I’m far more the type to bring my own Diet Dr. Pepper, but if you’re a wine fan and don’t trust the vino from a restaurant to be up to your standards, check out WineLovers.net, a directory of over 600 restaurants in the Philadelphia area that allow you to bring your own bottle. The site may be expanded to other areas in the future, but at the moment it looks like a total labor of love (no ads, no “featured listings,” etc.)

WineLovers starts out with an extensive search page that allows you to search by the name of the restaurant, city (not so useful at the moment), whether or not a corkage fee is charged (a corkage fee is a fee that a restaurant might charge you for bringing in your own wine), cuisine type, whether lunch or dinner is served and when, and wine friendly rating. (You can also do a zip code radius search.) The search page also has a pretty nice link list to the right covering restaurant reviews, wine reviews, wine forums, etc.

I did a search for restaurants with corkage fees of less than $20 that serve dinner on Wednesdays. I got 567 results. Results included contact information (most of the time also a Web address), BYOB policy, whether or not outdoor seating is available, whether reservations are required, and type of cuisine. There was also a wine-friendly rating which is calculated based on a formula that’s explained here.. Two links lead to a map page (on WineLovers.net) and a search for restaurant reviews (a nicely-customized Google results page. I would have done it a bit differently, but eh.)

The site is amazingly extensive; keeping this up-to-date just for the Philadelphia area is quite an undertaking. Elegant design, too. Worth a look.