http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/dining/10-manhattan-restaurants-with-affordable-wines.html 2014-10-09 23:19:32 10 Manhattan Restaurants With Affordable Wines These 10 Manhattan restaurants offer good bottles without Champagne prices. === What’s the first thing you do when examining a restaurant wine list? If you are like me, you look to the least expensive wines, intent on good deals or at least good values. Possibly, you too have sighed in exasperation. Too often the cheapest end of the list is not so cheap. Chalk it up to rising rents, simple greed or the economy in general. As with so much else, the price of wine has gone up in the last few years. Just as we may be resigned to the $65 restaurant steak, so, too, have we silently accepted the sad fact that a bottle of Champagne or a modest young Burgundy on so many wine lists will cost no less than three figures. Yet more than a few restaurants are making a determined effort to augment the low end of the list, which nowadays at even the most cost-conscious restaurant is around $40 to $60 a bottle. In these places, wine is a treasured part of the aesthetic rather than simply a profit center, and wine directors try to ensure that everybody, even the lowest spenders, have access to wines the restaurant is proud to show off. “I focus on small-production, naturally made wines,” said Jorge Riera, the wine director at Contra on the Lower East Side. “I want to make these wines accessible to more people.” No one would argue that the economics of running a restaurant are easy, especially in Manhattan, where rents and other costs verge on the insane. Add in the rising prices of shipping, storage, service and equipment, and it’s easy to rationalize bottom-end inflation. Yet creative wine directors have many ways of getting around this problem. Sometimes it requires being open to wine regions of lesser status or renown, substituting wines from the Loire Valley, say, for regional Burgundies. “There’s such a representation of regions today that used to be unknown,” said Patrick Cappiello, wine director and a partner at Pearl & Ash, on the Lower East Side, where the wine list is great for spenders of every stripe. It also requires a shift in thinking. Restaurants may decide to discard rigid pricing formulas, the conventional two to two and a half times retail, opting instead for a softer markup, to be made up in other ways. Marta, the new pizzeria and trattoria opened by Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, offers excellent values throughout the list, especially in Champagne, a category in which many wine directors feel free to inflate the prices. “You have to be a little generous first before you can expect generosity back,” said John Ragan, who oversees wine for the restaurant group. “If maybe people drink two bottles instead of one, everybody wins. People will enjoy, and hopefully come back.” Back in 2011, ALL’ONDA BARCHETTA BAR PRIMI CHERCHE MIDI CONTRA ESTELA MÁ PÊCHE MARTA PEARL & ASH RACINES NY