So, so much for Houston wine lovers to toast these days
Four of Houston’s best and brightest wine guys are preparing for their Master Sommelier final exams in a couple of weeks, and another one of the city’s rising young wine stars has earned the right to sit for the three-part Masters exam in 2016.
Jaime Deleon, the man in charge of the excellent wine program at the Kroger on North Shepherd, passed his Level III exam in Portland, Ore., recently. Deleon celebrated, caught his breath and then resumed studying for the next stage, although he won’t take his theory exam until March 2016. The Court of Master Sommeliers program works like the Richter Scale. Each step is exponentially more difficult than the previous one, so Deleon, who grew up on Houston’s north side and attended Sam Houston High School, isn’t wasting time.
“I’ve got to keep grinding,” he said. “Level III was hard. It took me more than one try to get there, and Level IV is at a different level. But this is really important to me.”
Master Sommeliers are few and far between. Of the 186 around the world, only Guy Stout of Glazer’s currently resides in Houston, and he’s one of just seven in Texas. But Stout could have as many as four local colleagues join him in one of wine’s most exclusive fraternities by May 20. Bill Elsey and Steven McDonald of Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, David Keck of Camerata at Paulie’s and Ben Roberts of Republic National Distributing Co. all will be sweating bullets in Aspen, Colo., May 17-20, hoping to complete the parts of the Masters exam they haven’t yet aced.
Mark and Marcus team up
Another one of the city’s best young sommeliers, Marcus Gausepohl, has taken on a different kind of challenge. Gausepohl, late of Ibiza, is the new wine guy at Mark’s American Cuisine, 1658 Westheimer, and with chef-owner Mark Cox’s blessing is already re-shaping the list to reflect his passions and pricing model.
Regarding the latter, Gausepohl learned from the best, chef Charles Clark and his business partner, Grant Cooper, who blessedly pioneered the mini-markup concept when they opened Ibiza in 2001 in Midtown. Although Mark’s still won’t be offering acrossthe-board bargains on the same aggressive scale as the Clark & Cooper Concept Restaurants — I’m told markups will range between 2.2 and 2.8 times what a wine goes for retail — longtime customers should be pleasantly surprised.
The obvious upside for Cox is that he’s certain to attract a new group of hip and wine-savvy customers who understand what a bottle of wine should fairly cost even in an elegant landmark restaurant like his. Cox may be old school, but he got it. Wish a few more folks around town would follow suit.
Happy homecoming
Luis Rivera, a 2008 Spring High School graduate, left Houston to prepare for a career as a chef at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. While there, he was offered an internship at Pujol in Mexico City, where, he says, “the currents began to change for me.” It seems he’d fallen in love with wine, and he wound up landing jobs in several New York hot spots, finally becoming a sommelier at Corton under Paul Liebrandt, then moving to Mario Batali’s flagship restaurant, Del Posto.
Now, Rivera has come full circle. He’s the new sommelier at The Pass & Provisions, 807 Taft, where he inherits a wonderfully eclectic and unpredictable list, presided over most recently by one of the chef/co-owners, Terrence Gallivan. Expect Rivera to put his own stamp on it in the coming months.
Happy anniversary
Tony Vallone is celebrating his 50th year with Tony’s, long Houston’s reference-standard kitchen, and I’ve asked him to reflect on the evolution of his wine list since the 1960s, when he freely admits his staple bottles included Cold Duck, Mateus Rosé and Gallo’s Hearty Burgundy.
“That’s what people knew and what they wanted to drink,” Vallone recalls, laughing. “I was trying to stay in business.”
I’ll soon be following up with him in this space in much greater detail on a trip down memory lane. And note that Vallone, who has Sicilian ancestry, is staging a series of Italian dinners at Ciao Bello featuring pairings with wines from the country’s many dramatically different regions.
Vallone toasted Venice with “Una Serata Veneziana — last week by serving a Prosecco, a Soave, a Valpolicella and an Amarone. He’s now contemplating a rustic Piemontese dinner in August built around the region’s lighter-bodied, lesser-known but still excellent wines such as arneis, dolcetto, barbera and nebbiolo blends, as opposed to the big Barolos and Barbarescos. Will keep you posted.
Tasting notes
• Fans of the Rosenthal Collection of wines, distributed in Texas by Douglas Skopp’s Dionysus Imports, should be turning cartwheels. Three spots that have opened in 2015 have loaded up on a variety of offerings from these boutique producers: Beckrew Wine House at 2409 W. Alabama, Peska Seafood Culture at 1700 Post Oak and Weights & Measures at 2808 Caroline. New York importer Neil Rosenthal is best known for his Burgundies, a goodly number of which are now available at the aforementioned, but his Champagnes and Italian wines are in the mix as well.
• Frank Bijon, director of Château Larose Trintaudon, was in town last week to introduce the 2009 vintage of his famous Cru Bourgeois from the Haut Medoc. It’s the ideal Bordeaux for bargainhunters. Selling at Kroger, 1035 N. Shepherd, for less than $18, it’s a 60-40 blend of cabernet and merlot, offering intense ripe fruit, round tannins and perfect balance. Why so cheap? Because the winery has more acreage under vine than any Château-designated estate in all of Bordeaux. Quantity plus quality equals bliss.
• Rosé season is upon us, and Rob Harvey at Triniti, 2815 S. Shepherd, has already gotten into the spirit of things. He’s offering seven pink wines from California, France (Cahors, Loire and Provence), Spain and Argentina by the glass. In addition, Harvey has partnered with Antonio Gianola to serve wines during lunch that Gianola has selected from his Houston Wine Merchant inventory across the street. This is a great idea. If you like what you tried at the restaurant, dash across Shepherd and buy the same bottle to take home for dinner. Also, Gianola has launched his Summer Rosé Club, and the six April offerings are available at the store.