Trees on the Hill

“There are so many things I love about this image. The depth and layers are stunning, from the rich dark of the vines in shadow to the distant looming cone of the mountain seen through the fog and the emerging sun. I also love the way that the sunlight turns the fog into disembodied bits of light that hang like spirits here and there throughout the vineyard.” — Alder Yarrow

INSTRUCTIONS:
Download this image by right-clicking (Mac users, click and hold) on the image and selecting “save link as” or “save target as” and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image and drag it to your desktop.

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PRINTS:
If you are interested in owning an archive quality print of this image, or any of the other vineyard images featured here on Vinography, you can purchase one on the Michael Regnier Photography web site for $85.

ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Every Thursday, Vinography features a new image from photographer Michael Regnier for readers’ personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect Michael’s copyright on these images.

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In my utopian future, every neighborhood has its own little wine bar where locals can congregate to share a glass of wine with friends and gossip about the goings on within a ten or twelve block radius. Of course if we all lived in small towns in France or Italy, we wouldn’t need to fantasize about such institutions, we would have grown up with them. But alas, here we are in San Francisco, and we have to make our own bits of the old world come to life.

For a time, I very nearly was about to take matters into my own hands and actually open a wine bar myself on my local main street, Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights. It’s probably good that Vega Freeman-Bradley and her husband Giuseppe beat me to it — I’d much rather drink wine than serve it. VinoRosso is as close to an old world Enoteca as you can get in San Francisco, down to its genial owners who often have their baby son slung over their hips as they serve their mostly local clientele. Like many of those old world drinking establishments, VinoRosso comes with its own quirks. Despite having about twenty seats maximum, the service is friendly but can sometimes be atrociously slow, especially when there are more than a few tables full. The cheese plates and salami plates are done well, but experiments with other hot dishes in the tiny countertop kitchen seem to not work out so well.

Lucky patrons who find the owners waiting on them will have their questions about the wines answered accurately and with aplomb, but the young help that fill in for the owners on some nights vary widely in their knowledge of the wines on the list, and even wine in general.

The wine list is one of the bar’s more redeeming features, particularly in its length, offering 15 or so whites, about 40 reds, and a half-dozen sparklers and dessert wines by the glass or by the reasonably priced bottle (3x the glass price). All but four or five of the wines on the list are from Italy or Sicily and range widely across the various regions and appellations of the country. And if your head is swimming after looking through the list and you care to browse by the label, the wine racks are nearby (though this means that the wines are not stored in a temperature controlled area — connoisseurs beware).

The fact that VinoRosso is stumbling distance from my front door, means that I’m somewhat of a regular customer there, as are many of the wine lovers in Bernal Heights. The size of the place, the casual atmosphere (which can often include one or more strollers and a couple of kids playing on the cement floor) and the humble offerings of wine and food mean that this bar isn’t worthy of being a destination for folks outside the 94110 zip code. For those of us in Bernal and the Inner Mission, however, it’s a friendly place to stop by.

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VinoRosso
629 Cortland Ave
San Francisco, CA
94110
(415) 647-1268

Open 4:00 PM to 11:00 PM Tuesdays through Sundays. Closed on Mondays.

Typically the bar offers Italian conversation with a local teacher between 4 and 7 on Tuesdays, and a kid friendly “Wine and Whiners” service early on Wednesday nights.

Parking in the area is reasonably easy to find in the residential streets just off Cortland, just be careful about blocking driveways. One of them might be mine!

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The modern world is fraught with dangers masked as opportunities. Don’t believe me? Then you haven’t been surfing Craigslist lately or buying things on eBay. If the Romans were around today they would have inserted a mandatory set of exclamation points after their lovely phrase caveat emptor.

In particular, the world of wine offers unusual proof that a fool and his money are indeed easily parted, as the other familiar saying reminds us. As wine lovers, we’re always out for a good deal on great wine. Like collectors of many kinds (along with garage sale shoppers, antique store browsers, etc.) the dream of getting a phenomenal wine for a good price lingers in the back of the mind, and makes it far too easy to spend hard earned money on bottles that can sometimes turn out to be just liquid mistakes.

So what knowledgeable but budget-conscious wine lover among us wouldn’t have at least considered following in the footsteps of Deetrane, a friend of my fellow wine blogger Neil, who runs the blog Brooklyn Wine Guy?

Deetrane has been posting as a guest on Neil’s blog recently telling the fascinating tale of his adventures buying wine off of Craigslist. And if you haven’t read them, they are certainly adventures rife with treasure, crime, justice, and moral corruption.

See episode one, in which the protagonist discovers great wine deals on Craigslist and eventually realizes that they are indeed, too good to be true.

Feast your eyes on episode two in which the protagonist is involved in a police sting operation to catch the perpetrator of heinous wine crimes.

Wonder aloud at episode three in which the protagonist lives happily ever after, and seemingly without a scrap of guilt at continuing to drink stolen wine.

These are quite an entertaining series of posts, to be sure. Unfortunately the ending leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, as Deetrane seems perfectly content to continue drinking wine that he knows is stolen, a morally corrupt point of view if I’ve ever seen one. But don’t let that stop you from enjoying the story, even if it ends happily for only one party involved.

Thanks to Jack at Fork and Bottle who told me that the final episode had recently been posted.

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