Ordering a bottle of wine at restaurants can be daunting — especially if the wine list is long, holds unfamiliar choices, or skews expensive. We studied the lists of three Dallas restaurants acclaimed for their wine programs — Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, Monarch and Sachet — seeking matches for a signature dish.
Then we followed our usual plan for in-person-dining: ask the sommeliers for advice. If your budget is tight, be open to regions you haven’t tried before. Some excellent values hail from the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and the Southern Hemisphere. If you’re splurging on pricier wine, all the more reason to get expert advice.
After learning your price range and what kind of wines you generally like (for example, Napa cabs, unoaked chardonnays, earthy pinot noirs), a good wine steward can finesse a pairing that takes the food as well as your wine preferences into account.
Read on for our wine list findings and sommelier pairing suggestions under $100.
Pappas Brothers Steakhouse: A grande dame of classic steakhouses, with a perennially award-winning wine list
The wine program: For 12 consecutive years, this Dallas steakhouse has received the Wine Spectator’s Grand Award — the magazine’s highest honor — for the consistent depth, breadth, and quality of its wine list and excellent service. (Only four Texas restaurants hold this international award, and three of them are Pappas Bros. Steakhouse locations.) Pappas’ wine list is 184 pages long, with about 4100 selections. It spans 18 countries, and includes top domestic wines from seven states.
Scattered throughout the list are 562 wines at or below $100 (excluding half-bottles). Among the priciest wines in the cellar are many collectible labels, including an 1847 vintage of Chateau d’Yquem for $52,000.
The dish: Dry-aged prime ribeye steak
The sommelier says: Former Beverage Manager and Master Sommelier Barbara Werley, who left Pappas in early August 2022 after 15 years, built the wine program at the steakhouse. A team now mines the massive wine list for a dizzying number of steak matches, ranging from $45 to thousands of dollars. Excellent matches aren’t limited to red wines, though.
“One thing I’m known for is white wine with steak,” Werley says. Contrary to what most people think, many white wines make ideal pairings for meat, she says. Werley is drawn to white Bordeaux and Burgundy, as well as white blends from other regions. She cites several advantages to her favorite whites: “They’re not bogged down with too much oak, there’s usually no tannin, and they’ve got the acidity you need to cut through the fat.” Acidity is the key to successful pairings, she says, and Werley’s red wine picks take this into account too. Here are her wine matches (under $100) for steak.
* Au Bon Climat Hildegard, Santa Maria Valley, 2016, California, $65A blend of 55% Pinot Gris, 35% Pinot Blanc, and 10% Aligote. For 40 years, the winery has been committed to marking Burgundian style wines.
* Garcés Silva Amayna Pinot Noir, Leyda Valley, 2015, Chile; $80
* Garcés Silva is a top Chilean producer, and the Leyda Valley is a cool climate region well suited for producing vibrant Pinot Noir with good acidity.
* Yalumba Old Bush Vines Grenache, Barossa, 2016, Australia; $55. An excellent value, produced by a pioneering winemaking family that has owned and operated the winery for over 170 years.
* Chateau Ferran, Pessac-Leognan, 2018, France; $75;A good Bordeaux value from Pessac-Leognan, a sub-region of Graves.
* Gundlach Bundschu Mountain Cuve, Sonoma County, 2019, California $60 (and sold by the glass); An affordable Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.
The Monarch: Perched high in downtown’s The National building, this glitzy restaurant offers sparkly views, wood-fired modern Italian fare, and an impressive wine list.
The wine program: At more than 70 pages, the wine list fluctuates between 2,000 and 2,500 selections, says Nicole Nowlin, wine director at Monarch. “We try to keep 300 selections under $100, besides having iconic ‘mic-drop’ producers that can be expensive,” she says. More than half of Monarch’s wines are from France and Italy. The list includes selections from 14 other countries, including the U.S. and emerging wine regions. Nowlin says that more wines from the Middle East are being added to the list. Wine prices range from $38 to nearly $14,000 for the 1998 Pétrus, Pomerol, Bordeaux.
Recently, Monarch was one of 21 Dallas restaurants to receive The Wine Spectator’s second-highest honor, a Best of Award of Excellence (for outstanding wine programs offering more than 350 selections). The magazine cited the wine list’s strength in Spain, France and Italy, and more specifically, the regions of Burgundy, Champagne, Bordeaux, Rhone and Piedmont.
The dish: Bistecca alla Fiorentina, a 40-ounce porterhouse steak, charred in coals and served sliced with lemon, hearth olive oil, arugula and rosemary sea salt. Priced at $180, it could serve four people.
The sommelier says: “Being a good sommelier means finding those bottles that people don’t know about, that deliver quality. We have a lot of lesser known wines that are at or below $100, so people can feel comfortable coming in on a weeknight,” Nowlin says.
Here are Nowlin’s steak matches for under $100:
* Alfredo Maestro Castrillo de Duero Tinto, 2019, Spain, $65, a single-vineyard tempranillo made with grapes from 70-year-old vines grown at high elevation in Spain’s Ribera del Duero region. “The earthiness and garrigue in this wine will bring out the char of the wood-fired steak and the rosemary salt,” she says.
* Markovitis Xinomavro, Naoussa, 2016, Greece, $58, a lighter-bodied choice that fans of Italian reds will enjoy. Bright red fruits, leather notes, and grippy tannins over-deliver in this wine, Nowlin says.
* Calabretta Vigne Vecchie Nerello Mascalese, Sicilia, 2012, Italy, $95: “A beautiful rustic wine from Etna. It doesn’t get much cooler than drinking a wine grown on the side of a volcano,” she says.
Sachet: A Modern Mediterranean-inspired restaurant with a wine list laser-focused on selections from Mediterranean regions.
The wine program: The list of more than 105 wines includes selections from Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Lebanon, Spain, Israel, Albania, Italy, Southern France (including Corsica), and Croatia. Although some of the wines may be new to Dallas diners, they’re from areas that have been producing wine for many centuries —even millennia — and are the original homes of some well known grapes. About 85% of the wines on Sachet’s list are less than $100 — a testament to the excellent value that many of these regions offer. The most expensive bottle is an outlier, at $650: Soldera Sangiovese, Tuscany, 2008. This year, Sachet was named a James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Wine Program.
The dish: The Iberico Secreto pork chop, a richly marbled, more flavorful meat from Spain’s prized Pata Negra breed of pigs, is the dish to get. The chop is served with a pimenton sauce and an herbal, salsa verde-like Mojo Sauce, as well as potatoes.
The sommelier says: ”We opened with a tabloid [sized] wine list, but there’s no need to carry that many wines; when people see a large and unfamiliar wine list they get overwhelmed,” says Brian Huynh, general manager and Advanced Sommelier. The restaurant trimmed its list to one page, front and back.
“I always try to find things that I can describe to clients in terms of classic regions. If someone wants a red Bordeaux, I look to Lebanese wines. Many Lebanese winemakers were trained in Bordeaux, so some of their reds are Bordeaux-style blends. If someone wants a white burgundy, Greece is making some fantastic chardonnay, in a restrained Burgundian style. Posip, an obscure Croatian wine, is like a chablis with high acidity, minerality, and a sea-spray salinity,” he says.
When pairing wine with the Iberico Secreto pork chop, Huynh takes the dominant sauce as well as the meat’s marbling into consideration. The brightness of the mojo sauce and the fat of the Iberico Secreto call for a white or a rosé with some weight, and good acidity to cut through the fat, he says. Here are two good matches:
* Troupis Winery “Ekato,” Unfiltered Moschofilero Rosé, Arkadia, 2019, Greece, $47: Although moschofilero is a white wine grape, it has a pink-purple skin. “Lengthy skin contact — 100 days — not only gives this rosé a rich crimson color, but also a rich texture and grip that holds up to pork. And it’s bursting with acidity,” Huynh says.
* Gavalas Assyrtiko-Nykteri (aged), Santorini, 2017, Greece, $89: “It’s clean and focused — like a cross between albariño and sauvignon blanc — but aged, so richer, and heavier in style,” Huynh says. “It has high acidity, lower alcohol — so it won’t amp up the spice — and enough weight to stand up to the meat.”
Tina Danze is a Dallas freelance writer.