How Cyrus and Hazel Hill create their wine lists

Here’s a peek at both the wine cellars and the wine lists at two upscale restaurants: Geyserville’s Cyrus and Hazel Hill at Montage Healdsburg.|

PEG MELNIK

THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

January 24, 2024

Tips for restaurant-goers

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, keep this in mind: Restaurants typically charge up to three times the wholesale price. If you’re wondering if a price is too high, use your smartphone to check a wine’s website for a bottling’s suggested retail (not wholesale) price.

Wine by the glass

There should be several wines offered by the glass on a wine list, but perhaps not many. These wines might be less complex than the bottles of wine on the list, but don’t dismiss them. As for the price, you can do your research on them, as well. Each glass is approximately one-fifth of an entire bottle.

It’s fair to ask how the uncorked bottles of these wines by the glass are stored. The answer you’ll be hoping to hear is that the restaurant has some sort of wine-preservation system that injects inert gas into open bottles to displace oxygen or some other gadget to protect the leftover wine from air. At the very least, you’ll want to hear that the restaurant is corking these bottles tightly, keeping them out of sunlight and refrigerating them (ideally, white wines at 45 degrees and reds at 55 degrees).

Uncorking a bottle

If you order a bottle, the sommelier will uncork it in front of you and ask someone at the table to taste and approve it before he pours it.

Usually, the taster is the person who ordered the wine, but not always. Once the taster approves the wine, the sommelier will fill the other glasses first and finish by pouring wine into the taster’s glass.

Defects

If a wine has a defect, don’t hesitate to ask the sommelier to replace it. Defects could range from smoke taint (i.e., an ashy taste) to oxidation (i.e., notes of vinegar or a woody, toffee smell) to reduction (i.e., rubber, sulfur notes).

Bringing your own bottle

If you have a stocked cellar, you may want to bring a bottle to a restaurant. If you do, there are two things to keep in mind.

First, the proper thing to do is to call the restaurant in advance and make sure the bottle you plan to bring is not on the wine list.

Second, be prepared to pay a corkage fee for bringing your own bottle. This fee typically ranges from $10 to $40. (At Cyrus, the corkage fee is $100 per bottle. At Hazel Hill, the fee is $40 for the first two bottles, $60 for the second two bottles and $500 for more than four bottles.)

A lineup of champagne peeks out of a glass enclosed cellar at Cyrus restaurant.

A focal point in the dining room, this unique cellar imbues guests with a sense of revelry as if there was a swirl of confetti overhead.

“It gives you an intangible feeling of celebration,” said Cyrus Schultz, beverage director. “You cannot not look at it upon entering the building. It excites you. Who doesn’t get excited about seeing a lot of champagne in the room?”

Today, we give you a peek at both the wine cellars and the wine lists at two upscale restaurants: Geyserville’s Cyrus and Hazel Hill at Montage Healdsburg.

Choosing bottlings for the cellar and the list is no easy feat for professionals like Schultz. When asked what’s his favorite wine, he laughed and said, “It’s like asking who’s your favorite child?”

While fond of Gruner Veltliner, Sonoma chardonnay, pinot noir and old vine zinfandel, Schultz said, “asking what’s my favorite wine is a question that never has a steady answer.”

Cyrus

The floor to ceiling glass windows at Cyrus frame views of the Alexander Valley hills ribbed in vines.

Cyrus Schultz said he enjoys the view while fine-tuning his wine list of roughly 800 bottlings. The offerings are drawn from 4,800 bottlings in his white wine and red wine cellars.

What people would find most surprising about the behind the scenes of creating a wine list, Schultz said, is that it’s a multi-faceted process.

“It’s not just tasting the wine and let’s go with this or that,” he explained. “You have to make sure that you keep the budget in mind and the balance of the wine list. A lot of thought process goes toward that.”

The fundamental philosophy at Cyrus is to have the food play center stage with wine in a supporting role.

“The food comes first,” Schultz explained.

The popular pre-fixe dinner pairing, priced at $295 per person, has 18 to 20 courses.

“This restaurant is here because of chef Doug Keane and (maî·tre d'hô·tel/owner) Nick Peyton and there’s been a tremendous reputation built from years past,” he said.

The beverage director is referring to Cyrus’ first iteration in Healdsburg, a seven-year run from 2005 to 2012. Keane and Peyton opened the Geyserville restaurant in Sept. of 2022 keeping the same name, a nod to Cyrus Alexander, the founder of Alexander Valley who first planted vines in 1843.

The wine list

With a breakdown of 60% international and 40% local, the wine list also has a broad price range. It’s roughly under $100 up to $3,000. But for those with an extraordinary amount of disposable income, there’s one bottling that soars above that ceiling, a vintage Krug champagne priced at $10,000.

Contained in iPads, the wine list has a traditional rollout of bubbly, followed by white wines and then red. It has a static table of contents to make navigating user friendly for guests.

“I think more than saying, ‘hey, this is a super advanced restaurant,’ it’s about keeping the wine list up to date 100% of the time so we can update it daily without printing 90 pages of paper.”

Accuracy is very important, the beverage director said.

“There’s nothing more heartbreaking when thumbing through a list and you find a special bottle and you order it and then someone comes back and says, ‘unfortunately we don’t have that.’”

Schultz

With a vast knowledge of labels, Schultz began his wine odyssey while working at the wine shop Vintage Wine Merchants in San Jose.

“I was in front of so many wines,” he said, referring to the international range of bottlings priced from $10 to thousands of dollars.

“A person who just works at a restaurant can be very knowledgeable about the wine list but it’s narrow in scope.”

Schultz, 35, studied at Santa Clara University, graduating in 2010 with degrees in finance and English.

Born and raised in Maui, Schultz was deeply saddened by the fires in Lahaina in August of 2023.

“It was not too long ago that fires ravaged this area, so people know that disaster all too well,” he said, adding that he was pleased people in this region were eager to support the hardship there.

Aloha is a greeting that means compassion, along with love and peace and Schultz said it’s his touchstone.

“The aloha spirit is almost synonymous with hospitality,” he said, “so I try to carry that with me with whatever I’m doing.”

Montage Healdsburg’s Hazel Hill

The name of the signature restaurant — Hazel Hill — pays homage to the grove of hazelnut trees at the resort’s entrance.

In January, Paul Coker was named assistant general manager of Hazel Hill after serving as director of beverage since August 2022.

In his new role, Coker will continue to have his fingerprints all over the wine list, one he refers to as a “living document” that’s updated weekly.

“We identify a need or just fall in love with a wine,” he said. “It’s a constant cycle of regeneration and finding new treasures.”

The wine list

With roughly 500 entries, the wine list ranges in price from $55 to $7,000 with the sweet spot is around $150. The geographic scope is 75% Northern California, with 25% elsewhere in California and beyond the United States.

Designed for international travelers and locals, the wine list plays to two key audiences, Coker said. And the locals include the producers of the wine served at the restaurant.

“It’s with this in mind that I remind our sommeliers they have to assume every table knows more about the wine than they do,” he said.

The entries on the wine list are drawn from a cellar with roughly 5,000 bottlings.

While Coker said he’s not opposed to high tech options, the restaurant offers a printed wine list.

“We just tend to like and gravitate toward the tangible,” he explained.

Coker

Decoding the wine list for guests is paramount to this assistant general manager. He usually has one to two sommeliers available to diners at all times.

“You can know everything about wine but if you don’t share it, what’s the point?”

Coker, 43, majored in global and international socio-economics and politics at UC Santa Barbara, graduating in 2002.

It was during college when wine bewitched him.

“Sometimes I was gifted a bottle and then I’d take it home and create a dish around it,” Coker said. “I fell in love with the marriage of food and wine.”

What people would find most surprising about creating a wine list is the genteel sparring behind the scenes, he said.

“There’s a lot of back and forth with the sommeliers,” Coker explained. “We all have favorites but there just isn’t enough room for all of them. It turns into a negotiation.”

You can reach Wine Writer Peg Melnik at 707-521-5310 or peg.melnik@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @pegmelnik.