USA! USA! NY, NY! The Ryder Cup, Bethpage Black, September 26-28, 2025

Celebrate or drown your Ryder cup emotions at one of the best wine restaurants in NY (see link below)

I’m so full of patriotic Ryder Cup anticipation I’m tempted to limit this article to NY restaurants that focus only on US wines. But we’re also presented with the problem of how to adequately sum up the NY metro area wine scene from Bethpage to Brooklyn, let alone Manhattan. As you’d expect, it’s an embarrassment of riches.

So I’m going to default here to another source, one I’ve written about elsewhere and is more than worth your attention: Star Wine List. SWL is a site that kind of does the same thing I do, but its target is sommeliers, not golfers. This is its greatest strength, but also a bit of a weakness for all but the most ardent wine nerds, as we’ll see.

In brief, the site holds international competitions to identify the world’s best restaurant wine lists and sommeliers. But they also employ local experts to create wine guides to the restaurants in specific cities around the world, including some in the US. I won’t beat around the gorse, here’s the Star Wine List Guide to 51 restaurants in NY:

Let’s unpack what you’ll find there. The Guide features an interactive map leading to curated, detailed descriptions of each restaurant and its wine program, contact info, hours, a link to their wine list if available, and ,even an option to make a reservation all from the same page. It’s a one stop bonanza. What’s not to like?

If we had to criticize Star Wine List I’d say it sometimes overplays to the sommelier audience and defaults to lists with esoteric regions, wines and producers that will be completely unfamiliar to many wine drinkers. If you’re open-minded it can be a great learning opportunity, or it can feel like you just got handed a wine list in the Mos Eisley Cantina. But in fairness there are plenty of iconic restaurants that make the NY cut like Gramcercy Tavern and Daniel. Net, you can’t go wrong if SWL has a guide for your city of interest, including The Big Apple. Go USA!