Wednesday 1/14
6-8 pm no reservations needed
$15 + 10% off wines tasted

It’s an odd position we wine merchants find ourselves in during “Dry January,” a month in which some folks eschew wine, having drunk a bit too much of it during the holiday season. For me, I didn’t drink sufficient wine during the holidays, as the rush of business (thank you!) found me schlepping home on New Year’s Eve, taking a swig of kombucha, and then falling asleep on the couch, arm wrapped around our cat, Prune, hours before the start of the new year. A bottle of Champagne, as yet untouched, still slumbers in our refrigerator. This year, there’s an additional, plaintive vibe to the whole thing, with some swearing off wine entirely, convinced that a glass or two of it will cause their livers and brains to explode. It’s a peculiar position, wanting customers to drink wine, indeed needing them to do so as it is the core value proposition of owning a wine shop, but wanting them to consume happily. Not too much, of course, and without fretting about the potential, deleterious effects of a glass of wine on our bodies and souls. The peer-reviewed science regarding alcohol consumption is uncertain, as, oddly, there’s a lower overall rate of mortality associated with moderate wine consumption, as Eric Asimov, responding to our former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, admirably summarized in the New York Times last year.

On a lighter note, the way I look at it, all nostrums are a placebo, and there’s nothing we can do to eliminate the inevitable. Here in Los Angeles, the banal act of driving to work always entails a nonzero probability of harm. One crucial thing that falls out of the actuarial calculus is the potential neuroprotective effect of wine consumption. I’m not referring to the debunked theory that the anthocyanins in red wine provide a significant source of disease-abating antioxidants (alas, the quantity of anthocyanins in a glass of even the most deeply pigmented red wine falls far below the threshold of clinical significance), but rather to something that we can experience whenever we taste, smell, and think while taking pleasure in a sip of a compelling wine. I hypothesize that functional MRI imaging might reveal that the act of experiencing an engaging wine—one that is not a product of industrial production and manufactured according to the same sort of psychographic-driven logic that gives us cake in a box and frozen TV dinners—lights up your brain in ways that other acts do not. Experiencing the flavors and aromas of the curious qualia of this experience, lionized in the Somm movies, where trained wine professionals demonstrate a prodigious ability to pick up on sensory cues and deduce the identity of a wine, is an experience also available to us mere mortals. In addition to this thought experiment, it seems to me that there may be a neuroprotective function in tasting a compelling wine with a friend or two, as the Greeks of antiquity knew well through their symposia, get-togethers when everything important in life was hashed out, gently lubricated by watered-down wine, dissolving the barriers that keep us apart. So, here’s to 2026, when it’s more important than ever to keep our brains lit and to spend precious moments with our precious friends.

Tonight, we’re tasting a few wines that may, I hope, light up our collective brains. We’re starting with some fizz, as we like to do, this time Vincent Bergeron “Certains l’Aiment Sec,” a dry, crisp pét-nat, organically farmed, of course, and all chenin. Then, a subtle, savory, flor-affected dry white wine from the brilliant winemaking couple, Martin Lichtenberger and Ariana Gonzalez, followed by a vastly different wine from another brilliant winemaking couple, Tomoko Kuriyama and Guillaume Bott, this one a cofermentation of gamay and aligoté. Next, we jump into the deep end of the pool with Laurent Lebled’s “Je t’Ai Dans la Peau” made from the medieval grape, menu pineau, a wine that opens up an interior space that resembles a primordial forest, or perhaps a stark, medieval-inflected science fiction magazine cover from the 1960s in which curious, non-humanoid aliens inspect our practices. To finish, a light, dry, fresh red wine from Justin Dutraive that to me perfectly encapsulates the thing about anti-industrial wine—you don’t need to be a somm to dig it, and can glug it happily without a thought, until you pause for a moment in conversation, and wonder, what the fuck is this thing of beauty?