Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  Clinton is always a great customer. He’s always wanted to be a wine guy, and he asked a lot of questions. I tried to explain to him about the wine I make in Friuli, in northeastern Italy, but he had no idea what I was talking about. Then it dawned on me that right next to the winery, twenty clicks down the road, is Aviano Air Base. Once I mentioned that, he knew exactly where it was—he had been there many times, of course—and now he was enthusiastically telling me things about Italy and insane details of NATO policy that I could not possibly understand. No matter, he always drank whatever I recommended—always my own wine, and he loved it.

  President Clinton would stop traffic when he got up from the table to go to the restroom, and he would literally go to every other table and say hi to everyone. He’d work the whole room, then go outside on the street and work the line. He was always working. Bill’s got giant hands, very warm and soft as marshmallows. When he shakes your hand, you get the feeling that you’re floating in amniotic fluid. It’s hard not to trust him.

  He used to come into Babbo pretty often. He would roll with these heavy finance guys. They liked to whoop it up, a lot of wine and a lot of talk. We got to know him a little, and the people who work with him on the Clinton Foundation, which is based in Harlem. We believe in Bill and his charities—we’ve done events for them and have always contributed. One year we donated a barrel of wine—that’s 225 liters, which is three hundred bottles, or thirty cases of wine—but we bottled it into twelve massive eighteen-liter bottles, each with original art, hand-painted right on the bottle and signed by Bono. Someone paid half a million bucks for the whole shebang.

  One night he came in with Bob Kerrey and I think another man and a woman, and we sat them at Table One, which is the four-top in the front left corner as you come in. This was in 2001, and they had come from a St. John’s basketball game at Madison Square Garden. He always had a few Secret Service guys with him, but not as many as you’d think, and they did a good job of staying out of the way. I kept thinking, Boy, that’s Mission Impossible—keeping an eye on Bill Clinton must be like herding cats.

  Now, if you recall, Bob Kerrey, back in 1991, when he was still a U.S. senator, sabotaged his run for president by telling Bill Clinton a lesbian joke that was picked up by a TV camera. (At the time Bill waffled and refused to say if he’d laughed or not.) That gaffe pretty much cost Kerrey the election and any chance for higher office.

  The tables in Babbo are tight. At the table next to Bill and his party were four very sharp women who saw them come in and just hunkered down. I think one of the girls was from Vanity Fair, and she was with her friends, who all had the unmistakably hungry look of gossip columnists and publicists, and they were not moving, not a fucking inch—never mind that they had already finished dessert and had already called for the check.

  At Clinton’s table it was like guys’ golf-course talk, lots of backslapping and drinking. The ex-president is always funny, but he appears to have a hard time with any sort of self-governance. Like, it seems that he is always trying to watch his weight, but when it’s time to order, he goes nuts with the menu.

  These guys, wherever they show up, are treated as if they’re on a private jet. Wherever they are, they behave like they are the only people in the room. Sometimes that doesn’t quite work out for them. The women sitting at the other table across from them were tuned in and turned on, and they weren’t moving.

  At a certain point, I told President Clinton, politely, that they might want to dial it down—there was a table of plugged-in celebrity-journalist types sitting next to them. Discretion may turn out to be the better part of valor after all. He was cordial and polite, as always, and kept on telling the jokes.

  And I wasn’t the only one telling them to cool it—the woman at their table, who I was later told was a former White House counsel, was also telling him to shut the fuck up.

  The whole Monica Lewinsky thing was still very much in the air. Try as he could, Clinton could not separate himself from his reputation as a sleaze. Lately he’d been making a huge public effort to behave, what with his wife making a go at a career as senator, and you’d think he would have been a little concerned about getting busted telling dirty jokes in a restaurant. But there is definitely an air of Greater-Than-Thou-ness about Clinton—in the sense that after all he’s been through, he’s still a total rock star. Shit doesn’t stick to him; he’s like the Teflon Don. Maybe he kind of cares about what people think, but he doesn’t really care, because he’s Bill Clinton.

  At the moment the joke that got him in hot water didn’t seem like such a big deal—in fact, he was just repeating the same bad gag that Kerrey had told him years before. You could even say that at this juncture it had historical significance.

  And, truthfully, not only isn’t it all that offensive, but the butt of the joke wasn’t even lesbians-at-large—rather, it was Jerry Brown, the ex-hippie former and now present governor of California. The joke was about Brown going into a bar and approaching a couple of lesbians. For those of you who can handle it, the punch line went something like this: “I like to eat pussy. Does that make me a lesbian, too?”

  I guess that’s what passes for humor in the locker rooms of liberal politicians.

  The next day the papers and the Internet were howling. That gag had sunk Kerrey in the ’92 Democratic primary, and now, nine years later, they still hadn’t learned their lesson! Oh, the humiliation! One Web site wondered if Clinton and Kerrey were going to face a lesbian firing squad—what they called a “Militia Etheridge.”

  A few others who didn’t think it was so funny wondered just how many times he was going to embarrass Hillary before she finally tossed him out.

  We make such an effort to keep things chummy at Babbo, and yet President Clinton got busted for telling a dirty joke, no easy feat. Even more embarrassing, Bob Kerrey got screwed for the same joke for the second time. For him it was double jeopardy. To me it was always amazing how Bill Clinton, a brilliant lawyer in a previous life, could ever let something like that happen.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sour Grapes

  No bottle of wine costs more than five dollars to make. Understand this and you are well on your way to cutting through the bullshit of the wine world.

  Wine is a commodity item, even though it has less inherent value than most things you would buy or trade. The price is driven purely by supply and demand, mystique and marketing, and ratings.

  Grapes are basically 90 percent sugar and water, plus some dry extract, the pits and skins. What distinguishes wine from grape juice is a naturally occurring phenomenon, the wonderful process of alcoholic fermentation. Single-cell yeasts are the heroes of this story—their whole life function is to transform sugar into alcohol. Can you imagine? That is some noble shit.

  You may think that survival is an intuitive, instinctive reaction that exists solely among animals, but even plants struggle to exist. It’s a reproductive imperative, and grapevines, as all living things do, put every ounce of vigor they have into reproducing themselves—the fruit is essentially the vine’s attempt to propagate its species. It takes a lot of passion to want to exist in the future. You have to respect that.

  The phenomenon of fruit fermenting into alcohol is something that happened before man had the bright idea to control it and have a party with the results—it really is God’s way. Beer is like cooking—it needs a recipe and a kitchen—but wine, it could use a little nudge, of course, but it’s going to happen. It was always there.

  Wine is an agricultural product, not so different from orange juice or olive oil. A vine left to its own devices, a mature fifteen-year-old vine, will produce between ten and thirty pounds of grapes a year, and it takes about a pound and a half or two pounds of grapes to make a bottle of wine.

  So if each vine has the potential to produce fifteen bottles of wine, what is the true cost of a bottle?

  When you look at the material needed to construct a bottle of wine, no matter where it is in the
world, you will find that it does not cost more than about a third of what it costs to go to a movie in New York City. Then why should glorified grape juice be so expensive? The first thing that factors into it is the cost of the land. Real estate and rent. You’ve got your Rodeo Drive rent—maybe an address in Bordeaux—and you’ve got your ghetto rents—maybe a region in South America that hasn’t caught on quite yet as a producer of great wine or a patch of wind-strewn, high-plains desert in eastern Washington State, formerly home to a warren of meth labs, that all of a sudden gives life to Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc that make you think Left Bank or Right. But the act of pressing and turning grapes into wine, and the fermentation process, is inexpensive. There’s really no cost involved with that. Barrels can be expensive—a single new standard-size oak barrel that you would see in Californian or French wineries costs almost a thousand dollars. Two hundred and twenty-five liters go into a barrel, basically three hundred bottles of wine. If you were to use a barrel only once, you would be talking about three bucks per 750 milliliters for that toasty wood-juice goodness, but barrels are often used many times, so the cost can be much less than that.

  And then there is the grape market, which sets the value of wine grapes. Today there are not many grapes in Italy that cost more than two dollars a pound, and in fact there are plenty of quality grapes that cost less than a buck per, depending on where they’re from and the relative quality of the vintage, which can be based on any number of things no one can control, like a sudden hailstorm. Right now the global market for grapes is as low as it’s ever been, because of both increased production to the point of overproduction and the global financial markets. In California they trade in tons—five hundred dollars a ton, one thousand dollars a ton, but there are very few scenarios where the pound and a half or two pounds of grapes that go into a bottle of wine cost anywhere near five dollars. If you take out the cost of capital, what’s left is the time that you’re holding the wine. So you are basically a wine bank, and that has value, too; it’s capital over time. But still, the real cost of making any single bottle of wine, not counting the value of the land you grow it on, will rarely exceed five dollars. What drives wine prices is the perceived supply and demand—scarcity and rarity that are, for the most part, fabricated by the industry. The wine industry has succeeded in creating a delusional commodity market where factual overproduction is subjugated by contrived demand.

  Managing the perception of supply is one of the dirty secrets of the business. Look at Dom Pérignon—they’d like you to think it’s somehow rarefied, somehow limited in terms of production. The most important thing Dom Pérignon has to do to preserve the price point is to create an illusion of limited production for a brand that exists in extreme abundance. You can get it anywhere—down the street, at an airport, in the world’s crappiest nightclub. You can buy it by the case at Costco. They make around six million bottles a year of Dom Pérignon. Six million bottles. That’s heavy industry.

  Wine is not like other luxury items. For instance, a Mercedes-Benz is definitely better than a Toyota. That’s not subjective. Close the doors of one, it goes pffft. It’s practically orgasmic. The other goes chonk! It’s like having the door to your jail cell slammed shut. One is so much better that you can actually hear it, smell it when you climb in, never mind when you start it up and go wheeling down the road and can really feel it. Quality tells, every time. But is a bottle of Dom Pérignon that costs a hundred and fifty dollars three times as good as a fifty-dollar bottle of Bollinger NV? Do you think most people could tell the difference or would prefer one so much over the other that they would spend three times as much if these wines came in bottles without labels? To what extent is the myth of the brand informing your taste? The connection between quality and price point in wine is an illusion. A Mercedes-Benz might cost five times as much as a Toyota, but it is tangibly, significantly better. I don’t think that paradigm works with wine.

  Which isn’t to say that a hundred-dollar bottle of wine isn’t going to be better than a twenty-dollar bottle—you are paying for the terroir and for the experience and reputation and talent of the winemaker, which has real value—but five times better? I don’t even know how to measure that. This is the great truism of the wine business: What is the baseline? This bottle is worth twice as much as that, but what is that, really? It’s more like art than like cars—the subjectivity is what drives its price, but the quantitative costs quickly dissociate themselves from the price when the product reaches the consumer.

  Of course industrial, mass-produced wine is going to cost less, or wine that doesn’t have centuries behind it, or a heralded family name—but at the most basic level, in the wholesale world, wines are priced on the illusion of rarity of the product. The myth of scarcity has proliferated through all strata of the wine industry. The golden rule in winemaking is, You always want to make six bottles short of what your distributor asks you for. As soon as you make more than the market wants from you, you’re immediately depressing the value of your brand, globally. And that’s the wine business. It’s always, “I can allocate you twelve bottles. If I look around, maybe I can find you another twelve…. But it’s going to cost you.”

  It used to be that great wine producers would try to wield power through the perceived scarcity of their product: “This is your allocation, you get twenty-four bottles, period. You should be thankful. You should thank your lucky fucking stars that I’m going to give you that. Forget about what it even costs.” There was always that attitude in the industry.

  If you shop hard and really take your time and look, you can find a decent bottle of fifteen-dollar wine. People make a living doing that, selecting quality wines for every budget. That’s what being a wine professional, a sommelier, a wine critic, is about. Being able to discern quality for consumers and then putting it into their hands without putting them into the poorhouse.

  Robert Parker is the emperor of wine. Is there anyone else who can even come close, any restaurant critics who can drive menus and concepts, or movie critics who can dictate next year’s releases the way the world makes wine for Robert Parker? Robert Parker is a very smart guy, also an incredibly nice guy, especially for someone with so much power in an industry lousy with snobs. He was the first one to popularize this qualitative approach to wine criticism with the 100-point rating system. He’s certainly not infallible, and his palate has a very particular bent to it, but a lot of people happen to like it. He’s helped create a world where the value of wine is driven by the critics. Obviously, when a wine gets a big Parker score or Wine Spectator score, there’s more demand for it, which drives up the price, right up to the point that the market will bear. Parker is slowly handing over the reins to Antonio Galloni, the perfect successor, who will evolve the Wine Advocate, navigating the ship to a more old world heading.

  Part of this has to do with a lack of education—people don’t trust themselves or their instincts when it comes to wine. Quite frankly, being a wine consumer and having the confidence to judge a wine and to determine what you like and what you don’t like, and then to articulate it, is a skill set that a lot of people who genuinely enjoy wine will never have. So, because of their own insecurity, they feel that they need to be led—that they need the Spectator or Parker to score everything. I always try to encourage people not to worry so much. It isn’t that different from how we feel about the experience we create in our restaurants—you have to open up and let it come to you. What’s the worst that could happen? You drink a bottle of wine that you don’t fall in love with? You can fuck a lot of broads before you buy a diamond ring.

  We’ve all heard a lot of so-called wine experts say that the best bottle of wine is simply the one you like—and I’m calling bullshit on that kind of irresponsible, passive, facile, lazy advice right here. There is a quantitative aspect to wine, a very real way to measure and discuss it, and that’s why wine professionals exist. A lot of people like shit wine because they’re chumps, but it’s
my job to protect those who should know better and who will benefit from my knowledge, protect them from consuming bad juice. This is very real to me. I take this very seriously.

  The entry-level directive to the wine experience is the dichotomy between letting your palate guide you and letting people who know better help your journey. That’s how you rise to the level of a knowledgeable wine drinker. You should expose yourself to good wines in curated, professional dining experiences in good restaurants and tastings at good wine shops.

  One thing I can’t stand is when people drink wine inappropriately or blindly or, worse, knowing that it’s going to suck and then not even noticing when it actually does. The wine in a curry joint is never going to be any good. Drink beer in Indian restaurants, and don’t order fucking Pinot Grigio at a fucking sushi bar. It is bad for you, and it is bad for the world. It is a sin against the gods of wine. Don’t be fucking stupid and tempt them to punish you.

  That being said, drinking wine is not supposed to be a brain- teaser. It’s fun to get into the depth of it, and some wines will actually have the profundity to let you do that, but you should never be intimidated by them. Do you like it or don’t you? Is it better than the bottle of plonk your brother-in-law brought over? Is it adding value to your dinner, to your day, to your evening?