The Philosopher Who Chose Wine: Inside Heirloom Cafe's Most Delicious Secret

There is a man in San Francisco who once went to Pittsburgh to study philosophy and came back to pour Burgundy. This is not a tragedy. This is, in fact, the origin story of one of the city's most quietly extraordinary wine programs.

Stephen — co-owner of Heirloom Cafe @2500 Folsom — will be the first to tell you that he trades in depth, not breadth. He tastes hundreds of wines a week. He has vintages going back 15 to 20 years from Burgundy and Piedmont sitting in his cellar. He knows a Lambrusco family contains over 60 varietals (we only ever see three or four, like the tip of a very delicious iceberg). And on select Saturday mornings (3^rd week of the month), he opens the restaurant early, uncorks 15 to 18 bottles and hands you a glass.

Twenty dollars. No pressure. No sommelier hovering at your shoulder, eyebrows arched, waiting for you to say something intelligent about tannins.

This is, quietly, one of the best deals in the city.

 

Philosophy First, Bad Wine Never

Stephen's path to Heirloom is the kind of story that makes you feel better about your own circuitous route through life. He moved to San Francisco in 2008 to attend the California Culinary Academy, then detoured to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh to study philosophy, then came back because, as he explains with perfect economy: "It turns out it's really cold in Pittsburgh."

He started at Heirloom in 2010 as a cook who was quietly auditioning the wine program. What he found was an apprenticeship in the old tradition — not the academic, WSET-certified, flashcard kind of learning, but the slow, repetitive, sensory kind. Sitting across from Matt Straus, the restaurant's original owner, opening bottle after bottle, building a vocabulary one vintage at a time.

"Matt loved to open bottles," Stephen says, "and he had a vast amount of knowledge." The student absorbed it sideways, the way you learn a language by living in a country rather than conjugating verbs in a classroom.

By 2021, in the strange, suspended middle of the pandemic, Straus was ready to pivot to a new project in the Berkshires. Stephen and chef Joshua DeClercq stepped in and took over the majority stake. The restaurant that had shaped them became theirs.

 

The Wine List as a Point of View

If you've ever sat down with Heirloom's wine list, you've already experienced Stephen's philosophy in physical form. It is, in his own words, "a little more narrow and a little more deep." Burgundy is the foundation. Piedmont earns its keep. The Loire Valley shows up with the quiet confidence of someone who knows they belong in the room. California and Oregon have a growing presence — Stephen drinks a lot of California wine, he's quick to clarify, even if the list leans import-heavy.

What you won't find is a restless attempt to represent every region on earth. "You can't hold it all up there at one time," he says. Instead, the list rewards the returning visitor — the person who comes back and notices that the Chambolle from last year tasted different from this year, who starts to feel the edges of a vintage the way you feel the edge of a season changing.

"When you're buying the same wines from the same producers year in and year out," Stephen explains, "you start to notice vintage variation. You start to notice these little idiosyncrasies about terroir."

This is the philosophy degree talking. The examined wine, it turns out, is worth drinking.

 

Natural Wine and the Beautiful Mess of California

Ask Stephen about California natural wine and you'll get a man who is genuinely, productively wrestling with something. He loves it. He also has to be honest with you about it.

The challenge, he explains, is the sheer variability — climatic, geological, viticultural, logistical. Drive 13 miles inland from the Sonoma Coast and you've crossed through multiple microclimates. A producer might be working a lease that expires in two years. Compare that to a Chinon producer he admires in the Loire who has farmed the same land since 1634. Sixteen thirty-four. They have, you could say, worked out a few things.

And yet — this is where Stephen's optimism kicks in like a well-timed second act — the dynamism is exactly the point. Nobody has calcified into tradition. Everybody is still figuring it out, which means everybody is still open. "There's a lot more openness in the winemaking that's happening out here," he says. "Which, when you're going through a lot of change, can also be a good thing."

Climate change, for its part, is doing what it always does: complicating everything and opening unexpected doors. Vineyards that were once too marginal to matter are now producing wines of strange, exciting precision. Hidden terroir is emerging from the warming shadows. Stephen, the philosopher, finds a way to sit with the uncertainty without flinching.

 

The Saturday Morning Tasting You Probably Don't Know About

Here is the part where we get to tell you something useful.

For the past year or so, Stephen has been doing something on Saturday mornings (11am-2pm) that he's described, with characteristic understatement, as "a lot of work." He opens Heirloom before service, lines up 15 to 18 bottles, and invites people in to taste for $20 a glass. Self-pour. No ceremony. You can bring food if you want. The vibe, he says, is "really relaxed."

The idea grew partly from a practical observation: tasting wine has become prohibitively expensive, and you can't learn to love something you can't afford to try. When Stephen moved to San Francisco in 2008, you could drive up to Napa and taste for $10. A reserve tasting was $25. That kind of access — the luxury, as he calls it, of not liking what you're tasting — is how palates get built.

"I feel like too often today, it's so expensive to taste anyway," he says. "Just to have experience, to have range, to try things you may not like."

At his Saturday tastings, someone who thought they didn't like orange wine suddenly finds themselves standing in front of a glass of something funky and alive and thinking, oh. Oh, I see. That moment — the moment of reluctant conversion, of a palate expanding past its own assumptions — is, in some ways, the whole point of wine.

Starting in April, the tastings are settling into a regular cadence: the third Saturday of the month. Stephen has been quietly promoting them via email list, the way you do when you're not quite ready to commit fully to something, when you're still in the delicate early phase of figuring out whether it's going to work. It works.

 

One Last Bottle

Ask Stephen what wine he'd open on his last night on earth and he doesn't reach for the rarest, the most expensive, the most impressive. He'd open a Phillipe Foreau — a producer from Vouvray whose wines he's been drinking across 30 vintages.

"It's like a conversation that keeps going," he says. "I'd want to have a conversation with an old friend."

That is Heirloom Cafe, really. A place where the wine list is a continuing conversation, where the owner is a philosopher who learned by tasting, where Saturday mornings are an open invitation to show up curious and leave with your assumptions gently rearranged.

Twenty dollars. Bring something to eat. Try the orange wine.

 

Heirloom Cafe Saturday tastings are held on the third Saturday of the month. Sign up for Stephen's email list by emailing him by clicking here, for updates on times and what's being poured.