San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bay Area wine bars are suddenly cool
Genre criteria aside, countercultural vibes abound for music, food and conversation
The wine bar is in a moment of transition.
It used to be that the term “wine bar” suggested a staid lounge with soft jazz, themed wine flights and bad puns on the menu. Not so anymore. Today, “wine bar” could mean … well, anything. Restaurants are calling themselves wine bars. Nightclubs are calling themselves wine bars. Coffee shops are calling themselves wine bars.
I was thinking about this a lot over the last few months while frantically visiting every wine bar I could find throughout the Bay Area in preparation for our Top Wine Bars guide, which we published recently. To narrow down the list to the final 22, I had to reckon seriously with the question of what should actually qualify as a wine bar. This proved difficult. ( Is a coffee shop a wine bar?) Ultimately, my main litmus test was: Could you come into this place and order only a glass of wine — no food, no full bottles — and not feel weird about it?
This criterion eliminated a lot of great establishments from the running — mainly restaurants that, no matter how cool their by-the-glass list, just seemed like restaurants, not wine bars. (These restaurantsposing-as-wine-bars abound in New York too, apparently.) What that suggests to me is that wine is becoming a central focus at more restaurants, to the point where they are defining themselves not only by their cooking but also by distinctive wine lists. Valley in Sonoma, Daytrip in Oakland and Mijoté in San Francisco are three prime examples.
Genre criteria aside, what’s clear to me after all this bar hopping is that wine bars are now cool. They’re places to see and be seen. To party. To discover new music. If you took a date to one, they’d be impressed. Jordan Michelman, writing about the national wine-bar scene, articulated this beautifully in a recent piece for Punch. “How quickly we’ve gone from the cold cheese plate and flight model to something that feels more disruptive and countercultural,” he writes.
The new American wine bar, Michelman continues, “feels wholly unexpected, and in the right hands — and with the right song on the high-fi — riveting.”
It’s not that all the great new Bay Area wine bars have hi-fi systems. Fun comes in many different forms: I love the vibe at Oakland’s new CoCo Noir, which pours only wines made by women and people of color and which has no menu — resulting in freewheeling conversations between staff and curious customers.
El Chato, in the Mission, is the Spanish vinoteca of my dreams, with spritzy Txakoli wine flowing freely from the porrón and adorable pendant lights that resemble legs of jamón.
And I loved hanging out at Goodtime Bar in San Jose, where owners Steven Huynh and Ann Le are pouring splashes of whatever bottles they’ve just opened for patrons, offering tastes until you land on something you want a full glass of.
So check out our list (sfchronicle.com/projects/best-wine-bars) and find a wine bar to visit this week.