The Parish Selects All The Right Wines | Downtown, LA
What wine you should drink at The Parish
The wine list at The Parish is trying to tell you something.
What it's telling you (screaming at you, really) is this: Drink white wine.
Sommelier François Renaud, who also handles the wines at chef Casey Lane's The Tasting Kitchen, had nine bottles of white wine (two of them sparkling) on his list when we visited. As for reds? There were three.
And that selection of whites is a narrow one, focusing on high-acid, occasionally slightly sweet wines made from grapes like Riesling, Grüner Veltliner and Chenin Blanc.
Listen to the list: There's a delicious logic to Renaud's selection, one that has echoes in Lane's later-summer treatment of grilled corn (click here for the recipe). The cobs are slathered in honeycomb-laced butter, a sweet-on-sweet combination kept from being saccharine and turned delicious by a shot of lemon and a sprinkling of piment d'Espelette.
The acid and subtle sugar in wines like François Chidaine's 2009 Chenin Blanc ($64 for 750 ml) play a similar seasoning role to what the citrus and heat do in the corn, cutting through the richness and burn of Tabasco-lashed fried chicken ($23), or mellowing the fat-on-fat intensity of fried-oyster poutine ($15).
The Parish, 840 S. Spring St., Downtown; 213-225-2400 or theparishla.com