Wine & Spirits - April 2021 - 40

The Healing Power of

Restaurants
B

ROTH. IT'S PRIMAL. Yet, the healing power of broth
may not be the first thing that comes to mind
when you ask, tonight, " Where should we eat? "
In 2014, when Marco Canora opened Brodo,
it was a bone-broth takeout window connecting
Hearth's kitchen to passersby on First Avenue.
He was selling in New York what the French call
a restaurant-a restorative broth. When a soup salesman
named Boulanger opened for business in 1765, he was selling restaurants to his guests. The gathering places soon
offered more than broth, even as they kept its name. It was
a time when the French were demanding liberty and economic justice; broth, perhaps, was a way for people to care
for their own wellbeing, people who had, not long before,
been serfs. The restaurant was both the broth and the place
where you enjoyed it; It was part of the early healing of the
modern social fabric.
That sense of a restaurant, as a gathering place for social
and physical nourishment, turned into a vulnerability in

Contents
Tracking Sales Trends over the Past 25 Years ....................41
The Top-Selling Wines of 2020 .......................................... 42
How We Sift the Data .......................................................... 43
Wines that Worked, By Season .......................................... 44
Dispatches from the Front ................................................. 50
Directory of Participating Restaurants ............................. 64

WINE & SPIRITS

APRIL 2021

March 2020. A novel coronavirus, imperceptible and
deadly, spread on the breath, led to lockdowns across the
country. Restaurants were shut down overnight, feared as
super-spreader sites.
At Wine & Spirits, we immediately canceled our spring
tasting event, what was to be a celebration of the most popular wines in restaurants as reported in our Annual Restaurant Poll. And as news came in of permanent closures at legendary dining rooms-including many loyal respondents
on our list-we wondered if there would be restaurants to
poll in 2021.
It's not news that restaurant closures were a boon to
online wine retailers. Wine.com, the leading site, grew its
already significant sales by 215 percent from April to September. Many of the sommeliers who managed to keep
their jobs shifted to selling wine to go. For most restaurants,
wine sales crashed, the fall steeper than in either of the two
last recessions (see the chart on page 41). But for some, wine
sales actually increased as a percentage of their restaurant's
total sales. As Andrew Fortgang of Le Pigeon in Portland,
Oregon, reports, that didn't mean it was a good year-just
that he was able to continue selling wine during the times
that the restaurant was effectively closed. And, like others
we interviewed, he was able to find creative ways to sell it
through the strong network he'd built over a 15-year run.
Many chefs and sommeliers, servers and dishwashers, line
cooks and bussers, bartenders and back waiters have been
furloughed this year as restaurateurs struggle to keep the
lights on. The pandemic has led them to completely reinvent
their businesses. Some have survived selling meal kits, others
have taken their tables to sidewalks, parking lots and barricaded parking spaces. Many welcomed new guests at these
sidewalk tables, mostly younger people, those for whom the

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Wine & Spirits - April 2021

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