Love wine? Go to St. Vincent before it’s gone

David Lynch’s St. Vincent, in the Mission, is for sale — which means wine geeks should go right now, before it closes.

St. Vincent, at 1270 Valencia St. (at 24th), has been through the wringer: It opened in March 2012 as a wine-focused restaurant, with chef Bill Niles (now of KronnerBurger) and earned three stars from Michael Bauer; when Niles left, in 2014, Lynch brought on a three-chef team called the Other Guys. This fall, the Guys left, and Lynch decided to rebrand St. Vincent as a wine bar and bottle shop. “I was like, ‘I’m going to reboot this,’ ” Lynch recalls. “I still felt that we were going to dig it out of the hole.”

In this latest incarnation, Lynch is a one-man show, literally. Host, server, chef, wine director, private-events coordinator, floor-mopper — Lynch is doing it all solo. “Probably my biggest mistake was that I didn’t have any sort of operating partner,” he says. “As a wine guy, in a way I didn’t have enough bandwidth.”

Chalk it up to that, or simply to the fact that the San Francisco restaurant business is a hard one to hack. Lynch is undoubtedly one of this city’s wine gems. He’s the former wine director of Quince and Cotogna, as well as Babbo in New York; he’s also a James Beard Award-winning wine writer who continues to contribute to Bon Appétit. Whether it’s logistics or funding or re-branding that has led to Lynch’s decision to sell — “I really can’t explain it,” he says — this closure will surely be a loss for the San Francisco wine scene.

Lynch is not yet sure of his next move, though he hopes that the St. Vincent brand will live on.

When I visited St. Vincent a few weeks ago, for the first time, I was completely enamored of the place and of Lynch’s personable, if not always exactly warm, service style. The wine list is truly distinctive, featuring not merely the requisite roster of trendy California wines (Enfield, Tyler) but also the types of Old World treasures that fill wine geeks like me with total giddiness. Ar.Pe.Pe! Jamet! Olga Raffault! This is a wine bar that really gets it. And maybe more importantly, Lynch sensed my curiosity to try new things. He poured tastes for me and my companion of unfamiliar Austrian Rieslings and Moselle Blanc (from the northern French Moselle region, not to be confused with the Mosel), from the Auxerrois and Muller Thurgau grapes.

St. Vincent is open indefinitely until someone buys the space. I suggest you go now, while you still can.

“I’m going to keep running (St. Vincent) with passion,” Lynch says.