It’s a beautiful space, with textured, dark-green walls, and it serves better-than-average bar snacks, furnished by nearby restaurant Ernest. (The main difference, to my mind: The larger glasses allow you to swirl and actually smell the wine.) The first clue: Wines are served in Gabriel Glas, a modern, high-end crystal vessel that you’d expect to see in a fine-dining restaurant, rather than in the miniature, nearly shapeless glasses that have become ubiquitous among natural wine crowds. This is very much a natural wine bar - most of what’s available is zero-zero - but aesthetically it feels distinct from many other natural wine bars. just opened last week, and I visited on one of its first days. The wine bar counterpart of the Mission District’s Gemini Bottle Co. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.īar Gemini. It’s a great place to discover the classics like Chablis, Champagne and Bordeaux, plus fun, offbeat, even sometimes wild-tasting wines like an earthy Gamay blend from the Loire Valley and grippy Kekfrankos (sometimes called Blaufrankisch) from Hungary. The wine selection, though, is just as polished at GluGlu as at Ungrafted. It’s smaller and feels more casual than Ungrafted, with lighter, tapas-inspired food. (The opening squeaked in during the NBA playoffs, shortly before the Warriors lost the Western Conference Semifinals.) But GluGlu is worth visiting anytime, not just as a pregame pitstop. In May, the couple - both master sommeliers - opened their second spot, GluGlu, in the Thrive City complex surrounding the Chase Center. Ungrafted, in Dogpatch, has long been one of my favorite wine bars in San Francisco - it’s the sort of dialed-in place where you can count on getting a truly revelatory wine every time, served at a perfect temperature, thanks to the vault of hard-to-procure bottles that owners Chris Gaither and Rebecca Fineman have built. “We’re prioritizing wines that we stand behind and are a good representation of where they’re from,” said Sullivan. But Hohler and Sullivan still love wines that feel “traditional,” including many that may not fit stylistically into the reigning natural-wine aesthetic. They serve wines made only from organically or biodynamically farmed grapes, then treated with little human intervention none of the wines at Banter were inoculated with commercial yeast. Now it has grown up in the barrel! Typical of heirloom rye, the Balboa grain is a little smaller than modern varieties, with a lower output per acre of planting - but it's no less flavorful for that! Our Balboa Rye whiskey offers shimmering notes of spiced fruit unique from our flagship New Riff Rye.The question everyone asks them: Is Banter a natural wine bar? “We get this question from people who want us to say we’re a natural wine bar and from people who are hoping we aren’t super natty,” said Sullivan, whose parents own the respected East Bay wine importer Beaune Imports. He offered it to us and we distilled it into rye whiskey, probably the first time in decades that Balboa has been made into whiskey and quite surely the only example on the market today. His chosen variety was Balboa rye, an heirloom grain which dates back to the 1940s as a rye variety popular in Indiana. Our corn farmer Charles Fogg has been growing heirloom rye on his family's farm for many years. Balboa Rye is one of the first specialties we made. In addition to our flagship New Riff Bourbon and Rye, our distilling team has stretched their creative muscles over the years, producing a number of what we call "specialty whiskeys". Taste: Rounded and full-bodied, midpalate of spiced fruit compoteįinish: Very long and simply gorgeous, as the fruits are subtly shaded with many spices (clove, wintergreen, nutmeg) Water yields colorful (black-blue-red skinned) rye fruits and spice With time, develops waxy/honeyed (yet not sweet) fruits. Mash Bill: 95/5 Heirloom Balboa Rye/Malted Rye
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