Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  I like going to the opera, but I know a lot of people who won’t go because they have the idea that they won’t understand it. They think it’s like doing homework, which is bullshit. It was created to bring pleasure to you, not to stress you out. More people I know like to listen to Led Zeppelin than to opera. That’s cool, I love Zep. My question now is, how far do you want to take it? I can hear their terroir—the Mississippi Delta or the California coast or Northern Africa. Maybe someone else just hears some loud guitars and a giant fucking beat. The point is, you don’t have to know that “Whole Lotta Love” was swiped from Willie Dixon, or that “When the Levee Breaks” is an old Delta blues that was recorded in a former Victorian poorhouse, or that the guitar on “Kashmir” is tuned DADGAD, but if you get that far, that’s the next level. I love geeking out like that. But it doesn’t mean you can’t just respond viscerally to “Misty Mountain Hop” or the joys of a glass of Burgundy without having some music nerd like me argue the relative merits of Zep II versus Zep IV, or a know-it-all oenophile timing the finish on a sip of a big red with a stopwatch—and that’s no joke, I have actually seen it. Don’t sweat it, just enjoy. But be leery of the overly pushy waiter with an agenda, trying to sell you a bottle of wine. Waiters are often incentivized to sell “target” wines and are sometimes rewarded by the house for selling bottles with the greatest margin.

  Find someone, anyone, who loves wine, to help you. Wine is a true love, and you shouldn’t be shortchanging the experience to make an extra buck or to save a buck. If I were spending money in a restaurant, I’d want to know: Who chose this wine? Who buys it? Who wrote the list? And if the sommelier can’t answer the question, fuck ’em. Game over. As restaurateurs and wine professionals, I think that our job is as much to be consumer advocates as it is to be wine experts. We have to discern quality for people and present alternatives that fit their needs as diners and wine consumers. Mario and I have made a reputation and a living by never dumping inventory on customers, because the people who sell wines in our restaurants truly love wine, and anyway, whatever we have in the cellar, we’re going to sell it. We don’t have to push. In our places, as much as we’ll try to sell you up to something really incredible, you’ll get downsold to a great value as well.

  One thing I’m good at is remembering wines—I can taste them blind and usually identify them. Wines in my mind are collected like books in a reference library. I have my own abstract way of keeping all these sensations—the smell, the taste, the feel—of all these wines stacked up in my brain. I learned in my early days at Becco, and in Italy and at Felidia before that. Back then there were times when I would taste fifty wines a day. And not only taste them but academically, categorically, methodically analyze fifty, sixty, seventy wines a day and file all this stuff in my head.

  It’s like a form of savantism. I’m a librarian of olfactory impact. When I smell wine, it talks to me. Takes me to another place. It makes me either happy or sad. Or angry. Immediately the olfactory quality of a wine elicits emotion in me more than anything else in the world. Putting my nose into that first glass of wine before dinner or after a day or even in the morning—whenever it is, it brings me to places, which to me is more easily relatable than trying to deconstruct it in terms of other flavors. Sure, I might describe something as earthy or big or musty or having notes of cranberry or whatever, but I’m more likely to peg it right out of the gate as Burgundy or Barolo—this is from Piemonte, this is from Sicily, this is New World garbage.

  Some of the best tastings I’ve ever had were in the mornings. One of the greatest mentors of my life was Josh Greene of Wine & Spirits magazine. We used to start a tasting at eight in the morning and go through a hundred twenty wines before lunch. Not drinking, just spitting. Once you’ve gone through six, eight, ten wines and you’re not spitting, you’re not tasting it, you’re drinking it.

  Tasting the first wine in the morning is like seeing the first pretty girl of the day—the impact is clear, the impression is vivid, there is little ambiguity. Beauty is apparent, and it lingers. But with every wine tasted after the first one, it’s the same as with every girl you see on the street—you’re more likely to observe a ripple or a wrinkle, a blemish, poor posture. As you taste through a massive quantity of wines, what once was crystal clear becomes a blur of sensations, tactile and olfactory, from sublime to disgusting, but, mostly, simply good and bad. But even after a twelve-hour day when you’re sweating it out on the F train trying to get back to Queens and you see a beautiful woman, it’s like seeing the sun rise all over again.

  At least that’s the tendency. Being a focused taster means that even drowning in this abstract miasma of taste, you’re able to tell one wine from another, you can zoom in on details most civilians will never savvy, like how paint drops in a gorgeous splatter painting can either stand out from the background or compete and combine to make the whole picture.

  For me, I have a mental index card for each wine, and they all go into these metal file boxes I have in my head, and there are a lot of them. Some are schoolhouse green, or rusty red, or gunmetal gray, chipped and stained, and each one represents a topology of wine. And on each card are my impressions—they’re like snapshots of smells and flavors. Of impact. A taste of wine is one moment frozen. And I file it. The real skill is that when I’m tasting a new wine, I can riffle through the tens of thousands of these sensations and cross-reference the new experience with the old. It’s about cataloging sensory experience.

  My palate has evolved, naturally, over the years. As a serious wine drinker, you kind of start off big and bold, maybe some juicy California crap. Then soon enough you’re not pounding juice, you’re drinking wine from well-defined terroirs like Bordeaux and Barbaresco. Now you’re hopscotching around the world looking for fruit, acid, and funk in the mountains of Priorat or the valleys of the Loire. And in all the wine journeys I have ever seen people embark on, they invariably end up drinking vintage Champagne and perfectly aged Burgundy.

  New World wines will never catch up to the great wines of Old World Europe. It’s like going to a classical liberal-arts college versus going to vocational school. It’s the difference between Princeton and the Apex Technical School. It’s the difference of generations, and experience, and understanding. It is the difference between Sophia Loren and Pam Anderson. Of course there are quality, delicious wines from California, but in the global wine scene they are the new kids on the block.

  Vintage Barolo is like smack for a wine junkie—it has a timelessness and a complexity and an otherworldliness to experience that isn’t so obvious. I think the progression as a wine drinker is that you go from needing to be smashed in the head with a two-by-four—something frighteningly fruity, big, and aggressive—to a higher realm of finesse where the pleasures are almost—almost—out of reach and the sensation is almost fleeting. Trying to grab onto it, that’s where you get your high. That’s where you get your thrills. The wine brings you up to its level. You never drag it down to yours.

  By the Becco days, I was becoming a little more savvy about wine importation and distribution, about who was making what money and how I might get in on the action. Babbo wasn’t open yet—we were still just talking about it—but Becco was moving boatloads of wine, and that was the real spark to understanding how the economics of wine work, what the true cost of wine was, and who was driving the cost. The idea to get into the wine business at first was powered by one of Restaurant Man’s favorite maxims: Eliminate the middleman and widen the margin.

  When I was in Italy after my time on Wall Street, my mother’s friend Bruno set me up on my first big wine trip. He had a buddy named Valter Scarbolo who made wine in a town called Lauzacco. We drove there one night, went down into his restaurant in the basement around five o’clock, and resurfaced at about eight o’clock the next morning. We probably drank twenty bottles of wine and became fast friends. Every day we would wind up drinking Tocai Friulano made by a local farmer, out of these thick, chewed-up glasses. The
wine was kind of a golden brown in color, which was simply due to lack of attention on the winemaker’s part—there was some skin still left on the grapes when they’d begun to ferment. Skin is the only thing that gives color to a red wine—the pulp inside red grapes is white, it’s not colored. But this wine had such great richness; it was really waxy on the palate, almost thick and viscous, served chilled, but never too cold, and with a slice of prosciutto San Daniele it would give you an incredible sensation, like separating honey and beeswax right on your palate—the wax would remain between your teeth, and the honey would dribble down the back of your throat and warm your whole body.

  Trying to parse the richness and complexity and soulfulness of a white wine made like that, so down-to-earth, inspired me. It felt like the source of life of the people there. It really made you feel part of the place. It’s one of those things—that wine is so inexorably linked to that place that they’re one and the same. I always think about James Joyce. I like to think that Ulysses and Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were fueled by Tocai Friulano. When he lived in Trieste and wrote those books, he must have drunk bottles of it in the Piazza Unità, gazing out on the Adriatic.

  I love all kinds of wine, but that’s where I became a committed white wine drinker, and now I always say that if you’re going to drink wine every day of your life, and I mean a lot of it, you have to drink white wine. It’s more conducive to bodily and mental health than red wine is. There is a lot of shit in red wine, all that dry extract, which is what gives it the color and feel, whereas white wine is just like gently flavored water with a dash of alcohol and some acidity.

  Eventually I started to buy Valter’s wines and serve them at Becco and Felidia. And then Bruno came up with the idea that I should make some wine of my own.

  I bought the first winery in ’96. It was effectively a historical estate, the Belvedere Vineyards, which were part of the Zamò and Palazzolo estate in the town of Buttrio, the DOC of Colli Orientali del Friuli, in the region of Friuli–Venezia Giulia, in northeastern Italy. I knew that that area had the unique combination of climate and terroir to create the most powerful, long-lived white wines in Italy.

  The deal happened the same way it always does in the Old World: The farmer told the priest, who told the bartender, who told the town drunk, and eventually someone whispered in my ear that this vineyard might be available. Of course, in that part of the world nothing is officially for sale, because no one ever wants to be seen as needing to sell something, but of course we got to talking, and when we were done haggling, he didn’t sell me the vineyard, I had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Or at least that’s what he would tell his friends. The first vintage was ’98, the year Babbo opened. Few things in my life have made me prouder.

  A lot of people thought that if I went into producing wine, I would just have someone else make some shit for me and slap a label on it, then import it, right? That is still, unfortunately, sometimes the perception. And it couldn’t be further from the truth—we own every vineyard, and we grow every grape used to make these wines. They are completely a product of passion and an extremely intimate expression of who I am.

  We make Friulano, Vespa Rosso, and Calabrone, which is a blended red wine and pretty much our premier red, retailing for eighty or ninety bucks a bottle. It is very extracted, very concentrated, extremely dense and rich. Our Rosato is very easy to drink, I know people who say it is our best stuff—you can drink it with pizza or crudo, you can have it with dinner at Babbo or take it on a picnic. And we make Tocai Plus, which is kind of like our kinky, bisexual wine—it’s almost like a white Amarone, but there is something a little bit ambiguous about it that really turns people on. Our flagship wine is the Vespa Bianco, which is a blended white wine and the signature wine of the winery. It costs something like forty bucks in the store, pretty reasonable for a great bottle of wine, and in my opinion probably the best white wine made in Italy.

  I started out selling the Bastianich wines in our restaurants and then making the rounds, knocking on doors, getting people to taste them and telling them my story. Robert Chadderdon started importing some, which gave me a lot of credibility, even if he is a pretentious bully.

  Back when I was working at Felidia, I saw that some of the great Barolos had a sticker on their bottles, IMPORTED BY ROBERT CHADDERDON SELECTIONS, with his signature on it. The way he branded his bottles, the “imported by” sticker became more important than the label itself.

  This guy was all about quality. And all the wines he imported and distributed were excellent. Eventually I was buying wine for Felidia from him. And I got to meet him, and when I opened Becco, I started to order wine from him. But first he had to test me. I had to audition for him to convince him that I was worthy of his time and of buying his product. It was kind of crazy—he ran this two-person show, he and his assistant, Mary Ann. She was like a throwback to the secretaries of the sixties, real Man in the Gray Flannel Suit stuff. There were no salespeople or any other staff.

  She was the keeper of the gate for their office in Rockefeller Center. The whole scene was ridiculously pompous—Bob was very buttoned up, very Waspy. He actually wore field jackets with khaki pants, working the lord-of-the-manor, landed-gentry look. It made me want to club him over the head with a pith helmet.

  He had a waiting room with brass lamps and portraits of dogs, plus nautical-themed relics on the wall. Mahogany paneling with hunter green glen-plaid cushions. You feel like you’re going to the reading of a will at an attorney’s office in Stuck Up, Connecticut. In his office he had two guest chairs with a giant globe between them, and he sat at an enormous desk with bottles of whiskey literally from centuries ago, half tasted, and he’d interview you while peering over them. He would put out two wines, blind. Give you a white and a red, or maybe two reds, and ask you to taste them, without telling you anything, always projecting this greater-than-thou attitude, as if you were lucky to be in the presence of this Master of the Wine Universe. He would make you fax over your wine list and your menu. Maybe, if you were lucky, come and check out your restaurant. And then he would tell you what wines he would give you, which wines he would allow you to have. So it wasn’t even like you actually ordered any wines for yourself. He would pick the wines out of his portfolio that he thought were appropriate and just send them to you. He might send fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of wine or a thousand dollars’ worth. You had no idea. And you still had to pay for it within the time allotted.

  The second order he sent me was a ten-case lot of oxidized Soave, which was completely defective. It was totally rank shit. That was our first battle, because I refused. I couldn’t sell it. I didn’t want to get stuck with it, and he was pressing on thirty-day terms. That really drew the line in the sand. Somehow we got through the Soave incident—I think he credited me for some of it or gave me a couple cases of something else. It wasn’t easy. I ended up pouring it down the drain, but I chalked it up as an investment in our relationship, and I even wound up getting to taste with him a little bit, and went to Europe with him. He is a great taster, but also the best wine spitter I’ve ever seen. He would sit at his desk, sip wine, and the bucket could be either across the room or right next to him, and without even turning his head he would go sprffffft!—right into the fucking bucket. Which is a real skill. In the professional wine world, in cellar tasting environments, a good spit puts you in the big leagues—velocity, location, quality, flow, and linearity, it all counts. Someday I’m going to make up a scorecard and have a legit spitting contest.

  When I was buying the first vineyard, I actually brought him with me. We went through tasting older vintages and looked at the terroir, and he gave me his opinions. As much as the guy was an arrogant douchebag, he is one of the most intuitive wine tasters I’ve ever known. He is certainly one of the best out there, palatewise. Very classical, very Old World. Almost to a fault. He kept this Eurocentric worldview—he would never deal with California wines. It worked for him u
ntil pretty recently. From what I hear, a lot of people don’t buy from him anymore. He is not very well liked by today’s hotshot sommies; in fact, people hate him because he goes against the grain of everything wine is supposed to be if you have a healthy attitude toward tasting, which is communicative, educational, all about sharing information. He made it supersnobbified. It was always, “It’s a privilege for you to buy wine from me.” He’s snubbed and alienated a whole generation of wine buyers and wine professionals. To many of the most important buyers in this country, he’s an artifact. He lived in a very old model of intimidation, fearmongering, preying on the insecurity and apparent stupidity of everyone around him. Kind of like a schoolyard bully, of the old Euro guard. But you could never question the provenance of the wines. I still say he is a pretentious tool, but you could never knock his taste.

  The truth is, wine makes no fiscal sense. I will never earn a dime in my lifetime producing wine. It’s a very expensive business. But for me, and I think for most people, wine is really about passion. I’ve spent a lot of the money that I’ve made in my life investing in and pursuing my passion for wine.

  Having your name on a bottle that people are drinking from is a heavy responsibility. Wine is not like food. It’s not like opening a new restaurant. A bottle of wine is like a piece of music or a book—you can take it anywhere in the world with you. You can open it anywhere on this planet and enjoy that piece of my art in that moment. I used to put my cell-phone number on the wine bottles in the early days: “Call Joe when you drink.” People would call me from China, from India, from all these places in the world that you couldn’t possibly have imagined reaching with your message. “Hey, dude, I’m drinking your wine, we love it. Thanks!” I loved it. I used to stay on the phone and talk to them. It was a real connection. The circle was being completed. I always say that drinking a glass of my wine is like getting to know me a little.