Liquid Love

You would think a sleek, swank wine bar on South Beach has got to be the House of Pretentious Snobs, with cork dorks noisily proclaiming their ignorance and haughty staffers sniffing that you, peasant, couldn't possibly comprehend the indecent pleasures of this insolent little Bordeaux, which sells for roughly the price of a down payment on a waterfront condominium.

Got to be, right?

Well, no. At least not Vino Miami.

Yes, it is sleek, it is swank, it is smack in the middle of a district that breakfasts on pretentiousness and licks the crme anglaise off snobbery for dessert. But take away the slickly contemporary couches and tables, the nifty glass-top bar, tiny halogen spots, and industro-hip polished concrete floor, and you are left with a bunch of people quietly sitting around drinking wine and nibbling on some pretty decent snacks.

Although you could get the wrong idea from Vino's Website, which talks in hectoring tones about "strictly enforced" dress codes and punishments for "inappropriate or disruptive" behavior. But I merely take this as a message to a certain class of SoBe partytrash: Stay on Ocean Drive. Have another mojito. Throw up on your Versace. See if we care. Nyah-nyah-nyah....

Now that we have established that Vino is a friendly, comfortable, and unsnobby place to spend an evening, let's talk wine. There's a lot. Not a whole lot, but enough. Approximately 50 wines by the glass, all kinds of varietals, from New World and Old, at all kinds of prices (mostly from $9 to $11). You can also buy them, and others, by the bottle. A word of advice: When you find one you like, grab it. Vino orders in small quantities and rotates its selection often, so there's always something new to taste.

If they are still available when you visit, try the 2003 Château La Blancherie Graves, made from the Chardonnay grape but with a firmer backbone than those soft, flabby California Chardonnays that taste mostly of oak and overripe fruit. Sip the 2004 Negro Amaro from Sicily's Feudo di Santa Croce and get in on what could be the next big thing for red-wine lovers. Negro Amaro makes a bold and powerful wine, bursting with the flavor of dried fruit and earth, with a rich, almost portlike character.

Then there's the food.

It centers around a pair of fondues, a dish seen as often in local restaurants as snowstorms on the beach. Cheese fondue mates a birdbath-size pot full of molten Swiss with white wine, garlic, lemon, and kirschwasser; adding bits of chorizo and manchego cheese makes it vaguely Spanish. The latter is pretty good in a gooey, heartwarming, retro sort of way, though it would be better with a less skinflint application of chorizo. The other fondue is chocolate, and at $20 not exactly cheap, but portioned large enough to induce a diabetic coma in a battalion of chocoholic wine geeks.

Smoked salmon rolled in a flour tortilla with cream cheese, red onion, and dill isn't the most original dish in the world but partners nicely with the Graves or a tangy New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Tuna tartare wrapped in thin sheets of Japanese cucumber and crowned with a dollop of chili-fired mayo is delightful; prosciutto, salami, fontina, and tomato panini is, well, simply a sandwich, but quite tasty and generously adorned with the relevant salumi.

A wedge of amaretto-spiked rum cake was both dry and bereft of much amaretto flavor, but owner Gigi Olah noted our disappointment and sent out two glasses of an insolent little Sauternes, whose indecent pleasures we did our best to comprehend while wondering if we could ever afford a waterfront condominium.