Best Advice from the Best Wine Directors

How the people doing this well think about pricing, perception, and building a wine program that people return to.

Thirst Behavior is a project about wine, taste, and the social performances that form around them, the rituals of enjoyment shaped by status, media, money, and desire. Wine is the entry point; the real subject is how taste gets made, circulated, and contested, especially in New York and the Hamptons, where leisure and tastemaking overlap most visibly.

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Those who know me know that I LOVE to consume information. I have a real kink for how-to explainers and easy taxonomies. If you knew how much time I’ve spent on YouTube tutorials for niche musical genres I’ll never make, you’d be genuinely disturbed. I can also name an alarming number of weasel species, for reasons I can only trace back to my childhood interest in one them: the North American river otter. Unfortunately in my professional life, answers to my most burning questions are never so neat, or easy to come by.

I write about how restaurants use wine to create meaningful experiences, and I consult on wine programs, which means I’m constantly circling the same set of questions: how do you make a small, wine-focused restaurant actually work—financially, operationally, aesthetically, rhetorically—in a city that seems designed to make that outcome unlikely?

Some of this thinking has made its way into a couple of recent pieces I wrote for Caper—one on pricing, and one on access. A while back I also tried my hand at a how-to explainer for entering the somm trade.

This piece is an attempt to distill what I’ve learned from a handful of wine directors and operators I consider the best in the business, and translate it into something usable. It’s not a single strategy so much as a set of overlapping priorities—some of which build on each other, some run counter to others.

They tend to orbit some common questions: how quickly money moves through a program; how a list signals approachability; the importance of being a neighborhood staple; when a wine is ready to drink, as opposed to merely available; and, increasingly, how all of this gets communicated beyond the dining room, to people who may encounter the idea of a place long before they ever sit down in it.

Taken together, they start to look like a philosophy. This is, admittedly, one for the nerds—the people who care about list architecture, by-the-glass rotation and optimal drinking windows—but I’ll do my best to keep it moving.

Let’s get into it.

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1. Liquidity matters more than margin

Annie Shi—who owns King, Lei, Jupiter, and now Dean’s in Soho—talks about pricing in a way that most wine programs, frankly, avoid. Restaurants love clean percentages, applied consistently, as if the goal were to preserve a ratio rather than run a business. But wine is one of the only parts of the operation that can reliably turn back into cash—if you let it—and what matters is not how much you make per bottle, but how quickly you get your money back.

The faster a program turns over, the more liquid the business becomes. Cash returns to the system, covering labor, absorbing rising food costs, underwriting the next order. A list full of slow-moving, perfectly marked-up bottles may look disciplined on paper, but it locks up capital. This is where percentage-based pricing is not totally adequate, especially at the higher end, where holding the line on margin often means pricing wines into a zone where they simply don’t move. Once they stop moving, the logic collapses: you’re not protecting margin, you’re freezing cash.

Shi’s approach is more pragmatic, and less comfortable. Price the wine to sell. Go further than you think you need to. Accept less on the bottle—especially the expensive ones—if it means the bottle leaves the building.

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2. Use the wine list to communicate value

If Shi’s model is about how money moves, Chase Sinzer—partner in Claud, Penny, and now Stars—is concerned with how it feels. He understands the wine list in terms of information design, and attends to the emotional aspects of wine pricing. He asks, “how does this [price] feel to the guest?” This requires a weekly meeting with each of his wine directors, where they reprice the list based on everything that could affect that emotional reading: competitors’ pricing, retail value, secondary markets overseas, all of it.

Structure matters. What appears first, what is emphasized, what is made legible without effort—these decisions shape how a guest reads the room. A list can signal generosity, or it can signal extraction. At Stars, that signal is intentional: affordable wines are not buried but foregrounded, establishing immediately that someone can drink well without spending excessively.

This does more than drive sales at the lower end, though it does that too. It resets the emotional baseline. Once a guest feels a place “has their back,” the rest of the list opens up; a four-figure bottle no longer reads as a trap, but as an option. Sinzer describes this as building a base: if people know they can participate comfortably, they stop scanning for signs of exploitation. The defensive posture drops, and with it, the friction around spending.

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3. Serve your neighborhood

These first two principles—liquidity and legibility—find their most durable expression in restaurants built not around destination dining, but around return visits. Mike Patricola, who runs the wine program at Chez Ma Tante, understands this intuitively. Over the better part of a decade, the restaurant has settled into its role as a neighborhood anchor on the Greenpoint waterfront, and the list reflects that stability without becoming static.

Here, the goal is not to impress once, but to be used repeatedly. That requires a precise calibration of audience: millennial professionals who care about what they’re drinking but also need to function the next morning, guests who come often enough to notice patterns, and, increasingly, their parents—who appear over time and often pick up the bill. The list responds accordingly. It is natural-leaning but not doctrinaire, serious but legible—a natural wine list for grown-ups.

Pricing reinforces this. The ceiling is kept in check, while the middle of the list is dense with bottles that feel like easy decisions rather than negotiations. In-demand producers appear, but are priced to be opened, not admired. Familiarity and reliability are not concessions; they are the conditions of return.

The engine behind this is programming. Patricola buys shallow and rotates frequently, especially by the glass, ensuring that the list remains alive without becoming disorienting. Wines move quickly enough to reward repeat visits, but not so quickly that regulars lose their footing. The result is a list that holds together multiple logics at once—recognition and discovery, consistency and change.

To serve your neighborhood, in this sense, is not simply to reflect it, but to study it, respond to it, and build a system that people can re-enter without recalibration. In a city organized around novelty, that capacity—to hold attention over time—is what allows a restaurant to survive.

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4. Not all value is visible on the price

If liquidity is the starting point, it also defines the constraint under which more ambitious strategies operate. Jack Murphy, who runs programs across San Francisco and New Orleans, builds his lists around time—but only after accounting for the realities of liquidity. You cannot hold inventory if you have not first learned how to move it.

Restaurants excel at signaling access—allocations, cult producers, recognizable labels—but are less consistent about whether those wines are actually ready to drink. The current release becomes the default not because it’s delicious, but because it is available.

Murphy’s thinking reframes this. Most great wines are not complete on release; they are structurally unresolved, their components—tannin, acid, CO₂, oak—present but often unintegrated. Given time, these elements settle into balance. Without it, the guest pays for the idea of the wine without receiving the experience it promises.

The difficulty, of course, is operational. Storage is expensive, space is limited, and cash is tied up in bottles that are not yet generating revenue. So most programs release wines early. Murphy does not. He buys when he can, but holds what matters, tasting and tracking bottles until they are ready to show.

The effect is subtle but decisive. A wine with real age, priced in line with—or even below—younger counterparts elsewhere, signals not just access but real care. You are not paying for the idea of the wine, but for a real wine that is drinking the way it should. Over time, the cellar becomes less a static asset than a reservoir, allowing the list to evolve without depending entirely on what is new.

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5. The wine list doesn’t stop at the table

If the first four principles govern how a list functions internally, the final one addresses how it circulates externally. Nikkita Malhotra treats the wine program at Smithereens as an editorial project, extending its logic beyond the dining room into a broader system of communication.

The list itself moves in themes—Riesling, Grenache, Champagne—each iteration reflecting a specific line of inquiry. It reads less like inventory than like an issue. Through the Smithereens Zine, that thinking expands into essays, interviews, and dispatches from members of the team in different positions, translating what would once have been tacit knowledge into a distributed form.

This is not content for its own sake, but a way of making taste legible over time. One medium distills, the other elaborates; together they create coherence.

A similar logic appears at With Others in Williamsburg, where Shanna Nasiri’s Wine School turns the program into something participatory. Classes and tastings function as extensions of the list, allowing guests to engage with its values directly.

In both cases, the underlying problem is the same: a point of view must be communicated to exist. A wine program without one is just a list of options; a point of view without channels is invisible. My old friend Ryan Looper has been speaking about the importance of knowing who the list is for, in order to know what the list is supposed to do. The restaurants that succeed here build systems—languages, and multiple ways of speaking them—meeting their audience across formats, before and beyond the table.

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Running a restaurant in New York is, by most accounts, a losing game that people continue to play anyway. Rent is too high, labor is expensive, and costs move faster than menus can adjust; for most operators, alcohol—wine especially—remains one of the only places where the math still has a chance of working.

It is therefore tempting to treat the wine list as a margin engine: price aggressively, protect the spread, and let the rest of the business sort itself out. The logic is clean, even defensible, but it tends to produce something brittle—programs that extract efficiently in the short term and undermine the conditions that would allow them to last.

The operators considered here are making a different kind of bet. They turn their inventory faster, even if it means taking less on each bottle; they design lists that make people feel comfortable spending money rather than daring them to; they build programs that reward repeat visits instead of one-time splurges; they hold wines until they are actually ready, even when that ties up cash; and increasingly, they find ways to communicate all of this beyond the room itself, extending their point of view across multiple channels.

None of these decisions maximize profit in the immediate sense. Most, in fact, introduce friction—more work, more attention, more risk. But taken together, they produce something more durable: trust, not as an abstract virtue but as a pattern of behavior—the decision to return next week, the willingness to order another bottle without hesitation, the sense that, whatever one spends, one is not being taken for a ride.

This is the real revenue model: not extraction, but accumulation; not the highest possible margin on a single night, but the gradual construction of a place people return to, and bring others into. In a city that makes this kind of patience feel almost irrational, it is also the only strategy that works.

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