Third Coast offers wine dinner.
It’s been a busy year of firsts for chef Andrew Miller and Third Coast Provisions, which opened in January. Recently named to Carol Deptolla’s Top 30 list, the restaurant on Oct. 4 will host its first wine dinner featuring Napa Valley’s Buehler Vineyards.
A Chicago native, Miller worked for various restaurants in Milwaukee and set his sights on opening his own place. In 2015, he opened Merriment Social. Taking a more upscale approach with Third Coast Provisions, the chef-owner and his business partner, Cameron Whyte, opted for seafood and fine dining.
“After visiting Milwaukee a couple times and hearing murmurs about the growth, we decided to open here,” said Miller. “You really have access to tons and tons of awesome ingredients, and Milwaukee is becoming a food town of its own.”
For the restaurant’s first wine dinner, Third Coast Provisions partnered with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Food & Wine Experience and is bringing in Chicagobased Helen Buehler, a third-generation member of the family winery and vineyard.
“The wines they produce, apart from the Chardonnay, aren’t necessarily what you think about pairing with seafood dishes,” Miller said. “The Chardonnay was relatively straightforward to pair. The other wines, the Cabernet, the Zinfandel and the estate Cab are all pretty full-bodied and not necessarily things we’d carry all the time on the wine list. We tend to be a more white wine restaurant.”
For this wine dinner, Miller starts the menu with Chardonnay and sea scallop, red kuri squash, hazelnut, brown butter, lemon. The second course, featuring boudinstuffed lobster and wild rice, will be paired with a Cabernet Sauvignon. Zinfandel is the pairing for the third course, smoked chanterelle mushroom and foie gras.
“The third and fourth courses are more along the lines of what we do when we step out of the seafood realm and use a Midwestern approach to seasonal ingredients,” he said.
At the dinner, Buehler will share the history her family’s four-generation vineyard and winery, which started with her grandfather and father planting their first vines in 1971.
Tastings in St. Helena, Calif., are by appointment only. For the dinner here, Buehler is bringing several family wines, including her favorite, Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, paired with wagyu beef, sweet onion, bordelaise, potato and black truffle.
“That is the one that I’m most excited about,” she said. “It is the best representation of our terroir. It is 100% fruit we grow, but from all over our property, and it can almost be as intricate a profile as if you were blending three different grapes.”
The family started making its own wines in 1978, and they’re priced from $10 to $400. “We buy fruit from only one other person, my dad’s best friend, who we’ve been buying fruit from since 1981,” Buehler added.
She might also have you rethinking white Zinfandel, which they’re pairing with the final course, a Key lime semifreddo, coconut, graham cracker and meringue.
“People think of white Zinfandel and they think of the wine that their mother-in-law drinks, a really sweet wine without any structure and acidity. A lot of people don’t like it,” she said. “Ours is 100% red zinfandel fruit, so people should think of it is a rosé of Zinfandel. It is not sweet. It tastes like watermelon Jolly Ranchers and iced tea, and it’s been served at the White House.
“At the end of the day, food and wine are supposed to be fun, not intimidating,” she added. “The wine dinners I do are about making wine more accessible and having fun. I encourage people to bring questions.”
Miller said they’re anticipating doing more wine dinners in the future.
“This is a real value because the deal includes a combined ticket, the wine dinner plus (an admission ticket for) the Journal Sentinel’s Food & Wine Experience,” he said.
As part of that larger event, which began in 2009 as Wine & Dine Wisconsin, Miller and Third
Coast Provisions will be featured in the Critic’s Choice area, where they’ll be sampling the restaurant’s signature style of “comfort-driven seafood.”
“The relationships of all the chefs and restaurateurs in this city is fantastic,” said Miller, “and that has grown from events like Food & Wine Experience and charity events, where you meet anybody who is working at the top of their game.
“That forms a community and helps Milwaukee become a first-class destination for dining.”