Welcome to The Drink Menu, wherein we’ll take a break from our restaurant and food-related madness and focus on the subtleties and happenings of our other passion: alcohol.
Just when you thought that the wine bar boom was starting to quell, a veritable plague of vino-destinations has swept over The City, more potent than ever. Since it’s a bit tricky to weed out the also-rans from the hidden gems, we turn to the small army of Bay Area bloggers for their opinions on the wave of new wine bars.
Post-jump: Rouge et Blanc, District, Yield and naked people in trees.
Rouge et Blanc: According to Vinography, the former space of Enoteca Viansa “has kept most of the good things about the bar and gotten rid of most of the bad.” About 15 wines are offered by the glass and about 30 are bottle-only. The relatively short wine list is predictably French-influenced, but unfortunately, so is the indifferent staff.
District Wine Bar: District, in its second week of business, didn’t make the best of impressions on Ms. Gastronomie. In a nutshell, she thought of the SOMA spot similarly to, say, a Ferrari: absolutely beautiful in design yet thoroughly impractical. Like Rouge et Blanc above, District also had service issues. Are we sensing a pattern?
Yield Wine Bar: It was only a matter of time before San Francisco got an organic wine bar, and it was only a matter of time before “the organic people” got a hold of blogging software. Green Girls Global checked out the Dogpatch’s newest addition. The result? The gals praised the wine bar’s quaint intimacy, while poking fun at pretentious furniture: “No chairs that look like they belong in a museum instead I sank into a long couch with a wooden table that definitely was made with recycled wood from what could’ve been a fallen tree. It was very rustic.”
Well, at least we know where those naked Berkeley treehuggers got their liquid courage.
