I Fully Endorse Tipsy Wine Shopping at Bar Norman

Amiel Stanek
You can drink wine and buy a bottle to take home.

This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to our very opinionated editors’ favorite things to eat, drink, and buy.

The last time I was in Portland, Oregon, I walked into Bar Norman on a mission: to pick out a bottle or two of easy-drinking gamay for a friend’s dinner party. But the magical thing about natural wine hero Dana Frank’s takeaway shop-cum-bar is that you can’t not sit at the bar when you’re checking out. Which also means you can’t not see the list of 30-plus wines by the glass on offer. Which, of course, also means, well, whaddya know, you do have time for a splash (or two, or three) of that Loire pet-nat that you weren’t initially planning on buying a bottle of—but, of course, you are now.

Frank won’t steer you wrong. She stocks what she hails as “the grand-daddy of dry riesling in the Rheingau”: 2014 JB Becker Riesling Trocken Wallufer. “I absolutely love the unequivocal German-ness of Ha-Jo Becker’s wines and the fact that he was one of the very first to make naturally farmed dry rieslings that fly in the face of tradition,” she told me. Then there’s the 2017 Complemen Terre Muscadet Croix Moriceau. “It’s from the ‘new school’ of Muscadet, where the wines see a little bit of malolactic fermentation,” she explained. “That gives them an exquisite texture and body. Like sucking on a stone covered in lemon curd. So good!” Now that’s my kind of shopping.

Go there: Bar Norman

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit