Wine tasting in NYC means three different things and the search results only show you the most expensive one. There is the free tier, run by shops on a fixed weekly schedule, where the person pouring usually imported the bottle. There is the flight tier, run by bars that will sell you three or four small glasses side by side so you can actually compare them. And there is the classroom tier, which costs money and is the only one of the three that will teach you anything systematic. Most people who say they want to taste wine want the second, would learn most from the third, and have never used the first.
The tastings worth going to are announced on shop mailing lists and chalkboards, not on event sites, which is why the same twenty people turn up to all of them. Tell Karpo what you like drinking and which night is free, and it can point you at the pour that is actually happening rather than the ticketed one that shows up first in a search.
The free tier runs on a timetable
Astor Wines & Spirits, in the old De Vinne Press building at 399 Lafayette Street, pours free tastings on Saturdays from 3pm to 5pm, covering wine, spirits and saké in rotation — and if you buy what you tasted on the day, it comes with fifteen per cent off. That discount is the detail worth remembering, because it turns a free hour into a cheaper bottle. Down on Avenue B, Discovery Wines runs public tastings on Friday evenings from six to eight with guest winemakers and importers behind the table, which is a different and better proposition than a staff member reading from a shelf talker. Between the two you have Friday night and Saturday afternoon covered every week of the year, in two neighborhoods twenty minutes apart, for nothing.
How to get something out of a shop pour
Taste the flight in the order it is laid out, and taste all of it, including the one you are sure you do not like — the arrangement is a comparison, and skipping to the red you recognize wastes the only structure on offer. Then ask the person pouring one specific question rather than a general one: not what is good, but why this vintage is lighter than the last, or what the importer bought it instead of. You will get five minutes of real information. And subscribe to the shop's list, because these schedules are published to mailing lists and chalkboards and essentially nowhere a search engine will find them.
The flight tier: bars that sell comparison
A flight is the format that makes tasting make sense — the same grape from two places, or two producers from one village, poured small and side by side. In Brooklyn, Plus de Vin runs flight nights on Tuesdays with the wines poured blind and the flight comped if you call all four correctly, which is a considerably better use of a Tuesday than another glass of something you already know. Elsewhere the format shows up as a Monday flight deal or a rotating mystery pour: La Compagnie on Centre Street, with more than a thousand bottles on the list and about thirty by the glass, runs the mystery version. And Aldo Sohm's midtown room carries roughly forty wines by the glass against two hundred by the bottle, which means you can build your own flight from the glass list without ordering a formal one.
The deals that function as tastings
Several bars sell wine in a format cheap enough to experiment with. Cellar 36 is walk-in only and runs a happy hour of dollar oysters and twenty-dollar carafes, which is the price at which trying an unfamiliar bottle stops being a gamble. Somm Time on the Lower East Side discounts pours from four to seven. Cherry On Top in Bushwick takes twenty per cent off all bottles on Mondays and Tuesdays. Uptown, Bar Florine runs a Sunday special of three half-bottles of Sancerre for ninety dollars, which is a horizontal tasting sold as a bucket. And Stars, a walk-in room with twelve barstools, builds its whole list around bottles under eighty-eight dollars — the most useful constraint on any wine list in the city, because it forces the buying to be interesting rather than expensive.
The classroom tier, which is where people underspend
If you have done a dozen shop tastings and still cannot describe what you like, the missing piece is a structured class, and New York's are cheaper than their reputation. Astor runs a dedicated education space above the shop with scheduled wine and food classes; in Brooklyn, With Others runs a recurring wine school for people who want the theory rather than the evening. A single class costs roughly what two glasses cost in a restaurant and is the only thing on this page that will change how you shop for the next decade. Do the free tier weekly and the classroom tier twice a year.
One we could not confirm
New York's rooftop vineyard in the Brooklyn Navy Yard is the answer everyone reaches for when the word cellar comes up, and its current operating status is genuinely unclear — some listings show it running a seasonal tasting room by advance registration, at least one shows it closed. We are not sending you across the East River on that. If you want to go, call first and confirm the season is open, and have a second plan on the same side of the river.
A week of tasting, priced honestly
Friday, the Avenue B tasting after work, buy one bottle. Saturday afternoon, the Lafayette Street pour, buy what you liked and take the fifteen per cent. Tuesday, the blind flight in Brooklyn — win it or pay for it, either way it is the most instructive twenty dollars in the week. Once a season, a class. That is four or five different formats, a dozen or more wines a week, and a total spend well under what a single ticketed tasting event in a hotel ballroom charges for six pours and a cheese cube.
Please drink responsibly. Must be of legal drinking age.
Tags: #winetastinginnyc #nycwine #freewinetasting #astorwines #eastvillage #tribeca #naturalwine #wineflights #wineclass #nycwinebars #brooklynwine #winenight #newyorkcity
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Ask Karpo first
New York pours more free wine in a week than most cities do in a year, and almost none of it is listed where you would look. Ask Karpo which shops and bars are pouring near you this week and it can find the schedule before you pay sixty-five dollars for a ballroom tasting.
