Breaking Free: L.A. Wine Culture

Shattering the stereotypes

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Wednesday, Feb 6 2008

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In the United States, at least, the wine culture of a city often has more to do with the efforts of a few obsessed people than it does with factors that you'd think would be more important, such as climate, the ethnicity of its population and the physical proximity of vineyards. My favorite Bay Area restaurants, which should be awash in the big, glossy wines from nearby Napa and Sonoma, tend instead to specialize in handmade wines from the Rhone and the south of France, probably because of the influence of Chez Panisse and local wine importers like Kermit Lynch and North Berkeley Wine. The best Portland lists, while featuring a comprehensive roster of Northwest wines, are often deep in the sorts of boutique Northern Italian wines that rarely make it out of Piedmont. It is easier to find rare Burgundy in Manhattan than it is to find wines from nearby Long Island.

Greater Los Angeles may be the single biggest wine market in the United States, and it is situated just a couple of hours from the important winegrowing areas of Santa Ynez, Ojai, Temecula and the Guadalupe Valley, but it rarely seems connected to those regions, and the shape of its taste is often hard to discern.

Anne Fishbein

A glass of wine and sow: Lou Amdur, champion of oddball reds and whites at his wine bar Lou, contemplates the mysteries of the biodynamic grape and his next batch of pig candy.

Anne Fishbein

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(It says something, I think, that some of my best wine experiences last year were at Ludobar and Laurent Quenioux's Bistro K, two excellent, now-defunct restaurants that happened to have a BYOB policy. There is something subversive about bringing your own '91 grand cru Alsatian Riesling and ancient bottles of Clape Cornas to dinner — it lets you think that you are getting away with something, and you are drinking really, really well.)

Fifteen-odd years ago, the boundaries of local taste were more clear. Manfred Krankl, now a revered winemaker but then the general manager at the restaurant Campanile, was obsessed with both Italian wines and tiny-production California wines. He, along with Valentino's Piero Selvaggio, educated Angelenos on the necessity of paying serious money for then-unpronounceable super-Tuscans, whites from the Alto Adige and and ink-dark Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. (For years, I don't think there was a cult California or Italian wine that hadn't at one time been poured by the glass at Campanile's bar, which was also early on Austrian wines.) Philip Reich and other sommeliers at Michael's shaped the idea of what a great California-dominated list might look like. Joachim Splichal put serious French wine back into play, although Hollywood has always nurtured a large corps of Francophile collectors. The most important chef in Los Angeles, then as now, was probably Wolfgang Puck, and his head sommelier Michael Bonaccorsi helped to form the idea of the eclectic modern list.

You remember pictures of the old wine guys, old-fashioned sommeliers, the stout, florid, usually foreign men wearing tuxedos two sizes too small, worn Florsheims, and bunch-of-grapes pins stabbed into their grosgrain lapels? They wore heavy pewter tastevins around their necks, possibly awarded at a grand ceremony in France, and they muttered a lot about vintages. You saw them in the movies — Hungarian actor S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall made a career out of playing them. Charles Laughton corrected their pronunciation of "Montrachet."

Then one day we woke up, and the wine dude was the coolest guy in the room — profiled in magazines, rocking Comme des Garcons suits, riding motorcycles to tastings, cramming for certification exams with his cool friends. Sommeliers like Caitlin Stansbury, formerly of the Lodge, wore sexy pantsuits and brought serious wine to restaurants where the Aerosmith on the house iPod rarely dipped below stadium volume. Mark Mendoza at Sona matches wine to David Myers' precise cooking with the painstaking care of a project architect. David Rosoff at Mozza, who in a previous gig at Opaline was one of the few sommeliers to actually persuade the chef to cook to the contours of his wine, juggles the under-$50 Italian wines in the pizzeria and the pricier wines in the adjacent osteria and actually comes up with a coherent wine philosophy, even if that philosophy sometimes seems like Obscure + Italian = Good. Where else are you going to find the Slovenian Edi Simcic Merlot blend from Goriska Brda? Where else would you want to?

We started seeing curated wine shops, not full-service general emporia like Wally's, Red Carpet or the Wine House, but groovy joints like Silverlake Wine, the Champagne-intensive Wine Expo in Santa Monica and Mission Wine in South Pasadena, reflecting not just an inventory but a worldview, often with a subspecialty in esoteric but well-priced and satisfying bottles, in Ribolla Gialla and Teroldego and Cold Heaven Viognier. And after too many run-ins with the wrong Chilean Carmeneres, we've come to rely on the curators too.

(You have undoubtedly experienced the stages of wine disillusionment yourself: You fall in love with a California wine; you realize the French wine that the California wine is modeled on is cheaper than its clone; the French wine rockets to three figures; and then you sneak back to the first wine only to discover that you can no longer afford to drink that one, or even its New Zealand equivalent. It's a complicated process. It is why you are probably drinking more wines from Argentina and South Africa than you used to.)