Portland has several excellent restaurants. Portland has several restaurants with excellent wine lists. Sometimes you come across a restaurant that is excellent in both these categories. More often, not. There are quite a few beverage-program managers here with loads of enthusiasm but less of the solid experience and understanding necessary to run a top-notch wine program. (I empathize: My zeal outpaces my wisdom by kilometers.)

There also are a lot of diners who prefer cocktails anyway. And strange beers. But I usually feel that the high-wire balancing acts performed by today’s expert cocktails, and the eccentric spectrum of flavors spanned by contemporary brewing, are ultimately just innovative impersonations of great wine. They cannot go as deep as wine, because they do not have as deep an origin.

Grape vines reach into the soil, thereby communicating sense of place. Spirits and saccharified starches reflect the visible world but have less access to the invisible. As if you weren’t already aware of my prejudices.

I love the occasions when I am carried away by a Portland restaurant’s wine list, transported by its intelligent selections and clear, creative presentation. Still, I’m seeking something more. I love food, but since I feel that wine grapes are the planet’s best communicator of the truth of a place, I’m searching for a restaurant where the wine leads. Where sense of place is paramount. I want to have dining experiences where someone takes me by the hand and, using wine, leads me to new worlds.

So for all of Portland’s restaurant bounty, I fantasize about the restaurants that are not (yet) here. I construct in my mind establishments that use both food and wine to get to the essence of a place or state of being.

Yes, I enjoy the pleasures that a nice – or even excellent – glass of wine alongside a nice – or even excellent – plate of food can bring. But allow me, in the paragraphs that follow, to imagine the sort of transportive experience that is so much rarer. Allow me to describe a few restaurants, with suggested names sure to be improved upon, that teach us while they treat us.

THE ONE. The One is perversely anti-trend, the antithesis of the current moment’s default, which is to say small plates, super varied, 17 dishes on the table at once, tweezer-enabled Instagram-ready presentations. Contemporary dining, like contemporary life, is all about endless choice, egotistical digital “sharing,” and all the anxiety that attends.

Each evening at The One, just a single meal is on offer. Take your seat at the table, and a meal comes out: perfectly roasted game birds on a wooden board, a small bowl of olives, a pot of braised greens. Or a tagine, with a semi-complex chopped salad. Or an enormous platter of crustaceans, shimmering with olive oil, and grilled vegetables and torn baguette. The choice is all the restaurateur’s – or, to use a slightly outmoded word, the proprietor’s. The dining experience is based on trust, selflessness and the deeper satisfaction of having been taken care of.

A single bottle of wine (replenished as necessary) comes with each meal. My hypothetical roasted bird meal would be extraordinary with a skin-macerated (sometimes called “orange”) white wine such as the Sivi Pinot 2011 (pinot gris) from Kabaj ($22), or the fascinating sherry-like (but unfortified) Marenas Bajo Velo Pedro Ximenez 2011 ($34).

For the tagine, the beguiling Ixsir Altitude Red ($20) – a typically mishmash Lebanese blend of Bordeaux, Rhône and Spanish grapes – would be fitting.

For all that grilled seafood, there are innumerable wonderful options, but I’m particularly taken these days with the biodynamically farmed Mica 2013 ($15) from Vinho Verde (that’s a place in Portugal, not the name of a wine style): a blend of the native loureiro, azal and alvarinho grapes, it’s supremely flinty, salty and mineral, with a huge spritz of blood orange as the fruit balance.

POP. At Pop, all the wines have bubbles, and most are offered by the glass. The menu – small plates? sure! – is based on the many flavors and textures that match so beautifully, and often surprisingly, with sparkling wine.

Softly scrambled eggs with good blanc de blancs Champagne. Fried baitfish with Spiropoulos Ode Panos ($26), a briny blast from Greece. Tempura with Bellavista Franciacorta Brut Alma ($33), an exceptionally complex, classical-method sparkling wine from Lombardia. Beignets with the full-figured, luxuriant Mestres Coquet Gran Reserva Brut Cava ($25). Hot dogs with California’s true Champagne competitor, Schramsberg Blanc de Noirs ($38). Puffed grains sprinkled over glazed vegetables and teriyaki salmon, with Pascal Pibaleau’s clean, natural-tasting, slightly fruity “La Perlette” rosé from the Loire’s native grolleau grape, $19. Smoked fish and fermented vegetables with the exemplary, half-mad Jean-Pierre Robinot’s wild-tasting “pétillant naturel” chenin blanc, the Fêtembulles 2012 ($25). A salumi platter with dry Lambrusco.

You get the idea. The customer-is-not-quite-always-right vibe is torn from the book of New York somm and restaurateur Paul Grieco, who gained both infamy and praise for marking out specific periods of time when his wine bars’ only by-the-glass pours would be riesling, or sherry or some other category he felt was underappreciated. Sparkling wine is another such category.

Too many of us have been ruined by inoffensive but uninspiring, mass-produced proseccos, cavas and Champagnes. There’s a world of exciting, handmade, distinctive wine with bubbles out there, and Pop would get the word out.

NORTH. There’s too much damn Mediterranean food. I mean, I love Mediterranean food. I love Mexican food, too, and barbecue. But the traditional cuisines from higher latitudes are extraordinary, with flavors simultaneously vivid and subtle, almost Japanese in their delicacy.

And, of course, as Mainers we share a certain physiological and psychological affinity for the ingredients that call such regions home.

Vinland restaurant in Portland takes its inspiration from such cuisines, and from the forage-happy culture that international fine dining has embraced through such “New Nordic” superstars as Noma and Fäviken. But we can go further. North Restaurant would present dishes of Scandinavia, Korea, Russia, Iceland, Montana, Canada, the British Isles, Maine. The wines would be from the coolest possible climates, because – and this has been proven scientifically – cool-climate wines are the greatest wines in the world! And so woefully little-known and under-represented, overshadowed by the brimming, impressive, super-ripe wines of the Rhône, Napa, Spain, Tuscany. At North, you’d find whites from Friuli and Alto Adige, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Germany. The reds would be from Burgundy, Piedmont, and again Austria and Germany. There would be sake, ciders from Normandy and England, and – yeah – beer!

RUNNING IN PLACE. Here the menu would change monthly, with each iteration showcasing a single distinctive regional cuisine. Venice’s tapas-like cicchetti. The hearty, rustic, fatty fare of France’s southwest. “Cal-Ital” classics from Napa Valley. Greek mountain dishes. Sicily’s melting pot.

Each time the wine list would be a compact but comprehensive portrait of the given region.

Several excellent Portland restaurants, such as Piccolo and Emilitsa, already represent a similarly single-minded approach to place. But a combination of regional specificity with pop-up, catch-it-before-it’s-gone 21st-century dining would shine a deserved spotlight on any number of little-known culinary cultures.

It would take a chef with a passion for exploration, not to mention unstoppable energy level, to pull this off. And she or he would have to collaborate with a similarly well-informed, polymath sommelier who lived to explore every hidden-corner wine region out there. The team would commit fully to presenting the essence of a single, small part of the globe, as seen through its food and wine. Repeatedly.

Like all of the concepts I’ve imagined above, and indeed any restaurant born from passion, this last would take a tremendous amount of work and entail significant risk. All of which would be worth it, and likely appreciated by this city’s sophisticated but honest dining clientele – who sometimes need a little prodding to discover why going out to eat and drink is not just fun, but important.

Joe Appel works at Rosemont Market. He can be reached at:

soulofwine.appel@gmail.com

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