It’s Sunday night at Bern’s Steakhouse in Tampa, Florida, and we are seven bottles in, our eight-top a veritable battlefield littered with water glasses and stemware. At one end, Joanne Close, the co-owner of The Independent Caveau NOLA, a wine bar and storefront in New Orleans, Louisiana, can’t stop laughing. She is holding the famous Bern’s doorstopper of a wine list, which features 6,800 labels for a cellar of 600,000 bottles. She has found a steal: a 1979 Cairanne from Domaine du Grand Chèn. The price: $22.95.
“There are no guarantees,” she says and signals to our sommelier. Divided by the eight of us, even if it’s terrible (it was not), for less than three bucks a person we could each have a glass of 44-year-old wine.
It takes no special skill to pull up a chair at Bern’s and buy an $11,000 bottle of Domaine de la Romanée Conti. But navigating an extremely long wine list with friends on a budget can be more fun than freewheeling five-figure bottles.
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“You should know the group you are going with and have an understanding with them beforehand about how much you’re going to spend,” Close later told me. She said eight guests was the perfect number for good conversation, decent pours and an evenly divided check at the end.
Leyden Pavlova, the sommelier of N7, a popular French restaurant in New Orleans, met me earlier that evening in the bar at Bern’s. It is resplendent in red, an intimate throwback to a time of cigars and cigarette holders. A waitress descended on our couch and took our martini orders to start the night. Pavlova pulled up the wine list on her phone. She swiped through the 192- page menu, zeroing in on Northern Rhône.
“I really want to get the Chave,” she said, spotting a 2017 Saint-Joseph from JeanLouis Chave. “I read an article on the plane this morning about this idyllic vineyard there he revived from abandonment. It’s never been farmed with chemicals. I’m intrigued. I can’t resist.” I went south, landing on a 1979 Domaine du Vieux Lazaret Châteauneuf-du-Pape for reasons more pedestrian: I was born that year, and at $189, it was a splurge I could afford.
“For cellars this deep, in terms of value, it’s interesting to step off the main path,” she later told me. “An older wine that might be ever-so-slightly past its prime but still beautiful and arresting. Or just outside of famous, high-priced regions, there are less-expensive bottles with much of the same character.”
Close, a 20-year veteran of the wine industry, says going against a restaurant’s type could work well when seeking older bottles at affordable prices. “Bern’s is a steakhouse, so everybody gets caught up in the idea of mostly red wines,” she said, flipping through the list, “but they have so many great whites.” We went for classics, but from oddball years—a Kalin Cellars Sonoma Chardonnay from 1981 and a 2011 Ramonet Aligoté.
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Themes are always a good way to tackle a long wine list, she advised. Birth years can be fun, as can random letters of the alphabet or unusual wine regions. Leaning on the sommelier can also yield unexpected and rewarding finds.
“I always like to encourage people to reach out in advance,” said Dustin French, our sommelier that evening. “Everyone can lay out what they’re looking for, I can check the inventory, and when they arrive, I take over from there.”
In the end, after five hours of lively conversation and eight bottles of wine, our waiter brought the check. It came in at $300 per person—an astonishing deal given how deeply we were reaching into the cellar. And best of all, it meant we could all afford to do it again.
This article originally appeared in the November 2023 issue of Wine Enthusiast magazine. Click here to subscribe today!
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Last Updated: October 20, 2023
