"Wine isn't fun if we're not drinking it. It's not a museum, right? It's a restaurant that we want people to engage with and participate in," says Zimmi's general manager and beverage director Cory Holt. "We want to sell wine, and I think the best way to do that is make the pricing accessible."

In collaboration with Jenni Guizio, a partner and fellow beverage director at the West Village restaurant, Holt has assembled a list of wines the team and guests love—without getting too precious about them.

"We're living in this weird allocation world where you get a few bottles of this, you get a few bottles of that, and you have to do all this run around to get them. But you'll always find more wine to buy and sell," he notes. "For anything where we have more than a couple of bottles of it and it's sub-300 bucks, we'll offer a half-bottle. We're certainly not the only people to do it, but I think we are probably about the only people doing it in New York today. Again, it's lowering that barrier to entry, which is really important to getting people to drink wine."

That half-bottle policy spares Holt and Guizio from having to manage an unwieldy by-the-glass menu in Zimmi's compact space, while also bringing an unexpected element to the restaurant's dining experience.

"There are just some realities to the number of covers we're doing in a 16-table restaurant, right? So it didn't make sense to have 30 wines by the glass. And it means we have stuff open that's driven by what people in the room are interested in. It's a lot of two-tops, and they might want to have a cocktail, and people are drinking less, so we don't want to lose that whole sale. Even more so, we don't want to lose that whole experience of great wine," Holt says. "And there's also a communal aspect to it that energizes the room. Like we've had people from two different tables go in on a bottle together, or we've had, you know, 'Oh, you're drinking Alain Graillot Crozes-Hermitage '21 right? Somebody three tables over is drinking the single vineyard from '20' and now they might want to get a glass of each other's on each table to taste. It's a convivial thing. We've seen people make friends in the restaurant. It's very special."

As for what's on that wine list being shared around the room, selections focus on France and the Mediterranean, complimenting the comforting menu from executive chef and restaurant partner Maxime Pradié, previously of Lodi and Flora Bar.

"It's very centered around Chef Maxine's cooking and his personal background," Holt says. "He grew up in New York, but spent a lot of time in France, particularly southern France. His grandmother is a great cook, very skilled, as a home cook, and I think there's a lot of that kind of sensibility in his food. In a lot of ways, that's the driving force of what this restaurant experience is about."

"If there's an ethos behind the wine list, it's that we want to create an environment where it's easy to drink wine, and it's fun to drink wine, and there's an opportunity to have a different experience than you've had before."

"If there's an ethos behind the wine list, it's that we want to create an environment where it's easy to drink wine, and it's fun to drink wine, and there's an opportunity to have a different experience than you've had before."

"We want to include all of France by and large, but especially southern France. And then blurring some of those boundaries across the Spanish border and the Italian border. That approach aligns with the food; there's a thread that goes across those international borders. But I think when we step outside of France, we just ask the question, does this relate back? Does this wine fit into that conversation? And some of it is just about pleasure. We love these wines, they're important to us, so we want to bring them in."

We asked Zimmi's general manager and beverage director Cory Holt to name a few of his favorite gems from his list and tell us why he loves them.

2020 G.D. Vajra Barolo "Albe" ($95)

It's funny, because it's not a French wine, but in some ways I think one of the closest relationships both Jenny and I have nurtured over the years is with the the Vajra family. I have watched these wines go from a good value with some really high points to some of the most dynamic and interesting wines in Piedmont.

I've never really felt like people kind of fully understand how good they are and what they've done for the region because they have, like, a really accessible, widely available retail Barolo bottling, that you see a lot of places, but they make incredible wines at many different price points. From a collector standpoint, or a industry standpoint, they maybe don't always get their due on that–but they're truly, widely regarded as nicest family in wine.

I've had Giuseppe somm with us, when I was working at Maialino, on our anniversary night, he came in and just worked the floor with us and was amazing. And, you know, at the end of the day, yes, it is about sales, which is fine, but it's still rare and that family is really special to us.

2022 Domaine Dupont-Fahn Bourgogne Aligoté ($95)

2021 Anne Boisson Bourgogne Aligoté ($115)

There's sort of been this trend the last whatever number of years where people are pushing that Aligoté is a serious white varietal, just as good as Chardonnay. And I don't fully disagree, I think it has its place, but I find that a lot of them are not all they're being peddled as. I wanted to be in on it, but I was just running into constant disappointment. Broadly speaking, this category is just not very good yet. But I have had some. And the few that we've brought on, I feel incredibly strongly about.

There's a domaine called Dupont-Fahn that flies a little under the radar, and they make a very inexpensive Aligoté that is just one of my favorite wines in the Burgundy section of the list. Anne Boisson is another amazing estate. And in some ways, I like their Aligoté almost more than some of their higher-end wines.

2016 Maxime Magnon Corbières Blanc "La Bégou" ($130)

The whole Southern French region gets overlooked a lot, even though the wines are actually quite popular wines with guests. People who have some familiarity love them, but you don't see many lists focused on them.

Sometimes, certain Italian regions that are famous are quite angular and can be somewhat difficult for for some wine drinkers, particularly younger wine drinkers. And I think, Burgundy can be too light, or Bordeaux can be too this or that. But there's just a sort of sweet spot in the Southern French part of the world, Mediterranean wines in general, that just turns out to almost always be what people are looking for when you describe something to them.

For this, I would specifically go to Maxime Magnon. He makes a number of reds and a couple of whites. The whites are not necessarily the the focal point for the general public, and they're smaller in quantity, but the La Bégou bottling that he makes is, I think, one of the most interesting and delicious white wines in France. It's Grenache Blanc, Grenache Gris, and Carignan Gris. It totally defies Southern French whites, but also is very profoundly connected to them. Really high acid, lean and powerful, but it almost reminds me of like a really, really good Etna Bianco or Chablis — like a really ripe, fuller oak-aged Chablis from some of the better producers there. We had a vertical of them when we opened, from '22 to '16. Andvthe '16 was not only the best, it was just still so fresh and vibrant and young. We had the wines on the list for $125, $130; people I shared them with were like, 'I would pay double that for this.' It's a really serious wine.

2018 Georges Laval "Le Chênes" 1er Cru Brut Nature ($550)

It's not inexpensive, but I really like the single-vineyard wines from Georges Laval. Those are some of my favorite wines in the world. They're wines that I've been lucky enough to try a lot. They have an aromatic quality that I can usually identify immediately, and at this point it has this emotional impact on me. So those are really special to me.

We have a really close relationship with certain vendors like [Laval importer] Transatlantic Bubbles, who brings in an amazing portfolio of Champagne. The guys who run Transatlantic Bubbles–it's just two guys–and they almost exclusively import Champagne. They're just the nicest two people in the world.