We use data to find which producers are “natural” and the restaurants that carry it. 

Many years ago at Lelabar (NYC), I was doing some blind tasting, and a wine I had tasted natural (“natty”). My friend asked me what a natural wine was, and it was very hard to explain — I jumbled together a list of things like low-sulfur, kombucha-like, and sediment. We consulted with the sommelier. She (entirely correctly) stated that natural wine doesn’t have an exact definition and requires no certification, puzzling my friend even more.

Natural wine is an unassailable trend in today’s wine scene, and unfortunately as the somm at Lelabar said, it is entirely unclear what it is but natural wine lovers can often identify a natural wine by its taste, or at least recite a list of natural wine producers. Some wines, are definitively natural tasting, and rose to significance with the rise of natural wine (Sebastien Riffault, Gut Oggau, Frank Cornelissen, etc.). Then there are wines that don’t taste very natty, but have gained a significant following because they use practices consistent with the natural wine movement (the tribe of Jura producers like Overnoy, Ganevat, Kenjiro, Brignot or Richard Leroy from the Loire, who’ve seen skyrocketing prices, are a great example). Then, there are a (long) list of producers that are very natural but haven’t gotten much more interest with the natural wine movement because they were already famous for just being good wines. Most smaller producers, especially from regions like Burgundy, Rhone and Piedmont fall into this category (did you know Domaine Leroy is natural?) because they are often hand-harvesting and have low-intervention wine-making styles.

Despite all the various factors that make a producer natural, and the various ways a producer can get there, two wine lovers can generally agree when a producer is natural. This is quite the testament to a universal culture that surrounds wine.

How does Somm.ai simulate this level of soft intelligence? We find a group of restaurants that are more likely to have natural wine, crunch some numbers, and come out with a list. If you’re into data, you’ll know that overfitting is always a big concern, so our primary goal is to keep the inclusion criteria as simple as possible. So we found one city in the world that skews heavily toward natural wine (guess which one - it’s not in the US!) and used that as a reference point for what “natural” restaurants look like based on the producers that were on their list. We loved how elegant the inclusion criteria is — it was based on a single property — and when we looked at the results, we loved it. So here’s a list of NYC restaurants that lean heavily natural. We look forward to including factors like this in the future on the website to help you drink natural wine (or not!) at the restaurants that lean natty.

Somm.ai’s most “natty wine” restaurants in NYC/Brooklyn (above a certain size threshold). No surprise Brooklyn makes up a disproportionate part of the list.

  1. Ops, Brooklyn
  2. Frenchette
  3. The Ten Bells
  4. Anfora
  5. 1 or 8, Brooklyn
  6. The Four Horsemen, Brooklyn
  7. Cosme
  8. Estela
  9. Maison Premiere, Brooklyn
  10. Pheasant, Brooklyn
  11. Aska, Brooklyn
  12. Romans, Brooklyn
  13. Cafe Altro Paradiso
  14. Momofuku Ko
  15. Rucola, Brooklyn
  16. Nix
  17. Racines
  18. Colonie, Brooklyn
  19. Aquavit
  20. Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels