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You might not, though, have heard of Lee Campbell, who ran Tarlow’s wine programs for many years — unless you can quote the 10 crus of Beaujolais from memory. But Campbell, who forged her career working the floor at such key Manhattan restaurants as Verbena and Gotham Bar and Grill, was a pivotal figure in wine, and of the nascent Brooklyn ethos, as the borough’s restaurant industry began to boom. At Tarlow’s restaurants, she built lists full of bottles that were, to float a bunch of nowadays buzzwords, made by small producers, farmed using more light-touch — often organic — farming, and produced with minimal tinkering in the cellar. These were proto-natural wines, evangelized by Campbell before anyone, certainly in New York, was using that term. She was a driving force behind the popularity of many now-iconic producers, like Pierre Overnoy in the Jura, at a time when they were deep-cut esoterica. It’s fair, in other words, to consider her the mother of natural wine in New York restaurants.

So when word got out that Campbell had again teamed up with Tarlow for his first Manhattan foray, the much lauded Borgo, there was cause for excitement, of the sort you might have to hear that TV on the Radio was back out on tour. (If you’re nodding, you almost surely dined at one of those restaurants back in the day.)

Campbell has returned to her native New York after a sojourn in Virginia, where she began making wine and promoting the state’s wine industry. And she’s doing what she did all along — finding and sharing wines that are unexpected, that almost preternaturally predict what’s going to be on trend several years from now. It’s no surprise she made enemies of some small-minded diners in the past, by doing the scouting and boundary-pushing that’s now almost innate to the modern wine buyer’s job.

And yet. At a time when natural wine is not only ubiquitous but at the risk of a bubble, Campbell has again moved three steps ahead. She has grown uninterested in seeing the world in terms of “natty,” as she puts it, or not — making her the grown-up in the room amid endless bickering. She is, in short, over wine having to be in philosophical buckets, and more interested in what always drove the wine programs at Tarlow’s restaurants: “beautiful wines that people aren’t really heralding.”

At Borgo, that takes the form of a tightly edited 15-page list that leaves few corners unexplored. Her fondness for Italian white wines is evident — to go with Borgo’s Italianate fare — but those occupy cozy space with Burgundy upstarts like L’Aubraine, traditional dry Jurançon from southern France, and even, yes, Virginia.

Resy caught up with Campbell to get her take on the current state of wine in New York, her return to Manhattan restaurants, and what we should all be drinking right now.

The post Forget Natural Wine. Borgo’s Lee Campbell Just Wants Wine to Be Itself appeared first on Resy | Right This Way.