People often ask me how I got into wine. I find it quite difficult to come up with a concrete answer to this question. There was no one magic bottle that did it for me. I have long been drawn to it. I admire the culture of wine drinking societies. I am intrigued by wine's fickle nature. I am easily bored by routine. Wine rarely bores. Each vintage, each successive tasting of a single vintage of the same wine produces different results on the palate. Change is inevitable. A wine evolves. New wines emerge. There exists a nearly infinite number of wines to discover and taste.
I think I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but I am a whore for experience. I chase new sensations, flavors, smells, textures. Wine offers a variety of a magnitude that will keep me from the ennui of many other professions.
My first love was literature. It remains so. Wine is my mistress. For the moment she has superceded literature, who has taken a rather distant back seat to the infatuation with this seductive beverage.
While studying Comparative Literature at the University of Virginia I applied for a job as a waiter in a restaurant/wine bar/wine shop. My courtship of wine began much earlier than this however. I spent my childhood years in France surrounded by people who loved to eat and drink well (my father worked in a restaurant in Geneva). I remember people showing up for dinners at our house with bottles in hand and I recall being intrigued by the discussion around these wines.
After high school I worked for a while as an apprentice to the pastry chef in the only “fine dining” restaurant in my town (there was no wine shop there until about four years ago). As an employee I was able to buy wine at cost (and underage) and began trying wines here and there as money allowed.
When I departed for Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass my periodical subscriptions included Food and Wine, Gourmet, and Bon Appetit. For a while I thought I would go to culinary school for Pastry Arts. But literature continued to entrance and the idea of writing the next Great American Novel tempted me.
The financial burden of a Northeastern American private college led me back to Virginia and enrollment at UVa. I began reading wine writing in earnest then. I conducted research on the internet. I bought Parker’s Bordeaux book. Some nights I didn’t sleep in order to compare the prices of certain fine wines on Wine-Searcher.com.
Once it began, it became harder to repress. I fell hard. I couldn’t concentrate on Orlando Furioso. I thought about names with which I felt some mystical affinity: Gruaud Larose, Calon-Ségur, Giscours. On my 21st birthday (October 26, 2005) I walked from La Maison Française on the UVa campus (where I was currently living) to the downtown mall. Once there, I entered Tastings Restaurant/Wine Bar/Wine Shop and ordered a half glass of T. Solomon Wellborn Pinot Noir. The bartender asked me how I liked it. I responded with something to this effect: Very much, it has a nice fruit character and is quite soft. I surprised myself. I guess reading so many wine descriptions in Parker’s book had programmed into me the basic way to describe what I tasted.
I then inquired whether they might be hiring. In fact, yes they needed a server. I filled out the application while sipping. About a week later I commenced my tenure there. I stopped going to classes in order to pick up shifts. Bill, the curmudgeonly proprietor, is extremely knowledgeable about the subject and I picked his brain at every opportunity. I learned quickly. My appetite was so great for knowledge and experience that I began tasting as sales reps came in with their samples. Eventually I took over as bar manager and then front of house manager. Meanwhile, I was tasting anywhere from 30 to 80 wines a week.
The naive devotion and admiration I felt towards Bill gradually dwindled as I became more comfortable with the wine industry and my own knowledge increased. I realized that under his tutelage I was learning a great deal, but also basing my likes and dislikes according to his palate. He detested New World wines, adored Burgundy, and dismissed many interesting wines because of these prejudices. My palate became so calibrated to his that one day I decided that I needed to be able to decide for myself whether or not a wine was good without deferring to him.
I left Tastings shortly thereafter. A few month later I landed the job with Dionysos.
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2 comments:
Hey, I went to Hampshire College too! Funny how similar my story is to yours, only with less of the soaking up of knowledge.
Hey, is this your first comment?
For many years I watched dance concerts and closely observed the careers of present-day choreographers and dancers. I studied history, too, even teaching it at the university level at one point. I watched films and read obsessively and wrote as much about dance and its ever-changing nature as I could. What did I love about it? Its constant mutability. You say the word "dance" and you think you know what you're talking about. In fact, it's fungible. Wine is like that, too, I think, in my limited experience of it. Sure, one means fermented grape juice when one says "wine," but which wine and from where and drunk under what conditions and with whom? To draw a parallel from dance, "Agon" may be the quintessential mid-century modern ballet and the piece that best exemplifies Balanchine's daring redefinition of the medium. But the casting of "Agon," and the time in which it's performed transform the ballet further. And, depending on how experienced a viewer is and what she knows about the dancers and whether Balanchine is alive or dead when she watches it and whether there is a live orchestra and whether you have ever heard Stravinsky's music before -- all of this affects that night's life of the ballet. We all know what "Agon" is until we watch it. We all know what "cab sauvignon" is until we drink it.
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