the only sanctioned indoor activity, and going back to the rental — the rental that cost many thousands of dollars to inhabit for three days — would be admitting that the day is a loss.

So the charade continues. The enthusiasm thins out as the afternoon drags on; you can see it in the way the smile arrives for the photo op and vanishes the moment the phone lowers. A group of six in matching Sandy Liang fleeces — an upgrade, at least, from the linen contingent, though no less committed to the bit — spent forty minutes at my bar pretending to live their best life. They ordered another round before they had finished the first. They took a photo with the Aperol spritzes arranged in a neat little row, the gray window behind them cropped carefully out of frame. Then someone’s boyfriend said something about how it might be clearing up, and everyone looked at the sky with the desperate optimism of people who have not yet accepted that the weekend they planned is not the weekend they are having.

The outfits cannot go back to the rental. The outfits must be seen. So the dresses get wetter, the straw bags fill with rainwater, the Staud sandals — designed, I am fairly sure, for surfaces that are dry — slide across the floor of every bar in town.

As I watch all this unfold I keep thinking about the Google AI stylist. It offered to help. When I asked it what to do about rain in Montauk, it recommended something sensible about waterproof layers. It suggested, responsibly, a trench and rain boots. What it did not say is that nobody here wants a trench. The trench is absent from the training data. The training data is golden hour and circle brims and LoveShackFancy campaigns shot on dry afternoons with real sunlight and models who are not shivering. The AI learned the Hamptons from the same images the visitors learned from. It cannot help them because the Hamptons it knows has no weather.

Neither does theirs. Someone in a soaked co-ord set is walking past Goldberg’s right now, holding a phone in one hand and a dripping hat in the other. She is checking to see if the rain will clear in time for sunset.

It will not.

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

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Memorial Day weekend is here, which means the Hamptons restaurant ecosystem is preparing for its first busy weekend. The only problem is, it’s supposed to rain for the next few days. Get ready for lots of weather talk on this letter.

Earlier this week, Jonathan Gray and I hosted a Selection Massale Summer Portfolio tasting at Bird on the Roof. Jonathan is also the GM of Massale, which meant we opened a lot of very serious wine for a crowd that was, thankfully, not taking itself too seriously. Ideal conditions, honestly.

The patio slowly filled with restaurant people, beverage buyers, and a few stray members of the East End pilates-industrial complex. Mostly everyone just wanted to stand around drinking good wine and catching up after months apart. Usually by this point in May I’m already ready to commit a misdemeanor after hearing “how was your winter?” for the fiftieth time, but this one felt genuinely nice. All tasting notes below were from the wines we showed. If you missed the tasting but are interested in the wines, they all available out here.

I’m collecting intel all summer long, and I’ll probably make a Hamptons city guide pretty soon. Hit me with anything interesting. In the meantime, here’s what I’m paying attention to.

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This is the land east of the Dordogne River, anchored by Saint-Émilion (san ay-mee-lee-ON) and Pomerol (pohm-uh-ROL). The vineyards sit on a mix of limestone plateaus, clay slopes, and sandy flats, and those soils change the entire rhythm of Bordeaux.

The wines are not lighter. They’re just organized differently.

Less about tannin as frame, more about texture as core.

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The Structure of the Right Bank

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Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

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People are getting all kinds of information about wine on social media. Mostly, I think this is this is a good thing, even when it’s painful for me to watch. However terrible algorithmic media is for society in general, in the wine world, the harms are relatively minor and generally outweighed by the benefits. The only real problem for me is when a twenty-something downtown bro in baggy jeans looks up from the wine list and says with absolute confidence, “we’ll have the BOO-jo-lay.”

Now, I want him to have this wine, and I want him to enjoy it without a lot of intervention on my part. I also want to correct his pronunciation, to save him future embarrassments. I can’t obviously correct him because that would harsh the vibe table-side and potentially make him look silly in front of his date, or his friends. I also can’t let him go through life speaking like this forever. So I resort to a third thing, which anyone who has spent time working in restaurants knows well: I simply repeat the order back to him, but pronounced correctly, without emphasizing the correction.

This is a micro-calculation I and my colleagues in the restaurant business have performed thousands of times. How do we make it known, without making it known? The person in front of us, dumb as they may appear, has gone out on a limb to express interest in a wine. We do not want to scold them. We do, however, want to offer an example of how someone fluent in this world speaks, because it usually seems clear that this person wants to become someone who knows what they’re talking about.

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There’s been some very good writing on Substack lately about wine, elitism, and younger drinkers, including pieces by , , and two especially strong essays from Everyday Drinking by and . Together, they form a rich conversation about expertise, aspiration, alcohol culture, and the increasingly fragile social conditions under which people learn to care about anything at all; unfolding against the alcohol industry’s constant panic about why Gen Z is supposedly abandoning wine.

Silver’s piece, which prompted my own earlier essay Build a Bigger Table, Not a Dumber Wine List, argues that wine did not lose cultural relevance because it became too elitist, but because parts of the industry became embarrassed by expertise altogether. Strip away the history, ritual, specificity, and pleasure of becoming more perceptive over time, and wine simply becomes another lifestyle product competing against canned cocktails designed by branding agencies. I argued in my own piece that you can create a plurality of entry points without dumbing down wine’s complexity in the vague name of “demystification.”

I still think Silver is right. What I underestimated in my first response, however, is the degree to which younger drinkers are already demonstrating enormous appetite for complexity — just not necessarily inside institutional wine culture itself.

This is where ’s piece comes in. Her central observation is almost embarrassingly obvious once stated plainly: younger drinkers are not stupid. They are not uniquely incapable of nuance, patience, curiosity, or obsession. The modern internet is basically an engine for turning ordinary people into highly specialized amateurs. Entire subcultures now revolve around espresso extraction variables, Japanese denim provenance, obscure fragrance notes, modular synthesis, and baseball stats. People willingly spend thousands of dollars and countless hours acquiring fluency inside worlds that would appear completely psychotic to outsiders. Nobody watches a man explain the infield fly rule with the intensity of a medieval theologian and concludes that baseball needs to become less elitist.

What Lamb also points out is that much of the contemporary “accessibility” discourse around wine does not actually serve wine culture so much as it serves the commercial interests of large-scale commodity producers who benefit from wine functioning as a frictionless, low-engagement consumer product. A culture that encourages people to care deeply about producer, farming, vintage variation, geography, and style is ultimately a culture that becomes harder to sell industrial sameness to. Which means some portion of the endless insistence that wine must become simpler, easier, less specific, and less serious is not really about democratization at all. It is about maintaining a consumer base trained not to look too closely.

David uses baseball to interrogate this tension between enthusiasm and snobbery. Wine remains unusual in that it is one of the only enthusiast cultures where expertise itself is routinely treated as vaguely suspect. A person can spend twenty minutes explaining natural-process Ethiopian coffee and be understood as passionate; explain the difference between Côte Chalonnaise and Côte de Beaune and suddenly everyone starts reaching for the word “pretentious” like it’s a fire extinguisher.

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Part of this is because wine carries the residue of class performance and social sorting in ways that many other enthusiast cultures do not. People do not merely fear being wrong about wine; they fear being revealed as the wrong kind of person around it. The anxiety is often less about taste itself than about public self-consciousness.

This is why so much contemporary wine discourse ends up trapped between two equally condescending extremes.

The older form is familiar: the weaponized wine list, the sommelier monologue delivered like an oratorio, the subtle implication that ignorance is embarrassing. But the newer form — the aggressively flattened “wine should just be fun!” posture — often arrives at an equally insulting conclusion. In an effort to appear democratic, parts of the industry now speak to younger consumers as though they are incapable of seriousness altogether. Expertise gets apologized for before it is even expressed. Complexity becomes something to disguise beneath memes, cartoon labels, and the kind of chirpy anti-snob rhetoric that increasingly resembles a children’s television host explaining orange wine to someone with a master’s degree.

The irony is that younger drinkers are already entering highly coded taste systems all the time. They are perfectly comfortable learning difficult symbolic languages online. What they reject is not expertise, but asymmetrical social and financial risk. They prefer environments where curiosity is rewarded rather than punished.

That distinction — between initiation and humiliation — increasingly feels central to the entire conversation. Every meaningful enthusiast culture contains forms of initiation. You learn terminology. You make mistakes. You slowly develop sensitivity. You acquire references. Ideally, you become more perceptive, more attentive, more capable of noticing pleasure at higher resolution. This is not oppression. This is culture. What people reject is humiliation masquerading as expertise.

And what the wine industry often misunderstands is that hospitality and aspiration are not opposites. Under current economic conditions, they probably need each other more than ever.

A glass of wine in New York now routinely costs somewhere between sixteen and thirty dollars, which means every recommendation carries actual emotional risk. Younger drinkers are navigating wine culture under radically different material conditions than the ones that produced earlier generations of aspirational dining culture. Rent is higher. Social life is more fragmented. Restaurants themselves increasingly feel overdetermined by status signaling and financial anxiety. Going out often involves the strange psychological experience of spending half your grocery budget in a room where everyone is pretending not to calculate the math in real time. Young people simply do not have a lot of extra money to spend.

Under those conditions, condescension becomes economically intolerable very quickly.

’s recent essay widens the frame. His invocation of Hilton Als’s fairly brutal Whitney Biennial review — particularly the observation that contemporary social life increasingly oscillates between isolation and managed spectacle — gets at something larger than wine marketing. Many of the institutions that once slowly inducted people into communal forms of taste and pleasure have either collapsed, become prohibitively expensive, or been replaced by algorithmically flattened substitutes. Drinking itself now exists inside a strange moral atmosphere: simultaneously aestheticized, optimized, pathologized, and distrusted.

And the answer is, of course, better hospitality.

The best sommeliers I know understand this intuitively. They do not dumb wine down, nor do they perform expertise like a dominance ritual. They create permeability. They make it possible for people to move upward into greater fluency without pretending the fluency itself is meaningless. They also understand that part of what people are paying for is permission: permission to participate in a world that still believes attention, sensitivity, and cultivated pleasure matter.

This is why I remain skeptical of any framework that treats aspiration itself as inherently exclusionary. Most people want access to richer forms of cultural life. They want to care about things. They want to become more interesting versions of themselves. The popularity of niche expertise cultures online demonstrates this constantly. (The dude ordering ‘BOO-jo-lay’ probably knows more about sports betting and no-smoke nicotine delivery systems than I ever will!) What people do not want is to feel managed, patronized, or socially punished for trying.

And this is where the contemporary anti-elitism rhetoric in wine rings hollow. In trying to make wine appear maximally accessible, parts of the industry have accidentally evacuated the category of conviction altogether. The subtext increasingly becomes: relax, none of this really matters anyway. And by the way, why aren’t you buying the cheapest and least interesting bottles anymore?

But if nothing matters, eventually everyone tunes out. Wine does not need to become less intelligent to survive. If anything, it probably needs more spaces where intelligence, pleasure, and hospitality can coexist without embarrassment.

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Hello from the Hamptons, where it is still technically spring, though the machinery of summer is already beginning to hum. The beaches are empty, the air still cold enough for a jacket at night, and the magnolias are blooming in these sudden soft bursts of psychedelic pink that make the whole place feel briefly serene before it turns inevitably into a war zone.

The restaurants are waking up. Deliveries are arriving. Furniture is being dragged back outside. Rental business is reportedly up compared to the last couple of years, which we, in the restaurant business, treat as a leading indicator that we will be especially weeded this year. As I try to soak up my remaining quiet time in the cellar, unpacking boxes and organizing bottles before we open for the season, I’m also workshopping a lecture to all the dudes wearing Kith graphic tees and backwards flat brims about how ChatGPT is not going to be good at choosing wine for them.

One quick piece of news: next Monday, May 18th, I’ll be pouring wines with Selection Massale’s Jonathan Gray for a special Hamptons tasting at Bird on the Roof, in Montauk. If you’re out east and work in the business, consider this your invite. Reply to this email if you want details or want to RSVP.

Expect pét-nats, fresh whites, chillable reds, and the sort of wines that would have felt almost impossible to sell out here even five or six years ago. After more than a decade working in the Hamptons, it’s genuinely interesting to watch local wine culture begin catching up to broader national drinking trends. The natural wine conversation has finally arrived out east — just filtered through beach clubs, luxury hospitality groups, and markups that occasionally border on performance art.

Here’s what else is up:

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Located just south of the city of Bordeaux, Graves is the historical heart of the region — the place where serious Bordeaux wine was first established long before the Médoc marshes were even drained. The name itself means “gravel,” and like the Médoc, those soils define what’s possible here.

But Graves does something the Médoc doesn’t.

It makes both serious red and serious white wine — and that alone changes the tone.

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The Structure of Graves

Graves is divided into two main pieces:

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You can find my most recent feature here.

This piece is part of the Reviews section, where I visit restaurants, bars, and drinking establishments and look closely at the cooking, hospitality, and cultural theater of going out.

Reviews, like Friday features, are always free. But if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

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Bistrot Ha is loud. The music pushes right up against the volume of the crowd, and the crowd pushes right back. This place sustains a kind of perfectly managed overflow, a surplus of energy that makes you immediately want to order another drink.

The room is physically small — larger than the cultishly tiny Ha’s Đặc Biệt, the Lower East Side restaurant from owners Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha that already achieved the status of downtown crown jewel — but it still operates with the compressed intensity of a place on the verge of combustion.

We sat three across at the corner of the bar, which to my mind is almost always the best seat in the house. From there you can watch the entire living organism function: Anthony Ha’s kitchen, staffed by only a handful of people, pushing out Viet/French bistro mutations with alarming efficiency while the dining room folds in around itself like an accordion. Nobody appears stressed exactly, but everyone seems locked into the same frenetic rhythm. The energy is less fine dining precision than extremely competent band practice.

The crowd, on the night I was there, skewed heavily toward the kind of people who still know how to have fun in restaurants without making a full content strategy out of it. Fashion people, wine people, hospitality people, a table of New York Times writers tucked into the back, downtown couples sharing cigarettes outside between courses. The room possessed the loose confidence of a place already canonized within the cultural class, but not yet flattened into a mandatory stop for finance guys who get their restaurant recommendations from TikTok. Bistrot Ha has already become one of the most critically successful openings in the city, but somehow still feels more beloved than contrived.

Part of that feeling comes from the fact that the restaurant allows enthusiasm to remain visible. Before we were seated, the host greeted us with a splash of German pét-nat. When I asked what it was, he admitted, smiling, that he wasn’t entirely sure how to pronounce the grape — “sch…something.” “Scheurebe!” I replied, perhaps too eagerly. For those who do not spend their free time thinking about obscure aromatic German varieties, Scheurebe makes highly perfumed wines full of grapefruit, herbs, tropical fruit and electric acidity; the sort of wine natural wine bars love because it feels simultaneously nerdy, unserious, drinkable and usually affordable. We exchanged a few quick thoughts about it before he had to greet the next arrival. The moment lasted only a few seconds, but it clarified something important about the restaurant’s overall proposition. At Bistrot Ha, hospitality arrives slightly ahead of mastery. The wine list is clearly assembled by people with serious taste, but what’s more immediately apparent is that everyone here seems genuinely psyched on what they’re serving.

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That same improvisational swagger carries into the food. Nothing here tastes remotely dialed down. Contemporary downtown restaurant cooking has spent the last decade flirting with restraint, elegance, tiny portions arranged with architectural severity. Bistrot Ha appears to have looked at all this, shrugged, and decided that if a little fish sauce is good then an irresponsible amount might be even better.

The bartender, a tall and permanently cheerful presence working the corner closest to the door, joked while walking us through the cocktails that every dish on the menu contains fish sauce in some form, so they felt obligated to sneak it into a drink as well. The Ha’s Martini — gin, impossibly cold, garnished with a small pickled oyster — initially drinks cleaner than expected, almost delicate, until the oyster arrives afterward carrying a dense saline minerality that rephrases the cocktail retroactively. It eschews the muddy oxidized flavors of olive-brine that overtake many dirty martinis in favor of something sharper, colder, more tidal.

The menu itself plays a game of semantic camouflage. Dishes are described through ingredient fragments rather than recognizable forms, so that flavors arrive first as surprise and only later as recognition. A plate of asparagus appeared over a surprisingly bright, chopped egg sauce that, at first bite, revealed itself as a quirked-up take on gribiche; bright enough with vinegar to make the whole plate hum electrically. Smoky, pickled mussels scattered over the top kept interrupting the richness in brief jolts of marine funk. The bartender mentioned that the dish had only recently replaced the restaurant’s oft-lauded vertically arranged leeks vinaigrette, a reminder that the menu is in constant evolution.

Fried yuba stuffed with pork, shrimp, and cabbage arrived under the vague disguise of a tofu dish, only to immediately trigger the deep sensory memory of an exceptionally elegant Vietnamese egg roll. The yuba shattered with unbelievable crispness before collapsing into sweet-savory nuoc mam. Elsewhere, fried shrimp arrived beneath a glossy brown sauce whose acid and umami levels appeared calibrated by someone fundamentally unconcerned with moderation. At a certain point it becomes clear that the governing principle of the kitchen is not balance in the classical sense, but escalation. Every flavor, texture, and sensation is nudged just slightly beyond where another restaurant might stop. These dishes are cranked to eleven.

Usually this works beautifully. A peppercorn-crusted pork chop soaking in clam liquor and shrimp paste was probably the strongest dish we ate all night, managing to feel both bistro-ish and slightly deranged. A steak au poivre, meanwhile, arrived under a dense Sichuan-peppercorn-flecked sauce somewhere between the French pepper cream promised on the menu and Chinese-American brown sauce of childhood memory. Here, the kitchen’s tendency toward escalation briefly outran itself; the steak’s brazen savoriness exhausted the palate after a few bites. This particular dish was operating at, maybe, a twelve or thirteen. But strangely, even this felt consistent with the restaurant’s modus operandi. It is pursuing appetite at full blast.

I recognized the wine guy from his old job at Frenchette. He opened us a bottle of Ferme de la Sansonnière “La Lune,” a VdF of Chenin Blanc. In another context, a wine like this — oxidative edges, orchard fruit, wax, acidity held in tension with texture — might command the full intellectual attention of the table. Here it moved through the meal, cooling and resetting the palate against the relentless saturation of fish sauce, vinegar, shellfish and spice. Restaurants like Bistrot Ha, Win Son, and Sunn’s are helping normalize a style of pairing that still seems insane from the perspective of traditional wine culture: natural wines slammed against aggressively savory East and Southeast Asian flavor structures. But the pairing works because both the food and the wine prioritize energy over polish.

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Sadie Mae Burns, who remained in constant motion throughout the evening running food, clearing tables, and working the room, stopped by at one point to say hello and make sure we were taken care of. What struck me was not simply her competence, though there was plenty of that, but the sheer amount of warmth she still seemed capable of generating outward into the room despite the velocity of service around her. Some people possess a genuine gift for making strangers feel welcomed into the momentum of an evening, and Sadie seems to operate almost entirely on that frequency.

By that point the room had entered the wavy part of the evening where everyone seems to be pleasantly absorbed in the charming excesses of dining out. More bottles arriving. More fries than the table could possibly need. The music somehow just a little louder than before. The strange achievement of Bistrot Ha is that it manages to sustain all this energy without making too big a show of it. The place still feels genuinely thrilled to exist. It has not yet sanded down its edges into the defense mechanism of fake refinement. It still feels in process, very confident, occasionally ridiculous, and very much convinced that dinner should be fun.

You leave slightly overfed, slightly overstimulated, and with a ringing in your ears — fully convinced to go out for one more martini.

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Spring was fully switched on in New York City. McCarren Park was full of people walking their dogs and showing off thigh tattoos with real conviction. Margaritas everywhere. The terrace at Bar Valentina was completely packed—Gen Z-ers smoking cigs and speaking in questionably authentic accents.

The menus are keeping pace. I had an asparagus gribiche-inspired thing at Bistrot Ha that felt like it had been waiting all year to show up. A crisp-as-can-be little gem salad at The Four Horsemen achieves the freshness of a crisp gose beer on a sunny afternoon. Upstate, Stissing House is repping favas pretty hard, and Casa Susanna is grilling ramps and throwing them atop the most exciting beef tartare you’ve ever had.

My official excuse for going into the city was to sit down with , wine director and co-owner of Smithereens, to talk about how restaurants are starting to adopt editorial strategies to extend their point of view beyond the four walls of the dining room. Beyond her absolutely iconic Zine, there’s also King’s newsletter A Nibble and a Glass of Wine, ’s writing around Ernesto’s and Bartolo, and a growing number of small projects that that feel more like independent publications than e-mail marketing.

I wrote about this a bit last year, but it feels more real now. It’s a really interesting moment for independent restaurant media. Infinite niches to occupy. Infinite ways to make your concept legible.

The Kill Sancerre hat is here. Get one before it sells out.

Here’s what I’m paying attention to this week:

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Tasting Notes

• Michel Gahier Macvin du Jura — In my ongoing attempt to stack as much ambitious restaurant adventures into a single NYC day without getting too drunk, I’ve developed a new lunch move: a 2 oz pour of dessert wine. This one—at the bar at Four Horsemen last Thursday—was Michel Gahier’s Macvin, served alongside a blue crab and poached egg situation with tons of clarified butter and a big piece of aggressively crusty baguette. If you don’t know it, Macvin is a fortified Jura specialty: fresh grape must blended with marc (grape spirit), then aged oxidatively, landing somewhere between a mistelle and a young vin de liqueur. Gahier’s version leans nutty, honeyed, and lightly spiced, with enough lift to keep it from feeling heavy. The sweetness didn’t mute the spice so much as round it out, smoothing the heat while locking into the richness of the egg and the butter running through the whole dish.

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This is the stretch of land north of the city of Bordeaux, running along the left bank of the Gironde estuary. It’s flat, forested in parts, and not obviously dramatic. But beneath that surface is one of the most consequential soil formations in wine: deep gravel beds layered over clay and limestone.

That gravel is everything.

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The Structure of the Médoc

The Médoc divides into two broad zones:

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For a long time, it was the reference point — the model for what “serious wine” was supposed to taste like. Structure, oak, blends, aging potential. Entire generations of winemakers around the world built their wines in its image, often flattening those ideas into something more generic along the way.

That legacy lingers. For a lot of people, “Bordeaux” now reads as a style before it reads as a place — and not always in a flattering way.

At the same time, the top end of the region has drifted into a different reality. The most famous wines are priced more like financial assets than something you’d casually open, which has quietly pushed them out of everyday conversation.

But underneath all of that — the reputation, the pricing, the imitation — Bordeaux is still capable of something very specific and very compelling. At its best, it’s not just structured or powerful. It’s balanced at scale — over 117,000 hectares of vineyard and thousands of growers — built from moving parts that somehow resolve into a complete wine.

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If Burgundy trains you to zoom in, Bordeaux asks you to step back and understand how the system holds together. And that system starts with water.

The Rivers:

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Last weekend I was trying to wrap my brain around a flight of palomino wines—one gorgeously textured table wine and two sherries of different ages—when something pulled my attention away from the glass. The bartender was mid-presentation on something to do with solera aging when a young man walked in with his mother. This young lion was maybe fourteen years old. He was wearing a Geese T-shirt and a pair of untinted goggles perched on his forehead. He looked insane, and also just a little bit cool, in a way I didn’t fully understand.

I am, at best, begrudgingly aware of the band Geese. I have resisted the discourse as a matter of principle. I do not listen to them, and I do not observe hot takes about them—especially from those who want to question their fame based on just having learned how social media marketing works. As a child of Leonard Cohen- and Talking Heads–listening parents, and a survivor of the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah mania of the 2000s, I want absolutely nothing to do with them. I don’t fault others for feeling differently, but I am here for the oxidized pleasures of amontillado, not a referendum on indie rock legitimacy.

Still, the move was too precise and too weird to ignore. The shirt, as a basically utilitarian object, makes sense. You buy it at a show, you wear it later, and the garment does a small amount of social work on your behalf. It is quotidian clothing with an added layer of meaning, which is to say it is exactly what clothing has always been. It is a small but meaningful gesture of affinity.

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The goggles are something else. Outside of an aquatic environment, they serve no practical purpose, and it seems like their uselessness is the point. The message is no longer “I like this band,” but “I am willing to look kind of ridiculous to make that affinity legible.” The shirt states a preference; the goggles insist on it. They push the whole thing a step past coherence and into a kind of performative surplus.

One of the founding premises of this newsletter is that identity, as it moves through public space, is assembled out of consumer choices that double as performative statements. A purchase is never just a purchase; it is a small speculative bet on how an object might render you readable to others, a projection of meaning tied to—borrowing from Lauren Berlant—a “cluster of promises” that may or may not ever resolve.

The performance travels outward; the interpretation comes back altered, partial, sometimes completely wrong. Misrecognition is a precondition of legibility itself. As put it to me recently, that gap is simply “the price of doing business,” as a soul inside a body, or really as any subject, trying to express anything at all.

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One response to the inevitability of misrecognition could loosely be named the “anti-aesthetic.” The anti-aesthetic emerges as a kind of defensive posture: a refusal to play at full intensity, a dialing-down of signal in the hope that neutrality might offer some relief. Normcore was the cleanest articulation of this impulse, but its logic has persisted ever since, in more ambient forms, most of which orbit the idea that taste is best expressed by appearing not to have any.

The problem is that this move is almost instantly co-optable. The moment you decide that the safest position is to opt out of signaling, that decision itself becomes a signal—one that is incredibly easy to reproduce. We seen it in the hollow vibe of the unbranded dad hat with arbitrary sans-serif text.

recently argued in their broadside against “dumb dad hats,” is that this low-voltage mode has become the easiest aesthetic for brands to reproduce at scale. The anti-aesthetic, once framed as a rejection of excess, now functions as a kind of stylistic autopilot. Minimal design, vague messaging, just enough texture to imply taste without committing to anything that might actually mean anything. The result is not restraint but glut: a landscape crowded with mass-produced objects that are technically inoffensive and spiritually empty, each one asking very little of its maker or its wearer.

Against that backdrop, the urge to make a slightly incorrect, possibly embarrassing, or needlessly specific choice looks compelling. Not because it restores authenticity in any grand sense, but because it reintroduces stakes. It forces a bit of commitment back into the system.

Thirst Behavior’s inaugural essay, “Kill Sancerre” was borne of this impulse. The original piece was written out of a familiar service frustration: the way Sancerre functions as a default order, a kind of conversational shortcut that allows everyone involved to bypass decision-making. It dominates by being broadly acceptable, easy to pronounce, and just obscure enough to make people feel fancy, which in practice means that it crowds out more interesting wines, inflates the price, and lowers the quality of the wine.

It is not a bad wine; it is a bad habit.

The secondary effect of writing that essay, and then continuing to write under its shadow, is that Sancerre has attached itself to my own legibility in ways that are both predictable and slightly absurd. Friends now treat it as a conversational tripwire. Bottles appear at tables with a level of theatricality that suggests they are either a gift or a provocation. Entire interactions bend around the question of whether I will acknowledge it, reject it, or pretend not to see it at all. None of this was part of the plan, but it tracks with the basic mechanics: you make a claim, the claim becomes a signal, and the signal loops back into your life with added noise. Misrecognition is the price of doing business.

At this point, I should probably mention that I’m writing today to try to sell you a dumb dad hat that says “Kill Sancerre.”

I am aware that making Thirst Behavior merch is, on its face, a slightly ridiculous thing to do, especially when the object in question is a dad hat, the very form currently under indictment. The original version existed as a private joke, realized as a birthday gift by my wife, and perhaps it should have stayed there. Instead, it now exists as a purchasable object, ready to circulate through the same compromised channels of meaning/production as everything else.

What I find compelling about it has less to do with the statement itself and more to do with the form it takes as it moves through the world. The phrase “Kill Sancerre” is too blunt to function as a literal position, which frees it up to operate as something else: a gesture of affinity.

I see this as a bit closer to what ’s The Cut called Zizmorcore: a mode of wearable pride for a niche cognoscenti. In that case, the object—a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a dermatologist seen in subway ads—turns a hyper-specific allegiance into a kind of social signal that is legible only to certain audiences and faintly absurd to everyone else. The point is not universal clarity but selective recognition, the small thrill of being understood by the right people and misunderstood by everyone else.

The hat works, if it works at all, in a similar register. It is not a clean statement of taste, and it does not resolve the problems it points toward. It is a slightly overcommitted gesture, a way of saying, with a degree of intentional exaggeration, that you are willing to take a position even when the position is unstable, porous, or open to misreading. It is, in other words, closer to the goggles than the T-shirt.

You do not need the hat. No one does. But if you find yourself wanting it, I would suggest that the desire has less to do with Sancerre than with the appeal of making a slightly unnecessary choice and seeing what it does to your own legibility. It is a small experiment in how much signal you can introduce before the message slips, mutates, or comes back to you in a form you did not anticipate. As an example, one of the first times I wore the prototype out in public, I found myself in an argument about capitalism and terroir with the manager of a 7-Eleven in Manorville, Long Island.

The kid at Mirador had already run that experiment. He walked into a wine bar wearing a Geese T-shirt and a pair of goggles that served no purpose other than to insist on his own preferences a little too loudly. The result was not perfect clarity; it was something stranger and more interesting, a signal that exceeded its own usefulness and became, in the process, impossible to ignore. And that’s not a bad place to land.

Cop the cap here.

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Good evening,

Hamptons summer intel is starting to come in.

I’m bouncing between there, here, and the city right now, juggling a handful of projects, and it already feels like it’s going to be a big one. The early signals are strong: familiar spaces turning over and new concepts that might actually stick.

This summer will also be the one year anniversary of Thirst Behavior. How should we celebrate? I’m currently working on a piece about how algorithmic social media is reshaping the way people buy wine, specifically through creator-led wine clubs. If you run one, subscribe to one, build the platforms that power them—or just have strong opinions—I want to hear from you.

Here’s what I’m paying attention to this week.

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Geographically, Beaujolais sits just south of the Mâconnais. Administratively, it’s often grouped under greater Burgundy. But geologically and stylistically, it marks a clear shift. The limestone escarpment fades. The soils turn to granite and schist. The climate warms slightly. The grape changes and the wine style changes with it.

Beaujolais is not about hierarchy in the same way as the Côte d’Or. It’s about energy, fruit purity, and an entirely different expression of site.

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The Grape: Gamay (gah-MAY)

Beaujolais is built on Gamay Noir à Jus Blanc, usually shortened to Gamay.

Gamay is thin-skinned, early ripening, and high in natural acidity. It can produce:

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You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Those who know me know that I LOVE to consume information. I have a real kink for how-to explainers and easy taxonomies. If you knew how much time I’ve spent on YouTube tutorials for niche musical genres I’ll never make, you’d be genuinely disturbed. I can also name an alarming number of weasel species, for reasons I can only trace back to my childhood interest in one them: the North American river otter. Unfortunately in my professional life, answers to my most burning questions are never so neat, or easy to come by.

I write about how restaurants use wine to create meaningful experiences, and I consult on wine programs, which means I’m constantly circling the same set of questions: how do you make a small, wine-focused restaurant actually work—financially, operationally, aesthetically, rhetorically—in a city that seems designed to make that outcome unlikely?

Some of this thinking has made its way into a couple of recent pieces I wrote for —one on pricing, and one on access. A while back I also tried my hand at a how-to explainer for entering the somm trade.

This piece is an attempt to distill what I’ve learned from a handful of wine directors and operators I consider the best in the business, and translate it into something usable. It’s not a single strategy so much as a set of overlapping priorities—some of which build on each other, some run counter to others.

They tend to orbit some common questions: how quickly money moves through a program; how a list signals approachability; the importance of being a neighborhood staple; when a wine is ready to drink, as opposed to merely available; and, increasingly, how all of this gets communicated beyond the dining room, to people who may encounter the idea of a place long before they ever sit down in it.

Taken together, they start to look like a philosophy. This is, admittedly, one for the nerds—the people who care about list architecture, by-the-glass rotation and optimal drinking windows—but I’ll do my best to keep it moving.

Let’s get into it.

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1. Liquidity matters more than margin

—who owns King, Lei, Jupiter, and now Dean’s in Soho—talks about pricing in a way that most wine programs, frankly, avoid. Restaurants love clean percentages, applied consistently, as if the goal were to preserve a ratio rather than run a business. But wine is one of the only parts of the operation that can reliably turn back into cash—if you let it—and what matters is not how much you make per bottle, but how quickly you get your money back.

The faster a program turns over, the more liquid the business becomes. Cash returns to the system, covering labor, absorbing rising food costs, underwriting the next order. A list full of slow-moving, perfectly marked-up bottles may look disciplined on paper, but it locks up capital. This is where percentage-based pricing is not totally adequate, especially at the higher end, where holding the line on margin often means pricing wines into a zone where they simply don’t move. Once they stop moving, the logic collapses: you’re not protecting margin, you’re freezing cash.

Shi’s approach is more pragmatic, and less comfortable. Price the wine to sell. Go further than you think you need to. Accept less on the bottle—especially the expensive ones—if it means the bottle leaves the building.

2. Use the wine list to communicate value

If Shi’s model is about how money moves, —partner in Claud, Penny, and now Stars—is concerned with how it feels. He understands the wine list in terms of information design, and attends to the emotional aspects of wine pricing. He asks, “how does this [price] feel to the guest?” This requires a weekly meeting with each of his wine directors, where they reprice the list based on everything that could affect that emotional reading: competitors’ pricing, retail value, secondary markets overseas, all of it.

Structure matters. What appears first, what is emphasized, what is made legible without effort—these decisions shape how a guest reads the room. A list can signal generosity, or it can signal extraction. At Stars, that signal is intentional: affordable wines are not buried but foregrounded, establishing immediately that someone can drink well without spending excessively.

This does more than drive sales at the lower end, though it does that too. It resets the emotional baseline. Once a guest feels a place “has their back,” the rest of the list opens up; a four-figure bottle no longer reads as a trap, but as an option. Sinzer describes this as building a base: if people know they can participate comfortably, they stop scanning for signs of exploitation. The defensive posture drops, and with it, the friction around spending.

3. Serve your neighborhood

These first two principles—liquidity and legibility—find their most durable expression in restaurants built not around destination dining, but around return visits. Mike Patricola, who runs the wine program at Chez Ma Tante, understands this intuitively. Over the better part of a decade, the restaurant has settled into its role as a neighborhood anchor on the Greenpoint waterfront, and the list reflects that stability without becoming static.

Here, the goal is not to impress once, but to be used repeatedly. That requires a precise calibration of audience: millennial professionals who care about what they’re drinking but also need to function the next morning, guests who come often enough to notice patterns, and, increasingly, their parents—who appear over time and often pick up the bill. The list responds accordingly. It is natural-leaning but not doctrinaire, serious but legible—a natural wine list for grown-ups.

Pricing reinforces this. The ceiling is kept in check, while the middle of the list is dense with bottles that feel like easy decisions rather than negotiations. In-demand producers appear, but are priced to be opened, not admired. Familiarity and reliability are not concessions; they are the conditions of return.

The engine behind this is programming. Patricola buys shallow and rotates frequently, especially by the glass, ensuring that the list remains alive without becoming disorienting. Wines move quickly enough to reward repeat visits, but not so quickly that regulars lose their footing. The result is a list that holds together multiple logics at once—recognition and discovery, consistency and change.

To serve your neighborhood, in this sense, is not simply to reflect it, but to study it, respond to it, and build a system that people can re-enter without recalibration. In a city organized around novelty, that capacity—to hold attention over time—is what allows a restaurant to survive.

4. Not all value is visible on the price

If liquidity is the starting point, it also defines the constraint under which more ambitious strategies operate. Jack Murphy, who runs programs across San Francisco and New Orleans, builds his lists around time—but only after accounting for the realities of liquidity. You cannot hold inventory if you have not first learned how to move it.

Restaurants excel at signaling access—allocations, cult producers, recognizable labels—but are less consistent about whether those wines are actually ready to drink. The current release becomes the default not because it’s delicious, but because it is available.

Murphy’s thinking reframes this. Most great wines are not complete on release; they are structurally unresolved, their components—tannin, acid, CO₂, oak—present but often unintegrated. Given time, these elements settle into balance. Without it, the guest pays for the idea of the wine without receiving the experience it promises.

The difficulty, of course, is operational. Storage is expensive, space is limited, and cash is tied up in bottles that are not yet generating revenue. So most programs release wines early. Murphy does not. He buys when he can, but holds what matters, tasting and tracking bottles until they are ready to show.

The effect is subtle but decisive. A wine with real age, priced in line with—or even below—younger counterparts elsewhere, signals not just access but real care. You are not paying for the idea of the wine, but for a real wine that is drinking the way it should. Over time, the cellar becomes less a static asset than a reservoir, allowing the list to evolve without depending entirely on what is new.

5. The wine list doesn’t stop at the table

If the first four principles govern how a list functions internally, the final one addresses how it circulates externally. Nikkita Malhotra treats the wine program at as an editorial project, extending its logic beyond the dining room into a broader system of communication.

The list itself moves in themes—Riesling, Grenache, Champagne—each iteration reflecting a specific line of inquiry. It reads less like inventory than like an issue. Through the Zine, that thinking expands into essays, interviews, and dispatches from members of the team in different positions, translating what would once have been tacit knowledge into a distributed form.

This is not content for its own sake, but a way of making taste legible over time. One medium distills, the other elaborates; together they create coherence.

A similar logic appears at With Others in Williamsburg, where Nasiri’s Wine School turns the program into something participatory. Classes and tastings function as extensions of the list, allowing guests to engage with its values directly.

In both cases, the underlying problem is the same: a point of view must be communicated to exist. A wine program without one is just a list of options; a point of view without channels is invisible. My old friend has been speaking about the importance of knowing who the list is for, in order to know what the list is supposed to do. The restaurants that succeed here build systems—languages, and multiple ways of speaking them—meeting their audience across formats, before and beyond the table.

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Running a restaurant in New York is, by most accounts, a losing game that people continue to play anyway. Rent is too high, labor is expensive, and costs move faster than menus can adjust; for most operators, alcohol—wine especially—remains one of the only places where the math still has a chance of working.

It is therefore tempting to treat the wine list as a margin engine: price aggressively, protect the spread, and let the rest of the business sort itself out. The logic is clean, even defensible, but it tends to produce something brittle—programs that extract efficiently in the short term and undermine the conditions that would allow them to last.

The operators considered here are making a different kind of bet. They turn their inventory faster, even if it means taking less on each bottle; they design lists that make people feel comfortable spending money rather than daring them to; they build programs that reward repeat visits instead of one-time splurges; they hold wines until they are actually ready, even when that ties up cash; and increasingly, they find ways to communicate all of this beyond the room itself, extending their point of view across multiple channels.

None of these decisions maximize profit in the immediate sense. Most, in fact, introduce friction—more work, more attention, more risk. But taken together, they produce something more durable: trust, not as an abstract virtue but as a pattern of behavior—the decision to return next week, the willingness to order another bottle without hesitation, the sense that, whatever one spends, one is not being taken for a ride.

This is the real revenue model: not extraction, but accumulation; not the highest possible margin on a single night, but the gradual construction of a place people return to, and bring others into. In a city that makes this kind of patience feel almost irrational, it is also the only strategy that works.