Good Wine Matters

Starting a conversation about conscious consumption with the wine community.

Words by Jillian Riley, Art by John Hatherly

As a sommelier I’m taught to learn about the classic wines of the world and to look at them as the pinnacle of excellence. I’m taught that these are the ultimate expressions of terroir and of beauty. I do deeply appreciate these wines, and some of them have been mind-bending for me upon first taste. By and large, these wines are untouchable for the vast majority of the population. They carry burdensome prices, are limited in production, and hard to find.

It’s easy to get a warped view working as a sommelier in fine dining. I’ve worked at multiple restaurants where our average bottle of wine was over $100. It becomes strangely easy to find selling a $500 bottle commonplace. And while learning the classics has given me a wonderful sense of context and history, I can’t help but regularly remind myself there was a time when these wines weren’t considered classics, when they were young and new and attainable. Like every form of art, the world eventually decided what would be considered “pinnacle.”

One of the questions I am frequently asked is “what was my gateway wine?” For a somm this means— what wine made you feel you had to dig deeper into the wine world? What sparked you? People expect that I’m going to name some sort of amazing 1970s Burgundy or a mythic bottle from the Rhone, perhaps. My humble answer is, “some bottle of Sangiovese whose name and vintage I can’t remember.” I was 20 and had recently returned from studying abroad in Paris, where I was first exposed to seeing wine as a part of culture. I can’t name a single wine I drank while there, but I loved the camaraderie it encouraged, the slowness of sitting, relaxing, focusing on nothing but the people and street around you, perhaps the book in front of you. It was a form of meditation. After I returned to Brooklyn, as I was walking the 12 blocks down Bedford Ave. to my apartment one afternoon, I meandered into our local wine shop. I told them I was making spaghetti (the really fancy kind where you boil a box of noodles and heat a jar of pre-made pasta sauce). I asked them if they could recommend a bottle under $15. The clerk happily guided toward a Sangiovese and then checked me out. They never seemed bothered by the fact that I looked quite a bit shy of 21 with my baby face. They were just jazzed to help someone with a curiosity about wine. At the time, it didn’t occur to me the bottle would change my life, so there didn’t seem much reason to burn the name or appellation into memory. Heck, I didn’t even know what an appellation was. I can tell you it wasn’t Chianti or a Super Tuscan. It was actually labeled as “Sangiovese.” That much I recall. My roommates were both out for the evening, so I set our reclaimed dining table for 1 and began boiling my noodles. I will never forget taking a sip of the wine, then a bite of pasta, then back to the wine. It was as if time stopped. The glass of wine tasted better because of the food. The food tasted better because of the wine. It was magical. Meditation in the form of gastronomy.

This moment never left me. It continued to shape my food and wine philosophy throughout my restaurant career. At a luxury hotel where the least expensive wine was at one time $100, I promptly shook up the wine list upon becoming wine director. I brought in bottle after bottle under $100, many under $70— something almost unheard of for the property at the time. My boss was deeply worried at first. He said the restaurant had been there for almost 20 years, and they never had this many bottles that were that inexpensive. I replied by asking him if we were filling the seats each night. “Well, no,” he said. In fact, we were struggling. I told him we weren’t reaching enough people if we weren’t full every night. When the seats were full every night, I would stop adding less expensive bottles.

The number one thing a guest can tell me that will help me pick a great bottle for them is what bottle they had last that blew them away. As time went on, I realized more and more people were embarrassed to say. They worried the wine wouldn’t meet the standards of a sommelier. This concerned me. The sommelier community had given consumers the perception that their preference for certain flavors should be judged on a qualitative scale. Meanwhile, mass production wines continued to see sales growth, a deeply disturbing fact to me— not because of the flavors these wines delivered, but rather because of the ethics involved with their creation and distribution. These were the wines sometimes getting fined for excessive levels of arsenic. Their distributors often used tactics like bribing a wine director with sporting event or concert tickets, in some cases what amounted to cash, to get the wines onto the list. Consumers didn’t have this knowledge, though, because a publication marketed for them funded by ad dollars for these large companies would never print such an article. The reality was that these big box wines were a known quantity. They didn’t require the help of a sommelier who might be perceived as snobby, so that had become an easy route for the consumer. 

For those who realized something might be amiss with the mass-produced wines, the “natural” wine movement was a place to turn. These wines promised to be small production and. . . er. . . um. .  . natural? But, what does that mean? I’ve never trusted the word “natural” on my food or my skincare, so naturally I questioned it on my wine. (This conversation to be continued. . . )

I realized we somms need to do a better job for our guests and consumers. We need to value the ethics around wine as much as or more than we place a value judgement on flavor and expression. Not to mention that tomorrow’s classics may currently have a price tag of $12.99, just has been the case throughout history. Having been fortunate to see many vineyards, I am now well aware that wine-making is truly agriculture, and the way we tend our land and treat the people who work it will greatly impact our Earth in the years to come. I’m inspired to see more and more people voting with their dollar. These people are wise, savvy, and most importantly, they care. They deserve a transparent wine community, which is why we started Yield. It’s time to ask what we will take, and what we will leave behind. What will we yield our world? Welcome.