Inside the Wine Cellar at Passionfish

A bottle of 2009 Domaine de la Pépière “Cuvée Trois,” a special bottling from Muscadet legend Marc Ollivier, hovers at around $30 at a retail store. To find it on a wine list for $57, as it’s priced at Passionfish, a seafood-focused restaurant in Pacific Grove, California, would be considered a pretty reasonable markup. The difference between Passionfish and virtually any other restaurant, however, is that at Passionfish, the bottle in question is actually a magnum.

It’s not a typo or an inventory error; low markups on wine have always been a central part of the restaurant’s business model. In the words of longtime beverage director Jannae Lizza, who has worked there for over two decades, “From the beginning, that was always the plan, to have the same price points [on wine] that you’d expect to find at retail.”

Still, it raises the question of why—and more interestingly, how—Passionfish has maintained such a charitable approach over the years. Ultimately, it comes down to a series of trade-offs, beginning with narrowing the selection of glassware (the restaurant relies solely on one style of Bordeaux glass) and eliminating a formal wine staff in favor of educating servers.

Notably, the list also lacks the kind of far-ranging vintage depth that has come to define many of today’s top wine programs. Whereas those restaurants will invest in cellaring wine, and factor those costs into their pricing, the margins at Passionfish are tighter, rendering such storage impossible.

“If I buy it, it’s for sale immediately,” Lizza explains. “But at our price points, you’re probably going to order that second bottle, so we definitely sell more wine this way.”

What the list might lack in depth, however, it more than compensates for with the breadth and diversity of its selections. One major benefit of Passionfish’s generous pricing policy is that it facilitates the art of the hand-sell, incentivizing otherwise risk-averse guests to take a chance on unfamiliar wines. So while it readily embraces classics, such as benchmark Burgundy and Champagne—both hallmarks of Passionfish’s program—it also champions the esoteric and obscure.

“Pricing at retail gives me the excuse to offer you something you might not be willing to try at another restaurant,” she explains. “Nobody’s going to pay $70 for a St. Laurent from California, or a skin-contact white from a hybrid grape in Vermont, but they’ll buy it for $37.”

That $37 will also buy you a wine like Graham Tatomer’s 2014 Sylvaner, made from a white grape native to Alsace and Germany, but sourced from the Sisquoc vineyard in California’s Santa Maria Valley. Or, listed at $47, is Sam Vinciullo’s 2016 “Red/White,” an unorthodox blend of merlot and semillon from Australia’s Margaret River. Likewise, at just $42 for the 2014 vintage, is the exceedingly rare old-vines chasselas bottling from cult favorite St. Joseph producer, Pierre Gonon.

Normally, fringe expressions like these would risk intimidating certain diners. At Passionfish, however, the philosophy of radical affordability ultimately translates to one of inclusiveness. Rather than isolate less knowledgeable drinkers, this approach, backed by low markups, offers a powerful reminder that so much of the fun in wine is its ability to coax us out of our comfort zones. As Lizza puts it, “That’s when the sparks start flying.”

To her mind, that sentiment also applies to geeky collectors and industry pros who regularly show up from across the Bay Area, lured by the promise of drinking rare gems on the cheap. While she observes that “many guests come in ‘hot’ with the intention to drink as much [highly-allocated cult wine like] Clos Rougeard or Collier as they can,” they’re missing the whole point of what she’s accomplished.

“I’m really pushing for people to go out on a limb,” Lizza says, whether that limb is an alternative to the usual pinot grigio, or a look beyond the endless pursuit of Instagrammable trophy wines to something relatively new. “I guess I’m an instigator that way.”