Inside the Wine Cellar at Highlands Bar and Grill

Most chefs leave their wine lists to the discretion of a sommelier or wine director. That, however, is just not the way Frank Stitt rolls.

For the past 35 years, Stitt and his wife Pardis have run Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Alabama, long revered as one of the best restaurants in the South. And while Stitt has become an icon for his Southern-inflected, European country-style cooking, he’s also become an important figure in the wine world for putting together an impressive selection at each of his restaurants: the Italian-centric Bottega and Bottega Café, opened in 1988 and 1990, respectively; French bistro Chez Fonfon, since 2000; and, of course, Highlands.

His coming-up in both wine and cooking ran parallel courses, beginning when he took a turn working with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse while studying philosophy at UC Berkeley. It was Waters who introduced him to Richard Olney, the food and wine writer for Cuisine et Vins de France in the 1960s and ’70s, for whom he served as an assistant in 1977, alongside now-famed chef Jeremiah Tower.

Olney certainly made an impact on Stitt’s cooking track, but he also availed his wine cellar; this is how Stitt came to intimately know many of France’s top producers. It was through Olney, too, that Stitt met Steven Spurrier of the Paris wine school, L’Académie du Vin, who in turn introduced him to a friend who owned a winery in Provence. “I hitchhiked down from Paris and spent three weeks working vendange,” says Stitt, pronouncing the French word for “harvest” with his soft Southern accent. He even spent a couple days in the cellar at the lauded Burgundy producer, Domaine Dujac, with Jacques Seysses. “He was certainly kind of a North Star of how wine is supposed to be for me, and to a large degree in Burgundy,” he says.

Upon returning to the States, Stitt landed in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, where, after some time working in wine shops and teaching cooking classes, he decided to open a restaurant, with the likes of Chez Panisse and Galatoire’s in New Orleans as benchmarks. In 1982, he swung open the doors to Highlands, where he sourced produce from small, local farmers and made an unorthodox decision to run both the kitchen and wine program.

The first wine list he devised wasn’t all that different from what it is now, a collection of bottles from friends he’s made in his travels, with the stalwarts of California, like Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat, Joseph Phelps, Bruce Neyers and Paul Draper from Ridge, and the classicists of France and Italy all well-represented. And even today, he remains faithful to a large number of Old World producers, particularly in Burgundy. (“Let’s just say I always buy Fourrier and Barthod and Raphet and Dujac and Lignier. I always buy Chanrion and Lapierre and Chignard in Beaujolais,” he says.)

But his affinity for the tried-and-true doesn’t mean that his selections aren’t constantly evolving; within the last decade, for example, he’s discovered a love of Austrian riesling and grüner veltliner, as well as grower Champagne, thanks to importer Terry Theise.

“I certainly favor wines with moderate to low amounts of oak that have really good acidity, lower alcohol… So that puts me pretty squarely in a European range.” But he’s found American producers that make sense too, like Ted Lemon of California’s Littorai, who have also made freshness and vitality a hallmark of their style.

This, it turns out, dovetails perfectly with the type of food Stitt likes to cook—nothing too sweet, nothing too spicy, straighforward flavor combinations. “I like to think our food has an elegance and a harmony that is about balance,” he says. “They don’t have to be expensive, but they all need to have that sense of grace, I think.”