Pizza, pastries, and natural wine done right
NE Portland · Portland · Italian-inspired cafe with wood-fired pizzas and pastries · Visit Website ↗
Reviewed April 23, 2026
Wingman Metrics
The wine list at Cafe Olli feels like it was built by someone who actually drinks wine — not someone trying to fill pages. It's compact, intentional, and leans hard into natural producers in a way that feels earned rather than trendy. You're in a wood-fired pizza cafe on MLK Blvd and somehow the list is better than half the dedicated wine bars in town.
The list runs 50-80 bottles deep with a clear point of view: natural Italian producers anchoring things, with Oregon small-producers and French Loire Valley selections rounding it out. Skin-contact whites and Sicilian reds from Italian natural producers sit alongside Oregon Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir from names you won't find at a chain steakhouse. Loire shows up with enough conviction that it's clearly not an afterthought. The gaps are real — no serious Champagne presence, thin on the Southern Hemisphere — but given the focus, that's a fair trade.
Eight to fourteen options by the glass is a healthy pour program for a cafe of this size, and the selections rotate through the same natural, small-producer lens as the bottle list. You're not stuck choosing between a Malbec and a California Chardonnay — there's usually something orange or skin-contact in the mix. The sommelier on staff means the glass list actually gets refreshed and curated rather than just defaulting to whatever the distributor pushed that month.
Oregon Pinot Gris from a small local producer — $12
Small-production Oregon Pinot Gris at a cafe price point punches well above its weight — especially when you're eating wood-fired pizza and want something that keeps up without taking over.
Sicilian natural red
Most people sleeping on the Sicilian reds here are busy ordering the Pinot Noir by reflex. The natural Sicilian producers on this list tend to bring volcanic-soil funk and a savory edge that works remarkably well with the wood-fired everything coming out of this kitchen.
French Loire Valley white
The Loire selections are solid in concept but feel slightly underdeveloped compared to the Italian and Oregon offerings — you're paying for the category credibility more than a specific knockout bottle here. Spend a few dollars more and go Italian skin-contact instead.
Skin-contact Italian white + Wood-fired pizza
The oxidative, textured quality of a natural Italian skin-contact white cuts through the char and fat from the wood-fired crust in a way that a clean, crisp white simply won't. It's not a delicate pairing — it's a loud one, and it works.
🎲 The Bottom Line
Cafe Olli is what happens when a sommelier opens a pizza cafe and refuses to phone in the wine list. Yes, send your friends here for wine — just tell them to skip the Loire and order whatever's orange.
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