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America's 10 Best Wine Lists
John Mariani July 28, 2008
Restaurants with extraordinary cellars
Even ten years ago, it might have been difficult to come up with more than a handful of U.S. restaurants whose wine lists could be compared with the great cellars of Europe. After all, some of those restaurants in France, England and Italy have had more than a century to stock their lists—even if a pair of world wars intervened.
Americans’ passion for wine is of recent vintage. It's only since the 1980s that California wineries have made great strides in producing world-class vintages that were often less expensive than their European counterparts. As with so many new ideas, young, well-educated, well-traveled Americans pounced on wine with an enthusiasm and intensity unimaginable 20 years ago. Also, more Americans are training to be sommeliers, as compared to the last decade; it's the rare new restaurant that opens in the U.S. without a sommelier or wine director.
See our slideshow of America's 10 Best Wine Lists.
As a result, the U.S. has far more truly great and original wine lists than does Europe, where the holdings still tend to be European with just a few New World wines tossed in. In the U.S., sommeliers or wine stewards tend to be far more catholic in their selections, ranging from a celebrated first growth Bordeaux and $5,000 Burgundy to an amazing pinot noir from Oregon and a bargain-priced merlot from Chile
Thus, even though a resort and restaurant like Meadowood, which Wine Enthusiast magazine calls “the Mother Church of Napa Wine,” in St. Helena, Calif., lies smack in the heart of Napa Valley’s wine country, it stocks a list as rich in European and New World wines as it is in Californians. Master Sommelier Gilles de Chambure also oversees a nightly wine reception, holds wine classes and leads wine excursions throughout the valley—participatory options offered by no European restaurant that I know of. Fixed price dinners may be paired with wines Chambure personally chooses to go with your meal.
When an entrepreneur has the resources to make an out-of-the-way resort into a wine destination, the results can be staggering. In remote—very remote—Chico, Montana, the Dining Room at Chico Hot Springs Resort has a wine cache that would be daunting in any big city. Proprietors Mike and Eve Art mount dinners for guests that might be built around a theme like “Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year,” for which they pair the highest-scoring wines of the past several years with splendid dishes. (Their cellar has an Award of Excellence from that magazine.)
In Walland, Tennessee, members of the Beall family (owners of the Ruby Tuesday eatery chain) have committed themselves to making the beautiful 4200-acre Blackberry Farm one of the finest resorts in the world. It's already a Relais & Chateaux member, so its stock of wines has to be of the same caliber. Head sommelier Andy Chabot insists, “We are confident that guests with the most experienced wine palates will be overjoyed with the opportunity to experience the wine they have always heard about but never seen, or maybe just revisit an old favorite.”
See our slideshow of America's 10 Best Wine Lists.
Among the 5,000 selections and more than 115,000 bottles and large format bottles, Chabot stocks more than 170 half-bottles, allowing more leeway for different palates at a table. The cellar is particularly strong in wines of the Rhône Valley, which Chabot believes go best with the chefs' “Foothills Cuisine.”
When you have a well-heeled clientele who can afford anything, a restaurant’s winelist must be ready for the big splurge. Sixty thousand bottles should about do it at Valbella Ristorante, a superb Italian restaurant in tony Greenwich, Connecticut, whose parking lot is jammed nightly with Mercedes, Bentleys and Maseratis. Greenwich magazine wrote, “If Valbella Ristorante were any busier it would have to petition the gods to create an eight-day week.” One of the big draws is owner David Ghatanfard’s dedication to having whatever wines his clientele wants, so he stores more than 1,500 selections in an exquisite wine cellar dining room—also booked every night. The list is very strong in Super Tuscans, California “cult wines,” First growth Bordeaux and illustrious Burgundies like Romanée-Conti.
Some restaurants, like Veritas in New York, are literally built around wine. Drawing on the private holdings of owners Park B. Smith and Gino Diaferia, the list offers more than 3,500 selections and 200,000 bottles. Smith had amassed such a huge collection that he realized “I could never drink it all in my lifetime.” Ergo, Veritas. The best way to go is the $90 fixed price menu, and allow wine director Tim Kopec, or sommeliers Yoshi Takemura and Patrick Cappiello, to find the perfect bottle for each course.
What's even more impressive is how small restaurants in the U.S. have devoted themselves to extraordinary wine lists. In Scottsdale, Arizona, a 28-seat sushi restaurant called Sea Saw offers diners a list of 2,900 selections. The list is very global, drawing on small estates from emerging wine regions in Portugal, Lebanon, South America and even Arizona (represented by a dessert wine ). Chef Nobuo Fukuda’s cuisine is highly inventive.
Personal focus is sometimes the key to a great list. Frasca is a very fine but small Italian restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, owned by Bobby Stucky and Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson. It's dedicated to the wines of Friuli in northern Italy, but also has holdings from around the world. Stucky is one of the few people—only 60 in the world—to earn a diploma from the Court of Master Sommeliers, and he arranges his list by flavor profile, varietal and theme, always going table to table advising people on what’s best and newest. Frasca, which the Denver Post awarded four stars, also maintains the charming tradition of the tajut—a glass of Friulian wine as an aperitif.
But if you really want to see what American ingenuity—and canny marketing—can look like vis-à-vis wine, pay a visit to Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, Fla., where the late owner, Bern Laxer, barely drank wine himself. His interest was more in guaranteeing his guests anything they could possibly ask for. As a result, the cellar, with a Wine Spectator Grand Award, stocks nearly 7,000 labels, with 200 sparkling wines alone, 300 madeiras, ports and sherries by the glass, and more than 300 dessert wines, served in a special dessert room upstairs.
See our slideshow of America's 10 Best Wine Lists.
