Heart and the matter of the Mason jars

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Kat Wade/Special to The Chronicle

For our latest Bar Bites I tackled the Valencia St. wine bar/gallery known as Heart.

Heart fills one of those strange gaps in San Francisco nightlife in that it aspires to more than wine-bardom — in the form of a menu from Kitchenette's Douglas Monsalud, including a beautifully conceived brunch. Yet it shies away from being a fully realized restaurant: With no permanent kitchen (though that hardly stops many a pop-up restaurant) it has the luxury of not being tied down to one concept.

In that sense it is absolutely of the moment: unwilling to add to the city's restaurant roster; there to advance an unabashedly populist vision of wine (and some food to accompany) without getting tied up by gas lines or reservations or — in a twist I still can't figure out — a fully functioning credit-card system. (For slightly mysterious reasons, tips can't be added to card splits.) And so no surprise that this Sunday it will host a gaggle of street-food cart vendors, pairing owner Jeff Segal's list to the stylings of, say, the Magic Kurry Kart. Heart is a mashup of San Francisco's current food counterculture in one convenient spot.

Segal, a former financial journalist who worked in wine retail on his way to creating Heart, says one of his inspirations was New York's Terroir. It's good source material: Paul Grieco's list may have its rough patches but its badass prose, Steven Solomon's punk graphics and the chance of wandering into an earsplitting jag of Flock of Seagulls saves Terroir from the realms of pretense. It's a venue (with a great chef) that doles out street cred for wanting to drink weird things.

Heart seems to want to occupy that space too.

Segal seemed thoughtful on the topic when I called him. He is on a mission to put a fork in all the typical wine-drinking tropes.

"I think a lot of people are intimidated or turned off by drinking wine," he explained, and so his goal is "trying to bring it down to where Americans see beer and whiskey."

I'm not sure that's quite the right goal for wine — there's a reason that wine occupies a different place in the culture, and it has nothing to do with fern-bar Chardonnay. But it does explain why Segal's tasting notes read like he spent a long, sleepless night with some Red Bull. He says his goal is to avoid discussing specific flavors, though "Sardines, grapefruit, hazelnut, beeswax. A mindf--- of a wine" for a Bornard Savagnin seems to veer toward that approach. (I'm more partial to his take on the Moric Blaufrankisch: "Syrah, Nebbiolo and Pinot Noir had a baby and gave it a very long German name.")

The big convention-breaker, though, is the Mason jars in which wines are served. Segal knows this is his big anti-snob hook; why else would the wine list come with its own Mason Jar Manifesto?

The manifesto was sure to get my hackles up, though the truth is that the Mason jar thing seems to be a conceit; Segal endorses stemware on some occasions, and you can get somewhat outsized stems upon request (disclaimer: they will make you look like a tool), which softens the impact of the jelly-jar jihad. While Segal insisted the jars "fit Heart well," he also insists he's not anti-stem.

The manifesto is a good road map to understanding the cultural disconnect on stemware. "Go to a cafe (or a winemaker's house) in most of the world's wine-crazy countries," it insists, "and you'll see people drinking wine out of water glasses." Segal sees the jars as an American twist on the rustic vigneron's tumbler, but I'd respectfully throw doubt on that notion. Good winemakers, and certainly those who populate Heart's list, would likely produce a decent set of glasses if you showed up on their doorstep. This is their life's work; they want it shown in the best light.

Segal argued to me that good wines will still taste great out of a jar. The manifesto echoes this: "Respect the grape, and the human hands behind it, not the stem."

But a good wine glass isn't a vehicle for pretense. (A bad wine glass, however, is precisely that.) Those who drink wine for a living have experienced the full spectrum of vessels: jelly jars, Nalgene bottles, plastic cups, Riedel bowls that could comfortably house a tiger shark, probably from our hands if it came down to it. And yet we find ourselves gravitating back to good stemware when we have the chance — sneaking it on camping trips and into Chinese joints in the Sunset.

That guy who totes his own stems to every restaurant because, well, his are better? And the restaurant that saves its best glassware for top- dollar bottles? Those are the pissants who give stems a bad name. But to put fancy wines in Mason jars seems like a slightly self-conscious exercise in high-low.

The puzzling thing here is that Segal's wine list reveals an intellectual curiosity that's far more anti-snob than the glassware. It actually avoids most of the current hipster darlings in favor of more obscure, interesting fare. A Hofer Zweigelt for $7/glass? (Make that $7/jar.) Two trocken Rieslings? Segal is having some freewheeling fun — without falling into the pitfalls of corporate Malbec or ho-hum flights of Viognier — that all wine bars should demonstrate. The Mason jars make the populist case in broad strokes. But they ultimately seem to undermine Heart's message.

Heart: 1270 Valencia St., S.F. (415) 285-1200. www.heartsf.com.

Posted By: Jon Bonné (Email, Twitter, Facebook) | April 22 2010 at 04:30 PM

Listed Under: Restaurants, Riesling, San Francisco, Wine Bars, Wine lists