Elite UES Wine Store Facing Eviction Over $3.6M In Rent: Court Docs

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Expensive, rare wines weren't the only thing missing from an Upper East Side elite wine dealer, according to a new lawsuit.

Park Avenue wine seller Sherry-Lehmann owes $3.6 million in rent payments, and a new lawsuit wants the troubled shop to pay up and get out.

And for every 30 days the 88-year-old wine shop stay at 505 Park Ave. past the end of August, they'll owe nearly $250,000 — or $8,120 per day — according to the filing.

The suit, filed by landlords in Manhattan Civil Court on Tuesday, says that the trio of fine wine proprietors who run Sherry-Lehmann had only paid a couple of months of their monthly $121,661 total rent since March 2020.

Things got so bad that in August 2021, the struggling wine shop asked to take out a nearly $200,000 loan from their $475,000 security deposit, with the agreement that they would pay it back, in addition to the rent payments by the end of January 2022, according to the landlord's filing.

That never happened, the suit says.

With a lease that was supposed to run until 2027, the landlords continued to try and get their famous wine-y tenant back on track, offering two separate lease modifications — in November and in March — with repayment schedules.

"However, Tenant failed to make any of the required payments by their respective deadlines," the suit explains.

In the spring, the landlords decided that they, like many of the Upper East Side's jilted elite sommeliers, were done with Sherry-Lehmann not holding up their end of the deal, according to the court filing.

They gave the shop until the end of May to repay their portion of the deposit loaned to them on credit and when that never happened, the suit claims, they declared the wine store to be in default and cancelled the lease at the end of July.

In March, the store was closed by the State Liquor Authority for selling alcohol without a license — a $388,000 bottle sold after the license wasn't renewed on time, according to the New York Times.

A federal grand jury was convened in June as part of a criminal investigation into allegations that the longtime wine seller was accepting customer's money for huge amounts of valuable wine that they never delivered, The New York Times reported.

Multiple customers filed suits claiming that they had paid for over $1 million in wine that was never delivered as exposed in a New York Times investigation in May.

In addition to the $3.6 million in rental arrears, the store owes $2.7 million in unpaid sales tax, plus other debts owed to dozens of wholesalers, the Times wrote.

Wine Spectator reported in January that the shop's downfall might not be sudden, and has origins stretching back to 2018 when payments to suppliers began failing.