GRAPES OF WRATH
Eight years ago, at age 21, Victoria James became America’s youngest sommelier at a Michelin-starred restaurant. She has worked in several of New York City’s most lavish dining spots, including the New American pioneer Aureole and Michelin-starred pasta mecca Marea. She drank well and poured wine for the rich and famous — including Mick Fleetwood, Miley Cyrus and Mariah Carey. After arriving hours late to Marea, James said, the diva forced the staff to play her Christmas album on repeat the whole night. “I still have flashbacks about it,” James told The Post. “We all felt trapped in a dark fairy-tale world.” There were also countless society ladies, including one who idiotically mixed $5,000 worth of red and white wines to make a glass of rose. “A colleague said that a lot of these people come from old money and operate on the notion that wealth goes to the most deserving [while] everyone else is below them — and they let you know it,” James said. While there’s glamour associated with her career, she reveals in her new memoir, “Wine Girl” (Ecco), out Tuesday, that she’s also dealt with plenty of smut, too — from billionaires who called her “wine girl” and got grabby, to full-on sexual assault.
One wealthy businessman dining at Marea deemed James a “bitch” after she refused to sit on his lap and pour wine from a $1,200 bottle. Another time, when she offered to help a diner uncork a vintage he had brought from his own collection, he sandwiched the bottle between his thighs, pistoning it up and down, and said, “Come and get it!”
But that wasn’t the worst ofit.
“I was roofied!” said James, 29. “It [was] a group of wine collectors . . . They did it for sport, as if they had no sense of my humanity and wanted to pull a prank because they thought it was funny.”
Raised in central New Jersey in an unstable home, she bootstrapped her way through the restaurant world. The second oldest of five siblings, James got hooked on the food business at age 13 while waitressing in a greasy spoon. After a couple years at Fordham University, in 2009 she began bartending at Lattanzi.
Pre-#MeToo, bad behavior at ritzy restaurants was in full swing. “People who held high positions of power thought they could get away with murder because they had been . . . for years,” said James. “I thought I had to roll with it. You stay because you need the job.”
For years, she put up with a segment of customers she calls “corkage cowboys.” They showily brought in their own Grand Cru and paid more than $50 per bottle in corkage fees.
The worst of them, James said, bragged that their dining companions were prostitutes. One high-flying customer didn’t even let the woman with him eat.
“She reached for a bread roll and he slapped it out of her hand . . . and referred to her as ‘my hooker,’ ” James recalled. As bad as the customers were, some bosses were worse. In her book, James recalls one who raped her in a restaurant wine cellar. “I was young and insecure and thought that this was what women went through,” she said.
The man also insisted on taking nude photos of her: “He said that if I say anything, he would show the photos to everyone in the industry.” She kept quiet. Now living in Manhattan with her wine-salesman husband Lyle Railsback and working as a partner and beverage director at Cote, a Michelinstarred Korean steakhouse in the Flatiron District, James said she finally gets the respect she deserves — and makes sure her employees do as well.
“The point of calling the book ‘Wine Girl’ was to take something used as a slur and turn it on its head,” she said. “Hopefully things will change for the better. But there is still a lot to be done.”
We felt trapped in a dark fairytale world.
— Victoria James on the time Mariah Carey (above) insisted on listening to her own music while dining at Marea