Wine.Kittlehouse Wine List 8.10
! The Story of the Wine Cellar at Crabtree’s Kittle House Restaurant and Inn The year was 1988 and John Crabtree’s idea was to create one of the greatest restaurant wine lists in the world. Grounded in the belief that great winemakers make great wine, we set out to learn who the world’s greatest winemakers were - the talented people making the most compelling and delicious wines of their type, creating the greatest expressions of a special place, the grapes that grow there and that winemaker’s vision of how that wine should taste. When we started our wine journey, the Kittle House wine list had about 150 selections and the wine cellar held a few thousand bottles and took up a small fraction of the space compared to what it is today. Both the list and the cellar grew very fast. We invited winemakers to the Kittle House for winemaker dinners and travelled to meet them on their estates and in their vineyards. We started in California with the wines from legendary producers like Robert Mondavi, Caymus, Groth and Dunn and from the new guard like Marcassin, Peter Michael, Bryant, Colgin and Turley. We then went to France and procured wines from the big boys in Bordeaux and Burgundy – Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Mouton, DRC, Coche-Dury, Leflaive, Dujac and Drouhin. Then we moved on to the Rhone Valley, the Loire, Alsace, Champagne and the rest of France, then on to Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Northwest. So many great winemakers, so many great wines! In each place we would ask those great winemakers who, besides them, were making the best wines in the region.
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