D.C. Restaurant Albi’s Quest to Introduce the U.S. to Levantine Wines | Eater DC

"At Albi, I saw a wood-burning Middle Eastern restaurant on a mission to improve American perceptions of Levantine wine: sommeliers, led by co-owner and high-profile D.C. sommelier Brent Kroll with wine director Vanessa Cominsky and general manager William Simons sharing duties, work with small importers and distributors — and sometimes even message vintners on Instagram — to bring hard-to-find bottles from Lebanon, Palestine, and Turkey. Their Levantine-focused list includes a full page of whites and a page-and-a-half of reds, began with a dozen Chateau Musar bottlings and now includes around 20 Musar labels, and the team pushes for small, organic, low-intervention producers like Couvent Rouge and the new Leb-Nats despite supply setbacks from COVID, port problems, and the Beirut explosion; they also take care to pair wines with Michael Rafidi’s intensely acidic and smoky dishes by finding parallels to familiar regions and highlighting one component of a dish so the wine will "zip." Albi’s visibility and awards (Esquire’s Best New Restaurants in America 2020, Eater 38) are part of a strategy to prove there is demand for Levantine wines in American fine dining." - Eater