What makes a wine list great?
THERE’S A restaurant in Girona, Spain, where the wine lists (yes, plural) are delivered on a rolling cart, because they’re too heavy to carry and too bulky to peruse on the table. Most of the world’s great wines are represented, they’re all reasonably priced, and they’re served flawlessly. It is, by any measure, a truly great list. Lists. Whatever. There’s a restaurant in Berkeley, California, where the wine list fits on a single sheet of paper, with plenty of room to spare at the margins. It’s paper printed that day by someone who loves playing with fonts, but doesn’t much care what they actually look like on the page. And it is also, by any measure, a truly great list. How can this be? Aren’t all the world’s great wine lists like that first example? Giant cloth-bound tomes that kick up centuries of dust as they’re dropped on your table? Forty vintages each of the grapey greats, with their names engraved on vellum by some poor quill-and-ink scribe in a dank cellar? You peruse, the som
