Enoteca La Storia is a pretty great place to eat and drink for a restaurant without a kitchen. Enoteca is the Italian equivalent of a tapas bar, although it also allows people to purchase wine in the bottle to go. The place is a joint venture between the extremely convivial Joe Cannistraci and Michael Guerra, veterans of Santana Row’s excellent Vintage Wine Merchants.

Enoteca La Storia opened last spring, and the handsome wine bar has good looks to spare. Spindly pendant lights hang above the long bar. Opposite is well-curated selection of wine with a wide-ranging, international list. Between the bar and the wall of wine are tables for two, great seats for watching the action of the always lively bar from a discreet distance. The light-colored wooden floor gives the place the feel of a well-kept Old World grocery store. There’s an adjacent room with spacious tables for larger parties. Behind the bar sits a replica of a vintage meat slicer. Watch how thin the beautiful hunk of red machinery can slice proscuitto.

The bar is where all the action is. There’s a convection oven for toasting crostini and baking desserts, and that’s about as far as kitchen equipment goes. The restaurant uses an off-site kitchen for some dishes, but most of the food is prepared ˆ la minute before your eyes. As befits a wine bar, you won’t find full-size meals here. This is a place to nibble and snack. But the lineup of food is quite appealing. If you’re like me, you’ll order and order some more and then add one more thing and wind up being quite full.

The menu includes crostinis, a wide range of excellent and seldom seen cured meats, a glorious selection of 14 Italian cheeses, a few salads, some small plates and crusty sandwiches on Kelly’s Bakery bread. The crostinis are a great place to start exploring the menu. My favorite was the funghi ($5), a trio of toasted slices of bread topped with porcini mushrooms, black-truffle spread and olive oil. Try, too, the Carmela ($5), chopped and sauted fennel and peas with Mandarin-orange-flavored olive oil atop ricotta cheese. The peas and fennel needed a hit of salt to really set them off. The melanzane ($5) combines an eggplant pesto from Sicily layered with creamy mascarpone cheese. Mascarpone tastes great on warm bread, but the jarred eggplant pesto tasted, well, jarred, and lacked the snap and vitality of a freshly made product.

You can’t go wrong with the cured meats. Iowa’s La Quercia proscuitto ($4) gives Italy a real run for its money. If you like truffles, go for the Creminelli salami tartufo ($4.5), pork salami infused with black truffles.

While the cheese portion seemed a bit stingy to me, just point your finger at the list, and you’ll pick a winner. Make sure you try the unusual testun al Barolo ($5.50), a semisoft blend of cow and goat milk covered with barolo wine must, the spent grapes left over from pressing wine. It’s outstanding. The sandwiches are great. While the ones made on Italian rolls are a little too bready, you can’t complain about what’s between those slices of fresh toasted bread. Go straight for the porchetta sandwich ($10), hot, thick slices of roasted pork with sweet little roasted cippoline onions and spring greens.

The Arthur Avenue sandwich ($10.50) is La Storia’s take on a classic muffaletta: proscuitto, finocchiona salami, mortadella, provolone cheese, chopped olive salad, pepperoncinis and lettuce. The most intriguing is the Vittoria ($11), mascarpone, speck (ham) and arugula with olive oil infused with bergamot (think Earl Grey tea) served on a toasted francese roll.

Desserts are quite good. The chocolate hazelnut torte ($4.50) is made with Sunnyvale’s Snake and Butterfly chocolate; the ethereal but exceedingly rich dessert vaults to a higher level of deliciousness with the addition of crumbled bacon. The sfogliatelle, a ricotta-cheese-stuffed pastry ($4.50), takes 25 minutes to bake, but it’s worth the wait. It would kill with a glass of late harvest wine.

Of course, La Storia’s raison d’etre is the wine, and Guerra and Cannistraci have assembled a prodigious list. I counted nine whites and 14 reds, plus a sprinkling of sparkling wines available by the glass (available in 3-ounce or 5-ounce pours;nice). But for a wine bar, I expected a wider selection by the glass;with an entire of wall of wine opposite the bar I wanted more. Maybe I’m just greedy. But you’re free to pull any bottle off the shelf and have it opened up. There is a $15 corkage fee on the first bottle (none on the second);that’s a deal considering you’re paying retail price, not the typical 200 to 300 percent restaurant mark-up on wine.

The real value of La Storia is the knowledge of its owners, and their passion for wine fills the restaurant. There are some gems on the list of wines by the glass. The 2009 Dominique Piron Morgon, a 100 percent gamay beaujolais from Burgundy, is a great choice next to a plank of meat and cheese. And Campbell’s Trevieso winery is represented with its excellent 2006 Chupacabras, a luxuriously blend of syrah, grenache and viognier. It’s cool to stroll along the shelves of wine with a glass of wine in hand. It feels kind of illicit. Full kitchen or not, Enoteca La Storia is a great place to surround yourself with good food and wine.