Lula Drake Wine Parlour

The name says wine parlour and they mean it — walking into Lula Drake feels like stepping into a candlelit European cave where someone actually cares what's in the bottle. The list skews hard Old World, heavy on France, Italy, Spain, and Austria, with natural and low-intervention wines woven throughout rather than siloed into a gimmick section. This is not a steakhouse wine list dressed up in ambiance; this one has a genuine point of view.

Eighty to 120 labels sounds manageable until you start reading and realize how much ground they cover: grower Champagne from small estates, Loire Chenin Blanc and Cab Franc from boutique producers, Nebbiolo from Piedmont's smaller houses, Austrian Grüner Veltliner and Blaufränkisch, organic Rhône and Languedoc reds, Txakolina from the Basque Country, and occasional orange wine drops from Georgia and Italy. The regional depth is real — this isn't a list padded with Napa Cab and New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc to keep the nervous drinker comfortable. Gaps are minimal, though adventurous New World options are largely absent, which is clearly a deliberate editorial choice rather than an oversight. If your drinking lives mostly in Europe, you will find more to explore here than you can reasonably tackle in one visit.

Roughly 15 to 20 pours available at any given time is an unusually generous glass program for a room this size, and the selections rotate seasonally rather than sitting static for a year. At $10 to $18 a glass, you're not getting a deal exactly, but you're getting access to wines that most Columbia restaurants simply don't stock — Txakolina by the glass alone is a small miracle in this market.