Now as baseball reaches its crescendo and winds of change are in the air, the travel schedule has heated up and the market beckons. There is a palpable nervousness in many places, and the deepening worries about the financial future have made wine buyers skittish. Not that folks are drinking less wine--the consumption levels are static--but what the average or even above average consumer will spend on a bottle of wine for dinner, or even for a gift or special occasion, has declined somewhat according to most observers.
My visits to several major restaurant cities this month have borne some of this out. Many restaurant wine buyers are indeed apprehensive. In many cases this is due to slow summer seasons in warm places like Las Vegas and central Florida; in others it is a direct gauging of the rates of hotel occupancy, convention bookings, and other core business activities within a given city.
Yet, restaurants are still aiming high to deliver extraordinary product. And one note of caution that I must raise is the movement of much food-related beverage activity from classic wine to craft cocktails. Other beverages have also entered the fray: sake, craft beer, even sophisticated non-alcoholic concoctions. Not that I don't enjoy a properly made Manhattan or a classic Negroni from time to time--just that I didn't think they'd ever be considered food-friendly!
I enjoyed two grand restaurant experiences that I would like to dwell on. One was at the splendid new Restaurant Charlie, in the Palazzo Tower of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. I tasted incredibly delicious and creative food--about ten courses, I recall. I also had numerous tastes of splendid wine. Dining Room Manager Nick Rimedio was psyched that I was able to come in, and the beverage team pulled out all the stops. And amidst all this, I was treated to a wildly inventive range of house-designed specialty cocktails--specifically created to pair with menu items. This is a rather jarring experience to most of us traditional sommeliers, who see booze as a competitor for wine on the table. As a floor sommelier, my primary interest was always to discuss, recommend, pair, and properly serve an ideal bottle or two alongside several dishes. This idea has refracted over time, with degustation menus especially, to focus on ideal individual wine-and-food pairings through the course of a meal. We did this at Charlie Trotter's fifteen years ago and it seems de rigueur at any self-respecting high-end dining establishment now. The fact that ideal pairings now include non-wine items takes some getting used to. But it can be fabulous.
The second dining experience I found intriguing was the new L2O, a gorgeous Lettuce Entertain You/Chef Laurent Gras restaurant that has replaced the grand old Ambria in Chicago's Lincoln Park. Here I tasted many pristine and spare seafood driven dishes, and was served nothing but wine all the way. Sommeliers Chantelle Pabros and Doug Merello were most professional and even classical in their approach. An immediate flute of Champagne was offered upon arrival. The already formidable (for a two month old restaurant) wine list came along with the menus. I reviewed the wide-ranging troops, selected a crisp Alsace Grand Cru, and away we went. How lively a good bottle can be with so many intricate flavors! How malleable, how changing, how enriching. I still think it's the way to go, with perhaps pre- and post-meal augmentations.
These two meals made me also wonder: Where do rich, ripe reds like ours from Paso Robles fit in? As a representative of JUSTIN Vineyards, this is an ongoing question, and task, for all my sommelier friends. Neither meal sported more than a course of red-wine oriented food. Yet we know that most restaurants, even seafood-driven ones, serve more red than white wine. So maybe our new non-malolactic style of Chardonnay can hit the spot! If not, perhaps JUSTIN Syrah or Cabernet has a shot after all. In any case, please let's not make a cocktail out of it!
