The A-List

Here's the problem with wine lists: Unless you're a huge geek, being handed the wine list in a restaurant is often a chore, a bore or both. (Heck, lots of times it is for me, and I am fairly geeky.) Most people go out to eat to relax—not to break under the pressure of trying to find the perfect bottle of wine.

But while you can't begrudge sommeliers their big tomes—they get criticized if there's not enough to choose from—there's also the question of wording. While some sommeliers stick to a few adjectives, others like to tell a story. But as Nicole Burke, wine director of Epic Roasthouse, puts it, "If there's too much verbiage on the page, customers won't want to read it. But when there's just a listing of wines, there's nothing to guide them."

So the question is, how do you make a wine list that people actually want to read? A couple of San Francisco sommeliers are trying to spice things up, and one of them is Burke, whose wine list at Epic is one of the most thoughtful and creative ones around. Burke has one section she calls Epic Prospects, which she describes as comprising "rising stars in the wine industry that you may not have heard of … yet!" She features these out-of-the-mainstream winemakers by listing their day jobs: "Painter" and "professional skateboarder" come up. She also includes several labels made specifically by assistant winemakers, such as Shane by Shane Finley—the associate winemaker at Kosta Browne. Beyond Epic Prospects, Burke sprinkles the list with paragraphs of prose, each one telling a story or giving a detail about what makes a particular wine unique and compelling.

"I think that everything I gravitate towards has a personality, a story," she says. "I think that's what people remember when they have a great bottle of wine." This approach seems to be working. "It's unbelievable how well people respond."

For Emily Wines—who's taken an equally creative approach to her enormous, and potentially intimidating, list at the Fifth Floor—the sign of success is when she hears laughter coming from people who are flipping through the list, which is laden with wine-related quotes courtesy of such notables as Steve Martin and John Cleese (as Basil Fawlty). More fun yet is Wines' decision to devote the last few pages of her list to a description of what wines were good in each year going back to 1931. "So if you want to drink a little bit of history for a birth-year wine or an anniversary, you can have a sense of what might still be drinking well." (My own excellent birth year, 1971: Burgundy, Piedmont and German wines, plus Champagne.) Wines has also rather cheekily created a tasting menu for which guests can purchase an optional "food pairing," a refreshing reversal of the chef-dominated norm.

In a world of long, alienating wine lists that I can't bear to approach, it's great to find a couple I'd happily curl up with and read from start to finish. Burke says, "What's most gratifying is when I ask whether I can take the wine list away and they say no, because they're not finished reading it."