"We had four flights on the list when we opened. Now 75 percent of our wine business is our flights," says Dorgan, who was previously the wine director at Cascadia.
Matt Walker, beverage director of two-month-old O8 restaurant and Twisted Cork wine bar in Kirkland, believes in flights, too (he currently offers nine). He says that to convert the general populace into wine drinkers, he has to focus on the subtler signals customers get from him.
Photos by Kevin P. Casey
At Zig Zag, class is in session.
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"My focus is to make people feel more comfortable," Walker says. "If someone wants to geek out, I can definitely go there. But if they say, 'I don't normally drink wine and I want something sweet,' I'll bring them several tastes. 'Is this something you feel like drinking?' I'll ask. I help them choose a journey they'd like."
Still, the wine-bar experience isn't just set up for novice drinkers. Take Bricco della Regina Anna, a one-year-old wine bar at the top of Queen Anne. On any given night, you can pick from a daily list of 30 to 40 glasses, each listed without tasting notes or the usual easy-to- understand categories like "luscious reds" or "crisp whites." Wine director Jesse Hufstader's selection, which ranges from Roero Arneis (an Italian white) and Xinomavro "Akakies" (a Greek rosé) to Yakima Cellars' "Downtown Red," appeals more to drinkers who have some exposure to wine but are looking beyond what they can find at Safeway.
"The goal is to get customers to try things they normally wouldn't try," says Kevin Erickson, Bricco's owner. A list like Bricco's is exactly what drinkers like me, who have a solid basic education in wine but no claims to rarefied connoisseurship, love most about the wine-bar phenomenon. Discovering a boutique producer from Walla Walla—or just learning what the hell a Xinomavro tastes like—is a huge part of the fun. If I hate my glass, I'm only out $9.
Six new wine bars have opened in the area in the past year—in places as diverse as Burien, Capitol Hill, and Kirkland—and there are three more on the way (see sidebar, p. 26). The wine-bar proliferation, which is by no means restricted to Seattle but has arrived here a few years after it did in cities like Portland and Atlanta, is probably due to a convergence of intersecting trends. For one, the wine industry is doing more to reach out to customers, with less status-oriented marketing and more drinkable options for ultrabargain bottles like Trader Joe's Two-Buck Chuck. The 2004 film Sideways also got moviegoers talking about wine, and even resulted in huge sales jumps and dips for the grape varietals its characters praised and slammed. In Washington, locals are finally paying attention to the fact that we've become the second-largest wine-producing state in the nation, and that the nation's wine critics are giving the Pacific Northwest as much press as they do Spain or Italy.
David Michalski, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis, who is doing his dissertation on changing patterns of wine consumption, sees the growing American interest in scouting out boutique wines like Idaho rieslings and Austrian grüner veltliners as reflecting a much larger trend in how people form their identity through their consumption habits, much as they use their iPod play-list to show their friends the contours of their soul.
"Wine bars aren't just selling wine, they're selling the language surrounding wine," says Michalski. "If you think of wine drinking in terms of artwork, there's a culture that surrounds the gallery, in which people can debate their taste together by participating in the language of taste. In that way, the discussion of wine becomes a debate about other values."
Wine drinking centers around conversation and requires a space where you can have one. At Bricco, couples nibble on plates of bruschetta and swirl their wine glasses. Though there are no TVs or techno, the place is packed enough to generate a good amount of white noise. Talking is the primary form of entertainment.
Most of the wine-bar owners I spoke to talked up their atmosphere: lower key, a mature drinking experience that's nevertheless no blue-hair bar. Drunkenness is rare. "People don't get wasted here," says Jens Strecker, owner of Portalis, a four-year-old wine shop and tasting room in Ballard. "In four years, we've had only two cases where we needed to kick somebody out."
Personally, while I still enjoy MGD, I confess that I'm too allied with the gourmet sector to not love what these new places are selling. Perhaps I just love the fact that I claim my bar tab as a "continuing education" tax exemption. Perhaps I'm just settling into my 30s and spend fewer hours in bars. Perhaps I just prefer to drink things that taste good. These days, I guess I just want getting drunk to mean something.
jkauffman@seattleweekly.com
