Pair’s love of vino and sailing launches Mutiny
in the day, Mark Ellenberger and Emily Trout loved — and fell in love — through sailing and sipping wine, which are, to be sure, compatibly romantic pursuits. Yep, those sunsets over the water … But, as wine became an increasingly important part of their lives, something had to give.
“We sold our boat,” Ellenberger admits with just a trace of remorse, “to fund the wine.”
But they kept a nautical link to their lives by naming their Napa wine operation Kagan Cellars, after their lovely sloop-rigged vessel, and by naming their new Houston wine bar Mutiny. The latter humorously plays off the fact that they regularly frequent a wine bar in downtown Napa called Bounty — the space that inspired their venture in the Heights at 1124 Usener — and how they feel they staged a mutiny of sorts by jumping ship, abandoning their separate corporate-world pursuits to chase a shared passion.
Ellenberger, who grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., not far from the Stanford University campus, and attended the University of California, Berkley, met the Houstonborn Trout (Stratford High School, Southern Methodist University) when she was hired by the Dutch but Colombia-based shipping company he worked for because of her bilingual skills. She’d previously lived in Tampico, Mexico, where she taught English until the peso collapsed and, she said with a laugh, “I was suddenly broke.”
Though theirs wasn’t love at very first sight, it didn’t miss by much.
“She was the smartest, prettiest woman I’d ever met,” Ellenberger says. Trout responds: “Mark’s boyish charm, his excitement about life and experiencing new things … That was so attractive to me. He’s never been too cool to be excited about life.”
A half bottle of Château d’Yquem sealed the deal for her on “a rainy evening in November in the late 1990s. Obviously, it was a beautiful wine, rich and honeyed, but it was Mark’s excitement about opening it that really sold me. He demonstrated that great things should be shared and enjoyed, and there’s always something new to learn. It’s one of the things I love most about him.”
They enjoyed seven full years of dating adventures with sailing and travel at the fore before marrying in 2006. A year later, to celebrate their first anniversary, she gave him a barrel of syrah from the White Hawk Vineyard in Santa Barbara that she’d help make at a custom-crush facility in San Francisco.
“You should have seen the look on his face,” Trout recalls. “It came totally out of the blue.”
A year later, while that syrah was still aging in the barrel, they gave each other barrels of pinot noir and chardonnay. They suddenly realized that they had enough juice — “about a thousand bottles’ worth, a lot more than we could drink,” he said — to launch a wine business. Kagan Cellars was born, and the seed of an idea that became Mutiny Wine Room had been planted.
Yep, theirs is the perfect story for Valentine’s Day. This next chapter, Ellenberger admits, “is already the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” But because they’re tackling the challenges together and selling something they both find magical, it’s going to be the adventure of a lifetime and one that’s certain to bring happiness to many others, too.
Just north of Interstate 10, Mutiny is hyper-focused on wines from boutique producers mirroring theirs that can’t be found anywhere in Texas except on their shelves. Many of the selections — 45 to 50 available by the glass or bottle at any given time — are personal favorites that elicit fond memories of their own experiences.
Their mission? To bring a California wine-country vibe to the Heights. Toward that end, they brought in Ari Weiswasser, the chef-proprietor of a popular, sophisticated restaurant in the tiny Sonoma County town of Glen Ellen, to help sculpt a small-bites menu tailored for Houston tastes.
After 40 years in the shipping business, Ellenberger needed a change and Kagan needed a reliable outlet for its roughly 500 cases of annual production, which were previously available only on a consumer-direct basis. It may be a small winery, but it has some bigname vineyards in the fruit mix, including Stagecoach up on Atlas Peak and Andy Beckstoffer’s Georges III in St. Helena, San Giacomo in Sonoma County and two of Bill Foley’s prime Santa Barbara properties.
A graduate of Cal-Davis’ winemaking program and who has WSET Level 2 and 3 certification, Ellenberger serves as his own winemaker at Kagan. But he’s quick to point out, “The key to doing this is having access to good fruit.” The key to running a successful wine bar? It starts with the quality of the wines, to be sure, but ambiance and service matter hugely.
Mutiny has the former in spades with its bright-white Texas limestone walls and open, airy spaces, both inside and out. And though they’ve hired a full staff of servers, Ellenberger and Trout plan to be front and center, hoping many of their new customers also become new best friends.
When I asked each of them to pick favorite wines from their inaugural list, the selections were wonBack derfully diverse, hailing from three continents and two states. But, not surprisingly, Ellenberger included the aforementioned White Hawk Vineyards Syrah, saying, “Making this wine every year reminds me of the fantastic journey Emily and I have been so privileged to live for the last 22 years.”