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The Hidden Gems On My Wine List: The Morris, San Francisco

Alec Cummings, wine director at The Morris, shares amazing but overlooked bottles from the 56-page list at this James Beard-nominated San Francisco favorite.

May 17, 2024

The Hidden Gems On My Wine List: The Morris, San Francisco

Sometimes, we at The New Wine Review think that the best part of parsing a great wine list is just that: parsing it. 

By which we mean: flipping past the verticals of Grand Cru and Premier Cru Burg, steering away from the well-thumbed sections for Napa and Sonoma and Bordeaux and Tuscany and Piedmont, and digging deep. Looking for the Easter eggs; hoping to hear the dog whistles there for the real nerds. The great estates in overlooked regions. The hot new producer who will be galactically famous in a couple of years, but whose wines are somehow still on the list for just a little more than retail pricing. The wines that can only be there because the somm is excited about them. 

That’s why we’re starting this new recurring feature dedicated to uncovering such hidden gems. In it, we’ll interview the people who oversee enviable wine lists, ask them to choose a few such bottles, and tell us a bit about why they chose those wines. 

When it came to choosing the somm for our first Hidden Gems, we immediately thought of Alec Cummings, the wine director at San Francisco’s The Morris. His exquisite wine list—which draws on the deep personal collection of The Morris’s founder and its original sommelier, Paul Einbund—just won the restaurant a James Beard nomination for Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program.

The Morris considers itself a neighborhood restaurant, but the wine list—or, as they like to call it, the big wine list, which as of this writing is 56 pages long—contains serious nerd-bait on every page. With all that depth and breadth, asking Cummings to pick just a few favorite, lesser-known bottles left him with a challenging task. But he proved up to it.

All of the below figures reflect current pricing on The Morris’s list, and all of the comments below the wines are from Cummings, after being edited and condensed for clarity.

2020 Philippe Grisard Étraire de la Dhuy ($72)

No one has heard of this grape. It’s Étraire, which is indigenous to the Savoie. ​​I had never even had this grape before Paul [Einbund] and I went to visit Philippe in the Savoie. The only reason we met him is because we went to meet his brother Michel, who, along with Belluard, revitalized farming there and pushed it into the future. Michel introduced us to Philippe. From what we can tell, no one has imported Philippe’s wines. So we import this ourselves. 

This is like you are tasting a windswept mountainside, with fresh strawberries and fresh raspberries. It’s very versatile, medium bodied, and you can drink it across the entire menu.

2013 Malat Höhlgraben Kremstal Alte Reben ($115)

This is single-vineyard Grüner—a really versatile grape—from a great farmer and great winemaker in Austria from Kremstal. First of all, it’s a 2013. It’s hard to find these with age. It’s made in a reserve style, a bit bolder and richer, and its age helps that intensity. This is very fresh and also very rich, with a lot of minerality. It’s yellow apples and honeycomb and honeysuckle and white pepper and over-steeped green tea and fresh-cut radish—the classic markers for Grüner. And it’s savory. It works well with salads, but because of the richness and freshness, it works well with our smoked duck, which is always on our menu. 

2013 Château de Brézé Clos de la Rue Saumur ($121)

I love the Chenin section of our list so much. But if I were to call out one, it’s this Château de Brézé, made by Arnaud Lambert.

So: 2013. A cold, lean vintage. Clos de la Rue: a pure, rocky, cold site. Those things together make this a laser beam in a bottle. Age softens all the edges and rounds it out—it’s in a perfect spot. It’s precise, but it has weight from bottle age. The profile is lemon peel, lemon pith—just a lot of citrus—white stones, and a nuttiness like roasted almonds. It also works across our entire menu, but I love recommending Chenin for the duck.

2000 Cuchet-Beliando Cornas ($345)

It’s rare. Cuchet-Beliando probably produces less than 2,000 bottles a year. And they release their wines really late. [Retired Cornas legend] Robert Michel vinified this wine. The style is super elegant—it’s some of the most elegant Cornas I’ve ever had. I’ve blinded my team with this, and they thought it was Burgundy. These wines show the smoke, the meat, the sauvage of Cornas, and then with age they integrate, become more elegant, and shed the rusticity of youth. The 2000 is very pleasing at the moment. We also have the 1996, which is fun, too, just more of a thinker. It shows more tension—a little bit less fruit, and more earth and minerals. 

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