Raise a glass to the 10 best Dallas restaurants and shops for wine

The countdown is on for CultureMap Dallas' 2024 Tastemaker Awards, our annual awards event honoring the best in Dallas food and drink.

Restaurant industry stars have been nominated for awards in 10 categories, spotlighted in a special editorial series. We've already celebrated candidates for Rising Star Chef, Pastry Chef, Neighborhood Restaurant, Patios, Bars, and Bartender of the Year, as voted by our panel of esteemed judges.

There is also our Best New Restaurants category, the only one where the winner gets decided not by judges but instead by readers, in a bracket-style tournament where nominees go head to head. Voting is still open at this link.

One winner will be announced at the awards ceremony on May 16 at the Fashion Industry Gallery, where we'll toast the nominees while indulging in bites and sips. Tickets are on sale now.

This entry pays tribute to the top wine programs in town: everything from casual wine bars to shops with unique selections to acclaimed restaurants with stellar selections.

Here are our nominees for 2024 Wine Program of the Year:

Fig & Favor
Grab-and-go market from the Harwood Hospitality Group features wines from top producers and emerging winemakers. They have labels you don’t find at other retailers, including wines generally available only at restaurants, some so small they don’t even have bar codes. You can get a generous 5-ounce glass of their house brand for $5 on-site, and they run a wine club with two levels ($125 or $250).

Leela's Wine Bar
Low key neighborhood wine and pizza spot with eco-friendly wines on tap debuted in 2018 on Greenville Avenue and has since spun off locations in Uptown and Trophy Club. Their wine selection is compact and user-friendly, with a quirky selection of about two dozen wines that check off each varietal: chardonnay, malbec, zinfandel, and pinot noir. Keeping the user-friendly theme, they offer every bottle in 6-ounce pours, 9-ounce pours, or the whole bottle.

Locals / Farmers Branch
Wine shop-cocktail lounge hybrid in Farmers Branch houses Locals Craft Beer & Fine Wine, a retail market with 250 wines, including selections from small and/or natural vineyards. Sommelier Britt Wallace, who spent several years as wine buyer for a a Texas grocery chain, emphasizes fun and accessibility, and that can be seen in the helpful categories they offer, such as price and wine style. They also have a wine club with quarterly shipments.

Mansion on Turtle Creek
Like the iconic Turtle Creek hotel in which it resides, the Mansion on Turtle Creek has won innumerable awards for its service, food, and wine, most recently winning an Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator magazine in 2023. Its massive wine cellar houses hundreds of selections, including treasures from Bordeaux and Burgundy - currently overseen by capable and highly personable wine director and advanced sommelier Brian Huynh.

Neighborhood Cellar
Bishop Arts wine shop and wine bar founded by sommelier Ian Montgomery and his wife Lindsey offers wine by the glass, flights, tastings, charcuterie, and snacks, plus a wine club and natural wines. Prices are about average, but you get a discount if you join their ultra-flexible wine club. They have bites and flights, bring in winemakers, and host generous tastings every month or so - really putting the "neighborhood" in Neighborhood Cellar.

Nick & Sam's
Dallas steakhouse, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, features a classic steakhouse wine cabinet with more than 500 labels, including exclusives, world-famous options, and all the old world Cabs you'd ever want to pair with your steak. The thing here is their by-the-glass list, because it offers a relatively affordable way to sample those labels which you could probably not buy or afford by the bottle.

Postino Addison
Sophisticated wine bar founded in Phoenix made its DFW debut in 2021, and currently has locations in Addison and Southlake. In addition to a menu of bites and shareable dishes, they have a small but respectable list of about 30 options, each available not only by the bottle but also by the glass, dominated by Postino private labels such as Perfekt Riesling, Nevermind rose, and Stagedive pinot noir, priced from $11 to $14.

Sister
As part of Duro Hospitality (The Charles, El Carlos), it's a given that this Italian-inspired trattoria on Greenville Avenue is going to have exemplary food, service, atmosphere — and wine. The list is compact, but every bottle counts, with hard-to-come-by treasures, most from Italy, one or two from California, that they weave in and out, like the Cesarini Brut Rose, a refined sparkler from northeast Italy, or the Fattoria Montellori Moro, a complex red blend from Tuscany. It would be silly to go to Sister and not eat, but the wine is really good enough to just go and drink.

Sixty Vines
Wine-obsessed restaurant with two locations (Uptown and Plano) from the FB Society restaurant group is a return nominee, and justly so. They feature a collection of 60 wines on tap, an approach that is both user-friendly and eco-friendly, which you can order in different sizes, from a 2.5-ounce sip to a 5-ounce mid-size to an 8-ounce big pour, plus thematic flights that let you sample and compare.

Via Triozzi
The wine list at this small Italian restaurant on Greenville Avenue is notable for its single-minded focus on Italian wines: spumanti, bianchi, rossi, all from Italy, to match the cuisine. Some such as the Barbera Del Monferrato cantine valpane, a red from the Piedmont region, are natural wines, grown organically and fermented without additives. Their list includes a dozen wines by the glass, priced from $12 to $21.

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The 2024 Wine Program of the Year award is presented by Rías Baixas Albariño.