Within a few days I received a call from a woman named Jessica at a restaurant called Campanile on La Brea Avenue.  She invited me to come to the restaurant for an interview, and I set about figuring a way to make myself look presentable and began to consider the prospect of landing at this place.  I remember that it seemed in some way alternative to me.  Before I had walked through the front door, whatever I gleaned from the restaurant website or online reviews in the days when those were written mostly by professional critics, gave me the feeling that I was in for something different.

I was at that moment fresh from a job in Boston at a restaurant called the Federalist, where, I was surely proud to say, I had demonstrated my abilities at the highest level of restaurant service.  I had been fitted for a fine waiter’s uniform by one of Boston’s top fashion designers, I had opened and served expensive bottles of wine and set them gently on sterling coasters on beautiful clothed tables.  I had worked to understand and to become comfortable in the ceremonies of dinner service to wealthy people.

About this Campanile place, words were used like rustic, and country, and I remember one expression in particular, “temple of food,” which was used to describe it more than once.  People seemed to talk about it as though it was some kind of fraternity, maybe like an outing club or a bird watching club.  It seemed to me like it might not exactly be up my alley.  I was looking for the place where diplomats dined on caviar and abalone and drank great Meursault, and found gleaming silver cloches protecting their plates when they returned from drying their hands on fine linens in the bathrooms.  But maybe this little hippie spot could help me get a foot in the door in the city.  I could pay my bills while looking for a job at a really great place.

So on a warm and sunny Los Angeles summer afternoon, I walked into a space which indeed felt and looked nothing like any restaurant I had ever seen.  There were skylights and natural light everywhere, old stones and bricks and tiles, a little fountain with a pool and and a few fat red goldfish just inside the front door.  It seemed something like a Mediterranean or North African bazaar, though not because I had ever seen one of those.  It was lunchtime and the space was buzzing with food service.  The colors were softly muted greens and bricks and perfectly juxtaposed, primary, blues and yellows.  The place was a bit of a feast for the eyes.

In an office upstairs, Jessica asked me if I knew about grape varietals.  I had followed her up a staircase next to the bar that was just wide enough for a person, and sat down with her in a little non-descript office.  “Jacques will be up to talk with you in a minute, and he’s going to ask you some tough questions about wine,” she said.  Jacques arrived a minute or two later, looking like a fit, flush-faced adolescent boy in a nice pressed suit.  Smiling, with a Cheshire grin he wore more or less permanently, Jacques wanted to know if I knew the difference between cabernet sauvignon and nebbiolo.

It turned out that I did know the difference, and it was a good thing for me, because a couple of days later I worked my first shift at Campanile.  What was immediately striking, I remember, was that everyone in the restaurant seemed to care about the difference between cabernet sauvignon and nebbiolo.  I had to familiarize myself with just six wines which were being offered by the glass—three white and three red, but the three red wines were wines that might or might not have been remotely recognizable to anyone.

At first I could hardly believe that it worked, that there really were enough guests to fill such a massive space who were happy to choose between a nerello mascalase from Sicily, a cabernet franc from the Loire valley and a zweigelt from Austria.  If I had walked up to the people I had waited on in Boston and offered them a glass of zweigelt at least half of them would have looked at me as though I had just jammed a pencil in my ear.  It didn’t take long for me to learn: in this place, merlot enjoyed no advantage from some arbitrary pole position in the American culinary vernacular.  Here, merlot wasn’t disqualified, but neither was it offered because it had to be.

The approach to wine, as explained by resident scholar and wine director George Cossette, was that the wines we poured needed to be not only delicious, and to represent value, but also to be authentic in some kind of regionally traditional way.  I learned that on the one hand, there was an endless supply of subjectivity in the wine world, and on the other hand that there were real discriminations to be made.  One should certainly discern the delicious and the not-so-delicious, and note the traditional bottle of Tuscan sangiovese as something different than the wine produced by a fledgling Tuscan vanity project winery which had been recently erected by three investment bankers hoping to make world-class cabernet sauvignon and merlot in Tuscany.  George used to say that if there was a certain wine that all the fishermen drank when they came in from their boats to their coastal village in Italy, we wanted that wine.

If it took some time for me to cobble away at the mountain of information and nuance that was the Campanile wine list, the activity and production of the kitchen produced a farily immediate astonishment.  In terms of the pricing of the menu and the sheer volume of dishes prepared I had never seen anything like it.  I had served my share of $35 entrees before, but those were the delicately-constructed, museum-style plates in Boston which were turned out a couple at a time, often by two or three cooks working together on individual components.  On Friday and Saturday nights at Campanile there were sometimes 350 people having dinner and paying those prices, and these plates weren’t half as precise as the ones I had served at places like the Federalist and the Harvest.  I remember, in the early going, feeling as though the whole thing was some kind of Hollywood ruse.

Then I began to taste the food, and to put it plainly, my life changed.  The flageolet beans and bitter greens and olives with the ribeye steak, the Brussels sprouts caramelized in Balsamic vinegar and covered with breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese, the Copper River salmon with perfect sweet English peas and feather-like cauliflower puree—they all changed my life.  I grew up eating not just junk but certainly my share of fast food and Drake’s cellophane-wrapped coffee cakes.  I hadn’t ever tasted anything like any of these things.  It was like learning a new language, with a vocabulary of things that came from the natural world.  There were flavors and textures more complex than any of the fine and expensive foods I had known on the east coast.  This was the California cuisine that had been made famous by Alice Waters at Chez Panisse and Judy Rodgers at Zuni Café and Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton at Campanile, about which, I soon realized, I had known only very superficially.

The particular word and idea that came to occupy such a big part of my thinking about food, and also about wine, was rustic.  It was a word that I heard tossed around at the restaurant for a few months, and one day I asked Mark what he meant by it.  “A rustic plate,” he said, “is a plate that looks as though it just fell out of the sky and landed on the table and had everything on it jostled around a little.”  There were two implications in this idea that were perhaps the most formative elements in my developing gastronomical sensibility.  The first was that there was no substitute for the finest quality ingredients of every kind.  Whether sourcing English peas or salmon or olive oil, when the intricacy of the plating takes a back seat to the flavors, the quality of the ingredients has to be first-rate.

The second idea was the paramount importance of diversity in cuisine.  What was possibly the most singularly amazing thing about Mark and Nancy’s plates was how uneven they were and how spectacular they were in their unevenness.  In Mark’s sautéed trenne pasta, in which triangular bits of pasta were sautéed crispy and served over beef and kale Bolognese and covered with shaved parmesan, lucky diners found no two forkfuls alike.  Some pieces of trenne had been sautéed hard on one side, and had two remaining sides that were still supple.  Nancy’s rustic apple tart—built like a medieval throwing star, was intentionally constructed to be just a shade fatter in one or two corners of the gloriously browned crust than others.

There is a premise behind this sort of approach to cooking which has it that an avoidance of uniformity, when executed at a high level, is likely to provide an eating experience which is less predictable, and as a consequence, brimming with vitality and sensory stimulation.  But it bears no resemblance to the kind of provocation one sees frequently at fine restaurants that has to do with the unlikely combination of esoteric ingredients.  It is one thing to be confronted by a plate with monkfish liver and persimmon and cocoa nibs, and to consider such an intersection never before imagined.  It is quite another thing to settle in comfortably to a steaming bowl of pasta Bolognese and to savor each bite for its distinction and particular deliciousness.

To say that this way of thinking has ramifications in the world of wine is something like saying that the farming of grapes has something to do with the world of wine.  How obvious the magnificence of, say, Jacques Puffeney’s weirdly oxidative white wines from the Jura seemed when one approached the tasting of wine looking not just for deliciousness but also for distinction.  How very defensive I felt, after watching Jonathan Nossiter’s groundbreaking film Mondovino after it was released in 2004, on behalf of the regional winemaking in obscure parts of Europe that looked vulnerable to consensus and corporate avarice and globalization.  And how much I appreciated it when Maria Jose Lopez de Heredia from Rioja, conducting a tasting 2006, proudly confirmed the variation found from one bottle to the next in her estate’s wines.  “In my family making wine is like making tomato sauce,” she said.  “They can taste a little different, depending on who is standing at the stove.”

As I write this, in the aftermath of Campanile’s closure late last year, it occurs to me that there has never been any variability in the effect that my two years of work at the restaurant had on my career, or even on the person I am today.  For one thing, I opened a restaurant about three years ago—after working in restaurants for more than twenty years—that has Campanile written all over it.  From the colors to the wine glasses to the wine lists to the cuisine, none of the restaurants on my resume influenced the development of Heirloom even half as much as Campanile did.

But there is also, there has always been, the mindset that was created in me from the time I spent waiting tables at 624 South La Brea Avenue.  Nothing could ever be so important to me now, or to the food we serve at Heirloom, as my recollection of the time Nancy Silverton told me that in the early days of Campanile she would walk up and down the cooking line every night tasting every piece of mise en place in every station.  Where would my wine cellar have gone if George Cossette hadn’t explained the primary importance of a dedicated space for wine storage to me?  I remember, like it was yesterday, the tireless food runner Tomas Martinez poking his head around the corner as I was ordering something at a computer terminal at the back of the restaurant, and saying “Man, you better go talk to Nancy.  She’s pissed off.”

Tomas, if you can hear me now, forgive me, but it never, ever turned out to be the case that Nancy actually was pissed off.  She never wasted any time or energy on being pissed off.  It was always the case that she considered feeding her guests the way a general considers a battle plan—with clarity and purpose, and a focus in her steely brown eyes that conveyed some unmistakable truths: that this was serious business, that nobody should be fooled by the slight asymmetry of an apple tart, and that even though it was just dinner, there was quite a lot at stake.

I have eaten at Le Pigeon five or six times, and have had the sense each time that it was one of those places that seem to have just sprouted up out of the ground—no construction, no human design, no permit hassles—just something as pre-ordained as a giant oak tree.  There tended not to be, in my experiences there, a single moment from the time a guest walked in the front door to the time he or she paid the bill, when one raised an eyebrow because something seemed out of place. When I picture Le Pigeon in my mind’s eye, I see cast iron pots, mason jars on shelves on the walls, smiling staff—none of it the least bit contrived.

To look at the current menu, as I did online after I arrived in Portland last week, is to see a selection of dishes only something like the roster of five years ago.  Shortly after Le Pigeon opened, everything coming out of Rucker’s kitchen had in abundance the three traits I consider to be most important in the production of superior cuisine: a sharpened focus on good ingredients, a hall pass for one’s creativity as it conjures and pursues artful and delicious combinations and permutations, and a wholesale freedom in the creative process from considering the inspiration and depth of one’s own profound wit.

The last characteristic is the only one beyond the grasp of any serious young chef these days, but we’ve all been suffering the unfortunate effects of its absence for years. Since the 1980’s, when America began to celebrify food, talented chefs around the country have been practiced at getting in their own way while designing and executing menus.  It occurs to them that their new lamb dish would be great with the addition of some tarragon, and then they have a feverish early-morning dream about infusing some tarragon into—oatmeal!  Or a tarragon beignet!!  Their dutiful staffs then set about indulging the chef’s genius, whipping up tarragon beignets which turn out to be very nicely constructed.

Even when the instinct and the execution work, the plate shows up at the table slightly out of balance, because the chef’s ingenuity is the most prominent ingredient.  And while we sometimes seem convinced that a dinner table full of ingenuity is inspiring, nourishing, restorative, it’s actually something a lot more like a charade, an affirmation session rife with congratulations of different sorts.  First diners demonstrate their own and each others’ good taste by pointing out this or that slightly-out-of-place texture or odd flavor, and then, praised be, if everyone is lucky enough to be regaled by the chef himself at the table.  Then the adulation reaches a fever pitch, for the man who dreamt this up—this tarragon ice cream, is standing so close we could touch him.

But while tarragon oatmeal fritters have descended like UFO’s in the dreams of legions of young American chefs in the last twenty years, west coast metropolises have been the most reliable places to find chefs who have politely excused themselves from the world of things unidentified or flying.  Owed to the regularity of superior local ingredients, many west coast chefs have been finding fulfillment for years from a creative process much less dependent on innovation, much more devoted to nourishment.

Portland especially, less encumbered by the appetite for glossy content that pervades Los Angeles and San Francisco, has for a decade or more been a city with very good restaurants that make you feel as though nothing is quite so direly important when you sit down to dinner.  There isn’t anything missing from the seriousness of the approach to food or service, but neither does one find very much stiffness or creative over-reaching.  Portland restaurants, while busy serving fresh and delicious food, have long been places where diners can actually relax.

What I found after I settled in to the city and began to look at some menus online was the impression that fritter UFO’s were indeed hovering overhead about five blocks east of the Burnside bridge.  During my visit to Portland last week, Chef Rucker and his cooks at Le Pigeon were serving, among other things, rabbit and eel terrine with a foie gras and miso vinaigrette, and pigeon crudo with smoked bourbon ice cream.  Both of these dishes were on the menu as appetizers.  What I remembered as Rucker’s flirtation with avant garde cuisine seemed to have blossomed into a full-throttle indulgence of his inner tarragon fritter.

A possible explanation presented itself when I decided instead to go to Rucker’s second restaurant—Little Bird, which opened about two years ago, closer to Portland’s city center.  My first night in the city, as I sat alone at the bar there with a negroni at about 8:30, and was served with promptness and grace by a bright and kind guy who was bartending, I settled in first for a salad of frisee, Dijon vinaigrette, a perfectly fat and juicy little boudin blanc and a perfectly-cooked crispy poached egg.  Following the salad there was a grilled half-chicken, crisp-skinned and bursting with juice, which was served astride a brothy succotash of tiny white beans and corn, cherry tomatoes and chili oil.

The exquisiteness of the food at Little Bird would be hard for me to overstate.—the two meals I ate there were indicative of a chef at the very top of his craft.  That first dinner was followed by a lunch a couple of days later that consisted of a half-bottle of Champagne and a butter lettuce salad with yogurt-feta dressing, watermelon and cucumbers, a ‘Le Pigeon’ burger which was one of those burgers that leave you absolutely convinced in the moment that your mouth will never enjoy a more delicious bite of food, and a side of brandied crimini mushrooms that served to remind me of the glory of simply-prepared vegetables.

Whether or not it’s the case, and without being privy to the inner workings of his mind, I am going to believe going forward that Gabe Rucker is allowing himself the license to serve lightly-cooked squab with ice cream at Le Pigeon because he opened another restaurant where we can all just have dinner.  Maybe the very high quality of the quotidian fare at Little Bird eases any qualms he would or would not feel about featuring pigeon crudo on his one and only dinner menu.  It certainly eases my concerns to know that a great boudin blanc with frisee and a poached egg and an exquisite Dijon vinaigrette is still there waiting for me.

I had ample time to consider this question and others as I headed back down the 5 freeway for the ten-hour trip to San Francisco, which would be punctuated by a date with Vernon and Charlene Rollins at New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro outside of Ashland.  That is a story for, and from, another time.

Very often, before I make purchases of the blind sort, which is to say when I buy wine that I’m not lucky enough to taste beforehand, I try and get a good deal of research done before I decide to buy.  Thankfully, in this day and age, the enterprise of gathering information about particular wines made by prominent producers isn’t very difficult.  There are websites which profile producers, websites which review wines, websites that provide listings of pricing across the country.  One can very often glean a lot of information in five or ten minutes.

Of course, as it’s the case with all things internet, some bits of information should be accorded more value than others—there are certain sources which I regard as especially helpful and elucidating.  One such source is the wine writer David Schildknecht, who has a long history in the wine business and who has been writing reports on German wines (among others) for Robert Parker’s website for years.  Schildknecht is certainly astute, seems to have as much integrity as anyone else currently writing wine reviews, and generally delivers me a pretty good sense of what’s happening inside bottles I haven’t ever encountered.

By now, railing against the wine journalistic practice of scoring wines is a race which has been run.  The case has been thoroughly made, especially in a wave of backlash against wine criticism in the last decade, that awarding 90 or 93 points to a wine can seem arbitrary, beside the point, somewhat grotesque to people who associate wine with romance.  Those people aren’t interested to know the score of a wine any more than they would be to know the score of a theater performance or an art exhibition.  What they would prefer, if they preferred to know anything at all, is a bit of hard information about content.

But as I read Schildknecht’s impressions of the 2004 Donnhoff Riesling Auslese from the Oberhauser Brucke vineyard, it occurs to me that the tasting note itself is something from which I would prefer to stay away.  His vocabulary is abundant, his palate keen, and his imagination fertile and far-reaching, and his tasting notes read like detailed descriptions of what it’s like to pass through the pearly gates.  None of them are markedly different from the others, so to consider as an example the note for this presently-considered 2004 Donnhoff Auslese:

“The 2004 Oberhauser Brucke Riesling Auslese A.P. #16 exudes aromas of pink grapefruit, blueberry preserves, golden delicious apple and exhibits a liqueur-like concentration and creamy texture allied to almost weightless buoyancy on the palate. Hints of white raisin and honey suggest the tiny-berried and dry-botrytis concentration of fruit achieved by means of ultra-selective picking. Subtle mineral and musky-meaty notes add to the sense of mysterious depth displayed in the long, rich, yet firm finish.”

What first comes to my mind is the debt of gratitude I owe to Schildknecht and writers like him for having convinced me, during a time in my late 20’s and early 30’s, of wine’s magnificence and its place as a treasure of the natural world.  I remember what it was like to begin reading notes like those regularly, when I was starting in the wine business, and I’m certain that collectively, they played a big part in the fascination and burgeoning love I started to feel for wine.

The more powerful reaction I have now is something more like revulsion.  Even as I copy and paste the note and re-read it as I put quotes around it, I find myself trying to avoid considering it too deeply, because of a very great aversion I feel to thinking anything about the way the wine tastes before I taste it.  What am I in it for, after all?  I don’t think of tasting and drinking wine as though it’s a kind of treasure hunt, with a roadmap and sign posts.  The only manner in which I’m interested to do it is without presumptions and expectations.

Think for a moment, because there’s some chance that this particular wine is now already diminished for you too, about what it means for a wine to have a “liqueur-like concentration.”  It’s an extraordinary notion, even if it does come from a word bin of recycled descriptors which has been visited regularly by wine reviewers for the past thirty years.  A liqueur-like concentration suggests something in the tightly-bound, alcoholic flavor of Cognac maybe?  But in this case not exactly, because the wine doesn’t have all of the alcohol of Cognac or a liqueur, so perhaps there is merely something similar about its viscosity or depth of flavor?

Now imagine that this wine is the wine being poured at the most special occasion of your life.  Your closest friends are with you, they all love to drink wine, and there’s a spread on the table of anything and everything you might like to eat with a magnificent, somewhat sweet Riesling—fresh goat’s milk cheeses, apricot cream tarts, foie gras, whatever.

Would you hope, at such an occasion, to consider the degree to which you find yourself in agreement about the liqueur-like concentration?  Would you want to know from your friends whether they too found that the wine was exuding aromas of grapefruit and blueberry preserves?  The resounding answer for me, having sat around tables at which these very sorts of conversations occurred, is no, thanks, and please point me in the direction of the nearest exit.

When I’m lucky enough to open great bottles of wine that I expect to help consume, my greatest desire is to be surprised.  My heretofore unarticulated hope, each and every time, is that I’ll look up from my glass after smelling and and tasting for thirty minutes with the dumbstruck impression that the wine is singularly spectacular.  Imagine, by contrast, looking up from the glass and saying “The wine is very good, and I’m amazed at how accurate Schildknecht’s note is—it’s all grapefruit and blueberries with a touch of golden delicious apple.”

And isn’t it true that we might not invite this sort of contemplation into any of our favorite sensory activities?  When your new sports car hits 50 mph, you’ll feel beads of sweat on the small of your back and a tingling in your thighs—be sure and stay on the lookout for them as you’re shifting into third gear.  The next time you have sex, about halfway through, you’ll have the unmistakable sense that you’re on a beach, being fanned by angels, a soft rain falling.  Just giving you a head’s up.  Keep an eye out.

It’s an observation that I offer with qualification, because I do believe that the writing has a real capacity to thrill and excite, to pique curiosity, to plant a seed for someone like me when I was on the brink of discovering the beauty of wine.  I (still) read those notes by the dozen in an attempt to gather information in order to learn about different vintages and wineries, in order to make decisions about what to buy.  I don’t know what I would do without this sort of criticism.

And yet if I could go back to the times when I felt nothing but ignorance and innocence, and awe, about wine, I would.  I often feel a twinge of envy when I’m tasting something extraordinary with someone who doesn’t have very much experience tasting, and I watch their face light up with joy and astonishment.  It’s a simple pleasure that often fades—innocence and experience can’t often co-exist—in all kinds of different realms.

I take it for granted that I don’t have the same dumbstruck feeling about love, or professional sports, that I had when I had my first crush or walked through a tunnel at Fenway Park for the first time.  For some reason, I’m less ready to relinquish the thoughtless exuberance of eating and drinking without a care in the world.

The first thing out of my mouth now when someone asks is that I feel a thorough devotion to the Green Chile Kitchen, which is a New Mexican restaurant at the unassuming intersection of Baker and McAllister streets. What I love about Green Chile, I often say, is that I think they serve the best, most honest meal in the city for the money. For less than $15, you’re served the most lovingly-crafted burrito, made with breakfast ingredients (eggs, rotisserie chicken, roasted potatoes, pinto beans) or dinner ingredients (rotisserie chicken, pinto beans) and spectacularly flavorful green chile salsa, and a beverage of your choice (coffee, lemonade, a bottle of Pacifico).
I like the place so much I sometimes go there two or three times in a week. I guess it’s my idea of a neighborhood restaurant, which to my mind is a place where I can go with an expectation of getting the same good meal all the time and not be more expensive than what I can afford. Of course, if you can afford just about anything, then just about any place could be your neighborhood restaurant, because the cost factor gets taken out of the equation. For me, a hearty delicious meal with a reasonable price tag means a lot, and I think nothing delivers that as well as the Green Chile.
The subject of neighborhood restaurants has been on my mind more than a little lately, since I opened a restaurant which I hoped would fit that bill for some restaurant-goers in San Francisco. We’ve certainly seen our share of neighbors and repeat guests in the almost four months since we opened, which inclines me to think that we’re doing something right on that front. A sympathetic writer even included us prominently in an article about neighborhood restaurants in a national magazine a few weeks ago. That was very gratifying.
If there’s been one consideration which has demanded more of my attention in the process of developing this neighborhood restaurant, it’s been the idea of how frequently our menu would change. Everyone seems to want to know the answer to that question. People talk about the fact that we only offer twelve or so different dishes at a time, they know we’re seasonally-motivated, they’re itching to know how often we plan to change things up. There’s no telling how much of this chatter has been influenced by the review that Michael Bauer of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about us. He basically said that he really liked what we were doing, that he would have awarded us three stars in his review, but that he had hoped to see more change in the menu between his visits.
I happen to think Michael Bauer is a pretty astute critic, and I was thrilled at all of the nice things he said about our place (which were of course all very astute), and I have no wish to take issue with this one observation about the frequency of change that any restaurant menu might experience. I have to say, though, that I haven’t stopped thinking about it since the restaurant opened, he wrote that article, and people began asking me about it in the dining room. How often should the menu change? If we think of ourselves as a place where local people could come a few times every month, what is it that we should strive to provide for those people?
My mind gets flooded by different ideas. I remember very poignantly the advice of my culinary school mentor, the barrel-chested teddy-bear-natured Austrian-Canadian Johannes Oberbichler: “The important thing, Mathieu, is to do one thing and do it very well.” That advice never seemed so salient as after my kitchen staff and I plunged into menu development, and the realization set in that the execution of our dishes improved rather substantially the more we practiced turning them out.
What’s more, I’ve always been much more inclined to the idea of developing and maintaining really excellent platings than I have to flashing culinary ingenuity every night. It’s true that I love the idea of a place like Chez Panisse that serves one different menu every single night, depending on their creative whimsy and the ingredients that are available at any given time, but I wonder if it’s possible to run a program like that and charge $40 for three courses instead of $100. One of the biggest advantages of our menu is that we waste next to nothing—which is a good thing because our profit margins aren’t built to sustain waste.
Then again, maybe our patrons would be thrilled to see new dishes on our menu all the time. I wonder if there’s something disappointing about arriving to a restaurant for the second time in a few weeks and being presented with the same options. I was friendly when I was in art school many years ago with a well-to-do lady who told me that she went out for dinner in order to find something new and creative that she couldn’t make at home. I didn’t feel the same way and I still don’t, but maybe a lot of people do go out to eat with the same mentality as if they’re visiting an art exhibition. They don’t want to go back to the museum and see the same thing again.
I guess in the end it has everything to do with this very personal way of thinking about food. How many people eat the same bowl of cereal every morning and how many people very much prefer to have oatmeal one day and eggs benedict the next? Personally, I enjoy revisiting the same foods over and over again. Of course I love discovering new and wonderful things, but there are weeks when I not only eat a breakfast burrito at the Green Chile Kitchen two or three times, but actually feel grateful that it’s there waiting for me when they open their doors in the morning. My occasional foray into a bowl of their green chile chicken stew, brimming with succulent, rich chicken stock and topped with a dollop of perfect guacamole, usually feels like all the variation I need.
The sagacious and soft-spoken Mark Peel, under whom I worked for two years at Campanile, used to say that the best diet is a diverse diet. And while I’m sure that there are very healthy people who subsist on more or less the same food every day, I think that perspective is pretty convincing. Apart from the fact that I think our bodies appreciate more protein or fiber or fat on some days and less on others, I think we rely on our senses to refresh our sensibilities. And it’s hard to imagine a more ready refresher than our mouths, which are called to action a few times a day already in the service of our physical nourishment.
It occurs to me that to run a restaurant is to try, somewhat audaciously, to incorporate the whole kit and caboodle. We want to nourish, we want to inspire, we want to honor our own creative instincts and steer clear of monotony, we must conduct the entire enterprise with at least an occasional glance at the bottom line of the financial ledger. There are so many considerations and so many possibilities that most of the time it seems to me that the only real choice is to do what feels true. If you can manage to open a restaurant and what really jazzes you is serving a different casserole everyday (not an unattractive idea to this writer), then by all means, start polishing those hotel pans.
I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do when Heirloom opened, and while I’ve been thrilled by speaking with people about their impressions of what the restaurant could be, we haven’t veered very far from the original concept. We set out to to design some exceptional dishes, to offer some variety every night, and to change things when ingredients became unavailable or when we could think of a better way of serving something. This approach is grounded in my own inclination to treat the restaurant more like a place to sit with friends and get fed, and less like a funhouse with a surprise in every room.

I can’t help but wonder if that sort of jealousy is what’s going through the minds of the apparently right-minded people who have been taking pot shots at Alice Waters lately. A few weeks ago, after his co-panelist, Momofuku’s David Chang, decried every restaurant in San Francisco for not manipulating food enough, television’s famous Anthony Bourdain said that he agreed with Waters’ message, but didn’t believe that she was the person to deliver it. He said he thinks she wants to legislate eating habits. He said she annoys the living shit out of him.
If he’s found time in what must be his own very busy schedule as a food celebrity to read Caitlin Flanagan’s recent piece in the Atlantic, called ‘Cultivating Failure(link),’ he probably appreciated it. Flanagan thinks that in working to introduce food cultivation and preparation to schoolchildren through her Edible Schoolyard initiative, Waters has used her celebrity to compromise their educations, and by extension, she writes, ‘diminish our shared cultural life.’ The Edible Schoolyard program suggests that schools take the earth-shattering step of planting gardens, so one wonders what sort of shared cultural life Flanagan thinks is on the chopping block. Is she talking about common American behavior like buying 100 count boxes of frozen hamburger patties at Wal-Mart and Costco? Perhaps that’s the cultural life that needs protection against the likes of Alice Waters.
In any case it isn’t easy to take Ms. Flanagan seriously, largely because her four thousand word piece about Waters and the havoc she’s wreaking in schools is so full of this strange animosity. In the midst of her assault, for instance, she mentions that people who eat at Chez Panisse like to say ‘right-on’ and ‘yes we can,’ and that they love ACORN, and that waiters at the restaurant have a penchant for interrupting dinner conversations. When children throw tantrums and incorporate all sorts of irrational grievances, we forgive them for their moodiness, but Flanagan isn’t a child.
She’s a big girl writer who has a seven page axe to grind, and the elephant in the room in each and every paragraph she writes is the question: why? What is it exactly that is so threatening about the idea of a child who learns to cook vegetables? The premise that underlies every facet of her argument is that time spent learning about growing and preparing food and time spent learning about Shakespeare or mathematics are mutually exclusive. Educators, she seems to say at every turn, must choose one or the other,.
It seems to me to be an outrageous suggestion, mostly because my childhood was so dearly lacking the very education that would have been afforded by the programs Flanagan derides. At my high school in suburban Boston, there was plenty of grammar and Victor Hugo and trigonometry, and there was also a ‘breakfast’ program run by the school cafeteria for students who arrived to school early. I didn’t need to be one of those students—I lived across the street from the school, but on many mornings in my freshman and sophomore years at Randolph High School I roused myself from bed in time to get to school a little early so that I could wait in a short line in an adjunct room to the school cafeteria, where a couple of ‘lunch ladies’ (as they were known) prepared breakfast.
There were two offerings on the menu on those mornings in 1987 or 1988, and I remember them like it was yesterday. For thirty cents, the growing boys and girls of Randolph could purchase either a warm, mass-produced, cellophane-wrapped cinnamon donut, or two pieces of Wonder bread which had been run through a toaster and slathered with a brush soaking with melted butter. My friends and I regularly made sure we had a dollar or two extra for that period before school, with which we’d purchase a balanced meal of two donuts and two ‘orders’ of toast (four slices) dripping in butter, or sometimes just four orders of toast, or some other monstrous permutation of empty calories. At fifteen years old, these foods were prominent in my culinary landscape, along with the sausage biscuits I was making at the local McDonald’s. I don’t believe anyone would deign to suggest that the gastronomic experience of my American childhood was unique. The shape of my body certainly wasn’t.
Now, it bears mention, the heartiest of collard greens wouldn’t have stood a chance in an outdoor garden in the winter months in Massachusetts while I was scarfing down donuts and buttered toast. The edible schoolyard would have required some indoor adaptation in order for it to have benefited me and my cold weather schoolmates. But what would have been the problem with that? If we had learned to jar and can and preserve, or to cook collard greens, or to rehydrate dried beans—would time spent learning the basics of gastronomy have compromised the rest of our educations?
The answer to those questions is that to the contrary, some education in how to prepare and consume food would have augmented our efforts in other disciplines. For starters, it’s considerably more difficult to be a conscientious and studious adolescent while you’re trying to fit in socially with a peer group that’s teasing you because you’re fat. But additionally, and this is something that advocates of physical education have been saying for years, a healthy young body is quite a lot more conducive to mental exertion than one hopped up on sugar or carbohydrates.
I don’t know how differently I would have felt if I had eaten poached eggs with spinach and roasted tomatoes in those days instead of heaping bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but it’s an experiment I’d surely sign on to if I had the chance. And it bears mention, to Alice Waters’ detractors who shout that she’s a socio-economic elitist–my egg breakfast would have cost about the same as my two bowls of General Mills cereal. (I don’t find the slightest hint of legitimacy in the argument about Waters’ elitism put forth by Chef Bourdain and others when they watch her poach an egg on national television in her expensive wood oven in Berkeley. Isn’t it obvious, when looking at the scope of her work, when considering her focus on organics, on vegetables, on education, that she’s much more interested in good healthy eating than she is in promoting expensive food or showing off her fancy kitchen?)
The facts and statistics that Caitlin Flanagan would surely unearth if she was as interested in them as she is in carving up Alice Waters, is that Americans have as woeful an understanding of food as they ever have. The meteoric rise of interest in cooking shows on television, celebrity chefs all over the country, and in watching Anthony Bourdain eat sparrows in Laos don’t seem to have done much to stem the tide of obesity and heart disease in this country. The CDC reported last month that the number of obese Americans seems to have leveled off in the last five years—we’ve reached a plateau at an even third, 34% of the overall population, which happens to be twice as high as the percentage was in 1980. The percentage of obese children has tripled since then.
But one wonders, really, why statistics are even necessary in this conversation. My sister, who works as a school administrator in Portland, Oregon (perhaps the most progressive food city in the country), told me recently that even in Portland, school lunches have in some sense actually gotten worse than they were when she and I were eating them twenty years ago. Cafeterias these days are churning out variations of the same fried processed chicken and mass-produced frozen pizza that we used to eat before fifth period history class. And as she pointed out, who would disagree with the idea that there are all kinds of gravely important issues that tie in to kids’ diets? Certainly obesity and mood variation are fundamentally connected, but proclivities to ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, perhaps skin problems are all enmeshed in the question of what kids eat.
We can only hope that Alice Waters and her colleagues and all the rest of us find new ways to improve the situation, which has for so long in this country been taken for granted but which so intensely requires our attention. So strange it is that the question of food and eating has become a political lightning rod. On the one hand there are figures like Alice Waters, who pleads with her country to learn how to eat–an admonition so clearly justified that it seems to defy contention. On the other hand we observe a sort of backlash to her work, from the likes of Chang and Bourdain and Flanagan, and it’s tempting to think that their complaints really are the product of some kind of jealousy. She is a great figure, and she does carry a message, and such people tend to inspire dissent.
But there is something deeper here, and it has to do with the shallowest of considerations. In the midst of a paragraph in ‘Cultivating Failure’ about visits to two supermarkets in the poor city of Compton outside Los Angeles, while attempting to establish her own gastronomical credibility, Flanagan writes ‘The produce section—packed with large families, most of them Hispanic—was like a dreamscape of strange and wonderful offerings: tomatillos, giant mangoes, cactus leaves, bunches of beets with their leaves on, chayote squash, red yams, yucca root. An entire string section of chiles: serrano, Anaheim, green, red, yellow. All of it was dirt cheap, as were the bulk beans and rice. Small children stood beside shopping carts with the complacent, slightly dazed look of kids whose mothers are taking care of business.’
She continues in the next paragraph to declare that this Hispanic market is a triumph of capitalism, because see? Real vegetables (beets with the leaves on!) are already available everywhere, even in Compton! Never mind that Compton is closer to a huge supply of vegetable-growing farms than almost every other city in the country, or that the point she makes doesn’t in any way substantiate her larger argument about the needlessness of food education. Obviously, a great many people who live in Compton are passing on the beets with leaves and opting instead for McDonald’s, Krispy Kreme and bags of fried pork skin.
This passage, in which her argument is the weakest, while she departs the world of statistics and writes instead about the inside of Ralph’s supermarkets in Southern California, reveals what I think is the defining aspect of her perspective, and also of Chang’s and Bourdain’s. The fact is that nourishing one’s self by eating well is so primary a human act, such an indisputable right of any living creature on this planet, that it makes sense that we should feel a good deal of collective shame and embarrassment that our national diet is in such a shambles. It’s natural for some people to lash out when they feel those things, whether they know they’re feeling them or not. It would be better of course to direct energy towards addressing the problem, which maybe could be eased by working with young people before they develop the bad habits to which so many people presently succumb. Maybe the seeds could be planted in the schoolyard.

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.

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.

For this reason, the state of wine production seems to a number of people with interests in gastronomy, the environment, art, and human culture at large as a monumentally important window to the human soul. When someone in the wine trade tastes a wine from Tuscany which seems clearly to have been made, intentionally, to taste like a wine from Bordeaux or Napa, he or she might feel a pang of defensiveness for the centuries-old traditions of Tuscan winemaking. Many of us are glad to know that we don’t have to eat food from McDonald’s when we’re hungry. We’re also grateful that global wine production remains relatively de-centralized, and that there are thousands of practitioners all over the world who exert their skills and tastes particularly, in the name of their homes and traditions.
We have been waiting patiently, since wine became a truly global commodity in the 1980’s, for someone to tackle these issues and others head on, from the perspective of experience and with the passion of one who has spent decades devoted to the preservation of greatness and diversity and the study of the wine market’s evolution. There are not so many Americans with feet in both the new and old worlds who might have been capable of assuming such a responsibility.
Neal Rosenthal’s recently published “Reflections of a Wine Merchant,” culled from three decades of experience buying wines from Europeans and selling it to Americans, is everything we might have hoped for. Filled with stories about his efforts to introduce the character—and characters, of the old world to dinner tables across the United States, readers of this book will be regaled with tales of winemaking families from Burgundy to Umbria and with cultural impressions borne of those experiences.
It is the book about wine that we have needed direly, and one which helps immeasurably as we try to hold our bearings—gastronomically and otherwise, in a world growing faster and less personal by the minute.

* * *

I first came to know of Neal Rosenthal when I was working as a server at a restaurant called Campanile in Los Angeles. I had become enamored there with a wine that came from Umbria in Italy and was made by a man named Paolo Bea. It had a colorful, iconoclastic label that looked as though it had been hand-scrawled, it tasted completely unlike anything else I had ever tasted, like it had lots of different flavors, and it was utterly delicious.
There was a label bearing Neal’s name on the back of those Paolo Bea bottles that would come to seem ubiquitous to me soon after. I found a job as a sommelier at another restaurant, and I was suddenly in charge of finding a few hundred different wines to buy for the wine list. For reasons that were mostly political, I could not have filled that list only with wines that had been imported by Rosenthal Wine Merchant, but I quickly realized that just about every one of my favorite imported wines came from Neal’s portfolio.
It would have been a strange coincidence had it been just luck. I bought imported wines then from as many as ten or twelve different purveyors, and most of them sold good wines at fair prices. But the wines that were consistently the most distinctive and luscious, and those which most of the time seemed to deliver the most quality for the price, consistently bore the Rosenthal label.
The portfolio was full of French and Italian producers who seemed to me, in my early-career naivete, that they must have been among the leading producers from their respective areas. There were the Brovia wines from Barolo, those made by Jacques Puffeney from France’s Jura, Ghislaine Barthod, Jean-Marie Fourrier and Edmond Cornu from Burgundy, Philippe Foreau’s Vouvrays, of course those mysteriously delicious Umbrian wines from Paolo Bea.
As I began to put months and years under my belt as a wine buyer, what were once suspicions about the consistent quality in the Rosenthal portfolio became some of my most deeply held convictions. I learned at one point of a word called ‘typicity,’ which is a word used to describe a wine that tastes as it should based on the place from which it comes. While producers from areas all over the globe have in recent years made wines with the ostensible purpose of seeing them compare favorably with highly-rated, thick and juicy Cabernets from Bordeaux and Napa, Rosenthal’s producers seem to demonstrate no such envy. They don’t lack ambition or greatness, but neither will anything stand in the way of them remaining true to their viticultural origins—which in many cases are centuries in the making.
The more I learned about wine—about what it takes to make it well, about the endlessly complex world of the global wine market, and about fine wine’s stature as one of the last examples of widely appreciable artisanal products in the world, the more I came to understand that the distinctiveness of Neal’s wines had nothing to do with coincidence. To the contrary, the composition of the Rosenthal portfolio and its longevity can only be the result of a number of radical commitments: to quality, to diversity, and to families and traditions.

* * *

The core of the success of Rosenthal’s career and also of his book can be traced to a chapter called ‘Loyalty,’ in which he describes the early days of his experiences buying wine. He writes specifically about his efforts to build relationships with producers from the French region of Burgundy, which is legendary as both a source for many of the world’s greatest wines and also for the frustration it promises for those foolish enough to expect any degree of consistency from it. Burgundy is one of the northern-most regions in the world that sometimes produces superior wines, and is the old-world home of the red grape pinot noir, which suffers considerably in weather which is either too hot or too cool. In Burgundy especially, the famously fickle pinot noir behaves like a moody Broadway diva who occasionally delivers performances of a lifetime.
Because of its geographic position and weather patterns, summers in Burgundy are sometimes glorious seasons of warm days and cool nights, but more often than not something happens—a hailstorm in early September or unremitting heat from June until August, which gives people the impression that a Burgundian vintage has been less than ideal. Vintages thought to be mediocre have vastly outnumbered those thought to be great. Some might say global warming has had an opposite effect in recent years—it’s been a long time since Burgundy had what was considered to be a terrible vintage. But still grape-growing conditions there carry no more guarantee than they did in the 1930’s and 40’s, when, an older winemaker once told me, there were years when conditions were so poor that wine simply could not be produced.
When Rosenthal was courting Burgundy winemakers in the mid-1980’s, the region had recently experienced a spate of challenging vintages. With the exception of excellent wines from 1978, production from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s was inconsistent at best and critically rejected at worst. By the time he arrived to taste the uneven results of the 1984 vintage and the better 1985’s, the producers with whom Rosenthal had been working were glum from a string of tough years. It was, he writes, an important turning point.
“A farmer’s fate is tied to the weather. To survive, a grower needs a proper partner, not someone who is there when the sun is out but heads for higher ground alone during the flood. It was clear to me what I had to do. I had to buy the 1984’s just as I had purchased the preceding vintages, in the same quantities but at a slightly lower price. I did precisely that, and although we struggled to sell through those wines (many of which, by the way, were quite pleasant) and suffered a good deal of financial pain, that decision was one of the most enlightened and productive of my career.”
What is expressed explicitly in this section is that it made good business sense for him to approach his developing relationships with the consistency he describes. He realized that his growers could not afford to lose entire vintages which were deemed, rightly or not, to be sub-par, and he demonstrated his willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with them in tough times. For proof that this mentality was indeed valued by his winegrowers as much as he suggests, one need look no further than the longevity of his relationships. In an era in which many producers and importers suffer ruptured business alliances every few years or more often, the Rosenthal portfolio is full of wines which have been imported by Neal Rosenthal, exclusively, for twenty years or more.
It goes without saying, especially in Burgundy, that these relationships have lived through vintages of all sorts of different qualities and complexions. There have surely been thousands of conversations between Neal and his producers, at different points in different growing seasons, about what to expect based on what had already transpired, and about what surprises might have been lurking around the corner. Together, they have shared countless hours of hope and optimism and have endured difficult stretches of worry and despair. Together, they have arrived at the market to present—literally—the fruits of their labor. The story of how they managed hasn’t ever been the same, but it’s always been true. Sometimes the sun shone brightly and sometimes it rained. Sometimes the music sounded like Mozart and sometimes, it sounded like Little Richard.
And what Neal, for all of his achievement, might still be too humble to acknowledge, is that this is the real source of Rosenthal Wine Merchant’s success and of its power–his indellible thumbprint in the wine market. What he stops just short of saying is that his company, and indeed the world, actually thrives on the ‘down’ years. He has known this better than anyone. We need them the same way we need rainstorms in the summer, the same way we need rest after activity, and for the same reason we love tragedy in drama as much as comedy. A world without variation is a world without context, and quite obviously, a world without flavor. A wine market in which every bottle is a ten out of ten every year is a market that might as well be trading oil or copper.
I have no wish to take anything away from legendary wines or great vintages—god bless masterpieces of all kinds, be they painted on canvas or corked up in bottles. But ‘great’ wines also come with expectations, and in my experience it has often been the case that the most profound sips of wine have also been impossible to predict. Raise a glass of wine that someone has described as one of the greatest wines ever made, and your mind will set to analyzing and gauging whether or not the juice is really so perfect. It goes without saying–this isn’t any fun at all. It’s entirely preferable to get lost in something complex and beautiful and anonymous. (Once or twice, I have even exploited this dynamic by seeking out wines from notorious vintages which were reputed by critics to be particularly terrible. “Foul barnyard aromas have long beset this wine,” wrote Robert Parker about the 1970 Chateau Leoville-Poyferre, which he awarded 65 points and which a friend and I thought was pretty tasty.)
The wonderfully unlikely upshot of off-vintage wines is that they can often be more fun than the more heralded wines which are made before or after them. A friend of mine in the wine business was sitting at the bar at my restaurant having dinner one night last year and looked up at me with a canary-eating grin when I asked him how he was doing. “I’m eating a burger and drinking off-vintage Cornas,” he said, referring to the wine I had recommended from the traditional little village in the Northern Rhone. “How could life be any better?”

* * *

The wine my friend was drinking at the bar that night was a 2002 Cornas ‘La Geynale,’ made by Robert Michel, who has been a stalwart in the Rosenthal portfolio since the mid-1990’s. If not for his wines, I’m not sure I would have the impression of the syrah grape that I do, and neither would the French word ‘sauvage’ be the integral part of my wine lexicon that it is. I believe I probably discovered that word, which the French use to describe wines that are a little rough around the edges (and perhaps which are beset by barnyard aromas), when I was in my first job as a wine director and tasting a wine made by Robert Michel and doing some research to try and figure out how to explain Cornas, and these flavors, to my staff.
Sadly, as described in the closing pages of Reflections of a Wine Merchant, Michel two years ago announced his retirement to Rosenthal and his intention to close his winemaking career with the vintage of 2006. He had had a falling out with his wife, and his only son gave no indication of wanting to carry on his father’s work, and so there was eventually no choice but to cease production and sell his vineyard holdings. Someone may carry on tending the vines in the La Geynale vineyard in Cornas, but when the last 2006 Michel wines disappear from retail shelves and restaurant lists around the world in a few years, a style will be lost forever. Cornas is a tiny village with a mere half-dozen serious producers, and perhaps one or two of them share Michel’s taste for the classical sauvage qualities of Cornas syrah.
It is hard to say exactly what the world will be missing following Robert Michel’s retirement. Certainly it does not spell any sort of larger end in the world of wine. French syrah will continue to be produced at a very high level of quality, and even some wines which Michel himself would have been proud to make will surely remain after his are no longer available. And of course also it is easy to become too sentimental, to ascribe too much importance to one person’s work and elevate the importance of his contributions beyond what is reasonable.
But to characterize what is at stake with an even hand, I think, is to acknowledge the value of a winemaker who has spent a lifetime working to hone a particular sense of taste. We tend in this country to celebrate lifetimes of achievement in medicine, in politics, in work conducted around film cameras, and those disciplines surely are worthy of the respect they are accorded. America’s relationship with matters of taste has never enjoyed quite the firmness of footing as have those more empirical enterprises.
Neal Rosenthal, for one, has spent most of his life in the service of America’s taste, and in recognition of its importance. He has worked tirelessly not only to promote and preserve the great winemaking traditions of Europe, but also to make them accessible and discernable to a public with a famous appetite for speed and a penchant for forgetfulness. Perhaps it is this very juxtaposition that lends his memoir such compact force, delivering extraordinarily poignant and prescient cultural criticism in 200 short pages. And perhaps it is the same juxtaposition that fuels the inexhaustible drive of a man in his mid-60’s who reflected, upon the recent retirement of his lone Cornas producer: “Our ledger in the northern Rhone is now in deficit. We compensate by fleshing out our selections in other places, the curious wines of the Jura, or those of a committed grower in the northwestern reaches of Champagne, or an undiscovered fanatic in the less-heralded Loire appellation of Menetou-Salon. But the loss is there, it is deeply felt, and I will continue to explore, hoping to find someone, young or old, who will surface from the granite soils of Cornas or the seductive earth of Hermitage to satisfy our taste for these important wines.”

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.

First we anticipate the wine (I’ve included myself in the gathering — who wouldn’t?), which was bought five years ago but might be approaching its prime now. Then we pour and take our first smells from the glass. Then the first sips, and then, on our own time, as the evening progresses and the wine relaxes, we might consciously or unconsciously take a dreamy wander through a vineyard on a warm September afternoon in 1998, when the guy who made this wine was tasting grapes and decided it was time to pick.

Scenes like these, at the dinner table and in the vineyard, are what give wine its reputation for romance. When we put a corkscrew into a cork, our experience is characterized by anticipation, by the sensuality of smells and tastes and the sharing of that sensuality, and by the fantasy of imagining the origins and the life of the bottle.

But if we don’t take our time, if we don’t consider what we’re drinking, if we turn the bottle upside down and drink the contents like it’s light beer, there aren’t any flavors in the world that will make up for what we’ve lost. And much as we might hope that pleasures of the dinner table might be exempt from the global rush to quicken, miniaturize and streamline, there is ample evidence to suggest that they need some defending.

To survey the gastronomic concepts that have most powerfully captured American imaginations and curiosities over the last twenty years — critics’ scoring systems, which have encouraged wine drinkers all over the world to consider the differences between 92 and 96 point juice; or the popularity of wine flights, which invite tasters to compare and contrast sips of wine in multiple glasses as though they are examining laboratory specimens — is to find generally that we might not be savoring as much as we could should be.

The last few years have seen a proliferation of what might best be called wine dispensaries, little shops where patrons purchase single ounces of wine at a time by swiping their credit cards in much the same way that we pay for gasoline. The upside of this presentation is the opportunity to sample from a huge selection of wines, some of them very expensive, without committing to buying more than an ounce. Just like numerical ratings and wine flights, these shops can be great resources, especially for those working in the industry.

But I’m reminded of a remark the French chef Mimi Hebert once made to me while decrying the proliferation of menus offering small plates. “If the dish is good,” she said, “I don’t know what’s really happening until the fifth or sixth bite. It takes me that long to figure out all the flavors and textures.”

She might just as well have been talking about good wine, which becomes eminently more approachable as it’s shown the courtesy of a little patience. From its infancy as a bubbling swamp of fermenting grape juice to its shining moment on a dinner table years later, wine is an ever-evolving living organism, with vulnerabilities, and expressions of maturation, and distinct personal quirks and harmonies.

Complex flavors are what make great food delicious, and the nuance they bring to the dining experience is no different than what great character development does for novels or subtle foreshadowing does for great symphonies. None of these elements are discernable immediately, of course, and nor would anyone want them to be. Their very appeal is that appreciating them is a gradually evolving process.

That the same is true for good wine is something that anyone who has ever drunk a full half of a good bottle understands. The experience of that wine after ten ounces and forty minutes is entirely different from what it was when the cork came out of the bottle.

I once heard Aubert de Villaine from Domaine de la Romanee Conti in Burgundy say that he thinks of his wines as prisoners until they are let out of their bottles—living in suspended animation until they’re allowed to breathe again. The great Chateauneuf-du-Pape producer Henri Bonneau once compared an easy-drinking, fruit-forward wine to a prostitute, who he said puts all of her charm on display instantly. Better wines, he implied, leave a little something to be discovered down the road.

Here again, one is reminded of all the world’s great art forms, and the time it takes to appreciate all of them. Who would want to absorb the emotional experience of a great film in thirty seconds or a painting in one glance? What charms us is the duration of the thing, the consideration, the chewing on it.

At a winemaker event last summer at the restaurant where I work, winemaker Bob Lindquist, who has spent the better part of the last thirty years tending the vines and barrels at Qupé Wine Cellars outside Santa Maria, stood before a small gathering of people who had assembled to taste his wines and hear him say a few words about his work. When the chatter subsided to the point that Bob could be heard, he chose not to speak about the flavors of his wines, the qualities of certain vintages, or macerations and fermentations. He simply said that when he started making wine in the 1970’s, he did so mostly because he was struck by the sanctity of one simple experience: the act of two people drinking a bottle of wine together over dinner. The sharing of the bottle, he said, was for him the holiest part of the process, and was the most important motivating factor behind his life’s work.

Probably because I work so closely with wine, tasting dozens every week and spending countless hours dissecting flavors and considering values and looking at scores, and probably also because I’m something of a romantic, I’ll never forget what Bob said that night. There are few pleasures in the world as magical as savoring a great bottle of wine, and all we need to unlock them is patience and time.

Matt: Welcome to the table.

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

Matt: It’s an amazing moment for you. Tell me about life. What’s it like to be you right now?

‘96HC: Well, Matt, I am feeling especially blessed lately. I really just feel incredibly lucky. Things are really starting to hit on all cylinders, and I feel as though my self-expression has just turned a corner.

Matt: These last few years have been good to you.

‘96HC: They have.

Matt: Well you certianly look beautiful. I have to say, you have a kind of radiance about you.

‘96HC: Thank you Matt.

Matt: So tell me, how does the world look today, to you–I mean now, in 2008?

‘96HC: Do you mean the world of wine, or are you asking me to comment on the entire globe?

Matt: (laughs) I’d love to know your thoughts on a whole range of other subjects, but the wine landscape is so interesting right now, isn’t it?

‘96HC: Oh it is Matt. There’s so much change and so many winemakers pushing the envelope in all sorts of interesting ways. It’s a very exciting time to be viticultural.

Matt: And what’s your sense of where we are right now?

‘96HC: I guess if I were to try to offer a snapshot of my sense of things now it would be that intensity seems to be on the rise. You have to remember, Matt, I come from a vintage that was really the tail end of a blessed little run in California in the early to mid-1990’s.

Matt: Yes.

‘96HC: Because, you know, beginning in 1990 we basically had this run of lovely little vintages.

Matt: Until 1997.

‘96HC: Well of course 1997 represented a watershed, at least in Napa–you know, I’m from Sonoma. But in the years between 1990 and 1996, we had these growing seasons that were all extraordinarily temperate, even though of course they all had their subtleties. Especially the back half, though, from ‘93 through my vintage, just produced an incredible number of wines that I think are truly among the greatest wines California has ever produced. 1994 and 1995 of course were nearly perfect, though I find the ’94’s for the most part to seem like stunners in evening gowns and the ’95’s to have a bit more meat on their bones.

Matt: Do you think those wines have long lives ahead of them?

‘96HC: Oh, I think they’ll live to ripe old ages.

Matt: And so too with the ’97’s?

‘96HC: Wow you’re really interested in the ’97’s, aren’t you?

Matt: I remember a lot of talk about them.

‘96HC: Yes, there was.

Matt: Robert Parker loved that vintage.

‘96HC: Yes, he did.

Matt: And the wines had a lot of hype, and from what I understand there’s been some dissent to the idea that it really was a great vintage–

‘96HC: Yes, I think Matt that the whole situation wiht the ‘97 wines–specifically Napa cabernets I think are what you’re talking about, I just think it’s all been very unfortunate.

Matt: How so?

‘96HC: Well, because the truth is that those wines were very ripe, and continue to be, but all of that praise from Parker I think confused people, who thought that a great, classic, long-lived vintage and a favorite Parker vintage are the same thing. And it has turned out now that the ’98’s, which Parker didn’t like very much at all, are in excellent shape, probably because of brighter acid, and that many people actually prefer them to the majority of ’97’s.

Matt: What do you think of Mr. Parker?

‘96HC: I think he’s brilliant, to begin with. And I think he’s done a tremendous service to the country, really, with all the attention he’s brought to the world of wine. He hasn’t ever seemed very interested in me or Hanzell of course, but we’ve had our friends over the years–and there hasn’t been very much of us to go around anyway.

Matt: How many cases?

‘96HC: For most of Bob’s tenure–do you know about Bob?

Matt: Bob Sessions, you mean.

‘96HC: Yes, well Bob Sessions is about the most wonderful man in the world. Am I allowed to say that about the man who made me? (giggles) Bob made Hanzell wines from the early seventies until five or six years ago. Well never mind the story of Bob. You asked about production. It was usually between 500 and 1000 cases–both the chardonnay and the pinot noir. I think they have it in mind to make a touch more now.

Matt: Who is ‘they’?

‘96HC: Well Jean Arnold Sessions, Bob’s wife, and Michael Terrien, who is the winemaker at Hanzell now are running the winery.

Matt: And have things changed there since Bob left? It must be difficult to maintain continuity in a transition like that.

‘96HC: I think it is Matt. Certainly Jean and Michael are both working hard to promote Hanzell and in so doing to preserve the legacy that Bob created. My feeling is that Michael’s tastes are not Bob’s tastes exactly, but that almost goes without saying. No two people have exactly the same attitudes about something as artistic as winemaking.

Matt: Tell me about that. How can those approaches be different.

‘96HC: Well I’m no expert in winemaking, but it seems to me that it all depends, to some degree, on what the actual process of making wine means to you. I think I would say that Bob’s greatest legacy, the thing about him that really separated his work especially from a lot of what’s going on today, was his humility and his willingness to let the wines speak for themselves. Whatever that hillside in Sonoma produced from year to year, whatever the qualities of the fruit, I really believe that Bob just felt like a steward. He was there to facilitate, which when you think about it, when you think about that sort of communion with nature, to just show up for work everyday for thirty years and care for vines and grapes–it’s quite an amazing thing.

Matt: Do you think that Michael Terrien approaches his work the same way?

‘96HC: Well you have to understand, Matt. It’s such a different world today than it was even in the early 1990’s. Wine has become big business, in just about every way. There’s a star quality that goes along with making wine now, and there are a lot of dollars on the line, and the examples of prominent wineries that escape those realities are far and few between.

Matt: So how does Michael approach his job differently, say, than Bob does?

‘96HC: Well listen, Matt, Michael is a very wonderful guy. He’s bright, and very hard working, and I think he’s an excellent winemaker. But I do think that to compare the way he approaches his work with the way Bob did is to compare apples and oranges. Michael is still young, and he’s a little brash, and I think he thinks about making a splash and really putting Hanzell on the map. I’m not sure Bob ever thought about a map. I’m really not. He’s very shy, you know, and I think he worked like a monk for all those years. The magnificent result is that he made thirty years worth of the greatest wines California has ever produced, even though when we’re young we’re not particularly flashy or, you know, opulent.

I do think that Michael is interested in making wines that are somewhat more opulent when they’re young, but I don’t blame him for it any more than I celebrate Bob for doing what he did. I think it’s just a matter of a changing world, and the dynamics of the wine market.

Matt: Doesn’t it make you sad, though, to think that a tradition has gone by the boards?

‘96HC: I prefer to think of these things in terms of phases. We’re living in a time now when winemakers juggle a handful of different projects at once, and people like Michel Rolland–what’s his nickname? The flying consultant, or something like that? People fly around and analyze a grape here or a grape there and computers make the wine and that’s the way it is. But that doesn’t mean that’s the way it will always be.

Matt: What a pleasure it has been to have you here, and I have to say, to drink you. Thank you.

‘96HC: Thank you Matt. I’m honored to have been opened at this stage in my life.

Matt: I look forward to checking in on you again in a few years.

‘96HC: See you then.