Timberline Grill

Walking into a casino steakhouse, your expectations for the wine list are usually somewhere between depressing and aggressively mediocre. Timberline Grill resets that immediately — a 150-plus bottle list with a clear California backbone and a sommelier, Charles Sailors, who actually knows what's on it. It's not trying to be a wine bar. It's trying to be the best wine list in a mountain casino, and it largely succeeds.

The list leans hard into California, which makes sense for the room and the menu — big steaks want big reds, and the producers here deliver. Caymus, Silver Oak, Jordan, and Stag's Leap Cabernets anchor the red side, while Rombauer and Cakebread hold down the Chardonnay flank. It's not adventurous — you won't find a Trousseau or a skin-contact Vermentino hiding in the back pages — but the depth within California is respectable, and the $40–$150 price corridor means you're not forced into a $200 bottle to drink well. The Wine Spectator Award of Excellence, earned in 2023, is a fair read on this list: solid, focused, and serious about what it does.

Twenty-plus glass pours is a strong showing for a casino dining room, and the $10–$18 range keeps things accessible without feeling like a gas station. The by-the-glass lineup tracks the bottle list — California-forward, red-heavy, with enough white options to keep the seafood and salad end of the menu covered. We'd love to see more rotation, but what's here is consistently well-chosen.