Sommelier as Explorer

There’s no chance of forgetting you’re in a wine bar at Bar Boulud.Yes, chef Daniel Boulud’s newest creation does serve food, including a notable array of French charcuterie. But Thomas Schlesser’s design for the Upper West Side restaurant evokes a vineyard at every turn. Wine glasses hang upside-down at tables to the side and rear, ready to be grasped by thirsty patrons. The booths along the right are made from the same oak traditionally used for wine barrels and are equipped with indentations that resemble the riddling racks Champagne houses use to collect sediment in the bottlenecks of their bubbly. The backlit mesh walls are filled with shards of the sort of limestone found in Burgundy. Even the long dining room itself, with its vaulted ceiling and stone floor, is meant to look like a wine cellar.Walk downstairs toward the restrooms and private dining areas, and Schlesser’s world of wine continues. A narrow passageway lined with nickel-plated steel cages looks like a very attractively lit employee locker room. But it is, in fact, the wine cellar, the domain of the wine director, Daniel Johnnes. “It’s like a wine prison,” he joked, looking at the distinctive floor-to-ceiling metal bins where Bar Boulud’s 300 wine selections are stored. “Like Sing Sing.”That number may not seem like a lot of choices for a Boulud restaurant (the East Side’s Daniel has 1,600), but that was entirely the point, Mr. Johnnes said. “Daniel Boulud and I have been talking about this restaurant for seven years. The idea was to downscale it, make it casual. It’s a break from a lot of Daniel’s restaurants, where there’s a certain formality to it. I personally am tired of these voluminous wine lists. You feel this pressure. The idea is to keep this list tight.”The focus is on the Burgundy and Rhône regions, but there’s some wiggle room. A page of wine “cousins” is composed of wines made from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Grenache, and Syrah grapes grown in every corner of the planet, from France to Argentina to New Zealand. On another page, called “Coup de Coeur,” French for “heartthrob,” Mr. Johnnes throws all the rules out and simply tallies a dozen or so of his favorites.The heart of the list divides each major variety of wine (white Burgundy, say) into three: Legends (“Legendary vintages, legendary producers, and legendary prices,” quipped Mr. Johnnes); Classics (“A classic is just a classic appellation, like a Meursault”), and — Mr. Johnnes’s favorite part of the list — Discoveries.That is where he gets to experiment. “Saint Romain is not a classic,” he said, pointing to one offering. “It’s a small appellation. It’s in the backwoods of Burgundy. It’s something that most wine stores and restaurants don’t even carry. It’s something that most people aren’t familiar with.” Because most of the wines on the Discoveries pages are unfamiliar and under-celebrated, they can be fetched at bargain prices. Many cost less than $60 a bottle, and almost none exceed $100 a bottle. (If you’re really intent on throwing some money around, turn back to a Legends page and you’ll easily find a way to drop a few grand.)Mr. Johnnes — who served as the wine director at Montrachet for two decades before he joined forces with Mr. Boulud in 2005 and, at 52, looks about a decade younger than his age — is clearly having fun with the program at Bar Boulud. A circular table at the back of the restaurant, rimmed with suspended goblets, will be the location of future wine tastings open to the public and conducted by Mr. Johnnes, who relishes the interactive part of his job. And any day now he’s going to augment the by-the-glass program with cameo appearances from the Classics list. “Tonight, I might just grab a magnum, start pouring, and ask who wants a glass.”

Sommelier as Explorer

Sommelier as Explorer

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