Remembering Justin Chearno
An archive interview with the beloved musician and natural wine buyer, the influential wine mind behind Williamsburg restaurant The Four Horsemen, who passed away on August 21st.
Pioneering New York natural wine buyer, rock musician, and restaurateur Justin Chearno passed away Wednesday evening, at the age of fifty-four. A co-founder and operator of lauded Williamsburg restaurant The Four Horsemen, and a member of Pitchblende and Turing Machine, Chearno leaves behind a New York wine scene that he transformed and enriched throughout a quarter-century of perspicacious and open-minded collaboration. His is a legacy of interdisciplinary inspiration, at a nexus he helped forge between indie rock and natural wine.
It is also a legacy of memorable kindness. I first met Chearno in summer of 2008, when he worked as wine buyer for Williamsburg wine shop Uva (2002-2012). For me it was the first day of a very short-lived adventure1 working as a New York sales rep for a small California-based wine importer who specialized in vermentino (really). I confronted cold shoulders and derision at every sales appointment. Everywhere except Uva, where the articulate, bespectacled wine guy placed an order, and encouraged me to come back again when I had more wines to show. (I never did.)
I next ran into Chearno during the Loire salons in 2011, with our friend the Paris restaurateur Josh Fontaine. They introduced me to the natural wine importer Zev Rovine, who had worked for Chearno part-time at Uva, and for whom Chearno would soon go on to work (2013-2018). Throughout the next decade both would become familiar friendly faces on the natural wine route in France, Austria, and beyond. When in 2014 Chearno told me he was opening a restaurant with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem (along with Christina Topsøe and Randy Moon), I was overjoyed for him. Who better than Chearno to steer the wine program at what would surely become one of the USA’s most high-profile natural wine destinations?
Few in the wine world possessed Chearno’s combination of veteran pragmatism and irrepressible, child-like enthusiasm. His appetite for travel and his abiding honesty meant he was both able and willing to follow the story of natural wine where it led, never shoehorning it into his own commercial ends for a US audience. I’ve always considered him sort of an elder brother manqué when it comes to wine. So I felt really honored in 2022 when Chearno hosted the US release party for The World of Natural Wine at The Four Horsemen’s sibling bar, Nightmoves.
Chearno gave me one of the best compliments I ever received about the book, coming from someone of his experience. “It’s all in there,” he said. “All the stories and little biographical details that I’ve been using to describe these wines to people all these years, they’re all in there.”
I wrote about Chearno and The Four Horsemen for Sprudge back in February 2019. As usual, only a fraction of the conversation made it into the finished article. I thought I’d share unpublished highlights from that interview below, for subscribers who might like to read more from Chearno at this time.
Like many, I learned of Chearno’s passing on social media. Word traveled sufficiently fast that, for a period of time on Thursday, bereaved followers could still view his final Instagram story, thanking everyone for the impressive pre-order sales of the forthcoming The Four Horsemen cookbook-slash-oral history, which sees release on October 22nd. Something tells me the pre-orders are about to become even more impressive.
So long, Justin. We’re gonna miss you like hell.