Melissa Clark - Food Writer

Chefs and Collectors

Who wouldn't want a friend like Park B. Smith? When out to a restaurant with friends, he'll order an '82 Cheval Blanc, then pay for it. Ask him over for barbeque and like any good guest, he'll bring a bottle, perhaps a '90 Chateau Rayas Chateauneuf-du-Pape to swirl and sniff with those burgers-on-the-grill. If you're searing foie gras, roasting lamb and torching crmes brulee, he'll unearth something more esteemed, maybe a '61 Petrus followed by Chateau D'Yquem. And if he knows it's your birthday, he'll insist on rustling up something from your birth year - provided, of course, it was a good one.

Sadly, few of us are lucky enough to have friends like Smith. But what if you could at least gain access to his five cellars? Choose among the California Cabernets he stocked up on in the 70s, the first growth Bordeaux he sought out in the 80s, and the Rhones of the 90s?

You can. Just score a reservation at NYC's Veritas, which Smith co-owns - or any of several other new venues where a few very well-off wine collectors have turned their personal cellars ino the heart of the restaurant's wine list.

A former, self-described "big beer drinker," Smith got interested in wine in 1955, while he was in the Marine Corps. "Somehow I got my hands on a bottle of Beaujolais," he tells me, "and I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I didn't get bloated and I loved the taste. If I'm not mistaken I think it was $1.19."

He began collecting in earnest in 1978, and these days his cellars hold about 61,000 bottles. He recalls, "One day at dinner my wife said, 'let me ask you a question, if you drank a bottle of your own wine every day for the rest of your life, how many years would it take?' I said, 'I don't know, probably 25-30 years.' But when we figured it out, it was 219 years. I said, 'I've got a problem.'"

Smith's timing for this epiphany was impeccable. He and his wife were contemplating the future of their cellars at the precise moment that New York's alcohol laws were changing. A new statute allowed for private collectors to sell to licensed retail outlets. Like wine shops. And restaurants.

So in 1999, Smith along with partners Steve Verlin, Gino Diaferia and Chef Scott Bryant, opened Veritas in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. They based the restaurant's wine list on bottles from Smith and Verlin's cellars, a novel notion at the time - but one that's now been replicated serveral times on both coasts.
"Everybody wants to be in the restaurant business," explained Smith, who also owns a furniture company in New York, "So I said to myself, holy jingle, this is a great opportunity. I already knew who my partners would be, Scott and Gino from Indigo, where I was a regular. So I said to them, how would you like to open a restaurant with the best wine list in the country?"

From a financial standpoint, this made a lot of sense, at least from the restaurant's perspective. Most restaurants are woefully undercapitalized when it comes to wine; they simply can't afford to stock a formidable wine cellar. But by consigning the most expensive bottles to the restaurant, the initial outlay of cash is kept to a minimum, while the customer is offered a mind-boggling selection - over 2,700 bottles at Veritas.

Since Veritas' entrance upon the scene, other restaurants started by collectors have followed: Hush in Laguna Beach, Bastide in Los Angeles, and Washington Park in Greenwich Village (which closed abruptly this winter when chef Jonathan Waxman moved on to another project; it will reopen as Cru in the spring). All were opened by collectors who have, in some sense, too much wine.

Of course the rational thing to do when faced with such a problem could be to stop buying wine altogether, but, as Smith says, "where's the fun in that?" Selling the wine at auction is another solution, but auction prices are unpredictable and most of the demand is limited to a small range of wines: classified-growth Bordeaux, cult California cabernets, vintage Port. Plus, for collectors who are primarily drinkers rather than investors - the ones who truly believe that they will open, if not the entire vast ocean of wine in their cellars than at least a great lake of it - the drop-off-the-wine-pick-up-a-check character lacks any sense of satisfaction. "I'd rather give it away," Smith says.

Tim Kopec, the Wine Director at Veritas, notes that with some wine collectors there's a real urge to stay involved with the wine. It becomes a question of passion. "A restaurant allows them to continue their relationship with something they love," he says.
Perhaps more to the point, if it's successful, a restaurant also helps fund the collecting urge. None of these collctors moved into the restaurant business to lost money; and even if the restaurant in question forms only a small part of their assets, at least it's likely to generate enough income to justify purchasing that next case of Romanee-Conti.

Roy Welland, an options trader and the owner of Cru, grew up drinking old Bordeaux in Evanston, Illinois. "My father collected wine," he says, leaning back in a chair amidst the construction debris in wht was formerly the dining room of Washington Park, which will soon re-open as Cru. Chairs, tables and drop cloths are piled here and there, and brown paper is taped over the windows, obscuring the light and giving the room a very cave-like feel.

"He bought wine, at least a case or two each year he had a child, and would open a bottle on every birthday. All Bordeaux. It's one of my fondest memories. We'd get our little glass he'd teach us to smell it. When I started buying I assumed I'd drink most of the wine I bought. Then I realized I couldn't." He pauses for a moment to shut the ringer off on his cell phone, which started beeping out a touch-tone rendition of Fur Elise. "I only have a glass or two at the end of the day and feel a little buzz. I actually detest the feeling of being inebriated. But I really like tasting wine."

Cru's wine director Robert Bohr - formerly Welland's executive assistant - points out that part of the pleasure of having a restaurant like Cru for someone like Welland is that it allows him, in a sense, to spread the wealth of his collection. "We have a very low markup considering the industry standard."

Looking for an example, Bohr quickly pages through the 2,200 wines on the leather-bound list. "You see this '99 Roumier Musigny? Let's say it cost Roy $115 wholesale. He could make ten time off it {at auction}, but instead he'll sell it here for $230."

Similarly, at Bastide in Los Angeles, owner Joe Pytka makes it a priority to charge less than the standard market value for the collectible wines on his list.

"From the beginning we were aggressive in the pricing, charging less across the board for wine," says Christophe Rolland, Bastide's sommelier, "I had a lot of feedback from people who said, 'I can't believe you're going out there with those prices.' But Joe wanted to make sure that most people could afford some of the better wines...that they weren't reading the wine list like they were looking through a window at some jewels behind the glass that they couldn't buy."

This attitude can translate into bargains for consumers, who, if their eyes are sharp, can pick some fabulously under-priced cherries off these lists. But it shouldn't be mistaked for blind altruism. Just because collectors like Welland and Pytka don't gouge diners on wine doesn't mean they're incompetent businessmen--in fact, they've gotten to where they are because they're used to turning a profit. Instead, it's that their perspective on where to earn the profit may be different than the average restaurant owner's, and rather than the 300% wine markup, the tariff may come with the caviar or the Kobe beef. It's also worth noing that just because you're rich doesnt mean that you can't be annoyed with wine prices too.

"I go out to eat a lot, and being familiar with wine's wholesale prices, I'm often irritated at what is being charged in restaurants," Welland says. "I can understand markups, but I always thought that those should decrease as the price of the wine goes up. If you bought a bottle for $10 it makes sense to sell it for $30 because you can't survive in a restaurant without making money on alcohol. But if somebody wants to buy a $500 bottle? Obviously you can't charge the same $20 markup because occasionally you'll run into a bad bottle, but you don't need to charge them $1000 either. As an example of this, on Cru's wine list Wellan plans to price his '71 DRC La Tache, which cost him $1,300, at $1,700--admittedly a huge amount of money for a botle of wine, but also substantially less than it would be elsewhere.

Of course, there can be problems with turning a private collection into a restaurant wine cellar. Wine collections, like the collectors themselves, are quirky and while quirkiness can make for excellent dinner parties, it can also result in an unbalanced wine list, heavy on the Gevrey-Chambertin, say, and light on every other region in the world. All of these collectors-turned-restauranteurs have had to compensate for their own preferences, seeking out help from their wine directors and sommeliers.

At Hush, owner Chuck Rock, a film producer and internet marketer, has been collecting wine for years. He largely concentrates on Burgundy, and so sommelier LeeAnn Kaufman had to balance the cellar's depth in French wines against her clientele's preferences.

"Laguna Beach is really big on California wines, especially chardonnay," Kaufman says "so I made sure I had over forty California verticals to choose from. But I'm also making it a point to try and turn some of those chardonnay lovers around to white Burgundy. And Chuck's Burgundy selection, both red and white, is outstanding. So on the one hand I'm encouraging people to try something new, but at the same time making sure they can find the wines they love."

Even at Veritas, where the wine list is the marriage of two private collections with opposite sensibilities - Smith's, concentrated in Rhone, California and Bordeaux, and Verlin's, in Burgundy - Wine Director Tim Kopec still has his work cut out for him.

"I'm in touch with the customer every night," Kopec told me, "and can understand what they need. I have to make sure the list reflects that, and that it's balanced. There are certain wines that neither of the owners care for or participate in. German wines from the auslese level down, Austrian wines, Beaujolais. [Smith and Verlin] simply don't buy those wines, so I'm filling in that part of the list."

Another area that desperately needed filling in was the wines under $75 a bottle category. "Not everybody wants to spend more than $75 or even $40 a bottle," Kopec says, noting that it's essentially impossible to source wines from Smith and Verlin's cellars in that range.

Similaraly, Joe Pytka says of Bastide's wine list, "Christophe does two-thirds of the wine list and one-third of it is me. I'm responsible for the big wines; he's responsible for the basic workaday wines. I don't have any real interest in the wines he likes. But the people that come here love them because they're reasonable, delicious, and go with the food."

It's true that if you own your own restaurant, you certainly don't want to alienate those who can't spring for the Lafite-Rothschild every night--in other words most of your customers. And while millionaire wine collectors definitely frequent restaurants of this sort, most customers come for the food--and perhaps to ogle the $2,500 bottles they're not going to buy. "Even if they order a $40 bottle, most of our customers like to keep the wine list look at," says Rolland. "We encourage that because maybe next time they'll order the $50 bottle."

Even so, it's no surprise that the most committed regular customers, those people who order the most rarefied bottles of wine off the list, are the owner/collectors themselves. All of them wanted to open a place where they could go to drink wines from their collection.

"Wine has been a passion of mine for quite a while," says Joe Pytka, who produces film and television commercials. "It goes back to the early 70's when I started entertaining clients. So I have this enormous collection, but strangely there weren't really any wine-friendly restaurants near my office where I could go drink them." Before he opened Bastide, Pytka spent "too much money"--the L.A. rumor mill puts the amount somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per week--going to restaurants to entertain his clients. Instead, he now dines at Bastide two or three times a week, always ordering wines off the "Collection," or most expensive part of the list.

The funny thing is that while the desire to get rid of one's cellar may have been the impetus for opening these restaurants in the first place, that desire isn't always sustainable. When push comes to shove, most collectors don't really want to part with all--or in some cases any--of their wines.

Joe Pytka, for example, simply couldn't let go of his wine. "My wine collection is out of control but I don't want to give it up. I thought I wanted to, but realized I don't," he says. "The concept was misguided. But it's the same with all collectors, because they want to own whatever it is they're into. It's the same thing with the cars I own. I've had them for 30 years and I don't drive them, but I can't give them up."

But if the concept is actually misguided, as Pytka says, why do it? There are several reasons. First, you can't overlook the fact that owning a restaurant gives wine collectors heightened status. A Bastide or a Cru is a place to bring all the bigwigs of the wine world (or the film world, or the financial world) to share a bottle of '69 Musigny, to let them gaze in awe (or at least mild respect) at the multi-thousand-bottle depth of your collection.

"It's like putting your art on loan to a museum," Cru's Robert Bohr says. "It elevates your status...People actually get to see what you have, unlike if you keep it all in your townhouse."

Also, having a business legitimizes your habit; rationalizing one's addiction is much more to the point than kicking it. Tim Kopec, talking about Smith and Verlin, puts it this way: "Sometimes people say, 'Oh, these guys are just liquidating their cellars.' But the truth is that these guys are and have always been voracious buyers. They both own far more wine today than when they opened the restaurant."

Then, of course, there's also another key consideration: No matter how hot your restaurant it, no matter how many people you've got or what day of the week it is, you're always going to be able to get a reservation.

Sidebar:
When Scott Bryant packed up his pantry at Indigo, where he was the chef for TK years, to open Veritas, he left certain things behind: fiery chile peppers; Szchewan peppercorns; fermented black beans; Asian fish sauce; artichokes. Anything that would numb, confuse or overwhelm the palate was out. Bryant's rule is that as long as the wine comes first, as he considers it to at Veritas, the food should be simple - and all culinary frippery best left to restaurants where the cocktail menu is longer than the list of wines by the glass.
"I'm more conservative now," Bryant says before service one cold January evening. He's sipping seltzer, not wine (that happens later in the evening), and wearing perfectly pressed, spotless whites, the kind chefs keep on hand for walking around the dining room but take off before they cook. Unlike some chefs, Bryant actually cooks, every night. But that's not the only thing that sets him apart. His straightforward culinary style, egoless demeanor, and devotion to not mucking up the wine served with his food are three more.
"Before Veritas, I used to be a lot more experimental, Asian fusion, all kinds of fusion. But that doesn't work so well here," he said, refilling his glass, "I think that the best food, like the best wine, is simple and not manipulated. You use the best ingredients, like the best grapes, and you just don't do too much to it. When you pair it, you think, clean and uncomplicated. Like an '86 Montrachet. What would you want with that? I want something very simple, like maybe a roast chicken. Or just lobster with a light vegetable butter. And that's it. I'm not going to do a curry emulsion with kaffir lime foam and pork belly, that's not for me."
But is that philosophy limiting for a chef, especially in today's foaming climate of El Bulli-like experimentation?
"Sometimes it can be a little bit of a drag," he admits, "in the sense that you want to play a little more with some things. And you know I do specials, but I don't put it on the menu. Right now I have crisped fluke with a lemongrass emulsion, basically it's made with coconut milk, not too spicy, with some green onion basmati rice, and I think that goes great with gewurtztraminer, riesling, white Bordeaux. That's as out there as I get.
"What I do," he continues, quickly summing it up before dashing back to the kitchen, where, he readily admits, he's most comfortable, "it's about common sense, what tastes good with what. Using wine in the sauces works well with the wine you serve with it. We always have the wine-braised short ribs, it's one of our signature dishes. And we do sauces for lobster and seafood with riesling and vermouth. It's elementary and I don't over think it. In a sense, everything that's good technique has already been done a million times over. Except foam. But that's one thing I'm not going to copy. The food here, it doesn't need it. The wine here definitely doesn't. And you know what, that's the point."

Making the List

Two Great Restaurant Cellars Built from Scratch
Why does one restaurant charge $20 more for a certain bottle of wine than the place next door? Why is your favorite cult cabernet perennially on the list at the irritatingly loud steakhouse you don’t like, and never on the list at the low-key place you love? And where were the hidden values on that list you were looking at last night? If you’re a wine-lover who’s ever spent an evening in a top restaurant—which means most of us—it’s almost certain you’ve wondered about the answers to these questions. And you can find them, not so much by reading between the lines as by looking behind the winelist pages, at how those hundreds of bottles got there in the first place.

A Tale of Two Coasts
When David Rosoff, the wine director and managing partner of Opaline restaurant in Los Angeles, conceived of his wine list, a mantra that ran through his brain. It went something like this: No buttery chardonnays, no expensive, super-allocated Napa cult wines, and nothing that has been, to quote the cover sheet of the finished list, “smothered by new oak barrels.”

Banned from the list were the safe, easy-to-order crowd pleasers—the Kendall Jackson chardonnays, the Santa Margarita pinot grigios, the Rosemont shirazes. Instead, diners were going to be left to puzzle it out between, say, a Tre Monti albana from Emilia Romagna and a Domaine Brana Irouleguy, made from a blend of gros manseng and petit manseng. And anyone with a penchant for American wines could choose from four (out of 125 bottles), and none a cabernet sauvignon.

To say this is a gutsy—if somewhat rigid—position to take is putting it lightly. After all, Californians their local wines, often to the exclusion of all others. And in LA, a flashy, recognizable brand, be it an actor, watch or bottle of wine, is arguably valued far beyond the esoteric and unknown.

Around the same time, but on the other side of the country and with an entirely different approach, William Sherer was putting together the list at Atelier in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in New York City. With over 1,350 bottles, there would necessarily something here for everyone. All the major players would be present, the Comte de Vosges, the Sassicaias, the Insignias and Dominuses (or is that Dominii?). And these stars would keep company with lesser-known wines—a selection of Austrian grunier veltiners, a range of small and as-of-yet-unheralded California producers and regional esoterica like a Bourgeuil or two from the Loire. Sherer even decided to include a few dark horses, like a Sula sauvignon blanc from Nasik, India. He needed depth in older vintages, too—like an $11,000 1870 Lafite-Rothschild—and several verticals, such as a selection of Penfolds Grange dating back to 1966.

Now that both of these wine lists are finished, it might seem that the one thing they have in common is that they have absolutely nothing in common. They’re as different as chenin blanc and shiraz—or New York and LA, for that matter. And yet the thought processes and choices that went into them are strangely similar.

The Soul of a New List
Of course, that raises the question: just how is a wine list put together? What machinations go on behind the scenes that result in a particular group of bottles being offered between those leather, plastic or paper-bound covers?

According to both Sherer and Rosoff, certain strategies come into play whether the wine list is for a small, quirky, neighborhood bistro or a grand, pull-out-all-the-stops-and-bring-on-the-foie-gras hotel restaurant. As a wine directors or sommelier, you have balance your own vision, your budget, the different price points you need to meet, the food the restaurant serves, your relationships with vendors, and the availability of the wines in question, to arrive in the end at a document that will both entice wine-knowledgeable diners and not intimidate someone who just wants to order a pleasant bottle of vino to drink with dinner. And after you’ve managed that, you might relax by walking back into the kitchen and finding seven or eight plates to juggle.

But at its best, the soul of a wine list, just like that of a menu, reflects the sensibility, resourcefulness and creativity of the person behind it. This is why, though the route may be the same from restaurant to restaurant, the destination often proves as individual as the wines themselves.

“The concept of our wine list is dictated by my personal taste and what I believe in,” David Rosoff says. “It only includes the kinds of wines I think are, number one, well-made, and, number two, honestly made—which are two different things.”

To clarify, he points to the credo on the ivory cover sheet of the list. “Basically, honest wines are truthful expressions of their varieties, and the place and time where those grapes were grown. They are not overly manipulated or masked by oak, and generally you’re talking about hand-crafted, handpicked and often organically farmed grapes.”

For Rosoff, holding to this vision meant choosing almost solely regional European wines. “This is my taste and will probably continue to be until somebody can prove to me that the New World is making things that represent better value and food affinity,” he says, adding, “This is obviously a list that’s not driven by the market. I could put a bunch of expensive Napa wines on and my check average would go up exponentially overnight. And if I were about to go out of business unless I put Sonoma-Cutrer chard on the list I probably would opt to stay in business. But I don’t see that happening.”

Granted, this may be a radical example of a wine list in service to a philosophy—woe to the customer at Opaline who happens to like fat, buttery chardonnays—but it is true that having a strong mission can actually make it easier to put together a list than simply collecting a group of wines the sommelier happens to like.

Back in New York, William Sherer had fewer ideological concerns and a lot more bottles to stock, but his vision, while not as fervent, was just as personal.

“For me the first priority was putting together a wine list that’s an attraction unto itself, a world class wine list,” he says as we sit in the plush celadon green-accented bar that’s adjacent to the equally plush but beiger dining room. In Sherer’s universe, this means striving for a list that will win loads of prestigious awards, and, he hopes, lure customers away from the restaurant’s high-flying competitors: Daniel, Alain Ducasse, Jean Georges.

Uptown vs. Downtown
Here’s something to think about. Even before you sit down at your table and pick up the wine list, there’s a sense in which a good restaurant already knows who you are. And the wines on the list in front of you have been chosen with that in mind. It’s not as sinister as it sounds, though. Look at it this way: Atelier is located in a Ritz-Carlton hotel that occupies some of the most expensive real estate in New York City (directly across the street from Central Park). Rooms cost upwards of $600 per night. Opaline is in West Hollywood, a hipper, younger area populated mostly by people with multiple but not necessarily obvious tattoos, and the occasional pierced body part. Opaline’s prices for its wines—most bottles fall into the $35 to $45 category—is just right for the neighborhood and identity of the restaurant, but that formula wouldn’t work for Atelier. The typical customer here either has an expense account, is celebrating a major life milestone, or is wealthy enough not to care. Those $300 bottles of Cos d’Estournel and the $3,000 bottles of Romane Conti that customers want to see on Sherer’s wine list would be ridiculous on Rosoff’s. And vice-versa: if a group at Atelier wanted a bottle of bubbly to toast Grandmama on her 80th birthday, or to celebrate that closing of a major deal, Opaline’s $50 Jean Milan Brut Champagne—lovely though it is—would likely lose out to Dom Perignon every time.

Show Me the Money
Another element in the creation of a wine list is, of course, money. Opaline’s opening budget for wine was $16,000; Atelier’s was close to $250,000. But true to the old chestnut that no matter what one has it’s never enough, for both men it wasn’t, but they stuck to the numbers they were given. For Sherer this meant biding his time to fill in a lot of the older vintages he loves. For Rosoff, it meant buying the pricier bottles, such as the $275 1982 Grand Puy Lacoste (the most expensive bottle on the list) on consignment.

“Generally you wind up paying more for consignment wines,” Rosoff says, “or your mark-up is lower than on other wines. But boy, I’ve got things on my list that I couldn’t have had when I opened the restaurant otherwise.”

Then there’s the food. Though in the distant past putting together the wine list was often independent from anything going on in the kitchen, this has changed. Now a restaurant’s cuisine should play a role in the development of the list. Rosoff was in an enviable position because, as the managing partner and the person who actually wrote Opaline’s business plan, he could and did put the wine list first. When he hired the chef, David Lentz, it was with the stipulation that he cook the food Rosoff thought would work well with the wines.

“The food is very ingredient-oriented,” Rosoff says. “It’s not about plating and presentation. And it’s exactly the same with the wines. I want to taste everything in every wine, and I don’t want any ingredient in the wine that doesn’t need to be there, like extraneous oak.” The resulting menu is what one might call regional European bistro food influenced Mediterranean flavors, and by what’s available at the farmers’ market; and while that sounds a bit confusing, when placed in the context of Opaline’s wine list, it fits seamlessly.

But Rosoff is the exception. Most wine directors don’t wield much if any control over the menu. At Atelier, the chef Gabriel Kreuther is from Alsace, so Sherer has made sure that the wines of the region and those in a similar style are well represented. Kreuther’s modern French cuisine is very fish and seafood oriented, so along with the requisite heavy-hitting Bordeaux, California and Australian wines Sherer’s customers crave, he also makes sure to have enough Burgundies and other pinot noirs.

Is More Always Better?
When you sit down at a table and the sommelier hands you a wine list the size of War and Peace, are you thrilled or alarmed? Half the diners in a restaurant may answer one way and half the other, one of the problems with a list of 1,350. As Sherer notes, his task with the Atelier list was multiple: to give his customers the big name wines they knew they wanted, to offer a number of more unusual wines that they would want if they knew about them, to be able to include all the wines he himself was passionate about, and also, somehow, to organize the list into something both manageable and un-intimidating to the wine-neophyte. To this end, he made sure he included several of what he calls “comfort zones.”

“I think people are used to, and so there should be, a good selection of certain wines in certain price ranges,” he says. “A good sauvignon blanc at $30 a bottle is something a restaurant should provide. California chardonnays should be about $60 to $70, and a restaurant should have a supply of those. And you should be able to buy cheap cabernet, about $50 to $60 a bottle.”

Sherer also made sure that the list not only encompassed a number of types of wine, but also a variety of styles within each type (such as both modern and traditional styles of Barolo or Meursault). This allows him to tap into his creative side when talking with a diner: “It’s like being an artist with more colors on my palette to paint with. I have more flexibility and a greater ability to pull from a variety of wines to go with the specific needs of the guest, and help them get exactly the right Chablis for their tastes. The work of the sommelier is finding out exactly what the guest wants as far as style.”

Finally, in terms of presentation, Sherer opted for the traditional style of organizing wines by region, though he does take some liberties. For example, if you’re looking for a crisp Chablis to enjoy with Kreuther’s oysters, you’ll be disappointed if you turn to the white Burgundy section, where none exist. Instead, you’ll find the Chablis listed a few pages earlier, along with wines from the Loire, Alsace, Germany, and Austria under a mysterious heading labeled “Northern European Whites.”

“It’s a category I came up with myself, ,” Sherer says by way of explanation, “but I think the wines share a certain flavor profile and they work very well with the food.”

Rosoff’s list, unsurprisingly, takes a different tack. He broke the red and white wines down into 3 categories—light, medium and heavier bodied—a strategy found more and more often on wine lists these days. Then within those categories, Rosoff lists the wines by relative weight. The lightest wine he sells, a 2001 Von Simmern Erbacher Marcobrunn Kabinett riesling from the Rheingau, is first on the list, while the densest, a 1998 Clos des Papes Chateauneuf-du-Pape, is the last. Rosoff also made sure to list the grape variety next to each wine, so that those looking for a cabernet would know they could find it not only in a Bordeaux, but also blended with garnacha in Rene Barbier’s 1999 Clos Mogador from the Priorat, Spain, or blended with sangiovese in Capezzana’s Carmignano Barco Reale from Tuscany.

“I knew I was going to have wines that Americans find esoteric,” he explains, “and I felt I needed to make them more accessible. Not everybody can speak the language of Languedoc-Rousillon, but everybody can speak the language of light, medium and heavy. By taking unapproachable wines and making them approachable, I thought, in a sense, I could market the wine list a little bit.”

Bring on the Wine
Once everything else is taken into account—structure, cuisine, budget, customers, price points, and so on—then the real work of putting the list together begins: choosing the actual wines. Since vintages sell out and distribution changes, this task is best left to the last minute. Rosoff chose his in four weeks, albeit four weeks of near all-nighters.

“I don’t think I could have done it without a spreadsheet I made,” he says. “Two years ago, even before we had the space finalized, I sat down with Excel and broke the wines I wanted into categories, then divided up the kinds of wines I knew I wanted on the list. I said, ‘Well, I want Sancerre and chenin blanc from the Loire and I want riesling.’ And I assigned them categories. So by the time I sat down with my vendors to choose the wines, I was just filling slots. It was such a beautiful constraint. I could say: ‘love that wine, doesn’t fit on the list right now,’ whereas if I had no parameters I would have been hard-pressed to say no—but if that happens, then you sit there the night before you open with a room full of boxes of wine and no idea what to do with them. So I’m glad I handcuffed myself like that going in. It made everything much easier.”

Sherer’s constraints were more fluid. His first task was amassing the star-wines he knew his list had to have. The next phase would normally have been to augment and refine the list, adding the lesser-known wines that he wanted to be able to introduce to people, but before he could do this he had a middle step to contend with: The Ritz-Carlton Corporate Core List. A list of wines that are required to appear on all Ritz-Carlton wine lists, Sherer was mandated to include about 30 to 40 of them. “It’s an attempt to maximize discounts for economies of scale, obviously,” he says. This could deaden the personality of a smaller list, but for Sherer, those wines simply vanished in the blend, like that little bit of Trebbiano in some Chianti Classicos.

Opening Day
The bottles are in the cellar, their names entered into a database on the computer. The specially-ordered paper is on the shelf, the fonts assigned, the covers chosen (opalescent, pale-green leather for Opaline, and dark-brown leather, weighty and tome-like for Atelier.) Anyone would think: The work is done; the wine list is complete. Just turn the printer on, open the flood gates and let the thirsty masses converge. And in one sense this is true; Rosoff managed to fill his particular kinds of slots, and Sherer, his. For the moment, in terms of the wine list at least, everything is set.

But not for long. Even as soon as the end of the first Saturday night both Rosoff and Sherer were re-evaluating all their hard work in light of the one variable neither could fully account for in advance: the customers.

Because in the end, a good wine list is more than just a dry directory of bottles. It’s a tool that can open up the dialogue between the sommelier and the diner; and, ultimately, it’s this back and forth that will give the list its final shape and content. Since opening, Sherer has learned that that his customers favor red Bordeaux, white Burgundy, and weren’t ordering as much of the Italian wines as he thought would. And Rosoff, after seven months, admits to adding a few more California wines to the list (albeit from producers who are not exactly household names). Thus, the continuing challenge of maintaining a wine list unfolds; that is, giving the people what they want while persuading them to want what the restaurant has to give. It’s a precarious balance, forever in flux—which just goes to show, though a wine list may be printed on paper, it’s definitely not written in stone.

Chefs as Sommeliers

Chef Nicholas Harary is dressed to the nines. Designer three-button suit, thickly knotted silk tie, and gleaming polished shoes, he moves with the ease of man who isn't worried about squab jus splattering his crisp, tailored shirt. Expertly uncorking our Champagne, he fills our glasses with a one-handed flourish, nary a bubble lost, and goes on to explain why the wine at hand, Diebolt-Vallois Blanc de Blancs Grand Cru, will make a fine complement to the first two courses we are about to be served. Then he scurries back to the kitchen, frantically throwing on his whites and a toque, and proceeds to cook an inspired tasting menu including oysters with crme fraiche, turbot with honshimejii mushrooms, sweetbreads with mango and licorice dust, and suckling pig with quince and cinnamon. In between courses, he rushes out to the dining room (back in his unruffled suit) to pair and pour the wines, as comfortable discussing merits of the six different Condrieu on the wine list he created as he is wielding a saut pan over a dramatically leaping flame.

If you think this scene is the result of a writer's over-eager imagination, well,you'd be right, but only in part. Though I may have stretched a few of the details (Nicholas Harary is no quick-change artist and doesn't wear a toque), the 29-year old is in fact both chef and sommelier at his eponymous Red Bank, New Jersey restaurant. While he may not spend the night literally changing from one set of clothes to another (he keeps the suit on) he still manages to maintain perfect control of both parts of his restaurant. He oversees every detail, from the garnishes used on the daily amuse, to the particular sweet wine he might send out, gratis, with dessert for a regular customer's birthday.

While Harary may be precocious, and possibly out of his mind in his desire to do two full-time jobs at once, he is not alone. Over the past few years, a handful of chefs have crossed the front-of-the-house-back-of-the-house divide, pushing through those swinging kitchen doors into the dining room, where they are able to pursue their interest wine as full-fledged sommeliers - without giving up their toques (so to speak). And more and more chefs are following their lead, narrowing the gap between what has traditionally been two very separate spheres of influence.

Thirty years ago, a restaurant where the chef was also the sommelier would have been all but unthinkable. "Historically," admits Andrew Bell, the President of the American Sommelier Association, "there's always been an adversarial relationship between the back of the house and the front of the house. The chefs took care of the food and the sommelier took care of the wine list. But there was no real dialogue between them."

Mark Davidson, Director of Wine Studies at The Dubrulle International Culinary and Hotel Institute of Canada, in Vancouver, BC, concurs. "Even a few years ago, most chefs weren't that interested in wine or what was on the wine list," he said.

They also weren't necessarily in tune to the fact that the dishes on their tasting menus might eventually be paired with wine. "I'm not convinced that most chefs ever considered anything other than their food when they wrote a menu, and certainly not the wine," Davidson remembers. "When I was working as a sommelier, even in the best restaurants, I would look at these tasting menus and the flow was completely unfriendly to wine pairing. The menu might start with a heavy, wintry appetizer like a game terrine or smoked duck salad, then go to a light creamy seafood dish, and then back to red meat. It may have worked independently, but in terms of wine it was impossible because you'd want to start with a red, go to a white, then back to red. It could drive you mad."

But both Davidson and Bell agree that things have changed for the better. Over the past five years, they have noticed that chefs have been signing up for sommelier diploma/certificate programs in ever-escalating ranks.

"Every year we get a few more in the course," Davidson says of Dubrulle's program, "There's a growing understanding among the better chefs out there that wine education is necessary." And in the ASA class in New York City, the numbers of chefs who earned their certificates jumped by 800 percent in four years (okay, from one to eight, but it's still growing), with cooks enrolling from such New York restaurants as Aureole, Tappo, Babbo, and Il Buco, to name just a few.
"I'd call it a trend," Bell says, "a good one."

Considering that a sommelier certificate or diploma takes several months to a year of rigorous study, it's doubtful that chefs, already some of the busiest professionals in the country, would carve out the time merely to be trendy. For most, learning about wine is an obsession. That's certainly how anyone who met him would describe Colin Alevras, the chef and sommelier of New York City's Tasting Room, a restaurant committed to American wine and food.
Tall, reed-thin, and bursting with a hodgepodge of oenological and culinary expertise, 31-year old Alevras resembles neither the prototypical mysterious chef nor suave sommelier. Instead, his energy is more akin to the class clown, the one whom is always making jokes but everyone knows is actually the smartest kid in the school.

Although Alevras graduated from culinary school and worked in a few New York restaurants, his wine education didn't really begin until he traveled to Paris in 1996 and apprenticed at the three-star Arpege restaurant.

"As a cook in the United States you don't really get exposed to wine because they keep it locked up," he tells me over dinner one wintry night at the Tasting Room, "and the managers want young drinkers who work nights as far away from the booze as possible. It's very rare for wine to get sent back into the kitchen for anyone to taste."

In France, the tastes were a little more liberal since wine is considered an important and natural part of the dining experience. And Alevras was also eating out more, which propelled his interest.
"I started noticing that while the menu was maybe one or two pages, the wine list was like this," he says, positioning his thumb and pointer finger to show a Guinness Book of World Records-sized thickness.

His epiphany came at the end of a four-month Parisian sojourn. He was celebrating his birthday at Arpege, of course. In the middle of the six-hour meal, the sommelier decided to end with a surprise. He brought a wrapped up bottle of wine to the table and asked Alevras to identify it.
"At that point," Alevras remembers, "I didn't really know enough about wine to have fun with it. But I'm like, hell, let me make a rational guess. So I look at the wine and remember from my wine class at culinary school that the lighter the color the older the vintage. So I realize it's pretty old. The sommelier knows it's my birthday and how old I am, so I figure it's got to be a 1971 otherwise why would they do this to me? I know it's Bordeaux because it's in Bordeaux glasses and we're in a three-star French restaurant. So it's a '71 Bordeaux. And I'm stuck there. So I start thinking about the five big Bordeaux communes. It's going to be from one of them because again, we're in a three-star French restaurant and they're not going to pour me an obscure little wine. And I've been flipping through the wine list so I'm familiar with what's available. I taste the wine and, okay, it's not St. Julien because it's harder than merlot, it must be cab-based. I'm thinking, what's less expensive, what would they pour for me? What's the one without any premier cru or cru classe wines? And I'm like what's that Grateful Dead song? St. Stephan. '71 St. Estephe! The sommelier walks over to me and says 'you cheated, you looked at the bottle!' It was a Cos d'Estournel. And that's the moment when I realized, I can play this game."

On his return from France, Alevras continues after pausing to greet some regular customers, he furthered his wine education by taking a job as the cellar master at Daniel, and earning his ASA sommelier certificate. At the same time, he and his wife Renee were writing the business plan for what eventually became the Tasting Room.

Back at our table, the waiter serves a plate of earthy chicken liver ravioli with thyme, brown butter and balsamic, and Alevras shifts seamlessly from his personal story to the matter at hand: Why he chose to pair it with this particular wine, an Andrew Rich 2000 Chenin Blanc Vin de Tabula Rasa. "The chicken liver has a slightly bitter minerality that can work with red wines, but the tannins usually exacerbate the bitterness. The chenin blanc has both brightness and weight to it, and also a minerality that really works with the gamy liver and all the aromatics in the sauce."
I
n fact, the pairing works so well that it's hard to imagine savoring either the wine or ravioli by itself. Tasted on its own, the ravioli is a competent if slightly unctuous dish. With the chenin blanc, however, it's transformed. The acid in the wine brings out the nuttiness in the brown butter, and that compelling minerality really does make the thyme flavor pop. For its part, the richness of the ravioli sauce tempers and rounds out the tang of the wine.

The opportunity to put together pairings like this one, and to do so from both sides of the coin, as it were, underscores the reason Alevras and others chose their dual path in the first place.
"The whole philosophy behind what we're doing here," he says of the Tasting Room, "is to have the food build a platform that's going to make the wine look good, and to offer wines that are going to make the food look good, too "When it all comes together it can be pretty amazing."
Alevras will, on occasion, even adjust his cooking to match the wine choice of a table. "If someone is going to order a monster red the minute they sit down, it's going to obliterate whatever they eat. But I can modify my cooking a little bit, like bringing down the acid and salt in the salad. Or if a table is still finishing their pinot noir when they order a cheese plate, I will leave off the washed rind cheese because it will taste really metallic."

While the idea that the wine a dish is paired with can be as integral a part of the recipe as the salt, vinegar or herbs may smack of wine geekdom, all of the chef-sommeliers I've spoken with agree their wine knowledge has informed their cooking to some degree.

It's a most welcomed philosophical shift, says Vancouver's Mark Davidson. "Once a chef start thinking about the wine it enlarges their perspective," he asserts, "they might think harder about their sauces, or their use of vinegar. Their cooking takes on another level of thought, which by nature can make it better."

Chef Dino Renaerts, one of Davidson's first students in the diploma course, says the changes in his cooking are palpable since he took the course. "It's altered the way I approach cooking," says Renaerts, currently the chef of the Vancouver Golf Club and formerly of Vancouver's Pastis restaurant, "I don't use vinegar as much, maybe using verjus instead. The plates are cleaner; I don't mix together as many ingredients. I try to let the actual flavors of the main ingredients speak for themselves, which I think is your best bet for showing off wine."
Not all chef-sommeliers, however, follow this tact. When Thomas Henkelmann, chef of the Homestead Inn in Greenwich, Connecticut, decided to take his knowledge of wine to the next level by completing the ASA certificate course, he didn't do it to transform his cooking. He did it as a "personal exercise." He insists it hasn't actually affected his cuisine. But it has changed his perception of his cuisine.

"Tasting wine makes you more focused on tasting other things," Henkelmann asserts, "You are more analytical when you taste wine and it heightens your awareness of food as well. So I think in general I taste better now than I did before. And maybe that's made my cuisine more balanced. But I don't think the wine knowledge itself has changed my cooking."

Although Henkelmann buys all the wines for the restaurant, he does not appear on the floor to serve it. "For me I'm still first a chef," he says by way of explanation.

But this does raise the question: how do these chef-sommeliers manage to fulfill the sommelier-side of their duties, and make wine suggestions when they are back in the kitchen cooking dinner?

Every chef has a different solution. For Henkelmann, creating a tasting menu with the wine pairings included is his way of guiding his customers. Renaerts goes one step further, and will write his entire menu with wine suggestions for every dish. But for Alevras and Harary, who are more dependent on their sous-chefs to do the night-to-night cooking, remaining on the floor to help every table select their wine is part of what they enjoy about being chef-sommeliers. It's as much about the dialogue and interaction as it is about the cooking.

"We purposely don't give pairing advice on the menu," says Alevras, "because we leave that open as a way for me or the staff to begin interacting with the table. It's a deliberate omission to get people to ask questions, and it allows us to help them out. It makes the table feel like they are being taken care of."

This kind of personalized attention certainly can enhance the customer's experience. It also allows the chef to keep a tighter reign over the entire meal, not just the food.

"It is a way to control the table more," Henkelmann says of his decision to become a sommelier, "I know that the wine people will be drinking will work with my food, and that they will enjoy it all the more."

Clearly, understanding both the menu and the wine list inside and out also gives these chef-sommeliers an advantage when it comes to making pairing recommendations, especially if, like Alevras and Harary, they are working in the dining room during dinner.

Of the chef-sommeliers I've spoken with, Nicholas Harary is perhaps the most comfortable on the floor during service - probably because he's the only one to have held a professional, full-time sommelier position, at Jean-Georges in New York. (He also concurrently cooked there, spending his days in the kitchen and his nights on the floor.) And his pairing philosophy is slightly different. Unlike the industry standard of matching a different wine with each dish, Harary prefers half bottles, matching one wine with two courses.

"I don't believe that food and wine should always be in perfect harmony," he explains, "I think that you should be able to have a wine with two courses so you can really see how the wine interacts with different kinds of food, and develops in the glass, and how the palate changes and adjusts to the wine. That's why I don't think there's a perfect wine to go with every dish. I think there are a lot of wines that can go with a dish."

Harary's comment strikes at the heart of the matter. Given that each person's palate and taste is delightfully and bewilderingly unique, striving for one perfect match is impossible. It may even be beside the point. Exploring the infinite possibilities and pleasures of wine and food pairing is definitely most of the fun. As that old chestnut goes, the great joy of life is in the journey, certainly not in the conclusion. And, less morbidly, who wouldn't say the same of an excellent meal?
Or, as Harary puts it: "I'm not out here saying I'm some kind of genius, but I know good food and good wines, and I know how to put them together "That's all I'm trying to do.""

Pairing American Cheese and Port

Most perfect wine and food pairings are products of proximity. Chilled saline oysters and a crisp, cool Muscadet; a delicate fino sherry with warm, toasted almonds, or a robust, tarry Barolo with earthy black truffles all speak volumes about the innate, superior logic of terroir. It's just like that old chestnut, what grows together goes together.

Yet, every rule has its exceptions, and these often prove to be even more interesting than the tenets they upset. Consider, for example Port and Stilton.
Possibly one of the most famous and enduring pairings of all time (not to mention one of the most sublime) the two only met because of a twist in political history. The British developed an interest in Portuguese wines to spite the French. When bottles of their bounty reached the home shores (fortified against the ocean voyage with a stiff dose of brandy), with typical self-importance, the British didn't look back to Portugal for ideas of how to pair it. Instead, they looked to the superb cheese making tradition of their own countryside. Thus one of the great long distance romances began: syrupy sweet Portuguese wine and salty, nutlike English Stilton.

But while Stilton may arguably be the best cheese to nibble with a glass of Port, it's not the only one. Other varieties - some of even farther-flung provenance - can also pair well, including those much closer to home: American artisanal cheeses. American cheese making has a long and venerable history (see sidebar), and has gone through a particular renaissance of late. There's no doubt that these cheeses deserve to be enjoyed in the company of excellent wine. So to further explore this possibility, W&S held a Port and American artisanal cheese tasting, with guidance from cheese expert Max McCalman.
McCalman is the maitre fromager at Picholine restaurant in New York City and the author of The Cheese Plate (Clarkson Potter, 2002). If pairing cheese and wine wasn't part of his profession, it would simply be his addiction, and there are few others as passionate and knowledgeable in the field.

Port, he explained, has a natural affinity for cheese because of the initial contrast of flavors on the palate.

"Sweetness is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Port," said McCalman "and since cheese is generally salty, it harmonizes."

The flavor profiles of both salty cheese and sweet wines, while strong enough to stand up to one another, fall on opposite ends of the taste spectrum, acting as complements. That's why other dessert wines, such as Sauternes, are commonly matched with pungent, salty cheeses like Roquefort, and this is of course at the heart of the Port-and-Stilton marriage as well (and this also held true for other blue cheeses and vintage Ports in our tasting, see sidebar/box).
The reverse can also be true. A very subtle cheese will be flattened into oblivion by a heady glass of Port, and vice versa. So a good rule of thumb is to pair fragile cheeses with softer wines, such as a tender, fresh cheese with a citrus-caramel nuanced white Port. The contrasting salty/sweet flavors will be there, but in a gentler way.

Since cheese is generally a lot more intense than wine, in an unsuccessful pairing, it's usually the wine that suffers most (as McCalman says, "people always blame the cheese"). Even a dense, inky, vintage-style Port with loads of berry and cassis could lose its fruity character when confronted with a particularly funky blue, for example.

Contrasting flavor is just one part of the pairing equation. Another element is acidity. With pH levels, McCalman advises, look for similarities, such as matching a tangy cheese with a fairly lively wine (think of fresh goat cheese and Sancerre). In terms of Port, this would mean partnering a young, bright vintage-style with a young, tart mountain cheese or cheddar. Then, as both the wine and cheese age , shedding some of their racy vigor but taking on suave, nutty, secondary characteristics, they will marry well again. A brilliant example is serving very old vintage or tawny Ports with aged farmhouse cheeses, one of McCalman's favorite combinations.

Texture is yet another facet to consider. A rich, creamy, runny cheese will coat the palate more readily than a chalky or gritty cheese. This can be a bonus with young vintage ports still flaunting huge, rugged tannins. A lush cheese may help smooth them out. On the flip side, the syrupy viscosity of a Port is an elegant contrast to the crunchy tartaric acid crystals that form in some aged cheeses, for example a blue cheese or a gouda.

Beyond those relatively tangible basics, it gets harder to pin down. The rest of the magic comes from the aroma, and those multifaceted, fleeting flavor nuances (the alkylphenols) that are the expression of terroir in cheese. Finding a match that brings out and unites all the gorgeous complexities of both the wine and cheese is daunting (McCalman registers every success into a Palm Pilot to keep track), but the results can be stunning. These are the matches that McCalman gives his highest scores to, what he calls "the elusive plus-twos." On his personal rating scale, pairings go from negative-two to plus-two. A plus-two occurs when both the cheese and the wine are positively affected by the relationship on the tongue. A plus-one means that one or the other is positively affected. A zero means they neither detract from nor improve one another, and the negative side of the scale is simply the equation in reverse.

To get the most out of pairing Port and cheese, McCalman offered some tips on tasting methods. "Take a bite of cheese, chew it a little, and let it coat your palate," he said, "then sip some wine and let them meld into a cheese sauce in your mouth. You'll be able to see how and if the relationship works."

Whether it's a divine plus-two or a mediocre minus-one, the tasting is always the best part.

Beyond the Bland, A Brief History of American Cheese

Contrary to what most people envision when they think of American cheese, cheese making in this country did not start with individually wrapped Kraft singles. Nor, on the opposite end of the spectrum, did it begin in the 70s, with Laura Chenel's fresh goat cheese logs, which dominated every California-style salad for an entire decade. Cheese making in America has a richer history that dates back to the very first colonists: the Pilgrims. It was recorded that in 1620, the Mayflower hauled goats across the Atlantic to Plymouth, and that the first Thanksgiving meal most likely included fresh goat cheese along with the turkey. The first cows reportedly arrived a few years later, in 1624.

The various styles of early American cheeses developed among settlers of different nationalities. Emigrating from such excellent cheese producing countries as the British Isles, Holland, France, Germany, and Scandinavia, it was only natural that these hungry souls would bring their cheese making practices with them. New Englanders of British stock were aging farmhouse cheeses like cheddar, while New Yorkers with Dutch roots made gouda. In Wisconsin, German immigrants created cheeses like Limburger, and those of Swiss descent molded semi-firm mountain cheeses that all eventually fell under the generic name of "Swiss." As Max McCalman puts it, setting the record straight, "there is no Swiss cheese, only Swiss cheeses," except in America.

Unfortunately, high-quality, small production cheese making began to fall to the wayside in the early part of the 20th century, when mechanization and mass production became the standard way to churn out many a comestible. This remained the case, with a few notable exceptions, until the 1970s, when, yes, Laura Chenel teamed up with Alice Waters to bring hand-made fresh goat cheese into the public consciousness. It took a decade or so, but eventually others followed. Now, there are over 200 artisan cheese makers in the United States, up from a handful only 20 years ago. And here we are today.

Tasting Notes:

For our Port and cheese tasting, Max McCalman steered us to seven cheeses, matched with Ports in three different styles: Churchill's White Port; Ramos Pintos 10 year Tawny Port; Sandeman's 20 year Tawny Port; Noval 20 year Tawny Port; Taylor 1985 Vintage Port; Dow 1980 Vintage Port. Every cheese found a happy mate in one of the wines. Here are the results:

Capriole Wabash Cannonball: This pasteurized goat milk cheese is ashed, with a white mold rind. The balls of cheese ripen toward the center, with a milky, semi-soft paste and a gently tart, fresh, and slightly salty flavor. This rather delicate cheese worked nicely with the white Port, bringing out the wine's sherried, oxidized character and heightening its acidity. The richer tawny Ports and firmer vintage ones killed it.

Sally Jackson's Guernsey Cheese: Sally Jackson is well known for her goat and sheep milk cheeses, and is now making this suave, nearly runny raw Guernsey cow's milk cheese as well. It is wrapped in chestnut leaves and aged for 4 to 8 weeks. Beautiful with both vintage Ports, it was particularly brilliant with the Taylor, which had an abundance of ripe black raspberry flavors that made a perfect union with the sharp, tarragon-herbal qualities of the cheese. Plus, the creaminess of the cheese took some the edge off the tannins of this still-maturing wine.

Timson: Made by Vermont Shepherd Cheese, this buttercup yellow, washed rind raw cow's milk cheese is aged for 5 to 6 months. It has a complicated, rich, woodsy, almost smoky flavor. Pairing this nuanced cheese was difficult but for most tasters the tawny Ports, particularly the caramel-sweet Ramos Pintos' worked well, although some people detected a slight ammoniated flavor on the finish. The tanginess of the cheese also brought out the golden raisin and dried apricot flavors of the white Port.

Putney Tomme: Another cheese by Vermont Shepherd Cheese, this smooth, raw cow's milk cheese is aged for 4 months. It is made in the Tomme de Savoie style, with a gray rind, darkly tan paste, and earthy, tangy flavor with a pleasant underlying grassy tone. It was most successful with the tawny Ports. However, since it is a fairly mild, less salty cheese, it was not successful with the full-on sweetness of the Ramos Pintos, whereas it brought out the caramel, dried citrus rind, and nutty character of the Sandeman's.

Winchester Gouda: This farmhouse style, raw Holstein cow's milk cheese is cooked and pressed like a traditional Dutch Gouda, and aged for 9 months. It is hard and crumbly with a sandy yellow color and sweet, salty, butterscotch and nut flavors. This rich, complex cheese went well with the tawny Ports, bringing out the caramel and coffee notes of both the Ramos Pintos and the Noval.

Grafton 4 Star Cheddar: Aged for 4 years, this raw milk cheddar has developed a dry, firm texture and an intense, characteristic Cheddar flavor that allows it to pair well with all the Ports we tasted. This cheese made the Churchill's white Port seem intriguingly peppery, and brought out the deep, bittersweet chocolate taste in the Noval. But possibly the best pairings were with the vintage Ports, and particularly the Taylor '85, which seemed to grow even more jammy and fleshy next to the aged, nutty cheese.

Old Chatham Sheepherding Ewe's Blue: This moist, crumbly sheep's milk blue is made in the style of Roquefort. It has a distinct milky flavor with buttery overtones and a touch of sweetness, framed by a smoky and profound blue cheese taste without any bitterness. This cheese asks for a vintage port, and while the Taylor '85 somehow rendered the cheese bacony and too intense, the cheese brought out the fat initial fruit of the Dow '80, then its delightful secondary bottle age character of nuts and dried figs. This pairing was possibly the best among all the cheeses and ports.

Great Hill Blue: This crisp, zesty blue has a dense yellow paste, a pungent, saline flavor and a creamy texture. The Noval tawny was a very good match for this blue, although the cheese really shines with vintage Ports. It worked wonderfully with the older, more restrained Dow, highlighting its blackberry-briar patch fruit, than it did with the exuberant Taylor '85, which lost some of its freshness in the pairing.