Chez Panisse's wines - a list that matches a legacy(1)
Russell Yip / The Chronicle
Jonathan Waters, wine director at Chez Panisse, began working there in 1984 as a busboy and waiter.
Chez Panisse has for four decades quietly spurred a food revolution. Where there is food, there is wine. And so Alice Waters' restaurant has grown up alongside the maturing of America's wine tastes.
Its wine program has evolved from a basic snapshot of California and a fascination with country French wines imported by one of Waters' friends, to something more complicated. If the Chez Panisse kitchen has thrived by avoiding fads, by hewing faithfully to Waters' beliefs in the perfection of simplicity, the wine side of the equation feels more radical, more modern.
Yes, those glasses of Domaine Tempier Bandol Rosé are legend. But Gamay Noir from Oregon's Brick House or Pietratorcia's Ischia Biancolella from Campania - who knew in 1971 there was Italian wine south of Rome? - are a marked advancement from the original.
"When we opened that first day, we had two wines on the list," recalls Jonathan Waters, Chez Panisse wine director - Robert Mondavi Fumé Blanc and Ridge's Geyserville red.
British-born Waters, 49, is no relation to Alice, but he, too, has become a Chez Panisse institution. He began working in the restaurant in 1984 as a busboy and waiter. By the early 1990s, he was maitre d', and about a decade later he acquired the wine program, becoming the latest in a string of wine buyers that include Stephen Singer, Alice Waters' ex-husband, and Tom Guernsey, one of the restaurant's original principals.
He has navigated longtime tensions between the wine program's two often conflicting philosophies. On the one hand, there is a logical extension of Chez Panisse's locavore-is-as-locavore-does view. California wine, particularly Zinfandel, has been part of the core.
But the restaurant's French mystique weighs heavily, and that's where Kermit Lynch comes in. The link between Alice Waters and Lynch is as much personal as professional. He is godfather to her daughter, Fanny Singer (and she godmother to his son, Anthony). Her Cafe Fanny is next to Lynch's San Pablo Avenue storefront.
The relationship began in 1972, when Lynch opened his original store in Albany. As he tells it, Waters often ate at La China Poblano, an Indian-Mexican spot next door. Soon enough, he writes in an e-mail, "She started sticking her head in my front door to see if I could join her for lunch. I didn't have many customers (and no employees) getting started, so I'd hang up an 'Out For Lunch' sign and we'd lunch together."
Waters also introduced Lynch to Tempier, which might as well be the official drink of Berkeley. She was familiar with the Tempier estate in Bandol, on the edge of the Mediterranean, and when Lynch headed to France in 1976, she connected him to writer Richard Olney who, like Waters, would befriend Tempier matriarch Lulu Peyraud. Lynch first tasted Tempier's wines at Chez Panisse before importing them that year.
Now, if Waters is seen with a glass, it's usually the rosé.
"Without Alice's unwavering support for Domaine Tempier's wine, I don't think it would have the cult following it now has," Lynch says.
At the same time, the friendship brought tension.
"It hasn't always been easy to sell my wines to Panisse," Lynch says. Tension has also gone the other way, with concerns that Lynch's wines receive undue attention. Jonathan Waters has rebuffed occasional requests to add more of Lynch's fare.
All the while, the restaurant has retained a strong California bond. There always has been a house red, usually Zinfandel - at first from Joseph Phelps Vineyards in Napa, then from Napa's Green & Red, whose proprietor Jay Heminway hosted 1970s parties for the Panisse posse at his Chiles Valley property. Green & Red remains the house wine.
Unheralded local wines
As the kitchen honors local purveyors, there has been a celebration of unheralded local wines. Renegade vintner Sean Thackrey of Bolinas had his first wine, magnums of his Aquila red, served at the restaurant. A winemaker dinner at Chez Panisse remains a crucial plaudit.
