More than Chartreuse slushies: Why this Top 100 restaurant is the Bay Area's best wine destination
Wine director Alec Cummings wants Sirene to be known as the wine destination of the East Bay. (Andria Lo/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Sirene earned its No. 73 spot on the Chronicle's Top 100 Restaurants list largely because of its excellent buttermilk-brined fried chicken and inventive seafood charcuterie. But what the Oakland restaurant wants to be known for - and what it really ought to be known for - is its singular wine list.
"It's a big undertaking, but we want it to be known as the wine destination of the East Bay," wine director Alec Cummings said. Before its opening in 2025, he positioned the wine station by the front window, so that no one would be able to walk into or by the restaurant without seeing bottles.
Sirene is a wine geek's paradise, stocked with producers that are suddenly buzzy among those in the know - Champagne's Bichery, Burgundy's Guilbert Gillet and Vincent Paindavoine - as well as the benchmarks that those folks have been nerding out on for years - the Rhone's Pierre Gonon, Spain's Envínate, the Loire's Guiberteau. It has also become known as the premiere destination for pours of vintage Chartreuse, the herbal liqueur made by Carthusian monks in France, as well as for its popular Chartreuse slushies.
Customers Taylor Smalls and Holden Bussey chat with general manager Jake Michahelles at Sirene. (Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle)
The list that Cummings and Sirene co-owner Paul Einbund have assembled is a meandering tome divided into highly descriptive categories - some stylistic ("Rustic Reds that Love Food"), some regional ("Salty, Pure, Mineral Chardonnay aka Chablis"), some varietal ("Chenin Blanc, rocky & textural, lightning in a bottle"). They've painstakingly itemized each category's wines from lightest- to fullest-bodied. The markups are humane: Whereas most Bay Area restaurants list a bottle at about 3.5 times the wholesale cost, Sirene charges around 2.8. All of these factors contribute to why the Chronicle gave Sirene its Best Beverage Program award at the Top 100 gala earlier this month.
By traditional wine-program standards, Sirene's list is strange. It completely ignores genres that would have been mandatory for a serious wine list in a previous era, such as first-growth Bordeaux. "We would never get a Wine Spectator Grand Award," Einbund said, referring to the gold standard of accolades for wine-focused restaurants. Instead, it is a distillation of Einbund and Cummings' eclectic tastes - and, they hope, a reflection of the evolving wine culture of Oakland.
To understand Sirene's approach to wine, however, one must first understand its sister restaurant, the Morris.
Paul Einbund arranges his Chartreuse "museum" at the Morris, his San Francisco restaurant, in 2023. (Scott Strazzante/S.F. Chronicle)
When Einbund opened the Morris in 2016, it was a groundbreaking moment for San Francisco's wine scene. The sommelier had come up at blue-chip San Francisco restaurants such as Tartare, Bacar, Coi and the Slanted Door, before running the wine programs at chef Melissa Perello's New Californian restaurants Frances and Octavia. With the Morris, he was finally opening a restaurant for himself, and its focal point was the audaciously personal wine list, sourced in large part from the collection he'd amassed over a decade. Einbund imported many of the Morris' wines himself, securing cuvees that were otherwise impossible to find in the U.S. (and good prices on them). He bought troves of California wines from the '50s and '60s straight from the cellars of retired local winemakers. Against the advice of his bar consultants, Thad Vogler and Erik Adkins, he went heavy on Chartreuse, even introducing the cheeky slushie - "and, as fate would have it, Chartreuse blew up right around the same time we opened," Einbund said.
Before long, the Morris had become San Francisco's top restaurant for wine insiders: It was where visiting winemakers hosted special dinners and where serious wine collectors came to ball out on Burgundy.
One of the wine enthusiasts who flocked to the Morris in its early days was Cummings, then working as an animation designer in the city. Over a bottle of 2012 Bénétière Cote Rotie - a wild, powerful Syrah from France's Northern Rhone that made him think, "I had no idea Syrah could taste like that" - Cummings struck up a conversation with Einbund. Before long, he had a job as a busser at the restaurant. He was promoted to expediter, then worked his way up to become the wine director.
Paul Einbund pours wine at the Morris in 2017. (Jen Fedrizzi/For the S.F. Chronicle)
By the time Einbund and chef Gavin Schimdt were preparing to open Sirene, in early 2025, he had fully handed over the wine program to Cummings. A health issue with his throat has made it difficult for Einbund to fulfill a full night of sommeliering - which consists mainly of talking loudly to customers for hours - and so he has "transitioned to more of an overseeing role," he said.
Taking over a wine program that was so deeply defined by its founder's personality would seem to be impossible. "But I was trained by Paul, and the Morris was the only restaurant I'd ever worked (at), and he trained my palate," Cummings said. The list he created at Sirene "by design was meant to feel similar" to that of the Morris.
Chartreuse even makes an appearance in dessert at Sirene. Here, the buckwheat doughnuts with Chartreuse crème anglaise. (Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle)
Similar, but not the same. Sirene is for Oakland, not San Francisco, and reflects the Town's greater interest in low-intervention wines. "I think of Sirene's list as being more playful, younger, fresher," Cummings said, "really straddling the line between what I think of as the natural wine scene and the more classic, ageworthy wines you find at the Morris." Not that Sirene is trying to compete with Ordinaire, its Grand Avenue neighbor and arguably Oakland's foremost natural wine destination. The Sirene list will never be as "natty" as Ordinaire's selection, but it does have "more edge and more sauvage" than its sister restaurant's, Einbund said.
That translates, on the Sirene list, to entries such as Chablis from Athénaïs de Béru, a modern hero of France's natural wine scene whose Chardonnays would nevertheless please a more traditional palate. And to the already-quirky chapter list, Cummings recently added an entire section of Aligoté - the lesser-known white grape of Burgundy that is experiencing a quality renaissance right now, especially among younger, progressive winemakers. (Aligoté is less prestigious than the white Burgundy Chardonnays that comprise a large chunk of the Morris' selection - and also invariably less expensive.)
The Chartreuse slushie has become a staple at both Sirene and the Morris. (Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle)
As with the Morris, Sirene's formidable list belies the true depth of the cellar that supplies it. Einbund has nine offsite storage facilities for the two restaurants' bottles (plus the cellar in his own home, located above the Morris), totaling about $1 million worth of inventory. (That doesn't count the 6,500 bottles in stock at the Morris at any given time.) Only about 35% of that inventory is represented on the wine lists at any given time, Cummings said, an expression of the team's devotion to listing only those bottles that are perfectly ready to drink. If he and Einbund believe that a vintage needs a couple more years to open up, it won't be on the list yet.
The pair are also committed to pricing the wines based on what they paid for them, not based on current market value. When the Morris opened, the list included about three pages of old California wines going back to the '50s; none was over $200, and most hovered around $60. Einbund could have sold them for much more, but he'd gotten the lot for a song, from a retiring California winemaker. "All my friends said we needed to mark them up - they're going to disappear," Einbund said. "And I was like, ‘Great, people will remember them forever.'"
Chef Gavin Schmidt and Paul Einbund, the co-owners of Sirene. (Andria Lo/For the S.F. Chronicle)
He's made an exception, though, for some of his rarer Chartreuse pours. The Carthusian monks began producing less of the liqueur in recent years, opting to instead focus on their monastic duties, resulting in a global shortage just as demand was skyrocketing. The vintage market, Einbund said, has become rife with counterfeits. He will buy older Chartreuse from only two trusted sources, and he has increased the price on pours to reflect the dwindling supply.
Cummings conceded that Sirene might not yet be known as the wine restaurant of the East Bay. "I think Great China still has that crown," he said, referring to owner James Yu's beloved spot in Berkeley. And it doesn't attract quite as many wine obsessives as the Morris does.
"Wine action at Sirene is more sparse than we want it to be, but I think we'll get there," Cummings said. "I do really think that people are starting to see it as a wine restaurant."
