No Sour Grapes

The Story Behind Our Cellar.

Bar Parisette is named for a forest berry known in French as raisin de renard (‘fox grape’). In the fable The Fox and the Grapes, a hungry fox tries to reach a bunch of grapes. When he realizes they are too high to reach, the fox declares they were too sour to eat anyway, giving us the English phrase sour grapes.

The fox’s story is not unlike the experience of chasing our favorite bottles over the last few years as wine prices have skyrocketed. Standard Chicago restaurant markups are at least 3-4 times wholesale cost, so sour grapes are all too common. 

We understand why those markups are the norm here - restaurants are expensive as hell to run – but our mission at Bar Parisette is to put special bottles within your reach, as they are in places like Paris or Montreal. To facilitate that, most of our wine bottles are priced at roughly half the normal restaurant markup. Our list includes great bottles from our favorite producers at every price point, as well as deep cuts and older wines.

We want you to drink great wine because we love great wine, we love you, and we love the magic of great food, great wine, and great company coming together. We’re betting that you will love us enough that we can do a crazy thing like sell half-priced wine every night and still pay our bills. So tell your friends, buy that second bottle, order dessert.

If you’re up for a little adventure, head down the steps behind the host stand to check out our “grab bag” cooler. It’s stocked with one-offs, end-of-bins and hidden gems, all at amazing prices. 

One of my great wine memories is finding an off-list bottle of Veyder Malberg Brandstatt Riesling tucked away in a cooler at a restaurant in rural Austria, the night after a tasting with the winemaker himself. When I asked if we could open the bottle, the proprietors smiled and grabbed glassware. 

If you’ve ever been to Bacchanal in New Orleans (or great Chicago spots like Red & White and All Together Now), you know the drill. Reach in and grab what you like. Prices are marked on the bottle. Take a bottle home or to a party, or drink it here. No sour grapes.