Inside the Wine Cellar at Chez Panisse

The story of how Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse changed the face of food in America is now the stuff of established culinary folklore. Equally influential, however, is the restaurant’s historic relationship to wine, which has developed a legend of its own.

If we associate most old-school fine-dining wine programs with imperious back-vintages of pricy Burgundy and Bordeaux, then the myth surrounding the operation at Chez Panisse was constructed around a contrary set of values. A major progenitor of some of today’s most progressive wine lists, it dismantled convention, not only with its affordability and relatively small size, but, more critically, with its embrace of the Old-World notion of “table wine.”

According to longtime beverage director Jonathan Waters (no relation to Alice), however, the list emerged largely as a matter of happenstance. “The idea was simply to find the people you liked, or were friends with, and buy their wine,” he explains. “That’s how it all started.”

In 1970s Berkeley, this strategy translated into two core allegiances. True to its pioneering “locavore” creed, Chez Panisse always championed California’s emerging wine scene, bringing early attention to iconic winemakers like Paul Draper and Joseph Phelps, decades before their anointment as industry luminaries. Equally formative in shaping the wine list’s legacy, however, were the lessons that Alice Waters learned during her frequent visits to the south of France, and her lifelong friendship with Berkeley-based importer, Kermit Lynch.

“If there were mentors to the list—people who set it going—then Kermit is absolutely one of them, if not the one,” says Jonathan Waters. Among the first of his generation to introduce Americans to France’s regional wine traditions, Lynch spent the greater part of the decade in search of a new wave of independent, estate-bottled wines that had never been exported to U.S. shores. The influx of these French country wines—the kind served without pretense in the cafés and bistros of their regions of origin—provided a philosophical analogue for Alice Waters’ market-driven perspective on food.

From the start, this basic template, with its embrace of the nascent wines of California coupled with the unsung gems of France, placed Chez Panisse at the vanguard of a budding wine culture, and that’s where it remains to this day. But that’s not to say that the program hasn’t evolved over time.

“The list never expanded all that much in terms of quantity,” Jonathan Waters explains. “But as waves of new importers started bringing very good wines to California… the number of producers and regions we’re working with has multiplied.”

The selection of French wines, for instance, now runs the gamut, highlighting not just Kermit Lynch’s portfolio, but second- and even third-generation importers who have followed in his wake, representing the most recent inheritors of France’s “natural” canon (think the Loire’s Catherine & Pierre Breton, Domaine Gauby in the Roussillon or Burgundy’s Clos des Vignes du Maynes). Similarly, while still bolstered by classic producers like Ridge Vineyards, the California section eagerly reflects the younger generation of Golden State iconoclasts, including Scribe, Forlhorn Hope and Broc Cellars, among others.

In addition, there are plenty of old touchstones. The iconic Tempier rosé, a longtime favorite of Alice Waters, for example, is still available by the glass (at $19). And you’ll still find many Kermit Lynch standard-bearers—often offered with a touch of cellar age—such as Robert Chevillon (2004 Nuits-Saint-Georges “Les Vaucrains” for $270), Jean-Louis Chave (1997 Hermitage for $900) and Franços Raveneau (2013 Chablis “Valmur” for $460). The same applies to local wines, like the Ridge “Montebello” ($440 for the 2000 vintage).

But as Jonathan Waters points out, those price tags point to an inescapable paradox: Many of the humble “bistro” or “country” wines of the past, which institutions like Chez Panisse helped to popularize, have since transformed into highly-allocated cult bottlings.

“Many of the wines that were wonderful that we used in the past are now too expensive to use in any great quantity,” Jonathan Waters says, citing not just “blue chip” producers like Raveneau and Chave (former by-the-glass pours, believe it or not), but even Domaine Tempier. “If you want to keep the heart of your list in the $40 to $60 range, you’ve left behind a lot of wines that were once staples, from producers that you truly love.”

We might look back in envy at those romantic days when bottles of Chave Hermitage or Raveneau Chablis could be popped with abandon on a random Tuesday night. Then again, the same cultural factors that have since pushed those bottles out of reach are also responsible for the privilege we enjoy of drinking so widely and so well at Chez Panisse, and its countless successors, today.