Photograph by Andrew Thomas Lee
I’m perched on a bar stool at Madeira Park, slurping small, immaculately scrubbed oysters in a classic mignonette sauce. I nibble triangles of sourdough smeared with rich anchovy butter and decorated with radish, parsley, and pickled shallot. It doesn’t matter that I butter my mustache. A sip of the house white—a $12 glass of Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine—and all concerns vanish. As Hemingway once remarked, “I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
Plans for french fries to drag through aioli. Plans for chicken-liver tartine with crisp apple, pecans, brandied prune, green-garlic mostarda, and dill fronds. Plans for a glass of punchy, well-chilled, cherry-colored Italian Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo rosé, to wash down the unctuous poulet rouge liver.
It’s a swell moment to drink well in Atlanta, at places where the chefs dote on chicories and cheeses in the same way vintners dote on twirling tendrils and blushing grapes.
Photograph by Andrew Thomas Lee
Photograph by Andrew Thomas Lee
Photograph by Andrew Thomas Lee
Forgive me for romanticizing: It hasn’t always been this way. Atlanta has produced Michelin stars, nationally important cocktail bars, and James Beard Award–winning chefs. But as Madeira Park partner Tim Willard observes, until recently, Birmingham had more wine bars.
“I think it’s very strange that the expectation is, if you are at a wine bar, you are going to get some flatbread—some, like, uninspired food,” says Willard, a well-traveled sommelier who opened the Poncey-Highland spot with Miller Union’s Steven Satterfield and Neal McCarthy. “But you are there for wine, and the snacks are just to kind of keep you full or get your palate salted so the wine tastes better. We had no interest in that.”
Historically, Atlantans have leaned consistently toward tapas bars (yawn), beer and chicken wing spots (yay), and gastropubs with pretzels, burgers, and maybe good fish-and-chips (guilty). Our town’s wine culture has evolved in fits and starts.
Photograph by Andrew Thomas Lee
Photograph by Andrew Thomas Lee
Indeed, it’s been a long, slow crawl to Terry and Jenn Koval’s Fawn Wine & Amaro Bar in downtown Decatur, their follow-up to The Deer and the Dove, where Koval’s cooking earned him a Beard in 2023.
In the dark, zanily decorated Fawn, you’ll find the city’s first amaro-focused cocktail menu and volcanic wines chosen to complement the briny allure of technically daring seafood: urchin chips the staff calls “adult Pringles,” bresaola fashioned from blue-fin tuna, pommes macaire showered with house-cured bottarga and grated truffle. Dessert might be a glass of bittersweet amaro—there are more than 50 to choose from, and the collection seems to grow by the hour—paired with a fudgy wedge of chocolate-orange tart. Or an affogato, in which house-made coffee ice cream floats alongside house-made Biscoff cookies. If you hear audio from Absolutely Fabulous in the restroom, you aren’t (necessarily) overserved. The laugh track is real. Fawn is grinning at you.
While Midtown’s Eno (opened in 1999, now shuttered) brought in the century with style, and chef Doug Turbush delivered a legit spot for wine and small plates with Marietta’s Stem Wine Bar (2013), the pandemic snuffed out Hazel Jane’s on the Beltline and Cardinal in Grant Park, both delightful places with progressive tastes and women owners. I miss Cardinal’s vermouth spritz, with olives and oranges.
The tide turned in 2021, with Buckhead’s Lucian Books and Wine, where everything is stellar—food, wine, and books. Last year, Commune, an intimate wine haunt and listening lounge, launched in Avondale Estates, while Marietta Proper brought Jazz Age sparkle to Cobb County’s picturesque town square—and picked up a semifinalist nod in the James Beard Awards’ best new bar category to boot. Next year, Lucian’s owners will unveil a sister establishment, Sargent, in the Old Fourth Ward.
Suddenly our cup runneth over. What’s the secret sauce? Put a smart chef in the kitchen, one with a clear point of view and a relationship with the people who grow the vegetables, tend the chickens, and stuff the sausage. Teach your staff to show a little tenderness and respect, to explain the nuances of wine without being boring and stuffy. By and by, the reservation book will fill up. Diners will ask for the notebook with the rarest bottles. They’ll leave happy.
Photograph by Andrew Thomas Lee
Photograph by Andrew Thomas Lee
At Madeira Park, the POV is decidedly country French, with ingredients grown close to home. Ollie Honderd, the restaurant’s 36-year-old chef de cuisine, spent his salad days in France: farming, couch-surfing, cooking. Matt Watkins, Fawn’s beverage director, is a 37-year-old amaro geek with a law degree from Emory University. He’s traveled far and wide and sampled his beloved herbal liqueurs along the way; Fawn is his dream bar. Young dudes with passion—it shows in their work.
Not to be overlooked is chef Karl Gorline’s Bar Avize, in West Midtown. The room rides sidesaddle with Avize, his luxurious fine-dining paean to the Alps. I’m not sure I’d call this a wine bar: There are but five glasses on offer. On the upside, not a single glass is more than $18. Plus, there are fun cocktails and the food is playfully extra: Bougie Chicky Nuggies, topped with caviar and crème fraiche; truffle fries with Taleggio Cheese Whiz (be still, my heart); a frothy, gently sweet, mouth-cleansing rinse of juniper ice cream. Flavors this original are enough to lure me in. If you find the wine list lacking, just look around: Atlanta, at long last, has options.
This article appears in our July 2025 issue.
