(Eater) - With new natural wine bars opening, the U.S. is embracing European drinking culture.

A wine bar is not a wine bar is not a wine bar. Many establishments that serve wine, often labeled "Enoteca" or boasting a "house special" on a sidewalk chalkboard, are places to bring an internet date to drink quickly without actually caring about where you are or what you’re quaffing. But a different, Parisian-style wine bar has been popping up in U.S. cities thanks to a rise in appreciation of wine—especially, natural wine.

In New York City alone, three natural wine bars have opened up within the last six months: June and Four Horsemen in Brooklyn, and Wildair in Lower Manhattan. All feature an extensive selection of almost exclusively European wines made with little or no sulfur (a common preservative), and many are produced from less common grape varieties often farmed without pesticides. Although all of these venues serve food, wine takes center stage, and menus are designed to complement the juice, rather than the other way around. The inspiration for these wine bars lies in Paris, where the first establishments devoted to serving unmanipulated, easy-drinking wine cropped up in the 1990s.

Amongst the debutantes was L’ange Vin, the Montmartre bar à vins of Jean-Pierre Robinot (who now makes wine in the Loire Valley), which opened in 1989 and served casual fare like rillettes and tartines. In the early 1990s came Le Baratin, a cozy bistro in the 19th arrondissement that is now more of a restaurant. Zev Rovine, who started importing French natural wine to the U.S. (including that of Robinot) in 2008, recalls that these early restaurants were the main source of business in the French capital for pioneering natural winemakers like Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, and Domaine Gramenon—all renowned estates today. For those winemakers, says Rovine, Paris' early wine bars provided a guaranteed market.

The Paris natural wine bar scene grew quickly and peaked somewhat with 10th arrondissement star Le Verre Volé in the mid-aughts, along with Pierre Jancou’s bar Racines, which he sold in 2007. Manhattan scored its own branch of Racines in April 2014.