![]() ![]() ![]() She sources only natural wines but is quick to point out that she dislikes off-flavors or anything overtly “funky.” This is a place, rather, where you can find incidentally natural wines: bottles from storied regions like France’s Cornas or Beaujolais or Spain’s Ribera del Duero that happen to be natural but would taste delicious to just about any palate. Shelves of thoughtfully chosen wines line the walls, and Drzewiecki is an attentive guide to anyone who needs help choosing a bottle. Drzewiecki serves coffee and tea in the afternoons alongside wine - very European. The airy space has a long marble bar and tables for small groups to congregate. Owner Tala Drzewiecki also operates an online wine retail business, so this is her first brick-and-mortar presence - and anyone who lives nearby is lucky to have this addition to the neighborhood. It’s on a busy stretch of Mission Street in the Excelsior District, an area of San Francisco that’s seriously lacking in wine bars. I popped into this new wine bar, shop and cafe a few days after it opened last week. Owners Dominique Henderson and Alex Pomerantz, who’s also the winemaker behind the popular Subject to Change Wine Co., are pouring wines that serve as a good representation of where natural wine is today, like California Syrah that’s fashioned as a translucent, barely-red wine designed to be served cold, and orange wines made from richly aromatic grape varieties. It’s a beautiful space, with textured, dark-green walls, and it serves better-than-average bar snacks, furnished by nearby restaurant Ernest. (The main difference, to my mind: The larger glasses allow you to swirl and actually smell the wine.) The first clue: Wines are served in Gabriel Glas, a modern, high-end crystal vessel that you’d expect to see in a fine-dining restaurant, rather than in the miniature, nearly shapeless glasses that have become ubiquitous among natural wine crowds. This is very much a natural wine bar - most of what’s available is zero-zero - but aesthetically it feels distinct from many other natural wine bars. just opened last week, and I visited on one of its first days. The wine bar counterpart of the Mission District’s Gemini Bottle Co. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.īar Gemini. It’s a great place to discover the classics like Chablis, Champagne and Bordeaux, plus fun, offbeat, even sometimes wild-tasting wines like an earthy Gamay blend from the Loire Valley and grippy Kekfrankos (sometimes called Blaufrankisch) from Hungary. The wine selection, though, is just as polished at GluGlu as at Ungrafted. It’s smaller and feels more casual than Ungrafted, with lighter, tapas-inspired food. (The opening squeaked in during the NBA playoffs, shortly before the Warriors lost the Western Conference Semifinals.) But GluGlu is worth visiting anytime, not just as a pregame pitstop. In May, the couple - both master sommeliers - opened their second spot, GluGlu, in the Thrive City complex surrounding the Chase Center. Ungrafted, in Dogpatch, has long been one of my favorite wine bars in San Francisco - it’s the sort of dialed-in place where you can count on getting a truly revelatory wine every time, served at a perfect temperature, thanks to the vault of hard-to-procure bottles that owners Chris Gaither and Rebecca Fineman have built. ![]() “We’re prioritizing wines that we stand behind and are a good representation of where they’re from,” said Sullivan. But Hohler and Sullivan still love wines that feel “traditional,” including many that may not fit stylistically into the reigning natural-wine aesthetic. They serve wines made only from organically or biodynamically farmed grapes, then treated with little human intervention none of the wines at Banter were inoculated with commercial yeast. The question everyone asks them: Is Banter a natural wine bar? “We get this question from people who want us to say we’re a natural wine bar and from people who are hoping we aren’t super natty,” said Sullivan, whose parents own the respected East Bay wine importer Beaune Imports. ![]()
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