Lee Campbell grew up in the Hudson Valley and made formative trips to her grandfather’s farm in Jamaica, learning early to tell the real version of food from the fake one. She was headed for law school when a meal at Nora, in Washington, D.C., where the menu named the farmers behind every dish, changed everything. She talked her way into a job there the next morning. Years at Louis/Dressner Selections led to building the wine programs at Andrew Tarlow’s Brooklyn restaurants (Diner, Marlow & Sons, Achilles Heel and Reynard), where she helped bring natural wine to New York’s tables while the category still needed defending. In June 2026, she received the James Beard Award for Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service.
The Work
Today Lee runs the wine list at Borgo, Tarlow’s first Manhattan restaurant. It’s a list built for sharing, not for show: she favors fruit and acid, younger wines and growers who link the ancient and the modern, and she keeps it moving, treating it less like an archive than a conversation. In Virginia, she is a partner in Commonwealth Crush, a custom-crush winery and incubator that gives producers without their own cellars a place to make wine.
Why It Matters
Wine becomes vulnerable, Lee says, the moment it leaves the cellar. Between the vineyard and the glass, a bottle can be mislabeled, mispoured or explained to death. Her work is to recognize what a wine truly is and keep that knowledge attached to it all the way to the table. For Lee, it began with a winemaker’s callused hands, the moment she realized wine could be honest work:
“I wanted to know that this was something real.”
Support This Work
Borgo is Andrew Tarlow’s first Manhattan restaurant, where Lee builds and keeps reshaping the wine list.
→ Visit Borgo
Commonwealth Crush gives Virginia producers without production space a place to make their own wines.
→ Follow their work
Read the full conversation
→ Intact: On realness, restlessness, and carrying a wine from the cellar to the glass.
