If the name doesn’t give it away, the interior of Cork Restaurant in Camden will – this place is serious about wine. From the walls, painted grapey purple, to the white-zinfandel-pink chairs, the wine bottle tapestries and the painting of half-full glasses that hangs near the stairs, everything about the d?cor suggests this is an oenophile’s oasis.

As it should. Wine is the reason Cork opened, first as a wine bar, later as a full-service restaurant. That Cork has a fabulous wine list goes without saying, which made it a natural choice for Wine Spectator’s 2001 Award of Excellence.

Cork is one of 22 Maine restaurants that won the magazine’s award, which recognizes “the most outstanding wine lists from dining establishments all over the globe,” according to Terrence Meck of Wine Spectator.

To enter, restaurants must submit a current wine list, dinner menu, and a one-page letter explaining their wine program, including tastings, wine dinners, educational efforts and the like. Entrants are judged on breadth, depth and overall quality of the selections; pricing inventory on hand; storage conditions; and the appropriateness of the wine list selections with the restaurant’s cuisine. Though winners must submit a renewal form yearly, the restaurants are not visited by Wine Spectator staffers.

In the Bangor Daily News’ circulation area, eight restaurants received Awards of Excellence, including Cork and the Whitehall Inn in Camden; the Blue Hill Inn; Thrumcap, George’s and the Rose Garden Restaurant at the Bluenose Inn in Bar Harbor; Marcel’s at the Samoset Resort in Rockland; and Le Domaine in Hancock.

Though each restaurant is different, they share a few common threads. The owners or managers are serious about wine. They go on wine vacations. They read all the wine magazines. For them, a meal without wine is breakfast, as Tom Marinke of Thrumcap said.

The food at these restaurants is upscale, inventive and well-suited for wine pairing – lamb, duck, seared tuna. The wine lists cover a wide geographic, vintage and price range, from the affordable ($4 per glass) to the gasp-eliciting ($875 for a bottle). The restaurants are all relatively high-end, so chances are, you won’t leave any of them for under $100 per couple, with wine, of course.

Inside some of the restaurants, the wine connection is obvious. At Thrumcap, Bar Harbor restaurateur Tom Marinke wanted a change from his previous venture, the formal Porcupine Grill. He remodeled and went for a decidedly more casual atmosphere and changed the menu from “mountains of food” to tapas-size portions. The walls are a cool green, more vine than wine, but big reproductions of vintage wine posters fill out the space, along with maps of French wine regions. Windows give a glimpse into the restaurant’s centerpiece: a wine closet whose racks cradle 900 bottles – “just the cherries, just the gems.”

“It’s kind of like a ‘step into my office’ kind of thing,” Marinke said, laughing. “It’s not like a pick-your-own-lobster in a tank.”

At Porcupine Grill, which received the award each year from 1993 to 2000, wine was important. At Thrumcap, it’s as integral to the dining experience as the food. Maybe more so.

“Food and wine are hopelessly intertwined,” Marinke said. “Together [chef Mark Trietley and I] came up with a very codependent food-wine menu.”

A few blocks away, Adeena and Chris Fisher were excited about their first award as the new owners of George’s restaurant.

“George [Demas, the former owner] sort of hand-picked us to carry on the tradition,” Adeena Fisher said while sitting in a dining room that overlooks the patio.

So far, it hasn’t been too hard to do for the two Culinary Institute of America grads. George’s ninth consecutive award is a testament to Demas’ good taste (the Fishers bought the contents of the wine cellar when they bought the restaurant) to the Fishers’ love for food and wine.

“Our philosophy has always been … just a passion for food and a passion for wine,” Fisher said. “We’re trying to put our own touch on it.”

Their own touch includes wines from all over the world, from the big names to virtual unknowns.

“We like to have the list be very well-rounded,” Fisher said. “We find some more obscure wines. It’s nice to have Opus One or Caymas on the list – you need to have those because people ask for them, but we like to find the little wineries, too.”

So does Chip Dewing, food and beverage director at the Whitehall Inn. The inn has been in Dewing’s family for years, and in 1980, he started spending his winters in California, working at vineyards – both in the tasting room and in the cellar. There, he discovered many “boutique” wineries producing small batches of exquisite wine.

“I definitely gravitate toward some of the smaller producers in California, [but] the thing I pride myself on with what I have here is there’s a nice balance of wines from different regions of the world,” Dewing said. “Spain, Portugal, South America, New Zealand, these are wines that are really good quality and good value. Some of the wines in California and France, especially burgundy, are becoming quite cost-prohibitive.”

That hasn’t stopped Nicole Purslow, chef-owner of Le Domaine, the restaurant that her mother started in 1946. Every year, Purslow travels to her mother’s native Provence, where she seeks out wines. Then, she comes back to the States and tries to talk her distributors into importing them. It’s a lot easier now than it used to be, but it still isn’t foolproof.

“My wine list is entirely French,” Purslow said. “I’ve been collecting since, oh, how long has it been, 1972 anyway. Back when I started buying wines … there was nothing here. Truly, next to nothing. What I had to do is go to New York, speak to the importers and have them speak to the distributors.”

Nearly all of the local Wine Spectator award winners bemoaned the lack of wine availability in Maine. Many vintages are allocated by region, with less-populated states getting fewer bottles. Add that to the fact that Bangor is pretty much the end of the line distributionwise, and you can see where restaurants around here have a hard time putting together a wine list, let alone an award-winning one. But these restaurants have done it.

“I was ecstatic when we actually got it because I didn’t think we would,” said Aimee Ricca, executive chef at Cork.

Ricca hails from New Jersey, where it’s a lot easier to get things, from wine to chateaubriand and everything in between. The 26-year-old executive chef came to Camden one summer to help her mom and stepfather, Bunni and Gary Anderson, when they opened a wine bar at Lily, Lupine and Fern Emporium in Camden. They served light fare there, but the customers didn’t get the whole small-portions concept, so Ricca started cooking regular-size meals in limited quantities. The dinners caught on; the emporium moved to a storefront with no space for a restaurant; and Cork became its own entity, a few doors down from the original Lily, Lupine and Fern. Though they have no formal training, Ricca and her boyfriend, sous chef Brian Krebs, can cook, so they moved to Maine full time and took over the kitchen. Gary Anderson still has his say with the wine list, though.

“If it were up to Gary the wine list would be, like, 10,000 bottles and they’d all be hanging from the ceiling because we have no place to store them,” Ricca said, laughing.

Cork has a cellar, but not the type that you’d want to store wine in. So all of the wine is either in a refrigerator or stored in wine crates suspended from the ceiling. It adds to the whole wine theme, and keeps the wine list there ever-changing.

“Most places print their list once a year or once a season,” Ricca said. “We try to change ours every couple of weeks.”

At the Samoset Resort in Rockland, food and beverage director Arthur Howard frequently changes his 250-bottle wine list to keep up with his customers’ preferences.

“We’re always tuning and tweaking it,” Howard said. “Vintages change and some vintages are better than others.”

Sometimes, when restaurants order a case of 1997 cabernet – a very good year – they may get a case of ’98. Again, it all depends on the distributors’ inventory and what they can get their hands on. To avoid the problem of listing a ’97 cab and serving a ’98 (yes, people can tell the difference), Howard has his inventory in a database, so it only takes a minute to change the list and make the proper adjustments in the wine cellar.

While many people who dine at Marcel’s at the Samoset do have a broad knowledge of food and wine, Howard knows there are also people who can barely tell the difference between a zinfandel and a shiraz. So the resort offers informal wine talks that draw novices and experts alike.

“It’s amazing how enthusiastic they can become,” Howard said.

Wine education, in the form of informal seminars, wine dinners or simple suggestions from the sommelier, has gained favor at local restaurants. The Blue Hill Inn has held four wine dinners a year for the past 13 years. There, innkeeper Mary Hartley works with Blue Hill wine merchant David Witter to choose wines that complement each of the six or seven courses.

“He really sits down and matches wines to different items on the menus,” assistant innkeeper Duncan Hamilton said of Witter. “He attends the wine dinner and introduces each wine before each course, and then tells why he selected it.”

At the Rose Garden Restaurant, sommelier-manager Wayne Babin teams up with his distributors to plan several wine dinners each summer. Though the dinners do introduce customers to different wine-making regions, Babin says his customers are usually very wine-savvy. He attributes that in part to magazines such as Wine Spectator and Wine & Spirit.

“When Wine Spectator tells people information like that, they start looking for [certain bottles],” Babin said.

Thus, he uses the magazines as a compass when assembling his wine list. It must be working, because this is the first year the restaurant has won the Award of Excellence, and Babin hopes it continues.

“It’s really a great guide because it’s telling you what is popular and what the consumers are actually drinking, not just locally, but around the country.”

Around the country, wine has increasingly become the beverage of choice. Dewing of the Whitehall Inn said this is a result of wine’s emergence as a more healthful drink and the erosion of the snobbery that used to surround it.

“For years it was just sort of a subject that seemed so overwhelming, so much to learn,” Dewing said. “I think people were intimidated by taking a chance and experimenting. … I get a lot of gratification out of trying to turn someone on who doesn’t have a lot of wine knowledge. Just watching their expression, when they’re trying something they never would have [considered]. They probably wouldn’t have taken that chance on their own.”

Wine dinners are planned at the Blue Hill Inn Sept. 15 and Oct. 20; at the Whitehall Inn in early September and late October; and at The Rose Garden Restaurant in early October.

Maine recipients of the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence

? Arrows Restaurant, Berwick Road, Ogunquit, 361-1100

? The Back Bay Grill, 65 Portland St., Portland, 772-8833

? The Blue Hill Inn, Union Street (Route 177), Blue Hill, 374-2844

? The Bradley Inn, 3063 Bristol Road, New Harbor, 677-2105

? Clay Hill Farm, 220 Clay Hill Road, York, 361-2272

? Cork Restaurant, 51 Bayview St., Camden, 230-0533

? Gabriel?s, 47 Middle St., Portland, 775-1510

? George?s, 7 Stephens Lane, Bar Harbor, 288-4505

? Gypsy Sweethearts, 10 Shore Road, Ogunquit, 646-7021

? Hurricane Restaurant, 111 Perkins Cove Road, Ogunquit, 646-6348

? Lake House, 686 Waterford Road, Waterford, 583-4182

? Le Domaine Restaurant Francais, Route 1, Hancock, 422-3395

? Maine Dining Room at the Haraseeket Inn, 162 Main St., Freeport, (800) 342-6423

? On The Marsh, 46 Western Ave., Kennebunkport, 967-2299

? The Porter House Restaurant, Route 27, Eustis, 246-7932

? Rachel?s Wood Grill, 90 Exchange St., Portland, 774-1192

? The Rose Garden at the Bluenose Inn, 90 Eden St., Bar Harbor, 288-3348

? Samoset Resort, 220 Warrenton St., Rockport, 594-2511

? Seascapes, 77 Pier Road, Cape Porpoise (Kennebunkport), 967-8500

? Thrumcap, 123 Cottage St., Bar Harbor, 288-3884

? The White Barn Inn, 37 Beach Ave., Kennebunkport, 967-2321

? Whitehall Inn, 52 High St., Camden, 236-3391