On Saturday, celebrate our first anniversary by sampling free mini mimosas and beer-mosas from our new cocktail and wine menu!
A whirlwind year ago, we opened Persephone Café as a place to celebrate artisanal breads, pastries, tea and coffee. All along, we hoped to extend our celebration into weekend brunch and weekday happy hours. So without further ado, we would like to toast our anniversary by introducing our new wine and cocktail menu. To help us curate eclectic wines, we enlisted the expertise of Nathan Adams.
Growing up with oenophile parents, Nathan has always been interested in wine, but only recently did his interest grow into “more of an obsession,” he says. “I just love it.” You may have sampled his palate imprint at Sudachi, where he has managed the wine program since 2011. Parlaying his personal passion and professional experience, he has created a list for Persephone that is at once approachable and inspired. Here, he shares some thoughts on the menu, and its melding with the Persephone concept.
Ali, Kevin and I wanted to have a list of wines that were food-friendly, unique and approachable from a drinkability and price perspective. We wanted to focus on wines that could be consumed with brunch or lunch, or as an aperitif in the afternoon, and that, above all else, would complement the food and be fun to drink.
Every wine on the list is a wine I love to drink. When we were developing the profiles for types of wines we wanted to feature, we narrowed in on old world wines as most likely candidates. Right now, with only one exception, everything is from Europe, mostly France. While I certainly don’t discriminate, we found these wines to be great values and offer many of the characteristics that we look for in food-friendly wines: great acidity, medium body, lower alcohol, low to no oak (or at least no new oak) i.e. well-rounded and approachable wines.
The wine list is very affordable without compromising on quality. We don’t expect there to be any wines that are over $40 and the majority of the list is in the $20s. We want people to be able to come in on a warm summer afternoon, grab a bite, sit on the porch and enjoy some wine without breaking the bank.
We also will be selling most of the wines by the glass (technically more than a glass as it comes in a quarter-bottle carafe), half-bottle carafe and full bottle. We want to let people try out new wines and really get a feel for what they like. This gives us the opportunity to expose people to some lesser known grapes and wine making regions, which often represent great values. It’s fun to see people try new things and love them.
I think right now there is a trend of restaurants putting obscure wines on a list, just for the sake of being hip. I chose all of the wines for Persephone because I love them and they met the characteristics mentioned above – they just happen to be made from grapes like Négrette, Poulsard, Counoise, Gamay and come from places like Fronton (near Toulouse, France) and Bugey-Cerdon (near the Savoie and Jura regions of France). We also have a fantastic super-dry Riesling from upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region. The list also includes more familiar offerings too: we have a few wines from the Rhone, Provence and Loire Valley. The fun part of the wine list is we expect it to be an evolving entity; as such, we have purposely kept it small and nimble.