Anthony Mazzola was dining at an Italian restaurant in Norwalk, Conn., when Martha Stewart took the adjoining table and ordered a glass of the house white wine. “Could I offer you something better?” the restaurateur — who upped the Upper West Side dining ante as a partner in ‘Cesca — asked. Stewart gave up her nondescript house wine for the quaff on Mr. Mazzola’s table: an intense, hazelnut-inflected Fiano di Avellino, one of Italy’s best white wines.

Mr. Mazzola’s focus on worthy wine is meant to animate Accademia di Vino, his ambitious new enoteca, pizzeria, espresso bar, and projected wine school, which is opening today on the Upper East Side. The sightline down the length of the deep and ample main dining room, which seats 160, leaves no doubt that here, wine is forethought: A parade of ochre-walled alcoves are lined with dark-toned, glass-fronted wine-storage cabinets as well as blackboards with regional headings including Piemonte, Tuscana, and Veneto. For now, the blackboards are blank, but the plan is for them to be chalked up with wine notes. At the rear of the dining room is a 5,000 bottle, walk-in “cellar” which, like the wine cabinets, is maintained at a constant 55 degrees.

“No matter where you’re sitting, I want you to be able to see wine,” Mr. Mazzola said last Friday afternoon, as servers polished stemware for that evening’s dry-run dinner. A delivery man wheeled in four cases of wine toward the already-stuffed cellar. “Eventually, we’re gonna have to displace customers,” Mr. Mazzola said, seemingly in jest.

All 500 selections on the still-expanding wine list have been vetted by the proprietor, whose parents were teenage sweethearts in Sicily, and general manager John Fanning, whose fluent Italian belies his own Irish roots. “We taste each sample blind, without knowing its price point,” Mr. Fanning said.

Except for a handful of French Champagnes and California chardonnays (“if you’ve got to have that big, buttery, oaky style,” Mr. Fanning said), Accademia di Vino’s wine array is entirely Italian. It’s especially deep in Piemontese wines ($32 to $550), including 14 barberas, 10 dolcettos, and 50 choices of the region’s greatest wine, Barolo. Of almost 100 Tuscan wines ($29 to $400), a mere 10 carry that region’s most prestigious name, Brunello di Montalcino. None are older than 1999, meaning that none of these slow-to-mature bottlings have lost their baby fat (Mr. Mazzola promises to acquire older vintages soon). The region’s depth is expressed in 40 so-called “Super-Tuscans,” which lean to French grapes such as cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and syrah, rather than the region’s mother grape, sangiovese. From Trentino-Alto Adige in the far northeast down to Marsala on the Sicilian “toe of the boot,” Italy’s wine regions are covered.

The Bronx-born Mr. Mazzola, who as a boy worked in his father’s pasta factory on White Plains Road, started out as a retailer in the 1970s. His Sutton Wine Shop, on East 57th Street, catered to the carriage trade. “I learned that most people don’t have a lot of wine confidence,” he said. “Sigorney Weaver, for example, would come in the shop to buy wines for her dinner parties and ask me to tell her what to say to her guests about each selection.”

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Mr. Mazzola tired of being a wine merchant and headed to Italy to buy a vineyard. That didn’t work out, and after selling his retail business as part of a divorce settlement, he became a partner in Ouest on Upper Broadway with chef Tom Valenti. Then came ‘Cesca on Amsterdam Avenue, and an adjacent “red sauce” spot called San Luigi. He is also a partner in a barbecue restaurant at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut.

Even before the doors open, Accademia di Vino, with its comfortable seating (there’s even a rack under the dining chairs for bags) and traditional décor, already seems as relaxed as old clothes. The wine service will be no different. “We took the title ‘sommelier’ away, because customers don’t care how many hectares the vineyard is or what direction it faces,” Mr. Fanning said. “Sommelier is a word that gets overused. Too often, it’s not a qualified person, just somebody who used to be a bartender.”

What kind of training will servers get in parsing a complex wine list? “Last night, I filled a table to the edge with 100 wines, and I asked each server to take a bottle and break it down,” he said. “What did they taste in it? How is it structured? And what would they recommend to eat with it — because Italians don’t drink unless they also eat.”

Are there any rules for matching wines from a daunting Italian wine list to the menu? “Each region has foods and wines that are explicit to it, so I’d stay with them,” Mr. Mazzola said. “With bistecca a la Fiorentina ($40, made from American Kobe) from Florence, you might choose a Brunello di Montalcino.”

“Or with gnocchi alla Romana with a five nut ragu ($11), a semolina dumpling with a sauce that has bass notes, you need a wine with big boy bones,” Mr. Fanning added. “I’d pick a Colle Picchioni from outside Rome.”

According to chef Kevin Garcia, who migrated from ‘Cesca, “The food will be wine-friendly by being not overly acidic or highly spiced. I’ll take anything out of a dish for a customer, or put anything in.” Mr. Garcia’s specialty — learned as a young chef at Al Forno in Providence, R.I. — is grilled pizza.

Exactly where in his restaurant, Mr. Mazzola was asked, is the “academic” component of Accademia di Vino to be found? He led a reporter to a basement room filled with long, no-nonsense, steel tables. “See how narrow they are — too narrow for food,” he said. “They’ll be used in the fall for wine-tasting classes. That’s the school part. For all the rest, I want people to feel like they’re in a wine and food playground.”