From my upcoming book on Restaurant Wine Management.
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“When you come to a fork in the road,” Yogi Berra once said, “take it.”
As a sommelier, I came to one in 1989, after over 10 years of managing wine programs in classic French restaurants and table-side service steakhouses. I’d done the wine lists steeped in French crus and gobs of California wine—and man, was I bored. I had also just begun to work for a chef named Roy Yamaguchi, who infused Asian ingredients—and hot, sour, salty, sweet, bitter and umami-laced sensations—in every dish, even with French sauces and Latin vinaigrettes.
I was being challenged, and I needed inspiration. So I went to Provence and Italy, ostensibly to immerse myself in more mature culinary cultures. My first stops were Bandol and Cassis, because I loved the wines and longed to smell the air. This was followed by a harrowing drive to Tuscany, where one of my first meals was at one of those rustic country restaurants in Chianti.
I was with a large family who served as my hosts and lived in the neighborhood. They ordered the usual litany of Tuscan dishes—crostini with liver paté, white beans in olive oil, tortellini in broth, béchamel-laden lasagne, braised chard, rosemary boar, tripe with tomato, and at least a half-dozen more—and we drank bottle after bottle of a deliciously light, edgy Chianti, which effortlessly matched each and every course.
Needing a breather, I walked out onto the restaurant veranda, and turning my eyes away for a second from the spectacular view of rolling green hills, I saw hundreds of empty bottles of the same Chianti, stacked in trays like Coca-Cola bottles against the wall. I asked my host standing next to me, “Say, is this the only wine they serve here?” “Of course,” he said, “it’s the local wine, it goes with everything... why drink anything else?”
And it suddenly dawned upon me: What an ideal wine list! One wine, which goes with everything, has a great price, and is probably as predictably profitable as it get. Why do we even bother with the big, convoluted wine lists we have at home, where most of the time guests don’t even end up with the ideal wines for what they’re eating?
I was convinced I had found the right path, so I seized it upon my return home: Crafting strictly short wine lists (at first, never more than 75 selections), chosen specifically for food (our cuisine), preferably in the $30-$60 range. “Classic” restaurant wines? I could not see the point in, say, Bordeaux (too leathery), Burgundy (too expensive), or Cabernet Sauvignon (too wannabe) within the scope of what we were doing. Afterwards, I ended up crossing the oceans time and time again in search of more ideal wines for our purposes—finding wines like Biancolella in Ischia, Grechetto in Umbria, Rieslings in the Pfalz, or Rolle in Corsica... a long, strange, satisfying trip.
This was the 1990s, mind you, when consumers were still hung up on Chardonnay and White Zinfandel. But somehow we prevailed—our guests drank mostly Pinot Noir or Pinot Gris. We didn’t give them much choice, but it was that first experience in Italy that gave us the courage to do the right thing for us. It must have worked, because we eventually opened more than 30 more of our “Roy’s” restaurants, from Tokyo to New York.
What does this have to do with you? Maybe nothing, except for the fact that if you’re looking to shine in your own light, the best possible advice I can give you is to find your own path. You may have mentors or colleagues you respect. But unless they have the exact same job as you, chances are they cannot determine the style of wine list that works best for you—for your cuisine, your sales objectives and your motivations as a wine professional.
Don’t do what I did, but don’t do what anyone else tells you what you should be doing. Unless you are going your own way, chances are you are not really achieving something unique or special.