Meat shop brings a Tuscan flair to local foodies
During the 25 years Pete Seghesio headed Seghesio Family Vineyards in Healdsburg, he hosted an annual sausage-making party for customers. The popular wine-fueled event often verged on chaos, but Seghesio loved sharing the craft he began learning from his dad at the age of 13.
“Pete’s favorite day of the year was that crazy day,” says his wife, Cathy.
Now every day is a sausagemaking party for Seghesio, who sold the family winery in 2011 and soon thereafter began plotting the business that became Journeyman Meat Co. In August, Pete and Cathy opened the combination butcher shop, salumi counter and wine bar just off of Healdsburg Plaza, upending any thoughts of a leisure-filled retirement.
A meat enterprise wasn’t even on the radar when the couple traveled to Italy shortly after the winery sold. The only action item on their itinerary was to eat at Antica Macelleria Cecchini in Tuscany, home of celebrity butcher Dario Cecchini. “I was intrigued with meat, and in the meat world, Dario is the pope,” Seghesio says.
With time on his hands, the 49-year-old vintner asked Cecchini for an internship, a post typically reserved for people 30 years younger. The following winter, Seghesio spent a month with Cecchini; the first two days consisted of sweeping and mopping before Seghesio was promoted to the meat-cutting room and given a short course in whole-animal butchery. Another month-long internship, at the Tuscan butcher shop Macelleria Marini, taught Pete the slowfermentation techniques that make Italian cured meats so prized.
Journeyman Meat Co. shows off everything Seghesio learned. Customers can sit at the wide marble counter or a cozy side nook with slim metal tables and order a fragrant salumi sampler with soppressata, finocchiona, coppa and spicy Calabrese, shaved tissue-thin and presented on a board made from repurposed wine barrels. Italian pantry items — anchovies, artisan pasta, dried beans — line shelves, and cured sausages dangle overhead, some chubby, some slender, all wrinkled and cloaked in floury white mold.
Customers tempted by the well-marbled pork in the butcher case or the dry-aged beef in the cooler can have a chop cut to order and cooked for a $14 surcharge. Wood-fired pizzas are also on offer. (The Bianco pie, topped with roasted leeks, house-made bacon and a farm egg, is masterful.)
As for the wine list, it’s almost all in the family. The Journeyman and San Lorenzo wines are the Seghesios’ own production and are made with grapes and fruit purchased from a vineyard they retained in the 2011 winery sale. Other selections come from winemaking uncles, godfathers, adopted godfathers and cousins, honoring the many branches of this longtime Sonoma County family.
The stylish enterprise rose from the ashes of a former post office, which burned to the ground in 2010. The Seghesios bought the vacant lot the next year and started construction on a building intended to house the butcher shop and a salumi production facility next door. But when the fermentation equipment from Italy wouldn’t fit in the building, they moved salumi production to Cloverdale. One of Dario Cecchini’s former butchers now oversees that operation, and the Seghesios found a taker for the corner space they couldn’t use: the acclaimed restaurant Single Thread.
Pete Seghesio returns to Tuscany every year for more time with his mentors, but he is developing his own style. As a salumi maker, he thinks like a winemaker, obsessed with palate weight and depth of flavor. “I’m amazed at the similarities between making wine and making salumi,” says the part-time vintner, “but maybe that’s what the attraction was. We’re all trying to bring pleasure.”
Most large-scale American salumi producers ferment at high temperatures, which accelerates the aging, too. But Seghesio is convinced that “low and slow,” as he learned in Italy, yields superior texture and flavor. He also aims for lower acidity than most of his American counterparts do. As a result, Journeyman salumi is “going to taste smoother, rounder, more voluptuous,” Seghesio says.
And besides, that’s how they do it in Italy.