by Tom Johnson
Ville Voice Eats Correspondent

The most comprehensive wine list in town is the Seelbach’s, but almost no one under the age of 70 has ever seen it. Even with youth-intensive 4th Street Live just across the street, the Oak Roomís cellars are largely unknown in demographic groups that stay out past nine oíclock.

That’s about to change. With the economy slow and traffic among the Oak Room faithful charitably describable as “thin,” the hotel has decided to leverage its cellar to draw some fresh faces.

The first step will be building a wine bar in the large and largely empty lounge outside the Oak Room. The currently underutilized space has a bar built in what looks like a former coat-check closet. The 40 x 40 room is furnished with,well, with almost nothing, actually. It will be retrofitted with a tasting bar and seating designed for comfort, not for looking good on the cover of a 1953 edition of Better Homes & Gardens.

Then the real fun begins. Part Two of putting the Seelbach back on the wine map is offering deep discounts on some serious, serious wine. The Seelbach’s cellars – there are four of them – have bottles dating back more than a hundred years, including a couple of bottles of pre-Civil War Madeira that turned up in an inventory last year. The collection as a whole is strong, with depth in areas even good restaurants donít bother with: elderly Riojas and verticals of Sauternes, for example.

Seelbach management thinks it can get the wine bar off the ground by June 10. It will likely be something of a work in progress for a while, as they tweak and jigger in search of a winning formula. Certainly, events and half-priced-bottle nights will come fast and furious in an effort to alter Louisville’s center of (wine) gravity. They can tweak and jigger all they like; with a few hundred thousand dollars worth of old wine in the basement, they can take a lot of shots before they run short of bullets.