I ended the Southwest leg of my trip in Bordeaux. It was my first time visiting the city, and I spent a beautiful sunny Sunday playing tourist. I kind of forgot that it’s a university town, and so I was surprised at how young and energetic the city felt. I walked along the riverfront and stopped at the Chartrons market to slurp down freshly shucked oysters by the water. I sat outside a café in a large square and watched fellow patrons slowly shift their chairs with the changing light, like cats following a sunbeam. And, of course, I checked out some of the city’s wine bars. I loved dinner at Soif, a “restaurant with a wine list,” #notawinebar as the menu informed me (apparently you have to order food to be able to order wine).

And you would be missing out if you didn’t enjoy a meal there. Located in the heart of the Saint-Pierre district, it’s a warm, cozy space where Chef Cécile Lambré uses local seasonal produce to turn out classic, unfussy dishes. Small plates featured tempura enoki mushrooms and duck tartare, mains showcased lamb, duck, or fresh seafood, and dessert options included a brioche pain perdu with caramel and vinegar made from aged Banyuls. Lambré’s husband Nico Lefevre has assembled an impressive wine list of small, independent producers from across France and beyond, all working organically or biodynamically, with a lot of hard-to-find but attractively priced bottles. The highlight was tasting from a bottle of the 2004 “Totem” by Domaine du Pech, in the Buzet appellation east of Bordeaux, that Lefevre had opened for an event the day before.

I also enjoyed posting up at Cornichon, on the Quai Richelieu. It’s a bit more of a scene, good for groups, and situated just down the street from the Place de la Bourse, the city’s most iconic square. The wine list has plenty of deep cuts, especially from Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Rhône. Grab a seat on the terrace to enjoy a view of the river and the people-watching.

In the Glass

Now that I’m back in New York, I’ve been thinking about the House Martini at Place des Fêtes in Brooklyn. The drink’s star ingredient is a mindblowing tomato liqueur, the work of distiller, winemaker, and tomato obsessive Laurent Cazottes, who I met in February in Gaillac. (You can read about Cazottes and his incredible organic spirits in my latest piece for Everyday Drinking.) It brings incredible depth of flavor and complexity to the cocktail; it’s savory, salty, and disappears dangerously fast, leaving a plump Gordal olive rolling around the bottom of the glass.

Kenny Toll, sommelier at Place des Fêtes’s sister restaurant Cafe Mado, shared the recipe with me. Store your vodka in the freezer and chill all the other ingredients in the fridge for a few hours before making.

Place des Fêtes House Martini

• 1 ½ ounces of vodka

• ½ ounce of Laurent Cazottes Tomates liqueur

• ½ ounce of Equipo Navazos La Bota de Vermut Blanco 133

• 1 ounce of Vichy Catalan mineral water (the salinity is important!)

• ¼ ounce of manzanilla sherry

Add the vodka, tomato liqueur, vermouth, mineral water, and sherry to a mixing glass. Stir to combine. Pour into a chilled glass and garnish with a Gordal olive.

EVERYDAY DRINKING

Could These Fruit Brandies Lead A Revolution?

Distiller and winemaker Laurent Cazottes pointed to a diagram on the wall of his tasting room that showed the differences between conventional, organic, and biodynamic viticulture and certifications for the latter two practices. “Eighty-five percent of wine in the world is conventio…

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a month ago · 35 likes · 3 comments · Sarah Parker Jang

Odds & Ends

Balera, a new Italian restaurant in Williamsburg, opened last Thursday. I sat down with wine director Oliviero Lucchetti, formerly of Chambers, to talk about the wine program. I’ll share that conversation soon.

Currently Reading

Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live, by Amber Husain. I’m reading this as part of Alicia Kennedy’s Desk Salon Series. It’s about Husain’s experience with anorexia, but this is definitely not a traditional memoir about eating disorders. Husain dissects the political dimensions of her refusal to eat and of the connections between food and political empowerment throughout history. (ICYMI, Kennedy launched her magazine Tomato Tomato last week.)

Tasting Notebook

Before I left for France in February, I went to a tasting of Pierre Gonon wines at Freddy’s Tribeca, organized by Chambers Street Wines and led by Jean Gonon, who took over the family domaine with his brother Pierre in 1989. Gonon is the benchmark for Saint-Joseph in the Northern Rhône: all massale selection vines, organic grapegrowing and careful winemaking with minimal extractions and neutral oak, letting the vintage and terroir speak. The purity of fruit in these wines is stunning. Gonon poured six wines for the tasting. Some highlights:

2022 Pierre Gonon “Les Oliviers” Saint-Joseph Blanc

Co-fermented marsanne—roughly 80 percent—and roussanne. Gonon said that these wines need at least 10 years of age in bottle to “lose the fat” and develop minerality, but this is already lighter and leaner compared to other Saint-Joseph whites (compliment!). Good tension, notes of lemon zest, ginger, honeysuckle, golden apple, white peach, toasted almond, with a stoniness on the palate.

2023 and 2022 Pierre Gonon “Les Iles Feray” Ardèche Rouge IGP

This blend includes young syrah vines from Saint-Joseph and from the plain outside the appellation. Gonon explained that late heat in the growing season restrained sugar accumulation—the alcohol is only 12.6 percent. Made with about 50 percent whole cluster, 50 percent destemmed. It’s ripe, generous, but fresh, with floral and herbal notes from those whole clusters. The 2022 vintage was drier and hotter, but more consistent. It’s more red-fruited and energetic than the 2023.

2023 Pierre Gonon Saint-Joseph Rouge

A blend of fruit from three different villages. About half of the blend comes from Tournon, on what Gonon calls “classic Saint-Joseph terroir,” with the remainder from Mauve and Saint-Jean-de-Muzols. Blending the sites is the classic approach in the Rhône; Gonon noted, “in a blend it’s more difficult to show everything from the different sites.” Olive tapenade, barbecue ribs, mushroom, black—almost blue—fruits. It’s all beautifully balanced: refreshing acidity, structured and well-managed tannins, impressive depth and complexity of fruit.

Gonon also poured a taste of the 2017 Pierre Gonon Saint-Joseph Rouge, which is in a fantastic place right now. Rich, dense fruit with all those delicious savory notes: violets, bay leaves and black olives, smoky peppery bacon, dark and juicy berries, all wound around firm tannins. Very classic, very syrah, very Gonon.

Cafe Mado opened in the spring of last year, to high praise: The New York Times included it on its 2025 list of the 100 best restaurants in New York City, for one. It’s the latest of Redwood Hospitality’s hits, which includes much-missed Michelin-starred Oxalis (on hiatus while it finds a new location) and its outstanding sister restaurant Place des Fêtes in Clinton Hill, lauded as one of the best wine bars in the city.

When I visited Cafe Mado in September and October, the food was indeed exceptional. But now it’s getting an equally exciting wine program, thanks to the person who helped make Place des Fêtes’s bottle list such a resounding success: Redwood Hospitality sommelier and wine buyer Kenny Toll.

Toll worked at Place des Fêtes as lead sommelier, from its opening in 2022 until this August, when he took over the wine program at Cafe Mado in Prospect Heights, at Oxalis’s old address on Washington Avenue. Oxalis is where Toll began his career in hospitality; it’s where Place des Fêtes began too, as a pop-up in the empty parking lot behind the restaurant’s garden in 2020, during the outdoor dining days of the pandemic. “It’s kind of full circle, coming back now,” Toll says, about returning to the former Oxalis space.

The restaurant is an all-day cafe, offering coffee and breakfast pastries from Redwood’s Laurel Bakery in the mornings and lunchtime sandwiches, salads, and small plates. At dinner, the restaurant switches into a higher gear, what the Times described as “Oxalis in deep cover.” The menu is very seasonal, vegetable-forward small plates with two or three mains. It changes almost daily, with dishes like butter bean purée, Castelfranco radicchio with plum and Piave, a cheesy farinata (a chickpea pancake), and a toothsome tajarin slick with sungold-tomato pomodoro. It’s casual, adventurous, yet elegant—and Toll’s wine list compliments that perfectly.

For the seafood-forward menu at Place des Fêtes, Redwood’s beverage director Piper Kristensen wanted to focus on Spanish natural wines (French name notwithstanding). Toll dove into the new-wave Spanish wine world and assembled one of the most forward-looking wine lists in the city. Now, for the list at Mado, he’s channeling that same enthusiasm but returning to the French angle of Oxalis’s wine program, with a focus on Burgundy, Jura, the Loire Valley, the Rhône Valley, Savoie and Bugey. It all pairs well with the kitchen’s classical techniques and rich flavors, where chef Nico Russell’s time in southern France is evident.

“We’re still in the natural wine world, but leaning more classic,” Toll tells me. “This is the path for a lot of people that start with super-natural wines. I still love them, it’s where I cut my teeth. I didn’t go through any certification program, so it wasn’t like I entered into the wine world through Bordeaux and Burgundy. But slowly, you want to go deeper, and you start to uncover these storied, classic regions,” he says, “kind of from the side.”

Toll’s list ranges from appellations like Champagne and Côte de Nuits at the top, balanced by value-driven bottles from négoce projects or declassified vines. “They’re almost like loopholes. Maybe this wine says Beaujolais-Villages, but it’s actually vines in Fleurie that we’re getting, and it costs way less,” Toll says.

He stocks newer, small producers but also those you might call “traditionalists,” who were working without pesticides and sulfur long before it was fashionable: a mix like Salima and Alain Cordeuil in Champagne, Château de Béru in Chablis, Bénédicte and Stéphane Tissot in the Jura, Antoine Lienhardt in Burgundy. The list is rounded out with favorites from Italy and beyond, particularly Germany (Wasenhaus, Gut Oggau, Christian Tschida). There are always some exciting new producers that Toll has turned up, as well as hard to find wines like library vintages of sparkling chenin blanc from 2013 and 2015 from the now-shuttered Les Capriades estate in the Loire Valley.

Whatever wine he’s telling you about, it’s clear that Toll knows his stuff. He was an actor before pivoting to the wine industry—two very different careers that share essential skills. “It’s all about presentation and confidence in what you’re giving your audience,” he explains. “People know if you’re bullshitting. They know it in theater, and I think it’s the exact same thing in wine. You can fake it up to a certain point, but after that you’ve got to know what you’re talking about, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. I think that’s why I realized that I love not just wine, but the storytelling aspect of this, too.”

There was a time when Toll wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to work as either an actor or a sommelier again. In 2023, after contracting a non-covid respiratory virus, his right vocal chord was paralyzed and he lost the ability to speak. Doctors told him that he might recover his voice—in two years. In the meantime, he was only able to speak in a low register for a short period of time before his voice gave out. Some days he couldn’t speak at all, resorting to polishing glassware and other silent tasks.

It must have been an incredibly distressing couple of years for someone whose livelihood relies on being clearly heard from a stage or over the din of a busy restaurant. “There was a moment where I thought I would never have my voice again,” Toll says. “I thought, ‘If I can’t act and I can’t sell wine, what am I going to do?’”

Thankfully, at the two year mark, his vocal chord regained movement, and after surgery earlier this year to remove a node on the chord, Toll has fully recovered his voice. On an evening at Cafe Mado he can be heard, clear as a bell, greeting diners and having a conversation at each table about the wine list, sharing his knowledge and his passion. He also teaches wine classes for Redwood Hospitality in the Place des Fêtes space; recent ones focused on Burgundy and the Jura.

A few days ago I stopped into Cafe Mado for Steak Monday, the restaurant’s weekly pre-fixe menu that I will venture is the best deal in the city. (Cafe Mado is intentionally open on Monday, a night when most restaurants are closed, to welcome those who work in the industry.) For $80 per person, you get a three-course, family-style feast. The night I was there the plates included a mussels escabeche, a bright and bitter chicory salad tamed by plums and Bayley Hazen blue cheese from Jasper Hill Farms, followed by grilled chuck steak with shallots in a lush sauce, honeypatch squash, and the best onion rings I’ve ever had, followed by a paw paw financier dessert. Toll poured stellar by-the-glass pairings, all of which ranged from $18 to $25: a saline Arnaud Combier white Burgundy that was a perfect match for the unapologetic brine of the mussels; an autumnal, dark-berried Domaine Guion cabernet franc with the steak; and a Domaine de Haute Perche Anjou Blanc, driven by white-fleshed fruit and steely minerality, with dessert.

Cafe Mado is just a block north across the parkway from the Brooklyn Museum, Prospect Park, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I can think of no better way to end a day of art and nature in the neighborhood than with dinner at this restaurant, alongside a glass of wine and the story behind it—as told by Kenny Toll.

Climate change, tariffs, a decline in overall wine consumption but especially among younger people. To put it flatly, things do not look good for the wine industry. Now add to this the gloomy news that there aren’t enough young people making wine in France.

With the French government paying farmers to pull up their vines because of a massive surplus of wine in the country, the industry in France is facing the same reckoning as in California and other regions around the world. And just like the wine industry blames the “crisis” on young people for not drinking enough wine, apparently it’s now blaming them for not making it either. 

But as Jason Wilson at Everyday Drinking has written about for years now, there is a major disconnect here. It’s the wine industry’s reliance on the sales of cheap, low-quality wines that is driving its decline. Young people are indeed drinking less wine—but they’re spending more on quality wines made by smaller producers.

And there are young people who want to make wine in France—they just aren’t interested in making cheap, industrial plonk. Despite the often daunting economics of owning a vineyard, they’re passionate about crafting wines of place with organic grape growing and low-intervention winemaking. I met some of those young winemakers this summer, at a very unique winery based in Beaujolais.

Late one afternoon this June, I drove to Domaine des Jeunes Pousses in the village of Emeringes, near Chénas. This domaine is the project of vigneron Thibault Liger-Belair and investor Ivan Massonnat. In 2019 they launched it as a talent incubator for young winemakers in Beaujolais, on five hectares of vineyards purchased in 2015 and converted to organic. The project gives successive “generations” of winemakers full control of the domaine for a period of three years, to run the administration of the estate, farm the grapes, and vinify and sell the wine before transferring it to the next crop of jeunes pousses (“young shoots”). Each generation is responsible for every aspect of running the domaine, down to designing the labels for their bottles.

The first generation of winemakers was Hugo Foizel and Angela Quiblier, who have gone on to start their own domaine, OBORA, based in Chénas in Beaujolais. I visited Domaine des Jeunes Pousses just as the third generation of winemakers, Naïs Lombard and Olivier Cossec, was taking over operations from the second generation, Thaïs Lamy and Juliette Lumeau. 

Naïs received a degree in viticulture and oenology in Montpellier before apprenticing at Château Fontvert in Luberon. Olivier studied wine business and had a sales internship at Château Fontvert, where he met Naïs and was inspired to turn to the production side of wine. Together they went on to work in the Loire Valley and New Zealand. They followed the progress of Domaine des Jeunes Pousses since the first generation, Hugo and Angela, were in residence, thinking that one day they could apply for the project. They did so earlier this year, and were accepted as the third generation. They will be in residence until 2028.

They fit a very particular profile that the project seeks: someone with enough experience to run an entire estate, who is early in their winemaking career and will benefit from the experience, but who will also embrace their role as a steward for the next generation. Importantly, they are not inheriting vineyards or a winery from parents or grandparents.

“In this project you work for yourself, for your future, but you also work for a future generation,” Thaïs, from the second generation, explained. “You have to have a willingness to pursue the adventure for the new generation that will arrive.”

But in a way, this arrangement is liberating, too. “You can really put your personality in your wines, and because they are the first vintages of your life, you’re less afraid to make mistakes,” she said.

Thaïs studied agriculture and food science in Lyon and interned at various estates, including two years at Domaine Dujac. She met Juliette while studying in Angers, and they took over from the first generation in 2022.

The group took me on a quick tour of the tidy little cellar, with its bright blue doors and beamed ceiling. Jojo, the winery tabby cat, darted past the door. “There goes the winemaker!” Olivier joked. 

We sat on a picnic table outside of the domaine’s house and tasted two of the second generation’s cuvées, from the 2023 harvest. The wines have a remarkable freshness from predominantly clay soils—quite distinct from any other gamay I tried during my visit to Beaujolais, with its granite soils that dominate the crus. The wines are labelled Beaujolais-Villages, an appellation with a lot of potential for young winemakers for its low cost per hectare and its less restrictive winemaking relative to the Beaujolais crus. 

The domaine also purchases grapes from their neighbor above and behind the winery, who are one of only three organic grape growers in the village (including Domaine des Jeunes Pousses). These grapes go into a bottling called “Au Dessus da la Maison,” meaning “from behind the house.” With a slight change in elevation of about 80 to 100 meters, the Au Dessus is more lifted and perfumed.

The project just launched a new partnership with a nearby landowner to convert another plot of vines to organic—a collaboration that the young vignerons consider a victory, knowing that even just one hectare more will be saved. And the domaine recently planted chardonnay, pinot gris, and riesling, in an effort to increase biodiversity in Beaujolais, which is practically a monoculture of gamay at 96 percent of all plantings.

As the sun set, we sipped the wines and chatted about the decline of wine consumption in both France and the U.S., the role of context in tasting wines, and about sharing a moment over wine or “moments de partage,” a phrase that came up more than once in my discussions with vignerons while in France. Naïs and Olivier said that their goal as winemakers is to make an approachable, affordable wine that people will want to drink together, in a moment de partage.

Thaïs was staying through July to ensure a smooth transition from the second to the third generations by sharing detailed knowledge of everything from characteristics unique to the parcel, to quirks of the equipment, to taking over administrative tasks. There is a concept in French winemaking called “transmission,” the transfer of winemaking knowledge from one generation to the next. It happens on an accelerated, three-year cycle here at Domaine des Jeunes Pousses, before the “young shoots” go off on their next winemaking endeavor.

Thaïs will be harvesting and vinifying in Touraine this fall, and contemplating a future in the Loire Valley, Ardèche, the south of Beaujolais, or maybe even Burgundy. Juliette is on to a new project, planting hybrid vines on 7 hectares in Brittany. But Naïs pointed out that Thaïs and Juliette would still be at the domaine for a bit longer, in the form of their last harvest in the cellar, as Naïs and Olivier start their own chapter at Domaine des Jeunes Pousses.

These winemakers—who are producing quality wines, made transparently, that showcase terroir—are ones to watch in the future. As consumers and as those working in the industry, we need to support young vignerons like them who are making exactly the kinds of wines that younger people want to drink. And those with means looking for an investment opportunity in wine should consider creative structures that support these small, independent producers. The industry’s survival depends on it.

You might know Cameron from his time as a sommelier at Cote and Coqodaq. His career in hospitality started when he was 11 years old in his father’s kitchen, and he has worked in just about every role in the industry. (He’s also a certified Q Grader.) He landed on the idea for Crybaby after a friend of his visited New York and asked if there was a Jura wine bar in the city. Realizing the potential for the concept, he developed the idea with Rogers and Strickland for a corner location at Bowery and Broome.

The chic interior is outfitted in warm pinks and jewel-tone greens, with foxed mirrors behind a marble-topped bar. Downstairs will feature a speakeasy-style wine cellar hidden behind a secret door, available to reserve for private events. There will be a full food menu and a cheese program to complement cocktails and wines by-the-glass. So for a small upcharge, you’ll be able to add a “sidecar” of Comté with your glass of vin jaune. (Think the ubiquitous caviar bump, but dairy.) 

While Cameron said that Jura and Savoie are at the heart of the bar’s wine program, it will include wines from across all Alpine regions. “Some of the most exciting and interesting wines in the world are coming from there. It has really young regions, really old regions, and every style and tradition,” he said. That includes oxidative and non-oxidative whites, light-bodied reds, sparkling wines, and even aperitifs like Macvin du Jura, a fortified wine made by blending grape must with aged local marc (grape spirit). 

In a city with its fair share of niche wine programs—from Champagne, to new-wave Spain, to Eastern Europe, to Germany—a Jura and Savoie list feels long overdue, but putting together this program is no small feat given the tiny production volumes in these regions. Cameron wants to make these wines accessible to more drinkers, with by-the-glass values and smaller markups on retail pricing, while still delivering to devotees. Expect producers like Stéphane Tissot, Domaine Courbet, and François Rousset-Martin.

If you want a little preview of the wines on offer at Crybaby, Cameron is leading an “Acid and Funk” tasting for the James Beard Foundation on August 18.

And you can read more from me on Jura wines and climate change in my most recent piece for Everyday Drinking.

EVERYDAY DRINKING

How Will Jura Survive The Climate Crisis?

Driving into the Jura, heading north and east on France’s N83 toward Arbois, I took in the sight of rolling green hills, woodlands, red wildflowers by the roadside, and quaint little villages. The landscape was patterned with vineyards, fields of grain, and meadows dotted with grazing cattle. In a town with a single stop sign I passed a farmer leading his horse by the reins down the road. Situated in the foothills of the Alps on the border with Switzerland, the Jura looks a lot like the Shire—just populated by French humans rather than Tolkien’s hobbits…

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10 months ago · 34 likes · Sarah Parker Jang