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If you are looking for an extremely solid and unpretentious natural wine bar with nice ambiance and great snacks, as I often am, then check out The Ten Bells in NYC’s Lower East Side. This bar has been open since 2008, and has been serving natural wine since before people were talking about it.
In case you are unfamiliar, natural wine is low human intervention wine, meaning a return to pre-industrialization processes of making wine. No unnatural additives or usage of pesticides. And there is a myth that it will not give you a hangover, but if you drink enough wine you will, in fact, be hungover.
The Ten Bells has been a standby old favorite of many New Yorkers for a long time, so you may be asking, why shout it out now in a review? Because it’s hard for businesses to stick around for a long time in New York, and the wines they have here are really well selected. The wine categories are well balanced offering selections from a variety of global locations from domestic wines to the Loire valley to Morocco to Austria to Spain to Czech Republic, and so on. The bartenders are not, like, incredibly friendly but if they smell the wine nerd on you they will get into it and steer you towards something they are particularly excited about.
After my first round the bartender gave me a taste of an orange wine I didn’t see listed on the menu, Les Vins De Pirouette “Eros” by Vincent. This project was launched by famed winemaker Christian Binner to produce affordable but delicious natural wines in Alsace. The grape varietals of “Eros” are pinot gris, riesling, and auxerrois, and it is spontaneously fermented on the skins for 25 days producing the deep rich reddish orange color of this cuveé. This is followed by 8 months of aging in large (not new) oak casks. It was fruit forward but not sweet and had a nice minerality. A wonderful suggestion.
In addition to a really great natural wine list, The Ten Bells also has an extensive tapas menu that intentionally pairs well with the wine and doesn’t overshadow it. My date and I shared a burrata and it was a great snack. There are $1.50 oysters for happy hour as well, and in this economy, that is a rare and beautiful thing.
