Heirloom Blog

Matt Straus has been working in food service for the past twenty-three years, beginning with a stint at the neighborhood McDonald’s when he was fourteen. He worked primarily in kitchens until he graduated from college, at which point he began an extended involvement with service and wine. Prior to moving to Los Angeles in 2000, he worked in renowned Boston restaurants such as The Tuscan Grill, The Harvest and The Federalist, as well as with the acclaimed late French chef Sophie Parker, in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In his first five years in L.A., Matt held service positions at Campanile, L’Orangerie, Sona and Grace, where he performed the duties of wine director, managing a service staff of twenty and a wine list of almost 400 labels. In March 2005, Matt returned to the kitchen after studying European cuisine at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts in Vancouver, B.C.

Following his culinary education, a return to Southern California and kitchen stints at two Los Angeles restaurants, Matt became wine director of the brand new Wilshire restaurant in Santa Monica–a post he would hold for three years, and one which provided him with the opportunity to apply his skills and experience and build a wine culture from the ground up.

During his time at Wilshire, Anthony Dias Blue honored Matt as the Best Wine Buyer/Sommelier in Los Angeles in Patterson’s Beverage Journal, StarChefs.com named him a Rising Star Sommelier, and Food and Wine Magazine called his wine list at Wilshire one of the Ten Best New Wine Lists in the country.

Matt presently lives in San Francisco, where he owns Heirloom Cafe, a restaurant dedicated to high-quality, simple food and great wine.  He was named one of the top sommeliers of 2011 by Food and Wine Magazine.

review of Reflections of a Wine Merchant by Neal Rosenthal (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008)

It hasn’t always been so, but today it is the great paradox of wine that something so simple as a glass of fermented grape juice should be at the center of such impassioned worldwide considerations of taste and style, history and tradition, craftsmanship and global marketing. In my job as a sommelier, I live in the constant presence of this paradox. I make a living buying and selling wine, gauging levels of quality, weighing in tableside on the latest curiosity, recycling stories about great bottles and the great people who made them.
And yet all of this must seem gratuitous—even silly, to lots of people whose faces conceal none of the stupefaction they seem to feel when people start talking about wine. For many, when the conversation turns complex and philosophical about wine—it’s all much ado about nothing but a simple little drink. But to those who do fall under the mysteriously beguiling captivation wine can conjure, it is a source of never-ending nuance, intrigue and even controversy. From beginning wine drinkers moving through a tasting room schedule in Napa to old hands debating the relative merits of two vintages of Burgundy from the 1970’s, the universe of wine can seem like an interminable series of unanswerable questions. What makes this taste this way? Why does that taste so different? Why is that wine so expensive? Will this bottle be even more spellbinding in ten years than it is now?
Under the surface the considerations seem more momentous and more complicated, some of them cutting straight to the core of how people taste, what sort of work we value, how we regard our relationship with the natural world. Wine is the world’s lone example of an agricultural product, theoretically available in every corner of the globe, which has as much to do with artisanal human stewardship as it does with what the soil and the sun yields. With a little prodding, fields produce wheat and corn and apples and tomatoes, but wine production requires a vastly different quality of human effort—both physically and mentally.

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published in the LA Times 2-13-08 Savoring Time in a Bottle

PICTURE a few people at a table in a restaurant or in a home kitchen, with sumptuous food on the way, getting ready to pull a cork on a good ten-year-old bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône.

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The 1996 Hanzell Chardonnay is slim and pretty, wearing a beige cashmere roll-neck sweater and looking a little like Natalie Portman with a lighter complexion and blonde highlights. She sits with good posture, her legs crossed and her hands folded over her knee.

Matt: Welcome to the table.

‘96HC: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

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