Photo by Katharine Shilcutt

Sommelier Marc Borel, now of Backstreet Cafe, serving wine at 13 Celsius.

It's exciting to run across a well-priced favorite on a restaurant's wine list, or to discover something new as you dig through its pages. But there's more to making a world-class wine list than just stocking a cellar with Cakebreads and Chardonnays.

To spotlight the best wine lists in Houston, we turned to the experts: a panel of respected Houston sommeliers that includes Marc Borel (general manager at Backstreet Cafe), Jonathan Honefenger (lead sommelier at Richard's Liquors and Fine Wines), Evan Turner (formerly of Branch Water Tavern) and Justin Vann (sommelier at Oxheart). What these professionals emphasized most is that there are at least three things that make a truly great wine list -- starting with curation.

"There are a lot of great lists that are put together well and have interesting things and great price points, but who's curating them?" asks Turner. "You can watch a sporting event and it can be an amazing game, but if the people doing the color commentary are great then it makes it even better."

A wine list could have more hidden treasures than the Vatican, but without guidance from someone who knows the list, only the geekiest connoisseurs would be able to spot them. Vann specifically looks for a well-trained wine steward when scouting great wine lists, asking questions like: "Does the list have good somms taking care of it? Can they find me something I like on the list, in almost any price range?"

A second thing to keep in mind, says Turner, is how well the wine list holds up to its audience. A purposefully esoteric wine list has no place in a straightforward, casual restaurant, where diners would be baffled by a list containing only orange wines while a Chardonnay-and-Cabernet-heavy list of staid, middle American favorites can easily bring down a fine dining experience.

Lastly, look for how well the wine pairs with the food the restaurant is serving. An all-American wine list in an Italian restaurant can clash as loudly as an all-Korn soundtrack in a fancy French restaurant. It's okay to have a few familiar standbys, says Vann, but he cautions: "Does the majority of the wine pair well with the majority of the food?

The following 10 restaurants were cited over and over again by our sommeliers as examples of places with truly great wine lists in Houston. And although I'm no somm myself, I agreed wholeheartedly with each pick.

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Photos by Jeremy Parzen.

Philippe sommelier Vanessa Treviño Boyd serves up some funky and utterly delicious wines in her by-the-glass program. Pair that with collegiality and you have a winner in my book.

As vibrant as its food scene may be, Houston isn't exactly known for a shared camaraderie or general collegiality among restaurant professionals.

Of all the major U.S. cities where I've lived and worked (including New York and Los Angeles), Houston has always struck this adoptive Texan as falling short in the solidarity-among-restaurateurs department.

The dog-eat-dog nature of our restaurant scene is part of what brings it to the cutting edge. After all, there's nothing more American than a healthy dose of intelligent competition. But we're behind the curve when it comes to the guest chef and guest sommelier phenomenon that has been embraced by our counterparts on either coast.

Last night, I stopped for a glass of Muscadet and a chat with Houston sommelier Vanessa Treviño Boyd at Philippe on Post Oak, where she is launching a new guest sommelier series tomorrow night. (As of last night, there was one spot open for the first installment of the series, an overview of Austria with Fred Jones of The Pass and Provisions.)

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Photo courtesy of Paula Murphy

Sean Beck

Who he is:

Sommelier and wine consultant to a number of Houston establishments, Sean Beck started working as a waiter at Backstreet Cafe 15 years ago while he was pursuing a history degree at the University of Houston.

"At the time, Backstreet had about a 55-bottle wine list," Beck recalls. Backstreet's owner, Tracy Vaught, noticed that Sean excelled at recommending and selling wines to customers, and began asking him to help her with wine buying. "I started reading all about wine. Jeb Stuart [then chef of the Daily Review Cafe] and I also started meeting up to watch South Park and baseball and taste wines every Wednesday. I just tried to learn as much as possible."

Although Beck later enrolled in more official courses of study and certification programs, he describes his early wine education as "the school of hard knocks." He credits his vast knowledge of wine to being fearless about asking questions. "I went to every tasting possible. Asked about anything I didn't understand or know the answer to. It's always hard to ask questions for fear of looking stupid, but that's the only way to learn."

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Photos by Jeremy Parzen.

The Sutter Home winery group, which owns Trinchero Napa Valley, has forced the Trinchero family of Piedmont, Italy, to remove their surname "Trinchero" from the label.

La reproduction interdite... When a colleague showed me the new label for Trinchero Barbera d'Asti Superiore (2006 vintage) last night, I thought to myself, either he is playing a practical joke on me or this is a work of surrealist art.

As if plucked from a painting by Magritte or a fountain by Duchamp, a confident label stood before me (above), austere and elegant in its ensemble, yet marred by a glaring omission: A gaping space at the label's center was bare, unavoidably and inexplicably innominate and anonymous.

I had been told that the Trinchero winery in Piedmont, Italy -- a pioneer of organic farming there, known for its stunning bottlings of Barbera grapes, one of my favorite wineries from the Barbera d'Asti appellation -- had been approached by the Sutter Home winery group, owners of the Trinchero Napa Valley label. The California behemoth, said the family's Houston-based importer, Douglas Skopp (Dionysus Imports), had threatened the Trinchero family with legal action if they refused to remove their family name -- their family name -- from bottles destined for sale in the U.S.

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Photo by Jeremy Parzen.

I lead my share of wine tastings in different parts of the country, occasionally in Houston. I'm already spoken for, but, man, if I weren't, I'd hit every wine tasting I could. That's where the action is.

The most important thing my mother ever taught me is that every wine tasting is a singles event. It's not the only wisdom she imparted to me. But especially in the light of what I do for a living (writing and talking about wine), it's the most important.

Even back in the 1980s, when my mom was working as an adult ed programmer in San Diego, long before the wine mania of the late 1990s and the 2000s, wine tastings and wine classes provided ideal cover for singles events. Back then, when personal ads were just beginning to appear in magazines like New York (my mom was too modest to advertise but she did consider it at the time), the thought of meeting a future spouse or partner through a dating service was still taboo in this country. But those employed by the continuing education sector were one step ahead of the game: They knew that wine tastings were the perfect lure for folks who wanted to meet like-minded, "sophisticated" singles with expendable income. After all, would you attend a wine class if you weren't single?

Today, online dating, singles events and romantic connections through social media are part of the fabric of our workaday lives (I moved to Texas to be with my future wife after she and I met through blogging).

So there's no need to be coy, Roy: Wine tastings, wine classes and wine events are great places to hook up. And Houston has a healthy dose of them.

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Photos by Jeremy Parzen

Last week, Bear Dalton -- one of our nation's leading wine authorities and a Texan through and through -- walked me through his Champagne selection at the mothership Spec's on Smith Street.

The weather outside was frightful when I rolled up to the mothership Spec's on Smith Street one afternoon last week.

But it wasn't half as scary as the demolition derby that was unfolding in the parking lot there, between the old school Caddys, the C-Class Benzes, and the obligatory and ubiquitous GMC SUV, whose soccer mom pilot insisted on backing it into a space otherwise suited for a compact.

The holiday wine shopping scene inside reminded me of Dante's bufera (you know, the "storm" in the fifth Canto of the Inferno, "Where 'mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw / Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell / Their sorrows," as Keats once wrote). Lustfully happy wine shoppers literally flew through the aisles, navigating their passage between scantily clad women with painted faces offering plastic cups filled with all sorts of highly charged alcoholic beverages.

As I descended through the circles of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, "Cab" and Merlot, many a salesperson asked me graciously if I needed any help in finding what I was looking for.

But my Virgil was to be another: The wine buyer of wine buyers and poet of poets, Bear Dalton, had agreed to walk me through his Champagne selection, negotiating the often treacherous pitfalls of making that annual splurge purchase (aisle two for lust, three for gluttony).

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Photo by Jeremy Parzen.

Rosé has been aggressively marketed to Americans as a "summer wine." But at our house, we drink rosé wines all year round and especially during the holidays.

I'm just going to go ahead and blurt it out: The 2011 rosé from Syrah by Santa Barbara, California winery Ampelos is my favorite discovery for 2012 and it's my number one wine for the 2012 holiday season.

It's one of those rare wines that fire on all cylinders. It's fresh and it's clean. It's got great acidity (making it super food friendly) and a fantastic balance of astringency (thanks to its gentle tannin) and bright fruit. It weighs in at around $16 (well below my Eating Our Words ceiling of $25). And -- best of all -- it's widely available in the Houston market.

You can find it at Spec's or Richard's; I found the bottle in the bottle at the Spec's in Beaumont, on my way to Orange to visit the in-laws.

Some might find it strange that I'm recommending a rosé -- a pink wine -- as my number one holiday wine for 2012.

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Here are some ideas for wine-themed gifts for the 2012 holiday season, including a few that I'll be giving and a few -- hint, hint -- that I'd like to receive!

5. Wine Grapes by Master of Wine Jancis Robinson et alia

If you follow along here at Wine Time, you know just how much I revere Master of Wine and prolific author and editor Jancis Robinson. She's delivered yet another landmark work, just in time for the holidays, Wine Grapes: A Complete Guide to 1,368 Vine Varieties, Including Their Origins and Flavours (Ecco [Harper Collins], November 2012). As she likes to point out, an ampelographic work of this scope wouldn't have been possible even a few short years ago (ampelography is the study and classification of grape varieties, from the Greek ampelos meaning vine). Recent breakthroughs in genetic research of grape varieties have reshaped the field and revealed remarkable insights into the origins of some of the world's most commonly vinified wine grapes. At $175 a pop, this gorgeous cloth-bound tome is not exactly something you contribute to your office Kris Kringle. But a quick search reveals that you can find it for as low as $110 on bargain book sites.

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Asimov's new book, How to Love Wine (William Morrow, 2012), rehumanizes wine.

"Eric [Asimov] has the best job in the world," once said a friend of mine, who happens to be a prominent wine writer based in New York. "He's the wine writer for The New York Times!" she exclaimed.

From the standpoint of most of us wine scribblers, Eric's gig is as enviable as it is prestigious. As the chief wine critic for a national daily considered by many to be the world's greatest newspaper, his voice has a reach practically unrivaled in wine writing today (his own true peer is Master of Wine Jancis Robinson, wine critic for the London-based Financial Times).

But the many perks of his career -- the E-ticket access to rare wines and leading winemakers and the backstage passes to top wine events -- are also balanced by the responsibility of being the voice of the new and current generation of wine lovers in the U.S. today. Eric can't limit his attention solely to the wines he himself likes to drink. He has to take a demotic approach that embraces all styles and price ceilings. And he needs to speak with equal eloquence, discretion and good sense, whether he's covering an under-$10 Argentine Malbec or a priceless bottle of vintage Mersault from Burgundy.

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Photo by Jeremy Parzen.

Five years ago, screw caps as closures for wine were considered controversial and possibly untenable. Today, they are commonplace, as in the case of this excellent value-driven Pinot Grigio from Livio Felluga.

"Bartender, bartender! My wine smells like farts!"

No, this wasn't a George Carlin routine.

It was me (and my not so inner wine nerd) as I sat at a bar at one of Houston's most swank joints, waiting to be seated for dinner.

Honestly, I wasn't surprised that my wine smelled like a fart: It came from a bottle sealed with a screw cap.

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