To whom do we turn when our creature comforts — the things we use to get through these other things — are threatened? Slashed in half? Shut down, perhaps never to reopen? Existentialism points us to the people in these pages: the bright lights of hospitality…

We’ve been blessed, or cursed, with a restlessness that has always found a respite upstate. Feeling especially nostalgic lately and confined to wherever our bikes will take us in the radius of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, we’re headed north for a virtual escape.

“I think that we're at this cusp of: is natural wine an aesthetic or are we going to embrace a fuller and richer and more complex meaning for it—not just in the wines that we're choosing, but in our lifestyle choices around the wines that we’re choosing?”

Enjoy Natasha Pickowicz’s home recipe for grissini, the crisp Italian breadsticks she dreamt up as Head Pastry Chef at Café Altro Paradiso and organizer of the annual Bake Sale for Planned Parenthood.

“Let's get back to being human beings together. Let's talk about how wine brings a lot of people joy. And so what I would like to be is a conduit for your joy. Let’s just move it back to a place where it's about having a normal conversation together. I want to defang all the anxiety and the terror that's around the consumption of wine. All that shit has to do with class and privilege and luxury and I just find it repugnant.”

“I’m actually glad for learning in a Parker era because I saw how huge the difference was between everything that everybody drank and then the examples that were not that. I saw that the difference was a chasm. So it wasn't hard for me to want to bridge that gap.”

We sit down with Sam Anderson, marathon runner, diehard vegetarian, Frank O’Hara enthusiast, mixology savant and natural wine figurehead behind the esteemed LES institutions Contra and Wildair to talk climate change, industrial alcohol and the shadow of addiction…

“We don't just rattle off a tech sheet because that's alienating. And also, most people don't know what that means and it's not the point. If you want to get academic about it, Roland Barthes killed the author in the fucking 60s. Wine is art, right? Because just like music, it makes you feel something.”

“Natural is a gray area,” Henry spells out over tacos at La Lonchería, the delicious Mexican luncheonette a block from his eponymous shop in Bushwick…

“This was not an attractive category to be in in the ‘90s,” Justin Chearno muses over a bowl of congee. “People that worked at wine stores were old guys in corduroy blazers with patches on the elbows that were really rude to you and talked about Syrah all day long.”

What is the larger encapsulation of amaro? For Brooklyn’s Forthave Spirits it is a story of friendship and constant experimentation.

Wine is a different question every single day with Pascaline Lepeltier