Burlington

Farmhouse Tap & Grill is a great place for a burger and a local beer — the wine list is an afterthought that charges you accordingly. Come on a Wednesday, grab a half-price bottle, and keep your expectations calibrated to 'fine.'

The Windjammer shouldn't have a wine list this thoughtful, and yet here we are. It's not going to wow a serious collector, but for a reliable seafood dinner in South Burlington with a Cruvinet keeping your glass honest, it punches well above its zip code.

Honey Road is doing something genuinely rare: building a wine program with a real point of view in a mid-sized New England city, and the Eastern Mediterranean focus earns it a Wild Card badge without question. The markups are steeper than we'd like — a few bottles tip into hard-to-justify territory — but the sheer ambition and regional coherence of the list make it worth the trip.

Wednesday's half-price bottle deal is the only real reason to engage with this wine list — at full price, you're overpaying for brands that peaked in 2015. Grab a Weinbach on a Wednesday, eat the oysters, enjoy the lake view, and don't look too hard at the rest.

Hen of the Wood is the best wine list in Vermont and earns its place on any short list of serious wine programs in New England. Send your friends here, and tell them to ignore the safe choices — the whole point of this list is to go somewhere unexpected.

The Lower Deck is a genuine Wild Card — a casual Vermont bar quietly running a Cruvinet and stocking Cakebread and Far Niente next to your clam chowder. Markups hold it back from greatness, but the ambition alone makes it worth a detour.