Corrupt Review: Wine at the Hollywood Bowl

If There’s a Better Place to Drink Wine, Please Send Me There for Free

Compared to Substack, I could make so much more money if I let people punch me.

I know it’s extra obnoxious to have a favorite place to drink wine. I also know that if you have one, it should be a restaurant or a wine bar or Baron Éric de Rothschild’s house. But mine is the Hollywood Bowl.

This is partly because I am an aspirational asshole from New Jersey. Listening to Tchaikovsky while outside in Los Angeles and drinking pinot noir is like selling a screenplay, only way easier.

It’s sophisticated but not stuffy, relaxed but not useless - all the things I like about California. And the wine selection at the Bowl is awesome.

You go see the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, and you know what wines you’re getting at the bar? You don’t want to know. They only offer seven wines, all by the glass, and one of them is a Prosecco. Which costs $16. Why Mayor Mamdani never talks about that is suspicious.

So when a publicist asked if I wanted to sit at one of the box seats at the Hollywood Bowl and drink wine, I said, “When is the Tchaikovsky Spectacular where they shoot off fireworks and hire circus folks to do tricks before the USC marching band floods the stage?” You can only stray so far from your Jersey roots.

The weird thing about having a favorite place to drink wine is that you want to find the perfect bottle for that spot. You’re supposed to pair wine with food. Maybe the weather. But matching wine with location seems like a ridiculous new type of snobbery that I am very excited to invent.

The reason the wine at the Bowl doesn’t suck is that all the food and drink at the Bowl is supplied by chef Suzanne Goin and wine director Caroline Styne, the restaurateurs who ran the iconic L.A. restaurant Lucques, and still run the great A.O.C.

I asked Styne what makes a great outdoor concert wine. “People just want something delicious and fun and don’t want to think about it much,” she said.

Maybe that’s what I liked. Why bother with something complex when it’s too loud at the Bowl to barrage my lovely wife Cassandra with my annoying, made-up observations about smelling tar and roses?

Styne said that what she’s learned over the years is to go easy. Canned wines work well, partly because they’re smaller portions, and largely because they don’t spill easily.

“I try to have some interesting wines,” she said. “I want people to experiment, and sometimes those experiments aren’t of interest.” She tried a Rhône last year. “You think people are drinking a lot of Côtes-du-Rhône. They do not. I can’t sell a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage to save my life.”

But it’s more than just simple. The wines mesh with the place. Which is not an accident. Three-quarters of the bottles are from the West Coast. Most are smaller producers who use words such as “sustainable” or “organic” or - I assume - just “liberal.”

“I want it to feel very much about L.A. and our state and the local organic thing. You’re not in the middle of Chicago. You’re in the Hollywood Hills. It should all feel like it’s all in the right place,” she said. And every Wednesday and Sunday, three hours before the show, Styne has winemakers and winery owners pour free tastings.

I’ve never seen a venue that big where so many people are drinking wine. Mostly out of Solo cups, and often bottles they bring in themselves. But there’s something understood about pairing classical wine with music. Like you’re making an effort. Not Crozes-Hermitage effort. But an intellectual and social effort you wouldn’t make at a rock concert.

Before the show, I went to one of the restaurants at the Bowl, Stein’s The Backyard, which is named for neither her nor me, but does show just how Jew-y L.A. is.

I got the Vouvray, because even at the Bowl I’m awful, and my lovely wife Cassandra got a glass of California pinot noir.

When we got to our seats, Styne sent us a bottle of Hitching Post pinot noir, the one from the restaurant in Santa Ynez they frequent in the movie Sideways.

It’s also the wine that was on everyone’s table at the Bowl on May 12, 2021. The Bowl was the first major cultural center to throw an event, with seats at the rehearsal concert spaced out like satellites. I took my son, and he ate the giant chocolate chip cookie, I drank my half bottle of Hitching Post, and we listened to Samuel Barber’s Adagio and Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and felt deliriously lucky to be alive.

I felt that again when I followed up our Hitching Post with a $25 half bottle of the Pinot Project. It’s a bottle I wouldn’t really enjoy at home. But there, it was in the right place.