Photo below: Larry Mindel, Owner & former chef Christopher Fernandez. Chef Peter McNee who was sous chef is now the chef. (photo credit: San Francisco Chronicle photo by Chris Stewart)

I enjoyed an excellent repast, in a location idyllic for a restaurant—the Casa Madrona Hotel with windows that face onto the street and the bay beyond, and on the hillside above they tend an organic garden in a terraced plot overlooking the little town of Sausalito.
I was not surprised to find out that Poggio was the inspiration of Larry Mindel as it had all the earmarks to be one of his concepts, as I have followed his career from Ciao to Prego and on through the Il Fornaio years. In 1980, I was one of the three founding partners of the original Cruvinet Wine Preserving System and responded to an inquiry from his company, Spectrum Group; I met Mr. Mindel in his restaurant MacArthur Park in Palo Alto where I spent a few hours trying to convince him to buy a Cruvinet. He was very discerning, examining every aspect of the sales and technical data with more discussions continuing over the following weeks, before he finally bought one to test it in one of his restaurants. His company bought many more over the five years I was involved in Cruvinet.
As for the menu at Poggio (place in the hills) try any of the meat dishes cooked in the wood-burning oven, all pasta creations are also meticulously prepared and a marinated beet salad, with arugula and ricotta was as refreshing as it was well put-together.
We tried many different tasting glasses of different wines both large and small from their assortment. It was a good way to try different wines paired with each dish, similar to the Cruvinet without the machine. The wine list offers a good selection of Italian wines with many choices of well-known and some lesser-known wines in various regions of Italy and prices are realistic.

Located on a quiet section of Third St. this wine bar is usually crowded and well it should be; it made tapas-style small plates of basic Mediterranean fare fashionable.
I have brought many Japanese people here and they just love the great variety of small portion choices. For everyone else it is great fun to be able to pair different dishes with their diverse selection of wines available by the glass.

This operation is the brain-child of Susan Goin and Caroline Styne of Lucques fame.
Look for interesting items such as: brandade (A pounded combination of salted cod fish, olive oil, garlic, milk and cream), boudin noir and a large selection of charcutrie and cheese.

One evening as I sat at the bar, I looked up to see in the middle of the back bar a Cruvinet Wine Preserving Machine, being put to very good use. The original company Cruvinet I founded along with partners Jean France Mercier, presently owner of Tixa Wine Cellars the top custom wine cellar designer in the U.S., and Nick Bassill Luxine Ltd., a cutting-edge manufacturer of induction cooking units for commercial and home use. We put together this company in the early eighties, and it was, from the onset the quality leader in the industry, with as many as nine copy-cat competitors turning out inferior and less costly machines within one year. We all went our separate ways, for individual reasons, five years later.

This machine is ideal for this type of situation however, one of the employees after all of us dispersed, and basically without permission, usurped the technology, therefore I cannot vouch for its integrity today.