Have been thinking about wine lists lately.

My wife rolls her eyes when I ask for the wine list. Not because she thinks I might spend too much (she already knows that!) but because she’ll be deprived of my sparkling conversation while I try to make sense of the offerings, with two things in mind. Numero uno, obviously: is there anything we might want to drink? Numero two-o, with more at stake: is there an intelligent entity behind the list, an actual author, with a point of view on the restaurant’s cuisine and/or wine in general?

 Every wine list tells a story, and I’m an avid reader. It doesn’t necessarily need a beginning, middle and end. Often it’s more impressionistic, the way a painting or photograph communicates all at once, the image conveying a context and back-story, as well. (And yes, she likes to read them too, once I locate the “good parts.”)

Most often, the story is about a proprietor who doesn’t understand wine but knows it’s supposed to be part of the restaurant’s product. That kind of cluelessness frequently results in a kitchen sink compendium that’s more like a wine shop in print than an astute selection complementing the comestibles at hand.

Certainly, the majority of lists are merely serviceable, presenting a lineup of the usual suspects without particular cohesion or bias. Yet the unlikeliest establishments may offer a list with a personality behind it.

Not always a good thing, of course. We’ve all shaken our heads over the list aimed at a pretentious clientele that drinks labels and scores. “Look, I get allocations of Shrader and Marcassin—bow and tremble, unworthy geek!” Yet a list can be a respectable cash machine without the score-whores and hefty markup. For example, it may earnestly represent the tried-and-true classics, or offer an insightful geography lesson with tasty illustrations. Such a list may be curated like a coffee-table book or even an art exhibit, each carefully-considered wine a statement on its own and part of a whole aesthetic.

Sometimes I glance at a wine list and get sucked in immediately. Again, it’s like a good book, where you read the first sentence and suddenly find yourself fifty pages in, thinking you should turn out the light and get some sleep, but you don’t.

          That’s what I felt like one evening at Cotogna in San Francisco. I’m told I kind of dropped out of our group for ten minutes or so, then interrupted a perfectly sociable conversation to start blurting names of wines I wanted to try. David Lynch’s selections and descriptions—and, yes, the remarkable concept, every bottle $40 and each to be had by the glass for $10—had me like the first page of Game of Thrones.

Then I read David’s essay on wine lists in the September Bon Apetit (“Goodbye, Big Fat Wine List”). Writing about the trend away from Grand Award-type tomes toward leaner, hipper missives addressing the moment at hand, he concludes by saying, “It may be a book, but it doesn’t tell a story.” My kind of som! And that made me wonder what other sommelliers think about the philosophy and practice of wine list authorship.

Not that a more substantial list is de facto boring. I’ve enjoyed Paul Greico’s rather literary list lists for Hearth and Terroir in NYC, for example. While some diners might cringe at so much information, I’ve gotta love a som who cares enough to tell me, “Many moons ago, monks cut a road through the vineyard, following a differential soil line (part of explaining a Riesling Smaragd, Weissenkirchen Klaus, Prager, 2007, Wachau).

Are you giving the punters what they think they want (what they expect or are used to) or trying to engage their inner Dionysus? Do you specialize in a grape, region, or style? Is a list just a retail shelf in print, or a gateway to exploration and discovery?