Manzanita

The wine list at Manzanita reads like a greatest hits album from a grocery store endcap — Josh Cellars, Rombauer, Santa Margherita, Robert Mondavi. These are names everyone recognizes, which is exactly the problem. There's nothing here that signals anyone with a corkscrew and a curiosity put this list together.

The stated focus on California, Burgundy, Oregon, and Italy sounds promising until you see which bottles actually made the cut. We're talking Francis Ford Coppola Diamond Collection, Sterling Vintner's Collection, and Robert Mondavi Private Selection — the restaurant industry's comfort blanket of familiar labels that require zero selling effort. A 60-to-120 bottle list anchored by these producers isn't a curated selection, it's a distributor's default order. The Burgundy and Oregon presence may exist somewhere on this list, but nothing in the markup sampling suggests they've done anything interesting with it.

The by-the-glass program is where this list really earns its reputation. Cloudy Bay at $20 a glass on a $35 retail bottle, Sterling Chardonnay at $16 a glass on a $12 retail bottle — these aren't markups, they're warnings. With roughly five glass pours visible in the data, there's no sign of rotation or any effort to make the program worth engaging with.