COWBOYS AND INDIANS
March 2006
By John Mariani

Great Wine Cellars of the West

When Is a Cellar a Thing of Beauty? When It’s Stocked with Thousands of Bottles of Fine Wines. Here Are Some of the Best in the West.  

I will say it flat out: America has better wine lists than anywhere else in the world.

Not necessarily the biggest—Taillevent and La Tour d’Argent in Paris both carry more than 500,000 bottles, and Enoteca Pinchiorri in Tokyo is said to house more than 600,000—but the best in terms of diversity and knowledge of the newest, most exciting small wine estates around the world.

Not surprisingly, given its number of deluxe resorts, many of the finest cellars are in the West. Some boast lists built over decades in business; others magically mounted theirs almost overnight in the big, new resort casinos in Las Vegas, where high rollers get to pick from the cream of a vast crop.

A good wine list is not just overloaded with the most prestigious Burgundies, Bordeaux, and California “cult wines.” Rather, a good wine list offers breadth and depth in categories that range from champagnes and sparkling wines to dessert wines and ports, from great value regional wines under $50 to tantalizing small-estate wines from out-of-the-way provinces in Italy, Spain, and France. Balance is key to a great list, along with a commitment by management to back a professional sommelier in making a huge capital investment in wines that might not even be ready to drink for years.

Here are 10 extraordinary wine lists that show off the best in the West right now.

Napa Rose
Grand Californian Hotel
1600 South Disneyland Drive , Anaheim
(714) 300-7170

Disneyland probably does not leap to mind when you think of fine wine and world-class restaurants, and up until four years ago there was no reason it should. But the opening of Napa Rose in the Grand Hotel gave the theme park its fist serious restaurant—Paul McCartney, Roger Moore, and Tommy Lasaorda are fans of the place—with wonderfully sumptuous California-style cuisine under chef Andrew Sutton. It also allowed manager/sommelier Michael Jordan to compile one of the selective wine lists in the West, with 450 labels on the daily list and 1,000 other in a subterranean wine cellar, many aging for the next three to five years before being added to the list. In all, about 17,000 bottles are stored.

The Napa Rose cellar is very rich in big California chardonnay and cabernets (regular Johnny Depp orders Diamond Creek Cabernet), with all the cult wines represented in various vintages. But there are also large groups of Alsatian and German wines, grand cru Burgundy estates, and a “Wall of Fame” of really rare and oversized bottles.

Montagna
The Little Nell
675 East Durant Avenue , Aspen
(970) 920-6330

For years now The Little Nell at the foot of Aspen Mountain has been the most prestigious hotel in Aspen. Its bar and dining room Montagna are packed throughout the winter and summer season with celebrities photographed in ski clothes for the covers of People and US magazines.

From the bar’s tony yet casual ambience of white marble tables, bistro chairs, and linen walls to the elegant dining room, Montagna’s setting befits a wonderful wine list. Amid walls glazed in a sunny yellow set off with burnished wood, tables laid with Frette linens and thin wine glasses, you’ll feel all’s right with the world—or is certainly about to be—when you open sommelier Richard Bett’s extraordinary wine list. Thumbing through its 80 pages—15,000 bottles, 1,500 labels—you understand why this list holds Wine Spectator Grand Award. Montagna’s focus is on Burgundy and Rhone wines. “It has gotten to a point where our Burgundy sales are a large multiple of everything else combined,” Bett says. “As fans of Burgundy, we think this is pretty special and not just because we love it. It is also important because it shows that people are starting to understand that elegance is more important than girth!”

The Palace Arms
The Brown Palace Hotel
321 Seventeenth Street , Denver
(303) 297-3111

At 55 years old, the Palace Arms is a richly appointed venue for baronial dining in this former mining town. Set within historic Brown Palace Hotel, with opened in 1892, the restaurant is the kind of place for a celebration, a love affair, or clinching of a great business deal—deep shades of blue, red and gold, with a collection of Napoleonic antiques, replicas of 22 Revolutionary battle flags, and deep leather booths. The menu is appropriate to the décor with its entrees of massive sirloins, huge lobsters, bison, and venison. The wine list, under Daniel Fitzgerald, has great breadth and depth: 40 pages long, 1,000 labels, with two pages devoted to half-bottles, 75 champagnes and sparkling wines, 10 vintages of Haut-Brion, 13 selections from Heitz Cellar, and Hardy’s Cognacs dating back to Napoleon’s day, at $575 a glass. Feeling imperial?

Rainbow Ranch Lodge
42950 Gallatin Road , Big Sky
(406) 995-4132, www.rainbowranch.com

If you go this far to get away from it all, there’d better be good food and wine at the end of the trail. Big Sky is some to the most glorious mountainscape in the United States, and Rainbow Ranch set astride the Gallatin River, 12 miles north of Yellowstone and just south of Spanish Peaks Wilderness Area, is about as remote as you could ask for. With so much to recommend it in the way of wilderness, it’s perhaps surprising that Big Sky’s Rainbow Ranch also provides one of the most civilized dining experiences in the West.

The wine cellar here has daunting depth—more than 600 selections and 6,500 bottles set within the stone archways in the private dining room called Bacchus. In it you can toast the Big Sky with up to 14 people around a harvest table crafted from an old sign on the property. The range of wines is impressive; Austria, Spain, France, Italy, and the New World are all represented here. Prices range from $20 to over $2,000, with every bottle carefully selected for quality by proprietor Patrick Hurd to go with the Rocky Mountain cuisine of chef Tommy Donohoe.

Mary Elaine’s
The Phoenician Resort
6000 East Camelback Road , Scottsdale
(480) 423-2444

As far as you can get from the rustic chic of the Rainbow Ranch, Mary Elaine’s is posh in excelsis. It sits overlooking a golf course, nine pools, and a shadowy desert I the Phoenician Resort. No expense is spared in keeping this property at the very top of Arizona’s best hotels and dining rooms. Bradford Thompson serves up everything from rabbit and black truffle potpie with a rosemary crust and salsify to peppered benison loin with parsnip puttee, wild mushrooms, and a huckleberry jus. Go for his tasting menu ($120) and have sommelier Greg Tresner choose something special from a stellar list. With a 2,200-selection, 44,000-bottle list, the offering here tempts with marvels like Chateau Haut-Brion ’82 and Chateau Coutet Sauternes ’66.

Nana
Wyndham Anatole Hotel
2201 Stemmons Freeway, Dallas
(214) 761-7470

Since the 1980s Nana has been one of the most elegant of Dallas dining rooms. Perched atop the 27 th floor of the Anatole Hotel with a fabulous panorama of the city, exquisite Asian art, and a nude of Nana—whose name is the only thing known about her—it’s a lovely setting for a lovely wine-enhanced meal.

New chef Anthony Bombaci offers an excitingly eclectic menu with international influences, evident in dishes like marinated King salmon with chilled pea tom yum and tempura-fried and roasted salsify. Sommelier Rudy Mikula has gathered 1,000 labels for the wine list to go with such food, so trust him to find something unusual, perhaps from northern Italy, Chile, or New Zealand. Or do the when-n-Texas thing and try one of the delightful entries from Texas wineries in Lubbock.

Auberge du Soleil
180 Rutherford Hill Road , Rutherford
(707) 963-1211

With 50 rooms cascading over some of the most colorful vineyard land in the world, this Napa Valley resort has, since 1981, always had some of the best food to go with the incredible view. Sit out on the veranda and peruse the valley’s most comprehensive list. At 1,400 selections and 15,000 bottles under sommelier Kris Margerum, wining and dining at Auberge du Soleil is one of the loveliest of all gastronomic pleasures in California or anywhere else. Not only is every significant California winery—often in several vintages—included here, but the wine list also has an international cast of fine wines from most producing countries. Pairing wines with chef Robert Curry’s Mediterranean-Provencal-inflected food is what Margerum and well-trained staff do best, so allow them to spoil you.

L’Orangerie
903 North La Cienega Boulevard , Los Angeles
(310) 652-9770

L.A. was once awash in high-end French restaurants, now long gone. The best, however, remains. Opened by Virginie and Gerard Ferry more than 25 years ago, the ever-in L’Orangerie has maintained its seductive elegance, its nightly celebrity clientele, and its impeccable standards of haute cuisine. Now under chef Christophe Bellanca, L’Orangerie boasts a superb 50-page wine list that has long been among the finest in the city. The champagne list alone goes on for five pages; there are 10 Chassagne-Montrachets here, a rate collection of the wines of Loire Valley producer Didier Dagueneau, scores of California chardonnays, five vintages of Chateau Petrus, a dozen Sauternes and 13 cognacs. This is a place to fall in love or let someone down easy (Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were here right before they parted ways).

Rubicon
558 Sacramento Street , San Francisco
(415) 434-4100

What once seemed like an interloper from New York a decade ago has thrived and become one of San Francisco’s most respected and beloved wine-driven restaurants. Named after a wine made by Francis Ford Coppola—he is an investor in the restaurant, along with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams—Rubicon is a handsome, tastefully decorated dining venue on two floors. Known for chef Stuart Brioza’s simple, deeply flavorful cooking, this is a wine lover’s restaurant. Wine director Larry Stone, widely considered one of the most knowledgeable in the business, garnered a Wine Spectator Grand Award and a spot on Decanter Magazine’s “50 Best” International Restaurant Poll for a list with close to 2,000 selections and 20,000 bottles stashed. As at its sister property in New York, Montrachet, Rubicon is celebrated for its Burgundy holdings, which can match just about any in the world.

Alex
Wynn Las Vegas
3131 Las Vegas Boulevard , Las Vegas
(702) 770-3300; www.wynnlasvegas.com

This is the really big splurge restaurant in the new $4 billion Wynn Las Vegas hotel and resort. Named after the chef Alessandro Stratta, the restaurant offers cuisine as refined and deluxe as any in the city right now. Now matter what you eat—from velvety lobster quenelles with tomato, zucchini, and crayfish to strawberry brown butter cake with poppyseed ice cream, you’ll sit back, sigh, order a single malt Scotch, and wonder how it ever got this good in Vegas.

Such largess deserves the backing of an extraordinary wine list, and Alex has a great one. Here you’ll find just about anything a high roller or a gourmet visitor could want. Choose from among 1,200 labels, especially rich in red Burgundies, and almost ever sought-after cult wine from California, including Screaming Eagle, Colgin, and Harlan Estates, all compiled by sommelier Danielle Price.

Salud!