What if I told you that the best wine list I ever saw didn’t really exist?

No, it wasn’t in cyberspace or science fiction. It was at Fine’s Cellar, a smart restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona I visited not long after it opened last winter. Partly because the paint was just dry, but mostly because the owner Michael Fine is himself a wine retailer, at that point the bistro-esque spot had a printed list only of wines by the glass. If you wanted a bottle, you got to wander – really, on foot – through a small but very well edited store in the front of the building, pick one out, and drink it at retail cost.

We enjoyed a relatively hard-to-find, over-the-top rich, 2004 Two Hands’ Shiraz “Bella’s Garden” for a mere $47. We were severely tempted, too, by a 2003 Carruades de Lafitte, the prêt-à-porter version of Lafitte Rothchild, for about the same price. At any other restaurant, we’d have had to slap down a hundie at least for each.

For the secret to Mr. Fine’s fine idea, click here:

I revisited the place in June and the proprietor – whom I found sitting at his wine tasting bar making orders – specifies that although he now has a regular wine list, he still allows, even encourages, diners to hand pick a bottle from his shelves. He adds that he’s now marked up his bottles by 33 percent, but that’s still an outrageous bargain considering that the usual restaurant mark up is three times that.

Wine Spectator’s current cover story is on how dissatisfied diners are at restaurants’ wine service. The loudest complaint was – surprise – heinous mark ups. Well, Mr. Fine has a solution: restaurateurs should treat their wine like they do their food. Carefully choose it as close to the source as possible, pay wholesale, and mark it up reasonably, just once.

You see, the reason wine is so expensive in restaurants is because it’s pegged at 100 percent over retail, that is, 100 percent over an price that’s already considerably more than wholesale. It’s as if wine gets marked up twice. And that’s just not fair.

Suddenly I get another meaning to Fine Cellar’s tagline, “Where Wine is Food.”