Well, almost: To go with the sweet sippers (Nectar’s list calls them “stickys”), you can nibble on El Ray Venezuelen chocolate in three intensity levels, plus white. Along with its cheeses, selected by consultant (and basketball columnist for The New York Sun) Martin Johnson of the Joy of Cheese consultancy, Nectar’s only other food offerings are charcuterie and hummus. Both wines were well met by a trio of cheeses served on a plank: Ossau-Iraty, a Basque sheep cheese a four-year-old Gouda called Saenkanter, and a Gruyère-like Comté Marcel Petit. It turned out to be a light and chalky gamay from the Domaine Les Hautes Noëlles. “It’s Austrian.” Next, she poured a red, telling me only that it was from the Loire, her favorite region. The white wine she poured melded subtle spice, lime, and honeydew melon. But that was just about every wine at Nectar, so I asked the manager, Beth Bay, to choose for me. My usual habit at a wine bar is to order the wine that’s least familiar to me. Nectar looks like no other bar in Harlem (although more “downtown”-style spots are sure to come), and its 40-selection wine list, including 11 bubblies, also stands alone in its offbeat originality. And so it does, its cool vibe established by a sleek white bar, asymmetrical sailcloth panels covering the walls and ceiling, a battleship-gray concrete floor, and a burgundy-toned rear wall of horizontally stored wines. The proprietors, Jai Jai Greenfield and Eric Woods, wanted Nectar to have a different feel from that of Harlem Vintage’s medley of rich woods, exposed brick, and candlelight in the evening. Now comes the wine shop’s offspring: Nectar, a popular wine bar that opened next door to Harlem Vintage last month. More important, what gets rung up here - by and for Harlemites - is an eclectic and tightly edited collection of artisanal wines, along with a few fine brandies and whiskeys. But the cash register at Harlem Vintage, far from being protected, sits openly on a low counter, whose transparent top is inset with an intricate pattern of oak leaves. Nestled into a new-wave apartment building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, it opened four years ago and was a pioneering wine shop in an area where buying wine or alcohol usually meant pushing your money through a hole in bulletproof glass. In the beginning, there was only Harlem Vintage.
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