It’s a cozy night at Anaïs, the candle-lit wine bar tucked in among Boerum Hill’s brownstones, and Eliza Dumais is sitting in a corner booth. Next to her is Joseph Signa, a chatty, shaggy dude in a vintage sweater, and Anaïs’s wine director. It’s not entirely clear if Signa is firmly planted at our table because he wants to ensure I’ll write something nice about his bar, but the truth is less calculative: He and Dumais are old friends who first met at the now-gone Lalou, where Signa worked as a server and Dumais — a born-and-bred Brooklynite who reveres New York on an “Empire State of Mind” level — would spend hours talking, drinking, and writing.
As a lifestyle reporter, Dumais has covered travel, love, sex, and food. But her main focus is wine. She’s a mainstay among natural-wine producers and sellers and restaurateurs. For years, she was a co-editor for Swurl, an independent wine magazine. Last year, she printed custom zines with wine-giant Marko Kovac (and then hosted parties for those zines at places like Night Moves and Marlow & Sons) and curated panels for Zev Rovine, a name-brand importer and natural-wine demigod. While the wine world is evolving and undergoing something of an identity crisis — trying to shake free of the “natty fratty” stigma, navigating a public that’s drinking less, staying mindful of rising economic anxiety — Dumais embodies a spirit of unstuffy appreciation. “Most people are too intimidated to talk about wine at all, and then you have Eliza who will effortlessly say something like, ‘It tastes like pennies,’” says Alex McCown, the owner of Frog Wine Bar in Bed-Stuy. “No one else in the wine world would ever say that. Typically, we’ll say something tastes like tobacco, earth, limestone. And then you have Eliza who’s like, ‘Oh yeah, this one tastes like cherries and disappointment.’”
“She didn’t come through the traditional sommelier world,” says Rovine. “She writes about the feelings behind the tastes, and it’s very cool and very influential — she’s speaking to a different movement, a young, chic, downtown, natural-wine movement, and it’s exciting.” At Anaïs, I intend to take full advantage of her expertise. Our first bottle is a Chardonnay-Sauv-Blanc blend called Escargot made by Marie and Vincent Tricot, a favorite producer of Dumais’s. Some of the winespeak, not all unprovoked by me, included: a game called “What do bubbles sound like?” — per Dumais, “baby teeth” — the best wine to bring to a dinner party, Bisou by Domaine Mosse, because “it’s light enough to sate the ‘I don’t drink red’ constituent, and full bodied enough for the Cab dads … it’s just one of those crunchy, bright, easy-to-drink reds.”
All night, in addition to talk of Cab dads, “Sam” is peppered frequently throughout the conversation. Sam is Sam Lawrence, chef and co-owner of the ultrascene-y restaurant Bridges in Chinatown and Dumais’s boyfriend. Their relationship is the basis for Dumais’s first book, Grape Juice, an 831 Stories romance novel about an ennui-addled wine rep in New York who finds herself at a profound harvest in Alsace. There are passages in the book — a couple driving to Paris at the end of harvest, for example — that Dumais says she pulled straight from her own real-life love story, a story in which, much like Dumais IRL, the dominant flavor is unselfconsciously flowery. “While we drive, towns and small appellations rising and falling on either side of us, we tell stories,” she writes. “First kisses, sports games, driving lessons, apartment moldings.”
“I love writing while Sam is cooking — all the human noises of slicing and simmering helps me work,” Dumais says. “During long afternoons spent cooking and writing, the full breadth of our interactions will consist of ‘will you taste this?’ and ‘what’s another word for … ?’” She recalled a recent long lunch — one of her favorite kinds of meal — that Lawrence coordinated for her birthday. “The restaurant was closed,” she recalls. “Sam lined tables down the middle of the dining room and threw me and my 20 closest friends the most glamorous five-hour lunch of my life.”
Before I know it, three hours have passed during our night, and we were tipsy. When I ask Dumais what she’d order for us next — should we decide to get properly shitfaced? — she says, “I’m a sucker for bubbles and natural grower Champagnes, so I’d probably say … some glasses of Champagne Chavost or Lahèrte “Ultradition.” Anaïs, which was quite tranquil when I arrived, is suddenly noisy and bustling. Signa had mentioned that a mentalist was doing a show later in the night, but … is it already later? Dumais is telling me about another novel she has in the works, this time about female friendship in your 30s, when as if on cue, two female friends in their 30s interrupt us with, “Are you Eliza?” They’re fans, it turns out, who recognize Dumais from one of Rovine’s portfolio tastings for which Dumais had moderated a panel.
A random group of people squishes in next to us, and the room is now packed for the magic show, so Signa escorts us out through a secret wine cellar and unlocks an escape hatch around the back, while Eliza texts Sam about meeting up at a new restaurant opening, where he’s waiting with a pair of heels for Dumais in his tote.
