Espresso Bar Moonlighting as an Italian Wine Spot
Downtown Evanston · Evanston · European-style café, coffee and light fare · Visit Website ↗
Reviewed by the RagingWine Tasting Desk · July 13, 2026
RagingWine reviewed Cafe Mozart’s wine list and gave it The Wild Card — RagingWine’s Vibe-Check rating. How RagingWine reviews wine lists →
Wingman Metrics
You walk into Cafe Mozart expecting a latte and a croissant, and then someone hands you a wine list with Cà dei Frati Lugana on it. That's a genuine surprise. Eight labels isn't much, but whoever curated this clearly has taste — or at least knows someone who does.
The list leans hard into northern Italy and Austria, which is a coherent and underrated combination. You've got the crowd-pleasing Doppio Passo Primitivo and a Nero d'Avola for red drinkers, a Grillo and Custoza for whites, and a Zweigelt flying the Austrian flag mostly alone. The anchor of the whole list is the Cà dei Frati Lugana — a genuinely serious wine that has no business being on a sandwich-and-pastry menu, and yet here we are. Gaps exist: no aged options, no real depth on the red side, and the Moët at €130 feels like it wandered in from a different restaurant entirely.
Seven of the eight labels are available by the glass, which is an unusually high hit rate for a list this size — you're not locked into a bottle commitment just because you want something Italian with your afternoon. Pours come in 0.2L format, priced between €7.90 and €9.90, which is honest money for what you're getting. No rotating program here, but when your best bottle is also available by the glass, that's hard to complain about.
Doppio Passo Primitivo — €8.50/glass, €32.90/bottle
Rich, fruit-forward Sicilian red at a price that doesn't require a second look at your bank account. At €32.90 a bottle in a café setting, you're getting real wine at honest markup — order the bottle and settle in.
Cà dei Frati Lugana
Most people ordering wine at a café grab whatever's cheapest. Don't. Cà dei Frati is one of the benchmark producers for Lugana — a Trebbiano di Soave-based white from the southern end of Lake Garda that punches well above its category. Finding it here at all is the real surprise.
Moët Champagne
At €130 a bottle, the Moët is doing the heavy lifting for the restaurant's margins. It's overpriced for what it is anywhere, and especially out of place here. If you want bubbles, the Valdo Prosecco at €29.90 exists for a reason.
Cà dei Frati Lugana + Sandwich
A Lugana this good — all white peach and almonds with a clean mineral finish — cuts right through the richness of a well-loaded sandwich without competing with it. Light fare calls for a light white, and this is the best one on the list by a comfortable margin.
The Bottom Line
Cafe Mozart is a café that accidentally has one of the more thoughtful compact wine lists in Evanston — small, Italian-leaning, and anchored by a genuinely excellent Lugana. Come for the coffee, stay for the wine, ignore the Moët.
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Deep & Eclectic
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Acceptable
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