New projects will be a boon for Houston wine enthusiasts
Light Years, Tribute and more going full steam ahead with modern programs and concepts
You blink in Houston these days and the wheel is being ever reinvented on the wine front. In Montrose, things are light years ahead. As in Light Years Natural Wine Shop & Bar, on Alabama near the Menil Collection.
The Houstonian Hotel & Spa, which now qualifies as an H-town institution, is fittingly paying tribute to our culinary past with Tribute, although veteran sommelier Vanessa Treviño Boyd’s wine program is thoroughly modern both in terms of pricing and options.
Meanwhile, France (and Cajun country) meets the Heights with Savoie and La Grande Rue. The former will offer fine dining. The latter is a combo wine bar-retail shop, a concept that’s on fire around town right now.
Light Years, a long-in-the-works collaboration between lifelong friends Steve Buechner and John Glanzman, and Tribute are up and running, the latter only last weekend in the space where Olivette used to be. New Orleans native William Meznarich, formerly of Victory Wine Group, and Brian Doke, best known for the Tiny Boxwoods hip casual spots, are the driving forces behind the ambitious multiconcept venue on Yale that’s expected to come online well in time for holiday merrymaking.
And don’t forget Goodnight Hospitality’s fine-dining/casual-dining/offpremise shop compound on Westheimer, to be presided over by Master Sommelier David Keck. Assuming Keck’s construction planets align, he’ll be opening at some point in the first quarter of 2019.
So much wine, so little time . . . and only one liver. That’s OK. We’ll figure it out. Everything in moderation, right?
Full disclosure: As I write this, I’ve yet to personally peruse the 200 offerings on the shelves at Light Years — all made from grapes grown without pesticides and using natural yeast fermentation — or converse with Buechner or Glanzman, and I’ve only taken a gander at Meznarich’s ambitious project in what was once a somnambulant Houston neighborhood that most assuredly isn’t anymore. Keck’s similar magnum (wine) opus isn’t quite far enough along to get a good feel for it, although his pride and joy, a for-real underground wine cellar, is said to be taking shape nicely beneath what’s visible at street level.
But I have dined and tasted with the TRIBUTE team, headed up by executive chef Neal Cox and chef de cuisine Jeff Boudreaux in the kitchen and Treviño Boyd, whom I’ve known practically since the day, nearly eight years ago, when she returned to her native Texas after a long, edifying detour through Manhattan’s sophisticated wine world.
A printout of the wines on offer filled 35 pages, and nearly 100 of them, by my count, go for $65 or less. My new best friend is the 2012 La Roncaia Refosco from Friuli (Boyd singled it out as one of her “somm’s pick” touts on this page). Refosco is a varietal I was only vaguely familiar with but had never tasted. This big, bracing red poured with Cox’s smoked Wagyu short rib, on a bed of grilled cream corn, is on my short list of pairings-of-the-year contenders. In Treviño Boyd’s words: “The natural acidity of the wine cuts right through the melt-in-your-mouth quality we’ve come to expect from Wagyu.”
It’s a $60 bottle that way over-delivers, equal parts geeky, off the mainstream grid and gorgeous. Tribute’s across-the-board pricing sets it apart from the city’s hotel restaurants at large and makes it competitive with all but our most aggressively-priced spots.
Meznarich is promising to follow suit as a value leader with La Grande Rue’s 400 wines. That’s good to hear because that’s the future. In a close-to-saturated market, what Houston doesn’t need — and presumably won’t support for long — is even one more ripoff restaurant where the old 300 to 500 percent markups remain the norm rather than the exception.