Four wine glasses are strategically placed on the wooden tables, each accompanied by a folded chocolate-colored cloth napkin, ready for the three men who walk in the glass doors five minutes later.

Iowa City residents now have another option when it comes to choosing where to wine and dine downtown.

Share Wine Lounge and Small Plate Bistro, 210 S. Dubuque St., is the newest of the restaurants on the Pedestrian Mall. As its name implies, Share encourages diners to sample a bit of everything.

Share is not the first to bring the idea of sampling to the table. Graze, 115 E. College St., opened on the Ped Mall in April 2007.

Brady Moore, Graze’s dining-room manager, believes that diners are crazy about the concept of sampling or “grazing.”

“I think people have caught on,” he said.

And the National Restaurant Association has seen the trend coming. In an October 2007 survey, the association of more than 1,000 professional chefs of the American Culinary Federation concluded small portions of food, wine, and other alcohol beverages were rising in popularity.

Moore said there are plenty of differences between Graze and Share, so he is not too worried about any “competition.”

Share focuses on an “approachable wine menu,” said Bently Kriewald, the general manager of Sheraton Hotel.

Its “enomatic wine dispensing system” will set Share apart from the other wine menus downtown Iowa City, Kriewald said. The latest technology in the wine lounge industry, Kriewald contended, the appliance uses inert gas to preserve the wines’ flavor and body so that they taste as though they had just been opened. The system furthers sampling by allowing diners to taste a variety of different wines. Or at least that is Kriewald’s hope.

Share is part of the $11 million transformation of the Sheraton Hotel, Kriewald said. The decision to open its own restaurant with access to the Ped Mall was pure common sense, he said.

“In the past, we’ve had to recommend every restaurant,” Kriewald said. “We wanted to have a separate identity with locals.”

For this reason, Share was designed with an outside entrance in addition to the entrance inside the hotel — and of course, a patio to compete with its peers on the Ped Mall.

“We, too, will have that for [diners],” Kriewald said.