The Alcove

You're in Evanston, Illinois — not exactly the first place you'd expect to find Espérance de Trotanoy sitting next to Foillard Morgon and Cavallotto Barolo. The list reads like someone with a genuine point of view curated it, not a beverage director checking boxes. Sixty-one labels doesn't sound like much until you see what those sixty-one labels actually are.

The backbone here is unambiguously French — a tight but impressive run through Bordeaux (five appellations, all serious châteaux), Beaujolais crus, Burgundy from names like Joseph Voillot and Jacques Girardin, Rhône representation from Cornas to Crozes-Hermitage to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and a Loire outlier in Bernard Baudry's Chinon. Italy gets a respectable nod — Produttori del Barbaresco and Cavallotto Barolo do most of the heavy lifting, with Volpaia's Chianti Classico Riserva filling the mid-range. Spain, South America, and the US round things out on paper, but this list's soul is clearly Franco-Italian old-world, and it doesn't try to be something it isn't. The gaps are real — no white wine depth was evidenced here, and by-the-glass details are thin — but what's present punches well above a suburban New American's weight class.

We couldn't confirm specific by-the-glass options or how many pours rotate, which is frustrating on a list this interesting. If the glass program reflects even half the ambition of the bottle list, it's worth asking your server what's open. Don't just default to whatever they push first.