Scotch Lodge

You walk into a dimly lit basement speakeasy expecting to talk about Scotch all night, and then a wine list lands in front of you with Gérard Boulay Sancerre and Occhipinti on it. It's a genuine surprise — the kind that makes you reconsider your drink order before you've even sat down properly. The list is compact, maybe a dozen bottles deep on any given visit, but every pick reads like someone with actual taste put it together.

The wine program leans hard into Old World Europe — Loire Valley, Burgundy, and southern French appellations anchor the list, with a few left-field Italian picks like the Occhipinti SP68 Rosso keeping things honest. The Domaine Tempier Bandol Rosé and Julien Sunier Régnié signal that whoever's building this list has a clear point of view, not just a distributor relationship. There's no deep cellar here and no vertical of anything, but the curation punches well above the room's whisky-forward reputation. Gaps exist — no real German or Spanish white presence, and if you want something outside France or Italy you're mostly out of luck.

Roughly six to ten wines rotate through the glass program, which is a solid commitment for a bar whose identity is built around a wall of single malts. Small-grower Champagne appears by the glass seasonally, which is the kind of thing that earns genuine goodwill. The rotation keeps things fresh enough that repeat visitors have reason to check back in.