The New Sommelier

Mike Bonaccorsi, a boyish 35, is used to the double-take he gets when he approaches a table of diners at Spago.

“Yeah, I get that all the time,” he says, a bit ruefully. “People ask their server to send the sommelier over, and then I show up and they say, ‘Are you the sommelier?’ I say, ‘Yeah,’ and they say, ‘Well, where are the keys and the ashtray, the tastevin around your neck?’

“So actually, I stole a line from a customer,” Bonaccorsi admits. “I say, ‘Hey, this isn’t a cruise ship!’ They usually laugh.”

Bonaccorsi, who received his master sommelier diploma at age 30, is one of a handful of youthful wine professionals who are redefining how wine is bought, presented and served in Southern California’s finer restaurants. Bonaccorsi and his peers don’t fit the old image of a wine steward from the days of continental dining. Today’s wine stewards generally don’t wear tuxedos; they don’t sport tastevins on chains and they aren’t haughty.

“One of my biggest challenges is to break the barriers of intimidation that have prevailed in the past,” says Chris Meeske, sommelier at Patina restaurant, which holds a Grand Award for its wine list from Wine Spectator magazine.

“People have this image of the sommelier based on their past experiences, and they think he’s just coming up to sell them the most expensive wine. That’s part of the reason we don’t wear the tuxes and we don’t wear the tastevin--to get away from the formality and bring more of a casualness to wine. In reality, I have to make customers feel at ease so that they can entrust me to give them the best recommendation.”

Meeske moved to Patina from Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, where he was sommelier. Bonaccorsi spent several years as wine steward at Masa’s and the Cypress Club in San Francisco and, before that, was in wine retailing and wholesaling.

Despite their service backgrounds, Bonaccorsi and Meeske see themselves less as wine waiters and more as crusaders--advocates for wine in a culture that grew up on milk and cola drinks. A big part of their job, they say, is to demystify wine.

Europeans grew up drinking the stuff, but Americans have to learn about wine, a subject fraught with pretense, snobbery and difficult-to-pronounce foreign words.

The term “sommelier” itself is weighted with a certain amount of Old-World baggage. It’s a title that can be used by anyone, although the master sommelier diploma is awarded by the international Court of Master Sommeliers, which administers a three-tiered curriculum and examination program. Many local restaurant wine managers don’t call themselves sommeliers, preferring the less pretentious wine director or even wine guy.

David Rosoff, manager and sommelier of Michael’s in Santa Monica, admits that he doesn’t much like the title “sommelier,” although he plans to work toward the master sommelier diploma. “I think that [the term] lends this air of mystery to something that’s already mysterious and, really, the No. 1 function [of a sommelier] is to break down those walls of inhibition,” Rosoff says. “By calling yourself a sommelier when you approach the table, you’re immediately scaring the heck out of everybody sitting there.

“But whatever you call it, the function has changed because of the types of wines people are consuming and the variety of wines available to people today that weren’t available 10 or 15 years ago,” Rosoff says.

Michael’s was among the pioneering California cuisine restaurants that led the way in making the tuxedo-clad sommelier a thing of the past. Indeed it was one of owner Michael McCarty’s stated goals to kick the pretension out of fine dining, in part by dressing his staff in Ralph Lauren-casual and hiring a wine director, Phil Reich, who didn’t fit any of the old stereotypes.

Back then, in the early 1980s, many of Southern California’s top restaurants and hotels employed a sommelier who took full responsibility for wine buying and wine service. Less ambitious restaurants simply didn’t have wine lists. Today, of course, even neighborhood restaurants offer a wine selection, sometimes a surprisingly good one.

As wine service has become democratized, the number of sommeliers has waned. Bonaccorsi and Meeske are among a select group of full-time sommeliers in Southern California. It should be noted that they don’t work for just one restaurant but are called upon to do wine lists for an expanding empire of restaurants owned by their respective employers, Wolfgang Puck and Joachim Splichal.

Most Southern California wine stewards combine wine duties with other assignments. Rosoff, who began his wine career at the wholesale level and gained restaurant experience at I Cugini, manages Michael’s in addition to his sommelier duties. Manfred Krankl, managing partner and wine buyer at Campanile restaurant, spends most of his time overseeing the restaurant’s companion business, the rapidly growing La Brea Bakery, and handles Campanile’s wine program as a sideline.

Although the traditional image of a sommelier has him (and most are male) on the restaurant floor advising customers, most wine stewards spend a lot of time in the back room on the phone and at the computer, simply trying to stay abreast of the flood of great wines on the Southland market.

Never in their collective memory, say several sommeliers, has there been such an array of terrific wine from which to compose a wine list. Plentiful harvests, the tremendous strides that have been made in winemaking quality throughout well-established wine areas and the emergence of new wine regions around the world have contributed to the abundance.

“There’s so much good wine out there, so much more than ever, that I have to turn wineries down just because I can’t buy everything,” says Krankl.

“When I started in America in the early ‘80s, it was a whole different thing,” he said. “If you wanted to have a credible wine list, there were certain things you had to have, like Jordan and BV Private Reserve. If you didn’t have those on your list, you didn’t have a good wine list. Now, it doesn’t make any difference. There are so many wineries, there are whole bushels of them you can skip and still have a great wine list.”

Although it would be easy to simply sell the wines that consumers like--California Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, for instance--most cutting-edge sommeliers encourage customers to try the lesser-known wines that complement today’s eclectic cooking styles. Bonaccorsi took Spago’s wine list, which once was a bastion of California Chardonnay and Cabernet, and studded it with Austrian Rieslings, crisp whites from Friuli, stout Zinfandels and spicy red Rho^nes, which suit the cuisine.

On the one-page wine list of Wolfgang Puck’s ObaChine, Bonaccorsi has placed a dot next to the wines he judges “especially well-suited” to the restaurant’s Pacific Rim cuisine. There isn’t a single Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot with a dot next to it.

At the front of Campanile’s wide-ranging list, an open letter from Krankl promotes “the terrific wines” of Italy, France’s Rho^ne Valley, Provence, the Loire Valley, the Midi, Alsace, Germany, Austria, Spain, New Zealand, Lebanon and, almost as an afterthought, the United States.

“I don’t have anything against Chardonnay or Cabernet,” Krankl says. “I just don’t like only that. I think it’s sort of asinine that consumers blindly drink only those things. I think it’s our job, as restaurateurs and retailers, to help change that a little bit.” He says that his efforts have been so successful that he occasionally has to remind the staff that it’s OK to sell Cabernet.

Krankl has even gone so far as to do the unthinkable: He often doesn’t offer Chardonnay by the glass. “I used to make a certain amount of enemies, actually, because people would go, what, no Chardonnay? What kind of restaurant is this?” says Krankl, raising his hands in mock horror.

But, he argues, Chardonnay by the glass has become so generic that customers seldom give the taste of the wine a second thought. When Chardonnay isn’t an option, customers are forced to consider alternatives.

“I feel like I’ve really done them a favor, even if they don’t know it,” Krankl says. “They walk away with something that they now know about wine. They’ve had something that they’ve consumed with intellect. In the end, it helps further understanding of wine in a very gentle, subliminal way.”

Krankl also shuns the practice common among restaurateurs of putting a high markup on sought-after, sparsely allocated wines or hoarding them and doling them out to favorite customers. “I don’t believe in wines that are only for the special, privileged people,” he says, citing as an example the hard-to-find Chardonnay from Marcassin, of which he might be allocated six bottles for the restaurant. “I’m more interested in letting someone who has never had a great Chardonnay drink the Marcassin than in giving it out to six people who already know it.”

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Krankl, who makes his own wine under the Sine Qua Non label, stuck to his democratic principles with the release of his 1994 Queen of Spades Syrah from Bien Nacido Vineyards in the Santa Maria Valley. He made just a hundred cases, and Campanile got a paltry two. The wine, released in October, sold out at $50 a bottle the first week it was put on Campanile’s list.

At Michael’s, Rosoff campaigns for his personal favorite, Pinot Noir, a wine that goes with a variety of foods and is ideal for a group in which no two people are ordering the same food. But he admits that sometimes it’s an uphill battle.

“Unfortunately, people are not necessarily looking for a good food pairing,” he says. “The percentage of people who say to me, ‘This is what we’re having for dinner. What should we drink?’ is much smaller than the people who say, ‘What’s the exciting new Cabernet?’ And they could be having the gravlax!”

Although he says he tries to gently steer customers away from food and wine gaffes, he would never argue with a customer about a wine he or she was intent on ordering. The results sometimes make him wince. “You see horrible wine and food pairings, like oysters and Cabernet,” he says. “You die a small death every night watching some of the things that happen at the tables.”

Although good sommeliers know their wine list and menu intimately, most are careful not to appear overly doctrinaire or rigid when it comes to pairing wine with food. At Patina, in addition to the regular menu, the chef offers a nightly six-course tasting dinner for $95 for which dishes are carefully matched with wines selected by Meeske.

But Meeske keeps food and wine pairing in perspective. “I tell people, don’t get that uptight about it; it’s not that big of a deal,” he says. “Yes, if you want to have a specific wine to go with a specific course, great, go for it. But, if you just feel like drinking something, and if you feel like eating something completely different, who cares? I just tell them to relax.”

“The old approach of having someone say, ‘Well, I’m having the lamb and my wife is having the duck, what should we drink?’ has broken down,” says Scott Tracy, who runs the wine program at 2424 Pico, a casual Santa Monica restaurant. “People are drinking so much red wine with fish now. They aren’t so interested in having an appropriate wine as they are in having a good wine.”

Tracy doesn’t wait for customers to open the wine list and call him over to consult on a selection. Instead, he acts like a host and walks up to tables holding two open bottles, a red and a white, which he’s featuring by the glass that day. He lets customers have a taste of each, then pours them a glass if they like it. If not, there are the 60 wines on the wine list, of which about 35 are available by the glass. “I’m an advocate,” Tracy says. “I’m a lot more aggressive about saying ‘try this,’ and because I have a bottle of wine in my hand, customers open up to that right away.”

Another area in which local sommeliers are trying to promote a more relaxed attitude is with patrons who want to bring in their own wine. Traditionally, restaurateurs with significant wine lists have discouraged the practice by charging a high per-bottle corkage fee, from $14 to $20 or even more. Some establishments expressly forbid customers to bring in wine. But many restaurateurs welcome these customers, figuring that most are wine and food enthusiasts and that they may order bottles off the list as well.

“We’re more than OK with it; we are wildly accepting of people bringing their own wine,” says Rosoff of Michael’s, which charges $10 corkage per bottle. “I’ve never seen a place where people bring in more wine than here.”

2424 Pico charges an $8 corkage fee. “We have many customers who actually bring in interesting wines for me to taste,” Tracy says. “It creates a sharing atmosphere, as opposed to a traditional restaurant where the customer might be concerned about the price of corkage or that someone will be offended by the fact that they’re bringing in wine. . . . We’re very interested in encouraging those people, because people who care about wine are our customers.”

In the end, L.A.’s best sommeliers are angling not just for big tips but for converts to wine. Bonaccorsi says that his peak moments are when he can work with a table of diners and create excitement around the wines he’s chosen.

“There was a California winemaker who came in, and he was completely open to suggestion,” Bonaccorsi says. “So the chef did a special menu for him and his three guests, and I brought them an Austrian Riesling, a Rioja Riserva, a Co^te-Rotie--really terrific, unusual wines. The winemaker obviously had such an appreciation for wine that his face would light up every time I served him one. It was really great.”

Krankl goes into Campanile every morning and scrutinizes the sales reports from the night before. But when he picks up the wine reports, he’s not looking at just sales volume. “My biggest enjoyment is when I look at a printout and see we sold 50 bottles of wine, and they were 50 different ones,” he says. “That’s success.”