Being a sommelier today is very different than what it has been previously. Forget the fact that a contemporary somm needs to be aware of wines coming from Greece, Argentina, Portugal and South Africa in addition to the derigeur classics- Italy, France, and California. They have to be more adept at inventory management, staff training, cont controls and oh yeah, they need to know about pairing wine with food. Not as obvious today as it once was. Let me explain…

Historically there has been a ‘traditional’ culinary order that a sommelier addressed on the floor of a dining room: an appetizer or salad, a ‘main’ culminating in a dessert. Sure maybe a cheese course was fit in between the entrée and the sweet or an amuse was tossed in at the beginning to titillate the palate but the basic architecture of the meal was essentially consistent. But that’s not the case of many restaurants today. Continue reading »

Sometimes things surprise me. A bottle of wine that I didn’t think would age that did, a restaurant meal that blew me away that was completely unexpected, and people’s reactions to different reading materials. Case in point was my recent factoids blog of a few weeks back. I am personally obsessed with food and beverage

related tidbits; you can use them for conversation starters, selling business (really!) and impressing folks who come from those fields who themselves may not know that intriguing morsel of wisdom. So…back for a command performance, ‘did you know…” (FYI, all of these factoids are pulled from Gourmet magazine’s regular feature “Good Living”.)

For much of Italian history, eggplant and fennel were considered Jewish rather than pan-Italian delicacies (sure beats gefilte fish and kugel!) (April 2008)

Thomas Jefferson is credited with having brought French fries to the colonies. He was so enamored with the pommes frites he had in Paris that he brought home the recipe and served them at the White House (something to snack on while coming up with all those important policies.) (March 2008) Continue reading »

I was chatting with a good friend of mine who is planning a major trip to Europe and asked me for some advice on where to dine (restaurant recommendations) and how ambitious he should be in the ten days he was based out of his two metro locations, Paris and Barcelona. Lucky him!

After giving him a list of spots to dine, I gave him my advice on ambition and I think it surprised him. Let me explain. I have long since given up the ‘death march’ of trying to jam in as many different meals as possible during a trip and checking them off like a ‘to do’ list. Continue reading »

How to go about thinking about dinner varies from household to household. Some are avid cookbook followers, snapping up each and every new offering as they hit the store shelves or become available on Amazon. Others religiously sift through the current offerings of recipes as put forward monthly by Food and Wine magazine, Saveur or Gourmet. Others have their standbys (fish on Friday, Chinese on Sunday.) Then there’s the segment of what I call ‘market shoppers’. I put myself mostly in this camp.

What is a market shopper you may ask? A market shopper attacks the table by knowing what’s in season, at its peak of ripeness and is most flavorful. For me that means that I always begin at the produce and fruit sections of the market (farmers or super) and see what’s screaming at me. In the summer it could be corn, tomatoes and nectarines. In the Spring it may be peas and berries. Once I have decided on what produce rocks my world, then I decide the center of the plate, aka the ‘protein’. That’s not to say I always opt for meat, poultry or fish. Indeed I may go vegetarian if the offerings and mood strikes. Continue reading »

One of the questions I am most frequently asked is how do you know when to buy a wine? Or simply put, how do you know if a wine will age well? Great questions..complex answer.

The easy part of it is to know that certain attributes in wines will enable a wine to age longer. Tannin and sugar are two obvious preservatives. That’s why many of the longest lived wines are sweet dessert wines and big full-bodied and intense reds. Indeed collectors who are serious regularly collect big tannic reds like Bordeaux, Barolo, Cote Rotie, Napa Valley Cabernet along with their Sauternes, TBA Germans and, of course, Vintage Port.

Acidity too is a needed for a wine to age and high levels in wines with balance are often good indicators of wine’s ability to cellar well. Continue reading »

It was just a matter of time until wine too would succumb to the will and momentum of technology. While the history of wine is long, documented, and filled with centuries of romantic lore, today’s wine ‘business’ is markedly different than that of your grandparents. Availability is awesome. We can get wines from all over the world and from the far reaches of the smallest corners of countries that mere decades ago were unavailable to us. We’ve flirted with tech in vineyards and wineries for years; quietly improving wine quality thru now standard-operating-procedure advents like computerized fermenters, micro-oxygenation and electronic gadgets that sense leaf transpiration in vineyards. Though we reap the benefits of such tech in wine quality, it doesn’t visibly per se touch the consumer. Tech has been mostly behind the scenes…until recently.

I was chatting with a friend who does a lot of work in Korea and who has the rights to the Enomatic wine serving system in that part of the world. You may not know it by name but if you’ve been to Napa Valley’s Copia or a number of wine bars and wine destination restaurants who use this sleek looking, card swipe apparatus that allows consumers to try wines by the glass with the pull of a wine ‘debit card’ done in wine-perfect conditions that not only preserve the wine’s quality but give some panache to the presentation. Check it out at www.enomatic.com to see what I am talking about. Continue reading »

I don’t know if you do the same… but I subscribe to a lot of magazines that relate to my professional interests- food and wine. As I get busy, they stack up by the bedside and grow from a small pile of mixed colors and titles by my crocs (the modern day slippers for many) until they reach the height of the bed table and then I panic. Not being one who likes to miss out on anything, I put aside a few hours and hit the stack with a single-side razor blade and stapler and cut out all of the articles I want to save. Articles about wines and wine regions, restaurants to check out next time I am traveling, wine gadgets, breaking appellation news and any salient data and information that may, at some point, come in handy. You never know.

So the answer your surmised question is yes, I have virtually ever meaningful article (to me) from all the key publications in several dozen hanging files in several file shelves in my office going back to the mid 80’s. Really. When I come in to add new articles, I toss the articles that are no longer relevant, timely or, over time, accurate. It’s a great discipline and one that keeps me focused. Continue reading »