Step in the front door at 1944 West 4th Avenue and you enter the Riesling shrine. All right, that doesn’t do justice to the work of one of the city’s great chefs, but we’ll get to that later.

This is Fuel Restaurant—a lean, London-look, stylish 53-seater, and only one of the 100-plus new restaurants to open in Vancouver last year.

Fuel is the joint venture of the aforementioned great chef, Robert Belcham, and one of the West Coast’s leading and award-winning sommeliers and all-around wine fanatics, Tom Doughty. Both have paid their dues in a number of high-profile Vancouver restaurants over the years; here they’ve stepped out all on their own, and it took about a New York minute for the place to become recognized as a top dining spot.

But when I finally got there, I came—not ashamed to admit it, either—primarily for the wine. The food was just a bonus—a big bonus, mind you. Right off the top, the Fuel wine list became one of the city’s best: 20 selections by the glass, and not your ordinary stuff, either. Twenty-seven sparklers, and ditto about the not ordinary. Forty whites and 100-plus reds, including four vintages of Leonetti Merlot, two Tignanellos, four each of Lynch-Bages and Mouton-Rothschild, and two Penfolds Granges. There’s even an ’87 Pétrus. At $1,400, it’s only marked up a hundred bucks from the LDB’s current going price. Nice. And a dozen dessert wines.

And then there’s an entire page devoted to Riesling. Twenty-six different ones, including two vintages of one of the all-time greats, the Cuvée Frédéric Emile, by Alsace’s Trimbach. I’ll venture the opinion that this is the largest collection of Rieslings to be found on any single restaurant wine list in the country, and one that has to put pressure on the selection available in the biggest restaurant wine cellar in the world (check the Guinness book), namely the one that spreads several blocks beneath Tampa, Florida, at the legendary Bern’s Steak House.

“Tom is crazy about Riesling!” says PR person Tiffany Soper when I ask her for a copy of Fuel’s wine list for reference—and for fantasy moments!

As an uncharacteristically magnanimous gesture (and, frankly, a blatant attempt at ingratiation, so that he might consider popping a cork on one of those great whites with me one day!), I give Doughty one of my last bottles of ’75 Trittenheimer Apotheke Auslese. Anyone who’s so into Riesling ought to have a sip of that, I think. Besides, the vintage is the year of his birth.

Riesling continues to be my all-time favourite white wine, and Doughty agrees. “Here at Fuel we find Riesling to be the quintessential food wine,” reads the introductory paragraph to the wine list’s Riesling page. “It can be vinified so varyingly that it encompasses an extremely broad spectrum of flavours and aromas. We have assembled a collection of some of the greatest producing vineyards and vintages of our favourite (mostly German) Rieslings for you to enjoy.”

True, too. While I would not be prepared to favour a Kruger-Rumpf over a Selbach-Oster Halbtrocken (incidentally, one of the best buys on the list at $60 for a one-litre bottle), or a Dr. H. Thanisch over a Dr. Loosen, I will happily sit down with one of my all-time personal top three: Müller-Catoir Mussbacher Eselshaut 2006, Fritz Haag Brauneberger Juffer Spätlese 2005, and Schloss Reinhartshausen Erbacher Siegelsberg Auslese 2003. Major mouthfuls, all of them. (And aren’t some of the German wine names curiouser and curiouser? As Alice said, eselshaut means “skin of the donkey”!)

The Riesling shrine—that’s all there is to it, like I said. A wonderful place to lose yourself for an evening, or eight, in the pleasures of the grape. And also of the flesh, because Fuel’s menu is a carnivore’s dream: all-night-braised beef, Polderside Farms organic chicken, Fraser Valley free-run lamb, Alberta Prime rib-eye steak, and Sloping Hill’s organic pork with savoy cabbage and truffled sausage.

Chef Belcham has a meat-curing room out back, crowded with his own charcuterie, some of which may come to your table as an amuse to get gastricity going. He delights in doing his “individually designed menus”—four courses for $59, six for $79, with matching wines for an additional $39 or $51.

There’s a Grand Menu of nine courses for $115, plus $75 for the wines, and with advance notice he makes available an “endless” list of cuts and roasts.

Fuel’s smoked and cured meats and hams and sausages are among the best I can recall tasting. I ask the chef if he’s familiar with the work of the great Brian Polcyn, chef and proprietor of the Five Lakes Grill, outside Detroit. By way of an answer, Belcham hauls Polcyn’s Charcuterie textbook (coauthored with Michael Ruhlman) off the shelf.

Meanwhile, the sommelier is sneaking a bottle of his own onto the table. Four years ago, Tom Doughty founded Montagu Cellars on the Naramata Bench. Just a single barrel of Chardonnay and three of Merlot are produced each year; the Chardonnay may not be continued. Naturally, it’s available at Fuel (although not by the glass—there simply isn’t enough), as well as other discerning restaurants around town, including C Restaurant, Blue Water Cafe + Raw Bar, Bin 941, Salt Tasting Room, Chambar, Lumière, and Vij’s, and for purchase at the Kitsilano Wine Cellar.

I wonder why he’s not making Riesling under his own label. Maybe it will replace the disappearing Chardonnay. B.C.’s best-ever Riesling was briefly produced by Roger Wong under his short-lived Focus label, and he is still kicking around in the Okanagan, consulting here and there and making small batches of wine. He’d be happy to do a master class, I would think.

If you love Riesling like I love Riesling, here’s your next dining adventure. Book well ahead, let the chef do his thing, and explore the Fuel wine list. It’s only Riesling, not Montrachet, so you don’t have to drink it “on bended knee and with the head bared” as French writer Alexandre Dumas said about that brilliant Burgundy.

But it is definitely something of a shrine to our favourite varietal. So hats off, anyway, to Tom Doughty and Robert Belcham, for doing it.