I've devoted a good amount of this site to our enjoyment of wine. On my Wine Catalog page I state that "perusing a wine list in a restaurant is one of the aspects to a good dining experience". On our recent anniversary trip to Oregon, my wife and I had a "dining experience" that might call into question the sanity of that statement. After checking into our hotel in Lincoln City, we started looking in a local attraction guide to try and determine where we might like to dine that evening. It didn't take long before we found an ad for the Bay House. It boasted the "Top Rated Wine Program in Oregon" and the "Best of Award of Excellence" from Wine Spectator. Sounded just like our kind of place, so we made a reservation.

We arrived around 6:30 and were promptly seated. Immediately, I asked to see the wine list. When the waiter returned and placed the list in front of us, my wife and I looked at each other with this WTF expression. It's not a list, it's a book! I picked it up and swear it had to weigh 3 or 4 pounds. I turned it over and opened it to the last page. At the bottom was the number 150. Now, I've been to restaurants that had 30 page wine lists and was duly impressed. But, a 150? Next I turned to the Pinot Noir section (being in Oregon, Pinot Noir was the wine focus of our trip). On the very first page I could tell we were facing a  tough time. I turned the page and then again and then again and so on and so on. 34 pages of Pinot Noir! This is when my sense of wonderment changed to one of mounting anxiety. I began to worry that there would not be enough time to choose as I knew we were scheduled to leave the next day. Even had the selections been sorted by price allowing me to easily eliminate the ones that were clearly out of our price range, we would still have been faced with a daunting task. Suddenly, what is normally a pleasant and leisurely dining pastime seemed like a project.

We finally decided to stick with something we know and ordered a very fine bottle of 2007 Penner-Ash Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. Once the pressure was off, we felt that we could relax and enjoy the list. However, before too long we decided enough was enough. By then it had just become too much. We asked our waiter to please remove the list before our brains exploded.

The Bay House is a very fine restaurant and I highly recommend it to anyone visiting Lincoln City, Oregon. But, wine enthusiasts beware. You risk overload.