Rising wine prices shut out all but well-to-do

It was late June when I began declining invitations for drinks.

New Orleans between Jazz Fest in late spring and Halloween is like a psychology experiment run by sadists, in which we wear humidity like a straightjacket and the summertime sun broils our brains. Social events become social obligations. You sweat in the morning, you sweat in the evening. You sweat indoors at noon. But the night life goes on, and ordinarily, I am happy to commiserate with friends at local haunts over a nice glass or two of something chilled.

Until this year. It wasn’t the triple-digit heat that did me in, though. It was the triple-digit receipts.

Bottles of wine at just about any restaurant are going to be expensive. The traditional markup is somewhere between 200 and 300 percent. I don’t begrudge restaurants this, because wine is where they make their money. And you can convince yourself it’s fine—a deal, even: good wine is a flavor enhancer and social pleasure. You probably got your money’s worth.

But relentless inflation did not spare wine. Forgoing the bottle and ordering by the glass once offered respite, but as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, when it comes to a glass of wine, “$25 is the new $20.” Which means if you go on a date and each drink two glasses, you’re on the hook for a hundred bucks, not counting the tip.

For me, it just wasn’t worth going out anymore. If there is any consolation, though, it forced me to reevaluate what wine really means to me, and what it means when wine is priced out of reach for all but the affluent.

Bacchanal Wine, on the far edge of the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, is somehow both nondescript and unmistakable. The building has been around for centuries, and its pink stucco is peeling slowly away, exposing bright red bricks beneath. During the day, you enter through a corner door and find a well-apportioned wine shop—one of the best in town—carrying 300 or so bottles, Old World heavy, with an emphasis on traditional, minimal-intervention winemaking.

But Bacchanal is not a wine shop, exactly. It’s hard to say what it is, really, or what it’s most famous for. The place can be divided into three elements. There’s the shop, with its aging checkerboard floor tiles and strings of white Christmas tree lights. Wooden shelves wrap around walls, and racks are so arranged to form cramped nooks that evoke a used book shop: hidden wonders and mysteries abound.

Some of the wines are super natty, such as La Boutanche, a gamay from Beaujolais winemaker Olivier Minot. Some are classically made, like the 2020 nebbiolo from Oddero, a celebrated Barolo house. Interspersed, you can find easy grip-it-and-rip-it bottles you don’t have to think too hard about. There’s something at most price points, but the wines are well curated. This isn’t grocery store wine.

A door in the back of the shop leads to a backyard crammed with mismatched patio furniture: metal chairs, plastic chairs, rectangular wood tables, and round ones in wrought iron. Umbrellas abound for when the sun is too hot or the rain too hard, and outdoor heaters to repel our brief subtropical winters. And for illumination, enough string lights drape from trees around and within the yard to evoke a starry night, but nearer, giving the place an ethereal, dream-like air. When it’s packed, every seat is filled, and an overflow crowd leans from a second story balcony. Every night, guests drink and eat and listen to local musicians play from a simple wooden stage.

Even on the busiest nights, though, it’s not chaos, and it’s not raucous. This isn’t a synthetic experience of Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. Rather, it is organic and haphazard, almost spontaneous. It feels like a few friends came by, a party emerged, and things are going really well.

An upstairs wine bar represents the final third of the establishment’s offerings. The place has a mirthful, quirky aesthetic: yet more string lights glow from bottle-lined shelves behind the bar, and artificial grape vines crawl along the barroom walls. Expressive, colorful paintings of Bacchus and Ariadne, by artist Olivia Chigas, hang in one corner.

A couple weeks ago, I went there to meet Katie Singer, Bacchanal’s beverage manager. It was still early in the day, and crowds had not yet turned up. Singer and I found a table in the back. She has the look of a wine professional: hip and stylish, wearing gold, hoop earrings and a zebra-print blouse. After brief chitchat about the recent hurricane, we got down to business: Wine in this town is too damn expensive. The reason I’m here is because somehow, at Bacchanal, it is not.

“Access to good wine is really, really important to us,” Singer told me, “and keeping it flowing to the community is what we strive to do.”

It’s easy to find a decent bottle of wine in New Orleans. It’s easy to find a place here with a great atmosphere. It’s always easy to find something cheap to do on a Thursday night. But it’s usually a “pick two” type of situation. Bacchanal is one of the few places that delivers all three. Perhaps more importantly, the vibe here is authentic, the crowd mostly local: this is the “New Orleans experience” that people who don’t live here imagine it to be.

Singer started in the wine industry in 2009, working eventually at Webster’s, the oldest wine bar in Chicago. “They were pioneers in selling natural, low-intervention and small production wines. It was a really good opportunity to learn outside the box,” she said.

When she moved to New Orleans in 2017, Singer already knew about Bacchanal, which sells similar wines, and it seemed like a natural transition. She talked her way into a part-time job there, while also running the wine program and acting as restaurant manager at Boucherie, the celebrated restaurant inspired by South Louisiana cuisine in the Uptown neighborhood.

“But I just fell in love with working here,” she said. “I loved the culture and the ethos this place. We operate on some core values here: Respect. Kindness. Hospitality. Community. And it’s a lot of fun.”

Those values go back to Bacchanal’s beginning.

Chris Rudge, a former sommelier originally from Florida, founded Bacchanal Wines in 2002. The building it calls home was, at the time, a blighted property, overgrown with trees and weeds, on a gloomy corner of a  neighborhood in decay. Rudge wanted a place to sell his favorite Old World wines, and maybe have a drink or two with friends after work. Not long after restoring the building and opening the wine shop, he put some old patio chairs out back and hung a few lights.

The Bywater at the time was among the more bohemian in the city, a cheap place for artists, musicians, and hospitality workers to live. Weekly wine tastings attracted regulars in the service industry (who oftentimes brought their own lawn chairs), and those regulars attracted the local musicians would could walk over and play music in the evening every so often. It all just sort of happened by accident.

The terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 made Bacchanal permanent. The building weathered the storm and did not flood. So Rudge and his associates turned the backyard into an improvised restaurant, with an open fire pit that local chefs could use, and a little wooden stage for musicians to perform. It was a place for people to make a little money in a city now bereft of it, and and a lifeline for many in the devastated service industry. Even after Katrina’s recovery (to the extent it’s possible to recover from such a thing), the party never stopped.

Until 2011. That year, the city of New Orleans shut down Bacchanal, asserting that it lacked proper zoning and licenses for nearly everything it was now doing. So Rudge, who died in 2015, and the company’s co-owners, got a bar permit and brought in food trucks while it worked on building a compliant kitchen. But the city was inflexible on allowing a permit for live music on that little stage. There weren’t enough parking spaces, said the City Planning Commission.

Indeed, there are practically no parking spaces at Bacchanal. The business abuts rusting train tracks and the Mississippi River on one side, and an abandoned Navy base and the Industrial Canal on the other. The city government was demanding an impossibility.

In response, a grassroots “Save the Music” campaign sprung up, and at a planning commission hearing the following year, a contingent of Bywater locals arrived to speak in support of Bacchanal. The city granted the zoning variance, and the venue was back.

Today, the backyard retains the do-it-yourself spirit of improvisation. You go to the upstairs bar to order your drinks and bring them to your table, or to the wine shop to grab a bottle. (There is no customary restaurant markup, and no corkage fee to drink the bottle at a table while listening to music—I’m unaware of any other venue in New Orleans with a deal that good.) Local chefs continue to rotate through a now-indoor kitchen (though chefs still sometimes cook from the outdoor fire pit). You can order your food through an app—that’s new—but you get your own cutlery and condiments from a station off to the side. Local musicians, which skew jazz, blues, and alternative, perform nightly.

Per a recent industry study, if you had to describe the most likely person at the table with a wine glass in their hands, it would be an older, wealthy, college-educated, white woman who owns a home. She is spending more money for less wine than ever before, and the wine industry is happy to cater to her. Of those who drink alcohol, fewer men than ever are drinking wine. Ominously, most people between the ages of 18 and 34 believe that even moderate drinking is bad for you.

Meanwhile, wine is ultimately about agriculture, and thus dependent on stable, predictable weather systems and temperature. So things aren’t going well on that front, either. Climate change has been cruel to some wine regions—particularly Napa Valley in California, beset this decade by wildfires, the worst of which was the Glass Fire four years ago, which burned over 4 million acres, tainting grapes and causing a nearly complete loss of the 2020 vintage from such storied wineries as Cain Vineyard and Newton Vineyard. This hasn’t helped wine prices, either.

As a society, we lose something essential when wine becomes an exclusive beverage of the affluent. Meet friends at a bar, and beer is fine and cocktails are lovely, but both, I would argue, are solitary affairs: “I’ll have a martini”—“An old fashioned for me”—“Let me try that new IPA”—“Do you have any pilsners on tap?” Wine, though, is a shared experience: One bottle, one cork, four glasses, and communion and conversation ensue.

“I want our wine to be enjoyed by the community,” Singer told me, “and we have a unique and beautiful opportunity here.” Her goal is to have something for everyone in the wine shop, “whether you have been drinking wine your whole life, of this is the first drop of wine you’ve ever put in your mouth.”

She and the rest of the team select wines by the glass that hit certain popular profiles that people want, she said. “We also like to use that as a jumping off point.” People ask for sauvignon blanc because they know what it is. It’s familiar. “And we have a sauvignon blanc by the glass. But if we don’t, we’ll have something fun that hits that citrusy, high-acid profile. We like to show people, OK, well, if you like that, you’ll love this fun little weirdo.”

In the bar, wines by the glass top out at $13. Four are drawn from stainless steel wine kegs, but most are poured from bottles. They serve an ever-evolving list consisting usually of a sparkling white and sparkling rosé; three to four whites; three to four reds; two rosés; and an orange wine.

Wine kegs are my favorite development of the last decade: they are perfect vessels for inexpensive wines not meant for aging. During Happy Hour, every weekday from 4-6 p.m., Bacchanal sells their draft wines for $6 per glass. On average, they go through a keg a week of each of the wines on tap.

Among the wines presently available in the bar are Cuvée Anna, a Slovenian, minimal-intervention rosé made by fourth generation winemaker Peter Gönc from pinot noir and žametna črnina grapes. It sells for $9 per glass. The Provençal-style wine is dry with strawberry and stone fruit notes. I was also taken by the fortified wines on offer, among them a $12 rancio sec from Roussillon called “Matifoc.” Bacchanal’s menu described it as “France’s near-forgotten oxidative wine: dry like fino, funky like oloroso.” In other words, made for me, and honestly, that alone is worth a trip: caramel, nuts, spice, and a little saline.

The integrity of their wines on offer, and the accessible prices, keep the place crowded, especially as summer gives way to fall, when Louisiana’s climate loosens the straightjacket a little.

Because the primary industry of New Orleans is tourism, nightlife is oftentimes bifurcated: locals have local spots, and tourists have tourist spots, and never the twain shall meet. Bacchanal is one of the rare wine shops that straddles the line successfully. Things looked a little rocky in that regard until 2020, however, when, to quote Yogi Berra, “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.”

In response, Bacchanal has gone all-in on local programming. “The pre-pandemic levels of crazy are gone, and it’s been nice to see locals return,” she said. The bar’s weekly tastings and seasonal wine events have been especially popular with the community. In May, there is Rosé Fest: $25 for access to 40 rosés from around the world. In November, Beaujolais Fest. In December, Bubblyfest.

One recurring, popular seasonal event of note is called “Primal Nights,” in which a weekly rotation of local chefs cook on the outdoor pit. Guests get a plate of food for a $20 suggested donation, and all the money goes to nonprofit organizations, including Lift Louisiana, an abortion rights organization; ISLA Immigration Services, an immigration rights group; and most recently, Toups Family Meal, which helps feed people facing food insecurity. So far, Bacchanal has raised over $100,000 for the local community.

“The wine scene here is a little different than other places in the country,” Singer told me. “Because of the temperatures, we’re very much a rosé/white/chilled wine kind of town. Our changing seasons aren’t as drastic as some places, but when fall comes, it’s just nicer outside, and people start getting really excited about reds. We cater to that—we have some really nice bottles. It’s a lot of fun.”

And perhaps best of all, those nice bottles are affordable.

David W. Brown, The Food Section‘s wine columnist, is a writer based in New Orleans. He is the author of The Mission, and contributes regularly to The New Yorker and The New York Times. You can find him at davidwbrown.com.