In a city that endlessly cycles through hot new restaurants, French mainstay Daniel holds onto its cool grandeur. Tucked away on a sedate street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, home to a dining room with enough arches and columns to pass for a wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the flagship restaurant of French chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud seems a world away from New York’s buzzy restaurant scene—while still remaining a top culinary destination.

This trend-defying ethos extends to the wine service. “We don’t see a lot of demand for natural wine, even though there’s plenty of natural wine on the wine list,” says Daniel’s chef sommelier Erin Healy. “Even though those trends exist in New York, they don’t exist here.” Instead, classic wine reigns supreme, with emphasis on France’s traditional prestige wine regions: Bordeaux, and especially, Burgundy. But a perusal of the wine list (which, sadly, is not available online) makes clear that Daniel isn’t merely coasting on the big names. 

Here, “classic” can also extend to under-loved French wines such as Rhône Valley whites, or producers making French-style wines in exciting, newer regions such as Spain’s Sierra de Gredos and California’s Anderson Valley. And when it comes to heavy-hitters, Daniel offers surprising opportunities to drink some of their back vintages at relatively affordable prices, thanks to the restaurant’s strategically maintained cellar.

“There’s a culture of holding wine here,” says Healy. “About a third of the wine in the cellar is not on the wine list”—in order to forego short-term sales in favor of long-term value, and cater to guests looking to drink wine with age. And while some other restaurants in New York sold off wine cellars owing to lockdown-era financial pressures, Daniel held firm. “We didn’t sell anything,” affirms Healy.

Healy, who joined Daniel in 2023 after serving as beverage director at Gramercy Tavern, is aware of her own role in continuing this legacy. “A lot of [wines] I’m purchasing now are for people [after] I leave.” In the more immediate term, she’s enthusiastic about recommending the perfect pairings for Daniel’s seafood-centric menu at a wide range of prices. (And she alluded to a few special bottles off the list that she may pull out of the cellar for a guest who she knows will truly appreciate them—it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask nicely.) In the meantime, Healy invites guests to pay special attention to these favorites.

(This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Daniel Wine List Favorites from Erin Healy

2020 Jérôme Fornerot Les Murgers des Dents de Chien Saint-Aubin Premier Cru ($225)

In Burgundy, you have this predicament. Because of Napoleonic laws and inheritance laws, people who are interested in making wine might inherit a small parcel of land, but it’s still too expensive to buy out your siblings, so you either sell the land or sell the grapes. Jérôme Fornerot is a young grower from Saint-Aubin who had a little bit of land for a long time and was exclusively selling his grapes to the co-op. Then he started—little by little—making his own wine, and then finally turned into domaine production. And the wines are so, so good. So classic. I’ve now tasted three vintages of his wines, and they’re all so consistent, which is hard to find these days—especially with the young growers trying to make names for themselves. These are wines that hit the wine list far cheaper than their more famous friends, and just really over-deliver. For someone who likes classic white Burgundy but really can’t get into some of these crazier new vintage pricings, it’s just the perfect fit.

2019 J.L. Chave Sélection Blanche Hermitage ($245)

Something that works here—in part because of Chef Daniel’s connection to the Rhône Valley—is white Rhône. I’ve always loved Viognier, Marsanne, and Roussanne, but at every restaurant I’ve worked at, everyone tells me I’m crazy to put those wines on the list. They’re not low end—they start at $200 or $250. But the wines are incredibly good with food, and so dynamic, especially for people who love white Burgundy. As the Burgundy [pricing] bubble continues, white Rhône can be a really fun place to explore, with a breadth of styles I don’t think people know exist. Outside of the grands vins, which can be very expensive, something like the Jean-Louis Chave Sélections—his négociant wines—are so outstanding. As great as they are in his reds, I think the whites blow the reds out of the water. I’ve always been a fan of Chave blancs, and I don’t think people know that he’s making the white labels very similar to the way he makes his grands vins, and the blend is very similar as well. We currently have the ‘19, which is about 80 percent Marsanne and 20 percent Roussanne, and the wine is rich and savory, with notes of anise, and all of this texture. It’s so beautiful with a lot of our cuisine, especially as we get into richer fish dishes. 

2005 Simon Bize “Les Marconnets” Savigny-lès-Beaune Premier Cru ($395)

We probably have one of the most special collections in New York of the Simon Bize wines. We’ve been sitting on these wines for a very long time—I think the youngest vintage here on the list right now is 2019. Everything since then is sitting in the cellar, so we can maintain this really beautiful library of Bize across the board, from Aloxe-Corton to Savigny-lès-Beaune, to Savigny-lès-Beaune Premier Cru and Latricières-Chambertin, and have verticals of the Marconnets, the Serpentières, the Talmettes, and the Vergelesses. About 18 months ago, when I first started working here, the ‘05s were still very tight—they weren’t ready, and kind of in a weird place. And then about 6 to 8 months ago, we started opening the wines again, and they’ve just really come around. And you can drink them at a price point that, for Burgundy, is still very value driven, because we just intentionally held them, so that someone who knows about Burgundy can come in and dig in. 

They’re so beautiful. I’ve opened the ‘05 Marconnet recently and it’s just out of this world. You can drink it side-by-side with the Serpentières and really explore Bize’s ‘05 vintage without breaking $800.

2021 Domaine Tempier Bandol Rouge ($195)

One question that I get asked on a regular basis is, “I’m a full-bodied red wine drinker. You have a fish-heavy menu, and I want a bottle of red wine. What can I drink?” My answer is always, “I’d start in Provence.” 

Domaine Tempier for me is that wine—a full-bodied red wine that’s actually going to compliment fish and not just not offend it—and Bandol is a favorite region of mine, in white, rosé, and red. We have it backvintage from 1990 and ‘87, and even the ‘21 is just so beautiful and delicious right now. 

I recently took a trip to a coastal wine region, and more and more that I travel to these places like Bandol, or Bolgheri in Italy, I fall into this kind of mysticism that coastal red wine regions, especially when they specialize in something like Mourvèdre or Cabernet Sauvignon, have—a kind of magical, symbiotic relationship with the cuisine, which is largely fish. And I associate drinking something like Bandol rouge with the things that you eat in Bandol, like bouillabaisse and roast fish. It’s a really beautiful pairing, for guests who come here wanting to drink red wine.

1913 Château Latour ($7500)

For one really high-end, crazy, fun, special bottle. 1913 in Bordeaux was a pretty disastrous vintage. No one writes a lot about it. But there was a cellarmaster at Château Latour in the 1990s—named Monsieur [Denis] Malbec—whose whole schtick was going back into the cellar, finding these old vintages of wine, reconditioning them, recorking them, and then putting them on the market. In 1993, 1913 was part of that catalog. When I purchased this from a private collection, I had never seen this before. After doing a lot of research, I realized this was the personal project of Malbec, who did it as an anniversary bottling in 1993. The label is longer than the classic Château Latour label, which tells a bit of the story of the reconditioning and the rebottling. It’s a wine that, if someone really wanted to do a drive down the history of Bordeaux, is a pretty special and unique way to look at the vintage even though it’s an “off” vintage. It was held at the château until 1993. It’s like the “bubble boy effect.” If you live in a bubble, and you’re fed a perfect diet and have had a perfect air supply for so long, you generally have more longevity than you would otherwise.

2016 Littorai Savoy Vineyard Anderson Valley ($250)

Ted Lemon [of Littorai Wines] told me recently that Daniel was his first customer in New York back in 1993—the first Littorai vintage was 1993. These ‘16s are so gorgeous. Littorai is a special winery. Ted is leading in the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay movement in Sonoma and West Sonoma Coast, but he also worked at Roulot in the late ‘80s. He has this kind of origin story in France as well. In a French restaurant like ours where Burgundy is so important, these wines are incredibly special. It’s just a fun story to tell. As Ted will say, the ‘17 vintage was lauded and talked about so much, but the ‘17s are so tight right now, and the ‘16s just turned out to be so beautiful.

2022 Comando G “Rozas 1er Cru” Sierra de Gredos ($195)

When I was a young sommelier, I was invited to this festival that Comando G threw on the side of the mountain in the Sierra de Gredos. I was 25 years old, sitting around a table with Jean-Marc Roulot, Raphaël Bérêche, Pedro Parra, all these people who were looking at these two young guys, Fernando [García] and Danny [Gómez Jiménez Landi, the winemakers of Comando G], and just so excited about what they were doing. 

This is a wine that brings French inspiration into a different setting. Both Danny and Fernando were very inspired by Château Rayas, and both went and studied with the family at Château Rayas in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. They’re both from the Sierra de Gredos, this very mountainous region, about 45 minutes outside of Madrid. In Gredos, during the [King Ferdinand VII] years, all of the farmers were motivated by payouts to come down from the mountains and move into the cities to work in industry. They didn’t break anything down, they just abandoned these vineyards. 

Fernando and Danny were able to acquire and rent many of these very high-altitude, very rugged old Garnacha vineyards, and brought them back to health—but they still let them exist in this wild way. And they have mimicked the Rayas style. They age the wine in concrete and large foudres, so it has this incredible elegance and freshness. For someone who enjoys that style, for less than $200 on the wine list, Comando G wines are very much in that realm. 

2022 was a challenging vintage for them, but the wines are very pure. The quality of the fruit is there—the vintage just reflected how little fruit and how little wine they were able to make, rather than it actually being a reflection of the quality of the wine. They’re also a great sidestep for someone who likes red Burgundy. I feel like Garnacha made in this particular way can be mistaken very often for Pinot Noir.