Historic Room, Forgettable Wine List
Downtown / Gainsboro · Roanoke · American Rustic / French-inspired Southern · Visit Website ↗
Reviewed by the RagingWine Tasting Desk · July 9, 2026
RagingWine reviewed The Pine Room at Hotel Roanoke’s wine list and gave it The Lazy List — RagingWine’s Vibe-Check rating. How RagingWine reviews wine lists →
Wingman Metrics
The Pine Room looks the part — warm wood paneling, a historic hotel pedigree, the kind of room that makes you want to order a bottle and settle in. Then you see the wine list: 14 labels, heavy on house-branded selections, with a tap wine system doing most of the heavy lifting. The room earns a five-star rating; the wine list does not.
Fourteen labels is a thin offering for a full-service hotel dining room, and the range leans hard into domestic crowd-pleasers with almost no regional or varietal adventure to speak of. There's no meaningful Old World presence, no Virginia wines despite the state having a legitimate and growing wine scene worth celebrating, and no producer names that would make a wine-curious diner lean forward. The list reads like it was assembled for frictionless ordering rather than genuine discovery. It gets the job done if you just want something in a glass, but don't come here expecting to find anything.
All 14 bottles on the list are available by the glass, which sounds generous until you realize the list itself is only 14 labels deep — so the by-the-glass program is essentially the entire program. The anchor of the BTG offering is Dark Harvest, a house red blend poured on tap, which tells you everything you need to know about where the ambition level sits. Glass prices run $9–$15, which is reasonable for Roanoke, but you're largely paying for convenience.
Dark Harvest Red Blend (tap) — $9/glass
At $9 a pour it's the lowest-friction option on the list, and for a casual pub dinner it does what it needs to do. Just don't expect much beyond that.
Dark Harvest Red Blend (bottle)
If you're staying at the hotel and want something to share over a long dinner without overthinking it, the $34 bottle format at least delivers a functional table wine at a price that won't wreck your evening — though the 183% retail markup stings a little when you do the math.
Dark Harvest Red Blend (bottle)
At $34 a bottle for what retails around $12, you're paying a steep hotel premium for a house blend poured from a tap system. If you're wine-motivated, this isn't where you want to spend your money.
Dark Harvest Red Blend + Korean Bulgogi
A soft, fruit-forward house red has enough body to stand up to the savory-sweet char of bulgogi without fighting the dish — it's a low-stakes match that works better than it has any right to.
❌ The Bottom Line
The Pine Room is a great spot for a drink and a burger in a handsome historic room, but the wine list is an afterthought in a state with a legitimate wine culture worth showcasing. Order a cocktail or ask for whatever's on tap, and don't make a trip here specifically for the wine.
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