Smart Mouth

Introduction

How I Fell in Love with Wine

Three months after college, my parents helped me move into a small windowless room above the headquarters of the Hell’s Angels. It was August in the East Village, and the block smelled like garbage and stale beer—summer in New York. A cockroach scuttled along the wall of the elevator shaft. My parents stifled tears while my roommate, an acquaintance from college, said I should be glad we had an elevator, as most first New York apartments were walk-ups.

When I moved into that room I had a few hundred dollars, a degree in English literature, and a desire to write. My parents had hoped I might follow my father’s footsteps to law school but had encouraged me to pursue something I loved as a career. I was still figuring out what that meant.

I spent the first week in my new city delivering resumes to restaurants in the neighborhood. Until landing the writing job of my dreams, I needed to figure out how to pay rent. Of the twenty places I visited, nineteen did not call me back. The twentieth, on the corner of First Avenue and Twelfth Street, was a restaurant named Tappo (the Italian word for “cork”). Tappo had a large wooden bar and exposed brick walls lined with cabinets cross-checked in diamond shapes, filled with wine bottles lying horizontally, collecting dust. The kitchen was run by a talented man named Saul who had trained there with the famous chef Jodi Williams before she left. The general manager, Ron, hired me. He was my height, five foot seven, with brown hair, an ill-fitting gray suit, and a mustache like Tom Selleck’s in Magnum, P.I. He seemed to belong in Midtown, or another town entirely. Ron was my ticket to the “New York restaurant experience,” an important line item for anyone seeking restaurant employment in Manhattan. He offered me a hostess position, and I started the next day.

Soon that hostess job turned into a management role and, in an attempt to increase sales and keep their sinking restaurant afloat, the owners inaugurated internal wine tastings on Thursday afternoons. I don’t recall the particular bottles we tried, only that most were European and more interesting than anything I’d tasted up to that point. My wine education until then had involved sipping Chianti and Châteauneuf-du-Pape from my parents’ glasses at dinner tables and drinking cheap Chianti and Prosecco from a straw during my college semester abroad. A wine connoisseur I was not. There were many elements of that restaurant that did not feel like a good fit, but I was drawn to it anyway because of those wines.

The underlying purpose of these Thursday tastings seemed to be an opportunity for the owners—an unmarried couple in a tumultuous relationship—to communicate their feelings for each other. If they were compatible on tasting day, they found the wines “generous” and “sensual.” If they were arguing, the wines were “angry” and “closed.” In retrospect, this unconventional introduction to wine descriptions served as an interesting and ultimately beneficial lesson in the way we, as individuals, experience what we consume. It was at Tappo that I began to develop a language for discussing wines with restaurant guests; inexplicably, it was a way that resonated with them. A gorgeous Spanish Rioja reminded me of Penélope Cruz: voluptuous, striking (to my palate at the time), and full of beauty. A Sauvignon Blanc from Sancerre reminded me of Gwyneth Paltrow: lithe and steely, full of resolve.

My language for wine has evolved significantly since then. But as a young postgrad, these personas made wine easy to connect with, and they helped me make sense of the different expressions of regions and grapes. That eccentric wine education helped clarify that what speaks to us in a wine is intuitive and personal. Even after years of exams and analytical training, it’s more clear to me than ever that the wine descriptions that matter are ones that resonate with you.

I left Tappo to work at a restaurant called wd~50, an iconic molecular gastronomy restaurant on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, run by the chef Wylie Dufresne. Wylie valued curiosity and research and included anyone who showed signs of interest in menu tastings and conversations about meat glue, methylcellulose, and “soil” made of peas. It was at wd~50 that I began to consider a life in restaurants and redirected my dreams.

Eighteen months later, with elation, impostor syndrome, and a culinary degree from Johnson & Wales University, I moved to the Upper East Side to work in the kitchen at Daniel Boulud’s flagship restaurant, Daniel. In culinary school I’d read his book Letters to a Young Chef and had dreamed of someday working there. I began my job as a kitchen stagiaire (intern), and it would only be a few more months before I fell fully in love with wine.

Long before my time at Daniel, wine had already assumed an invisible pull, a connective and exhilarating quality I was not yet able to articulate. My father’s father, an Italian immigrant who died when my dad was thirteen, made wine in his basement in Waterbury, Connecticut. Making wine together is the only memory my father ever shares of his dad. When I was young, I tried sips of my parents’ wines at dinner, but they did not strike me as particularly special—just fermented grape juice, offering a promise to a world of mystery and romance—without that mystery or romance realized.

By the end of my six-month kitchen internship, my North Star had shifted. The change began gradually, with bottles I tasted during nights off. Then it was spurred by an impromptu conversation in the kitchen with Daniel Boulud himself over a glass of 1990 Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Hermitage Rouge. I had worked the garde-manger station and spent much of that evening wrapping fish fillets in potato strips for the restaurant’s signature dish at the time, the Black Bass en Paupiette. Before heading home, I’d swung by the kitchen to snack on abandoned pastries and happened to be carrying an out-of-print cookbook called Great French Chefs. Moments later, with seemingly divine timing, Daniel walked into the kitchen, holding a decanter.

“Hallo,” he said, eyeing me, then the book. “What do you do in my kitchen?” Followed by, “And, do you like wine?” He placed the decanter onto the pass and poured me a small glass while I handed him the book. The wine, made of Syrah and grown on the famed hill of Hermitage, in the Northern Rhône, tasted of bacon and leather, tobacco and licorice, black peppercorns, blackberries, and smoke. It was the first time I tasted a Syrah that made my heart stop. When Daniel landed on the page highlighting legendary chef Paul Bocuse’s recipe for Red Mullet with Potato Scales, his eyes lit like sparklers. Daniel grew reflective and explained he had flown to Lyon to gain inspiration at Restaurant Paul Bocuse between leaving his role helming the kitchen at Le Cirque and opening his own flagship restaurant, Daniel, in New York. That red mullet dish, shimmering up at us from the page on the pass, had inspired the very Paupiette I helped prepare every night. To further the synchronicity, the garnish for the dish in the book was a simple but striking sauce, velvety and rich, made of butter, shallots, fresh thyme, and Northern Rhône Syrah.

During my first summer of employment at Daniel, I began dating Robert, a man with whom I had been gradually falling in love with for a year and whom I would eventually marry. He was tall and handsome, with a sense of humor sharpened in Parsippany, New Jersey, an encyclopedic understanding of Burgundy and a closet full of Kiton ties. Robert, the first in his family to attend college, had turned down admission to Harvard Law School to continue working in restaurants, something his mentor, John Sexton, the dean of NYU Law School at the time, told him he should do until he no longer loved doing it. When we began dating, Robert was the sommelier and partner at a restaurant called Cru on lower Fifth Avenue, near Washington Square Park. Cru was fancy but warm. It had large windows that opened onto Fifth Avenue and a cocobolo wood bar, which looked like milk and dark chocolate swirled together. The wine list was so large it required two leather-bound volumes—separate books for red and white wines, with hand-drawn maps printed on pages woven with linen. Most impressive was the wine collection Robert had assembled.

By autumn, we saw each other regularly. While that sometimes involved late-night dinners at places like Blue Ribbon (where we ate roasted bone marrow with brioche and drank underpriced bottles of Domaine Roulot Meursault), evenings often began at Cru. I’d sit at the bar and Robert would open bottles from his favorite producers, which he’d pour for me “blind,” without showing me the label. On one occasion, he opened a bottle of 1980 Henri Jayer Vosne-Romanée Premier Cru Les Brûlées “for research,” he said, before pouring a ribbon of wine slowly into an enormous glass that looked like a fishbowl. It captured smells of a faraway time and place, which I could access over and over again upon sticking my nose into the glass. I still have the label, pressed between the pages of a Michel Bras cookbook.