It’s rare that I order a glass of wine when I go to a restaurant. Almost always, I order a bottle, because the bottle list is where the most interesting wines — and the best values — tend to reside. While a by-the-glass list is designed for mass appeal, mining the depths of a wine list tends to surface something more unusual, more limited, more mysterious.
But recently, a new restaurant in Healdsburg called the Matheson made me reconsider this calculation: It offers a whopping 130 wines by the glass. Eighty-eight of those are located in what the restaurant calls its “wine wall,” a panel of self-serve dispensers where customers can help themselves to small tastes or larger pours of any wine they choose. It’s a smart selection, appropriately heavy on the local specialty of Russian River Valley Pinot Noir, supplemented by crowd-friendly European classics. The wall has everything from Chateau d’Yquem, France’s most prized dessert wine, to lesser-known bottlings from famous California producers, like a Williams Selyem Chenin Blanc.
The Matheson is a huge, ambitious restaurant, sprawling across a three-story building on Healdsburg’s downtown plaza. Like San Francisco’s One65, it’s got multiple different concepts going on, including a formal dining room and a more casual rooftop bar, each with its own distinct by-the-glass and bottle list. It’s a fun place to visit, and my colleague Tanay Warerkar and I recommend it for dinner in our sparkly new guide to the Best Day Ever in Healdsburg, which we published today.
The vision for the Matheson was always to have 100 wines by the glass, says wine director Jon McCarthy. That’s partly because chef and owner Dustin Valette likes to order glasses of wine when he goes out to dinner with his wife, who doesn’t drink that much, and like me, he was frustrated at how limited his options often were.
Under normal circumstances, having so many wines by the glass would involve a lot of waste, so the Matheson folks decided to use these dispenser-preservation machines, made by a company called Napa Tech (located, confusingly, in Nevada). You may have seen these behind the bar at other restaurants, though I’ve never seen so many of them all in one place. (A collective tasting room in Sebastopol, Region, uses the same machines, with 50 wines on offer.) They’re an investment; a Napa Tech system for just five bottles can cost $5,000.
In the Napa Tech machines, a bottle of wine rests behind a pane of glass, hooked up to a pouring spigot. Using a kind of debit card that you’ve obtained from the restaurant, you press a button to determine how much you want — in the Matheson’s case, either a 1-ounce splash, a 2.5-ounce half glass or a 5-ounce glass — and out shoots your precious liquid. The card tallies up your tab based on how much you’ve dispensed, and you settle up at the end.
Behind the scenes, the machine is pumping argon, an inert gas, back into the bottle, which protects the remaining wine from oxidation. In theory, that means that the restaurant doesn’t have to worry about whether the full bottle gets drunk all at once; it will stay fresh back there, supposedly, for a couple of months.
That gives McCarthy and his team a ton of freedom to offer a wide range of interesting wines by the glass — the sorts of wines that would normally be reserved for a bottle list. The selection is about 70% Bay Area, mostly veering toward tried-and-true local classics like Hirsch’s Bohan-Dillon Pinot Noir ($4.50 for a taste/$11 for a half glass/$22 for a full glass) and Rafanelli Zinfandel ($4.75/$11.50/$23).
There’s nothing here that could really be described as edgy — no funky orange wines — but the wall does dip its toes in lightly adventurous waters with wines like a varietal Counoise, an obscure Rhone grape variety, from a winery called the Withers ($3.75/$9/$18). My favorite wine of the night was the salty, razor-sharp Peugh Vineyard Chardonnay from Sonoma County producer Anthill Farms ($5.25/$13/$26).
Some of the wine wall offerings are jaw-droppingly expensive, like a Merlot blend from local winery Verite ($26/$65/$130). These pricey offerings have been among the fastest movers, McCarthy says. Even if you can’t afford a full $130 glass, maybe you can splurge for a $26 taste. “I’ve blown through my entire allocation of the 2017 Opus One already,” he says, which was six bottles. A six-pack of Opus One retails for over $2,000.
If you’re waiting for a table at the Matheson, the wine wall certainly presents a more entertaining way to pass the time than a typical restaurant waiting area. And I love the idea of being able to try lots of small tastes of things without committing to a full bottle or even a full glass — I hope that makes it easier for people who might be shy about asking a sommelier for a recommendation to try something new. There’s a kid-in-a-candy-store feeling to it.
But sheesh, the tab can add up quickly. Four of us, grabbing little tastes of this and that over the course of about 30 minutes as we waited to get seated at the rooftop bar, ended up incurring a $150 bill (and that was without any Verite). Many of the wines we tasted were thrilling, though one Beaujolais was so full of brettanomyces, a spoilage yeast that can imbue a wine with a flavor often described as “barnyard,” that I didn’t want to finish my half-glass.
Sometimes I don’t want so much choice — sometimes I still just want a good old-fashioned recommendation from a knowledgeable professional about what to drink. And we would have undoubtedly spent less than $150 if we’d just ordered a bottle.
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