(Photo Credit: David Benthal for northforker)
Local wine people — both inside and out of the industry proper — have long lamented how few local restaurants support and offer local wine. Short of visiting every restaurant and asking to see their wine lists, it is hard to know precisely who is listing local wine and how much of it. Visiting restaurant websites — many of which aren’t updated very often, rendering them largely useless — does offer some insight, though.
The results are still ugly, though there are some exceptions — restaurants doing good things with local wine. Some restaurants, like Love Lane Kitchen in Mattituck, even have an all-local list.
Maybe a future column will focus on some of the best local wine lists. Today, I’d like to share the experience I had in Manhattan over the weekend that makes Long Island restaurants that ignore local wine look even worse.
I bought my wife tickets to the opera for Christmas but picked a performance in late April near my birthday so I could justify some great eating and drinking before and after.
Most wine lists out here — with local wines or not — are pretty awful, so when I’m in the city, where lists are carefully compiled with unique, interesting wines, I take advantage. But I still notice the local wines on the list, and I came away impressed with what I found at both CraftBar, where we had a couple drinks before dinner, and Gramercy Tavern.