Still no poker news to speak of. This is cross posted from my tumblr blog. Doing my best to keep the Leggo blogoverse alive.

The last two weeks have been fairly exciting. Before going to New Orleans, I had come across a thread on the guild of sommeliers website regarding wine preservation systems. Dumping wine from our by the glass program that has been open for longer than two days is a big cost for us. After two days of being open, the wine in the bottle just isn’t as good, so we dump it in order to give our guests the highest quality wine by the glass. It seemed like argon gas was the best. It sounds scary until you realize that argon is the third most common gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (.93%) and is inert—it doesn’t react with other elements, doesn’t respond to heat or cold, nothing. Also, many wineries use it as a guard against oxidation. Argon gas is also used in welding, and so I did my shopping at a welding supply store. I went to a couple of different stores, and the most helpful was also the least expensive. $250 later, the restaurant had a very simple system to deliver argon gas into the partially full (or partially empty, depending on your disposition) wine bottle.

The argon gas creates a protective layer between the wine and the oxygen in the air with its harmful effects. So far, we have a test wine that has been open for six days with little to no difference from the day it was open. Of course, there are all sorts of influential factors—if the wine has been temperature controlled the whole time or opened and poured and left out for the shift definitely has a bearing on the quality of the wine. However, I feel reasonably confident that we can keep a wine for seven days now instead of just two with little to no difference in quality. It is exciting because we save money on waste (and in fact convert those waste dollars into sales) and the guest gets a higher quality of wine by the glass. Everyone wins.

The other exciting event happened Saturday night, but started two months ago. Two months ago a large party of guests who enjoyed fine wines came in for dinner in celebration of a birthday. These guys had come in before, often times bringing wines from their private collection, but just as often ordering off our list, and they were accompanied once in a while by H., who has particularly refined taste. My GM usually acts as Sommelier for this group when they are out on the floor, but he was out of town at the time, so I went out and helped them. At the end of dinner H. asks me if we have Chateau d’Yquem. (For those of you who don’t know, Chateau d”Yquem is widely regarded as the finest dessert wine in the world, and is made in such a painstaking manner in a way that yields such small quantities of wine of a character that no other site in the world can produce that it is very very expensive.) I don’t think anyone at our restaurant really thought we could sell such an expensive bottle, especially one that is a dessert wine This guest, H., said he drinks it after dinner when he dines at Mastro’s in Beverly Hills. He settled on Louis XIII that evening and I poured a total of seven 1 oz. pours for the table. At the end of the meal, I told him if he wanted Chateau d’Yquem, I would try and get it for him to enjoy on his next visit. I took his phone number and called him three weeks later with the good news that it would be available for him on his next visit.

It didn’t take so long to find the distributor. It did take some time to convince my manager that we should buy it. The last thing we want to do is be stuck with (another) expensive bottle of wine that we couldn’t sell. This one would come in for a selling price on our list at close to $700 for a half bottle, 375ml., for the 2005 vintage.

The weeks passed. Every Monday, I would call it out during inventory and my manager would chuckle a bit. After six or seven weeks, it was a borderline joke. Still, I remained confident that H. would come in and order it.

Saturday night was very busy. I was in the middle of ringing in a dinner order when my Server Assistant came up to me and said, “The guy on 306 wants to know if we have any Chateau d’Yquem.” My first thought was that if I sold it tonight, H. was sure to come in the following night asking for it. Then I looked up at table 306 and saw that it was empty and the group was heading into the main dining room for dinner. H. was with them. I went out and shook his hand. He said that he felt bad because he had asked us to get the Yquem for him but he never came back to drink it. I said, “Oh no, not at all. You are certainly under no obligation to buy it. I had only called to let you know that we had it in stock and it would be available for you to enjoy on your next special occasion at our restaurant.” At this, he smiled broadly, and said that they would be enjoying it at the end of their meal that night.

Of course I was pretty nervous. I kept checking the progress of their dinner, and had all of the glassware for the table polished and at the ready. We had been storing it at 59°, and I asked the server to let me know when he was clearing entrees. I put it in an ice water bath for five minutes to get the temperature to around 53°. Any colder, and I don’t think the aromatics and full character of the wine would be there. We don’t have a gueridon, so I set up a tray and jack stand with a table cloth over it to make a bit more of a show. H. said it was “beautiful,” and thanked me. On his way out he said he would be coming back in a month or so with a larger group of people. On Monday I ordered two bottles with no resistance from my manager.

The week has really made me think about what it takes to advance towards the goal in my mind, to be the best Sommelier that I can be. Ensuring the quality of the wine you serve may seem obvious, but I am willing to bet it is often overlooked. Controlling costs: ditto. If there is one thing my stint in my current job has taught me it is the importance of hitting your numbers and how to think about your wine program in those terms.

There is one other very important attribute for a sommelier that keeps cropping up again and again for me: a sommelier knows people. When I first was considering this path months ago, I talked to some of my regulars and some of my contacts in the wine industry. Over and over I was offered an introduction to one MS in particular. Everyone said they know him, or he is a friend, or they would talk to him about me if I liked. I started to wonder, “My God, who does this man not know?” And now I think that is kind of the point. The nuts and bolts of the job are as much about the contacts you make as they are about the wine. How else will you attract the best talent to work for you? How else will you be able to procure difficult to find or highly allocated wines? How else will you discover new top quality wines? And finally, how will you “move” all of these expensive wines? It seems like having contacts in all aspects of the business (from growers to distributors to employees to guests) is of a great advantage. I am sure this is why when I looked at this year’s Top Somm exam there were not only questions about grape varietals and AOC laws, etc., but also a few questions about individual producers, estates, and importers.

It was not the first time H. had been in. I had waited on him twice before and gotten to know what he likes and doesn’t like in the course of my conversations with him. The Chateau d’Yquem was a culmination of several exchanges over the course of several months. I didn’t have to “sell” H. on the wine as he already knew it and liked it. Surely every guest is like that to some extent. Everyone has wines that they would love to order or at least are curious about but don’t because of the price or company they are with or the occasion doesn’t warrant it or whatever. I think regular contact with a guest can give them permission to order that bottle. It isn’t so much that you have “moved them up,” into a more expensive range (which is a phrase I hear a lot) but that your relationship with the guest as evolved in such a way that making that sale is possible, under the right circumstances, in a way that they will feel confident with their choice and enjoy the wine that much more. Perhaps, through this process, they end up choosing a less expensive wine. (Certainly it has happened to me.) That’s okay, too. As long as you are meeting the guest’s needs, they should be delighted, and they will certainly come back. Everybody wins.

Drink well. Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ