Guide helps novices be fearless buyers
Staring blankly at the beer shelves at the Montrose Whole Foods one day, it hit me hard how little I know about beer. I love beer, even if it’s called Miller Lite. But, should you prod too far below the surface, you’ll find I’m clueless. A little intimidated, too. So I just grabbed a four-pack — offering lower risk than a sixer — of Belgian ale, remembering several delicious Belgian ales I drank while in Europe earlier this summer. It proved quite satisfying, too. Got lucky.
Except I couldn’t remember the brand a few days later and, returning to the store, nobody working the beer aisle seemed to have a clue what I’d purchased. So I got some Saint Arnold instead. You can never go wrong drinking local.
The experience started me thinking about how novice wine drinkers must feel when they enter, trembling, with only the most rudimentary knowledge, as in, “Uh, I like white.”
So I went to speak to Ralph Castellano, a long-time buddy whose business card describes him as a “wine therapist.” (Sure could have used a “beer therapist” at Whole Foods.) After nearly 30 years of schlepping vino, most of them spent at the big Spec’s in Midtown, Castellano is among the city’s longest-tenured salesmen. He’s been around so long he’s now assisting the children of many of his longtime customers. The grandkids are on their way.
I wanted to find out what basic knowledge the mostly uneducated (no, I did not say unwashed) masses should come prepared with and what they have a right to expect in return. Also, I found Castellano’s thoughts on the varying, evolving strategies of selling wine in an internet-centric world most interesting.
The bottom line, he insisted, is don’t be afraid.
You don’t even have to know what you don’t know. In short, there are no dumb questions. His colleagues around town, the real wine pros in the mix, have your back.
“We’re ready for anybody,” Castellano said. “Tell ’em to come on down and let us do the work. First, I need to find out what flavors they like and what they think they appreciate in wine. Sweet? Dry? How sweet? How dry? What’s the last bottle of wine that you enjoyed? You can easily go backward with their palate and find out very quickly where they want to be, as well as where they might want to go. Then we’ll determine their budget constraints. Next we’ll figure out if there’s any ‘lateral’ movement possible. For example, is there a different country they’d be willing to try that they haven’t tried?
“That way, we can take them to the best possible bottle of wine first, rather than to something that’s kind of in the middle of their comfort zone.”
Which is to say a perfectly OK but mundane wine.
“I get excited when I can get someone to try something new, something more interesting,” he said, “because our palates are always going to mature. That’s inevitable. Our tastes mature. We grow up eating candy. We grow up enjoying steak. Same thing with wine. We drink grape juice as kids. Then, first thing you know, we’re drinking — and appreciating — great Bordeaux, a good Rhone, a fine Barolo or Chianti. It depends where a person’s palate is at the stage when we’re talking, and it’s my job to ascertain that.”
Castellano never attempts to talk a customer down from an irrational prejudice. If somebody, for example, is adamant about not drinking German or French wines as a matter of misguided principle — remember how hot passions ran against France when the country took a pass on participating in the Iraq War in 2003? — he’ll be disappointed, but he’ll move on quickly, picking his fights judiciously.
Note there are no dumb questions. The only consumers that truly frustrate him — not that he’d ever overtly show it — are the ones he describes as being hopelessly label conscious. “When they’re stuck in that rut,” he said, shrugging, “I don’t try to force them out of it. Why (bother)?”
Customers arriving with a mandate aren’t to be messed with, either. If they’re shopping for a specific wine because the intended recipient favors or has demanded the same, Castellano said, “we’ll make sure they leave with that exact bottle if it’s available. We want them to have that bottle.”
Also, you‘ll never hear him say, “Here’s something just as good for half the price,” calling such a tactic “retail suicide.” But if he suspects a customer might be willing to sample a wine that’s twice as expensive and at least as good, the option gets presented.
If applicable, he’ll be quick to explain, “This is the next up-and-coming wine. At one time Silver Oak was an upand-coming wine. People wouldn’t ask for it, so we had to recommend it.
“We as professionals like to point people in new directions, making sure that if they’re ready to move up or move on to something new — the undiscovered, so to speak — you take them there. You’re doing them a big service. And, with technology today, they can fact-check immediately, like scanning it on their Vivino app. And I encourage them to do that. It speeds up the process. There’s no reason for me to recommend a wine that’s not suitable, that doesn’t fit exactly where the customer wants to be.”
Turning a cabernetworshiping customer onto a Spanish tempranillo is something Castellano would be inclined to do because some cabs might naturally push people in that direction.
“If a wine has got the right amount of earth and tobacco nuances from the oak,” he said, “then by all means (a customer) is ready to be shown something nice from Ribera del Duero or Rioja. The greatest goal is always providing something over and above their expectations. If you do that, they’ll leave happy.”
Castellano, alas, was stumped when I asked him to come up with a nice Spanish beer. However, he did lead me straight to a fine Belgian ale, Tripel Karmeliet. Yum. Seems he sold beer before getting into the wine groove.