Thank you for peering into the Substack unfolding of my upcoming book on Restaurant Wine Management. The following entry, slated to be the first following the introduction, was originally written a few weeks after 9/11, which left a particularly sour taste in everyone’s mouth. You can probably taste it in the words…
For the longest time I wondered if I really understood wine lists, even though I began making a living writing them in 1978.
I especially wondered about that each year, when I would peruse the issue of our nation's bestselling, and most influential, wine magazine announcing the latest list of "Grand Award" winners: One restaurant after another, recognized for carrying a minimum of 1,500, 2,000, sometimes over 5,000 different wines.
It was not just the sheer size that always made these award winning wine lists "grand." From the nonplussed perspective of a perennial non-winner, it was also the content: Multiple vintages of Pétrus and Margaux, the requisite DRCs, the "cult" Californians like Screaming Eagle, Harlan and Araujo, and the usual litany of Gaja and Guigal, Dalla Valle and d'Yquem, Grace Family and Grange Hermitage, Comte de Vogué and Vega Sicilia. Nothing wrong with all of this, of course. More power to the great, and rare, "power" wines of the world.
But if you lined up all these Grand Award winning wine lists, it was always made perfectly clear what is required to achieve grandness: You must carry exactly the same wines that all the other award winners carry on their wine lists, and lots of them. It doesn't matter if your cuisine is French or Chinese, if you're a steakhouse or a vegetarian restaurant, or what region of the U.S. or world you identify with. Almost as if the objective is to list as many of the same wines as possible, individuality be damned.
Who established these standards? Do they really reflect the wine-consuming public's expectations? Is this some kind of conspiracy—a tyranny of a few print magazines?
Personally, or philosophically, I always thought we did this to ourselves. Consumers, restaurateurs, wine producers, wine writers and publishers, every one of us—we each played a part. We can't blame magazines, after all, because they only write what most of us want to read. Wineries produce the kinds of wines that critics like, but critics give the highest scores to wines that consumers, retailers, and restaurants seem to want most. The reality is that most of us are more easily swayed by quantity rather than quality, just as we are impressed more by well-hung, as opposed to well-matched, qualities in a wine.
I have my own hang-ups. In fact, I can't seem to extricate myself from the school of thought (is it old school or new school?) that wine lists should be selected to enhance the overall dining experience offered by each respective restaurant. Things like the cooking style of the chef, the specific sauces and foodstuffs, seasonings and seasons, not to mention setting, theme, décor, price points and community expectations. If wines with big names, high scores and lofty rankings fit in with this, all the better. But do they?
All I can say is that I distinctively remember when Robert Mondavi, back in the 1970s and '80s, began to travel around the country telling everyone who would listen that the industry must produce wines that blend seamlessly with food. What a wonderful thing this was—what he and Magrit discovered during their frequent visits to Europe, the physical and spiritual home of fine wine and culinary arts. So how in the world did bigger ever become better, or at least more important than affinity between wines and foods?
Meanwhile, over the years I began to take comfort in many a word written by Kermit Lynch, wine importer extraordinaire. Once, in one of his newsletters, he wrote about the taste of Cassis, a Southern French white wine made from the Marsanne grape, planted in vineyards scrubbed daily by mistral and spilling literally out into the Mediterranean:
. . . the Marsanne gives its honey with a smell of the sea (l'iode, as the French say)—vines were not planted at Cassis to receive high scores. Cassis was and is a fishing port where the people of Marseilles like to play on weekends. Vines were planted in order to have something to drink with the local catch. Seafood. Cassis. It's a natural.
I love it, Kermit, but what do we do in our restaurants when we recommend Cassis, or a lemony light Picpoul Blanc, an adventurous Albariño, or some other eminently worthy white wine to go with our seafood appetizers, and our guests peer over the wine list and ask, "Don't you have Screaming Eagle?"
I admit to being among those who, refusing to give in to Screaming Eagle compulsions, long ago resigned themselves to never receiving a Grand Award. And I just don't think a handful of contrarians, fools that we are, can do it alone. That is, bring some semblance of order and common sense to this standard of quality we seem to have foisted upon ourselves. Even if we wanted it, not everyone can carry Screaming Eagle because only a few hundred bottles are made every year. Which is beside the point because Screaming Eagle certainly isn't appropriate for every restaurant's cuisine, theme or price points.
Which is not to say that Screaming Eagle isn't cool. It's way cool because it's unusually good. But "cool" also means making a difference, or doing things with an almost unconscious sense of individuality. In early 2001 I was lucky to be invited to a pre-opening industry premiere of Bacar, a sophisticated 21st-century "restaurant and wine salon" put together in San Francisco by wine maven Debbie Zachareas and chef Arnold Wong. The restaurant is now long gone, but at the time I found its menus to be courageous in their originality, challenging Bay Area guests to rethink even their own, well evolved expectations of what constitutes great wine and great regional cuisine. The menu on Bacar's opening night:
Fresh poached Hog Island oysters on half shells with herbed tomato concasee—Billcart-Salmon "Brut Reserve," Mareuil-sur-Ay
Chèvre flan with petite frisee salad and truffle oil—Bastianich Tocai Friulano "Plus" Collio 1998
Applewood smoked Chilean sea bass with brunoise of cucumber and citrus nage—Marc Colin Meursault "Narvaux" 1998
Mascarpone polenta and grilled trumpet mushrooms in Zinfandel jus—Feliciano Gialdi Riserva Oro Giornico Merlot, Ticino, Switzerland 1997
Black mission fig and roasted chestnut stuffed quail with sautéed dino kale—Château Soussans Margaux 1996
New Zealand lamb chop with olive oil crushed fingers and mint rosemary sauce—Bodegas Montecillo Rioja Reserva 1995 and Rocche dei Manzoni "Bricco Manzoni" (Nebbiolo/Barbera) 1995
Mascarpone panna cotta with huckleberry compote—Forteto della Luja "Piasa San Maurizio" Moscato d'Asti 1999
Molten chocolate banana calzone with chantilly cream—Orosz Gabor Tokaji Aszu 6 Puttonyos, Mad, Hungary 1993
While not perfect, each of the matches achieved something either satisfying or surprising. I found minerality driven by racy acidity played up by the combination of chèvre flan and Tocai. I loved the merging of soft, liquid components in the polenta and Merlot; and the sweetness in the quail with fig somehow seemed to smooth over the tannins in the Margaux, bringing out the gently sweet nature of this dry red.
In less imaginative hands, the selections might have been more predictable—Sauvignon Blanc rather than Tocai, Chianti Classico rather than Swiss Merlot, Zinfandel rather than Margaux, and so on down the line. But by being unorthodox, Zachareas and Wong announced that they are "Bacar," and not EOS, Rubicon, Lespinasse, Le Bernardin, Charlie Trotter's, Slanted Door, or any of the other established restaurants in the day. I love that in a restaurant.
Just as I love what Kermit Lynch finds in Cassis, the way Germans feel about their Rieslings with sausages, and what Oregonians do with their open-fire planked salmon washed down with Pinot Noir. Finding cool and sensible food and wine matches doesn't seem to be a problem in special places, where wines and foods had a chance to evolve together, naturally. So if the ultimate experience of fine wine is in special settings, with specific foods, why is it that so few restaurants bother to put descriptions or food recommendations on their wine lists to try to encourage that? Why is picking a wine off a list more like aiming at a dartboard 30-feet away?
Yet in every restaurant there is probably at least one wine that is dynamite with at least one, specific dish. The chefs, managers, servers or sommeliers know what that is, and are only too anxious to share—you the customer must have this and you must have that. Imagine if wine lists were completely stacked with wines not meant to stand alone, but to be consumed with specialties of the house. But if this makes sense, why the compulsion to build wine lists that include every "grand" item listed in the Oxford Companion to Wine, as if this shotgun approach will unerringly effect memorable food and wine matches? Why are small wine lists, chosen to match food rather than make an impression, considered second rate—acceptable, but ultimately unworthy of a "Grand Award?"
So many questions, so little time. Perhaps that time will never come. Not in this day and age when restaurant wine cellars are being built into glass towers, sommeliers are lauded for the tightness of their pants or sex appeal of their smile, and dishes are finished with a wham! and a bam! Not to be a stick in the mud, but whatever happened to the first prime directive, the one that says "it's all about the wine"?
Once, in the late 1990s, I happened to remark to a Bay Area distributor that I was pretty happy with the variety in one of my wine lists, and he politely responded, "Ah, but I see you do not have a Washington State Merlot or Cabernet, and with the quality coming out of there today you really should be carrying one, two, if not three or four of them."
This, of course, was a very good point except for the most important factor of all: I could find no compelling culinary reason to carry a Washington State Merlot or Cabernet. In fact, carrying wines only because they are good, or even great, is probably how the obsession with big wine lists came about. You must have this and you must have that—not for customers to actually drink, but just to see on your wine list. Come to think of it, this is probably why so many restaurants need sommeliers (even if they don't have one): To help guests sort through all the useless stuff in order to find the one wine, among the thousands, that truly suits their needs, the occasion, the dishes they order. But what a shame if this is the real job of sommeliers⏤to be high class shit shovelers.
Makes me wanna holler, hold up both my hands. Or else grab all my winemaker, supplier and distributor friends by the lapels and ask them: When was the last time you sat down with a restaurant wine buyer and actually talked about the sensory qualities of a wine (not the Parker rating, the fermentation temperatures, barrel regime, etc.) and how these qualities might fit in with the specific dishes on the menu? How the taste of a wine, not its score or reputation, is bound to impress. Not in a while, I bet. God bless distributors and suppliers because we need them; but most of the many I have met over the years never bothered to dine in my restaurants or study my menu. And when they did come to lunch or dinner, they usually brought their own bottles, naturally expecting everything they order to match perfectly with their wine. We could be serving monkey brains and termite mounds for all they cared.
So here's my modest proposal: Instead of bowing to the conventional wisdom of what constitutes good wine, and great wine lists, why don't we collectively decide that the best place to start is with wines that fit a menu? And take it from there. That way, at least most restaurateurs will no longer feel inadequate because they don't have Screaming Eagle, Pétrus, or even the best and latest from Washington State.
What’s the worst that can happen? Wine lists with more variety and individuality as opposed to sameness. Guests dining safely under the assumption that no matter what they pick off a wine list, it will go great with their food, because some self-respecting sommelier or restaurateur made sure of that long before they walked in. And finally, sommeliers and servers living happily ever after, sharing those magical, serendipitous moments everyone loves in a restaurant: When everything comes together in a seamless sensory experience.
What a concept... what a pipe dream!
So let's discuss some more...