San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A win when sommeliers pick the wine
Chase Center program is impressive
Overpriced and bad: This pretty much sums up the drinking experience at American sports arenas.
Not so at the Chase Center, the Golden State Warriors’ new, stateoftheart home court in San Francisco. Discerning wine lovers will find plenty of great things to drink here, whether they’re in a courtside lounge or in the nosebleeds. It may not come cheap, but it’s a much better selection — and more fairly priced — than standard stadium fare.
When putting together a stadium beverage program, “the easy way is to let the national distributors write your list,” says Peter Granoff, a master sommelier who codesigned the Chase Center wine program with business partner Debbie Zachareas. “That’s the path of least resistance.” That way, no one on the stadium’s staff has to put too much effort into compiling a thoughtful, everchanging wine list — plus, there are always some sponsorship deals at play, which can lead to an even more homogeneous wine selection.
But Nicole Lacob, the wife of Warriors majority owner Joe Lacob, was having none of that. She’s a wine person, having worked for La Jota winery in Napa Valley and for Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (also known as LVMH). She tapped Granoff and Zachareas, two formidable sommeliers who own Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant among other wine bars, and gave them nearly free reign.
“We really wanted to make people feel like this wasn’t a cookiecutter wine program filled with big brands,” Granoff says.
Chase Center’s wine program is representative of a larger trend. It’s becoming much easier to find good wine — and good food, good beer and good cocktails — in settings like these than in the past. Bay Area music festivals like Outside Lands and BottleRock have upped their game, too; movie theaters like Alamo Drafthouse have acclaimed cocktail menus.
That’s not to say there aren’t sponsors with sway in the Chase Center wine program — this is the NBA, after all — and so the wines of sponsors LVMH and Silver Oak would have to be featured. You’ll find LVMH Champagnes, including Moet & Chandon and Krug, throughout the stadium, and Silver Oak’s Napa Valley and Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignons and the wines of its Twomey brand.
Granoff and Zachareas have stocked highquality wines from mostly local wineries producing relatively small volumes, the sorts of wines they carry at Ferry Plaza and their other wine bars, Mission Bay Wine & Cheese in San Francisco and Oxbow Cheese & Wine in Napa. (They’re in the process of opening another location, Mission Bay Wine Bar, in the plaza surrounding Chase Center known as Thrive City.)
The roster includes Failla, RadioCoteau, Spottswoode, Rhys, JolieLaide, Hourglass, Bedrock, Crocker & Starr, Unti, Scribe, Peay and Lieu Dit. The generaladmission areas feature grabandgo stations with canned wines from topnotch producers like Ferdinand, West & Wilder, Farmstrong and Brick & Mortar. Collectively, the lists throughout the various bars, suites and stands in the Chase Center comprise about 100 wineries.
“For every area, you have to make sure you have a Cab, a Chardonnay, a Sauvignon Blanc and a Pinot Noir,” says Zachareas. But they weren’t afraid to sneak in slightly more challenging wines, too, like the JolieLaide Trousseau Gris, a skinfermented wine that’s the color of copper (and tastes delicious). “We knew we couldn’t go too esoteric, but the JolieLaide was something where we both said, ‘We love this wine, let’s try it here,’ ” Zachareas says.
Onepercenters can drink really well at the Chase Center. The luxurious courtside lounges, which were designed to look like the interior of a wine barrel, have personal wine fridges and access to a shared wine vault where people can store their wine between games. Courtside lounge ticket holders are welcome to bring in their own wine, but they also get unlimited supplies of a set menu — which currently includes bottles from Dehlinger, Kistler and Rhys — so, unsurprisingly, the center hasn’t seen many people take advantage of the BYOB policy.
Visitors in the Club Suites get two free bottles of wine — one red, one white — and can then buy more. Chappellet, Anthill Farms, Wonderland Project and Long Meadow Ranch are among the complimentary offerings. The theater boxes, too, have a menu of included wines, like Ramey Cabernet Sauvignon, Occidental Pinot Noir and Twomey Sauvignon Blanc.
Zachareas and Granoff host a different winemaker for each game during the season and bring the winemaker around to meet guests in the suites and clubs. “We’ll do a popup tasting in the suites,” Zachareas says, usually with limitededition wines that the winemaker has brought.
To be clear, it’s not that the wines at the Chase Center are inexpensive — it’s just that they’re not overpriced. You’ll pay $12 for a glass of Bedrock