Café 2825

The wine list at Café 2825 arrives with clear ambitions — 78 labels, a Champagne section that opens with Cristal and Dom Pérignon, and a California whites column that reads like a greatest-hits of Napa valley floor darlings. It's a list that wants to impress, and to its credit, it mostly does. The question is whether you're paying for the wine or the occasion.

The Italian whites show genuine character — La Scolca's Gavi di Gavi Black Label is a serious pour, Feudi di San Gregorio's Greco del Tufo brings some Southern Italian soul, and the Cesari Albana di Romagna Secco is a left-field pick that not many AC restaurants would bother with. California Chardonnay gets heavy rotation: Kistler Les Noisetiers, Martinelli Three Sisters, Flowers, Jayson by Pahlmeyer — it's a murderers' row of West Coast whites that leans into the restaurant's big-night-out energy. The Champagne section is trophy-forward (Cristal, DP, Veuve, Moët Imperial) and built for celebration rather than discovery. We'd love to see more Italian reds with this kind of depth, and the red wine side of the list likely leans on recognizable names rather than anything that would make a Burgundy hunter sit up straight.

By-the-glass options aren't published separately on the site, and that's a minor frustration — in a 78-label list, knowing what's available by the pour matters. If you're flying blind at the table, push your server on this before defaulting to whatever house wine ends up in front of you. A restaurant with this bottle range should be doing more with its glass program.