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Smart Mouth: Wine Essentials for You, Me, and Everyone We Know - Hardcover

Salcito, Jordan

 
9781984858825: Smart Mouth: Wine Essentials for You, Me, and Everyone We Know
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1984858823 ISBN 13: 9781984858825
Verlag: Ten Speed Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A smart, witty, and delightfully informative guide to discovering and embracing wine, from the lauded former sommelier of Eleven Madison Park and Momofuku and the founder of Ramona spritzes.

Jordan Salcito was drawn to wine from a young age (her father shared memories of making wine with his father in their basement in their Italian American community), but she didn’t encounter great wine until she moved to New York and started working harvests at world-renowned wineries in Burgundy.

Over the years of sommelier exams, wine tastings, and creating award-winning programs at top restaurants, she honed her palate and her own criteria for choosing the perfect bottle for any occasion. Using her personal journey as a template, she demystifies this beloved beverage for everyone, sharing vital information so you can be confident in finding wines that you love, too.

Jordan starts with a framework for tasting wine (where it all begins), then leads you through the wine making process, from the importance of soil quality to the best harvesting practices, explaining how each decision influences the final wine. She offers invaluable advice on navigating restaurant wine lists and cultivating your own tastes so you can find your new favorites. Jordan also teaches you how to define a personalized criteria so you can identify what you love, and then drink it.


Full of practical advice on understanding your beverage arsenal, historical tidbits that make the world of wine make more sense, and illustrations and infographs, Smart Mouth gives you permission to feel smart about wine and then go forth with confidence, drinking what you love. You'll know what wine tools you actually need and what to get instead of Champagne when you're hosting on a budget.

The wine world is large, but figuring out what you love doesn't have to be overwhelming. The only expert in what tastes delicious to you is you. Smart Mouth will help you discover what that is.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jordan Salcito is an award-winning sommelier turned entrepreneur. She founded Ramona, oversaw the beverage programs for David Chang's Momofuku restaurants, worked as a sommelier at Eleven Madison Park, and spent her vacations working at some of the world’s most storied wineries, from Comte Liger-Belair, Mugneret-Gibourg, and Domaine Dujac in Burgundy, to Bodega Chacra in Patagonia. She is a Wine Enthusiast 40 Under 40 honoree and a two-time James Beard Award semi-finalist for Outstanding Wine, Spirits, or Beer Professional, and one of a handful of individuals to pass her Master Sommelier “Blind Tasting” Exam on her first try.

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Introduction

How I Fell in Love with Wine

Three months after college, my parents helped me move into a small windowless room above the headquarters of the Hell’s Angels. It was August in the East Village, and the block smelled like garbage and stale beer—summer in New York. A cockroach scuttled along the wall of the elevator shaft. My parents stifled tears while my roommate, an acquaintance from college, said I should be glad we had an elevator, as most first New York apartments were walk-ups.

When I moved into that room I had a few hundred dollars, a degree in English literature, and a desire to write. My parents had hoped I might follow my father’s footsteps to law school but had encouraged me to pursue something I loved as a career. I was still figuring out what that meant.

I spent the first week in my new city delivering resumes to restaurants in the neighborhood. Until landing the writing job of my dreams, I needed to figure out how to pay rent. Of the twenty places I visited, nineteen did not call me back. The twentieth, on the corner of First Avenue and Twelfth Street, was a restaurant named Tappo (the Italian word for “cork”). Tappo had a large wooden bar and exposed brick walls lined with cabinets cross-checked in diamond shapes, filled with wine bottles lying horizontally, collecting dust. The kitchen was run by a talented man named Saul who had trained there with the famous chef Jodi Williams before she left. The general manager, Ron, hired me. He was my height, five foot seven, with brown hair, an ill-fitting gray suit, and a mustache like Tom Selleck’s in Magnum, P.I. He seemed to belong in Midtown, or another town entirely. Ron was my ticket to the “New York restaurant experience,” an important line item for anyone seeking restaurant employment in Manhattan. He offered me a hostess position, and I started the next day.

Soon that hostess job turned into a management role and, in an attempt to increase sales and keep their sinking restaurant afloat, the owners inaugurated internal wine tastings on Thursday afternoons. I don’t recall the particular bottles we tried, only that most were European and more interesting than anything I’d tasted up to that point. My wine education until then had involved sipping Chianti and Châteauneuf-du-Pape from my parents’ glasses at dinner tables and drinking cheap Chianti and Prosecco from a straw during my college semester abroad. A wine connoisseur I was not. There were many elements of that restaurant that did not feel like a good fit, but I was drawn to it anyway because of those wines.

The underlying purpose of these Thursday tastings seemed to be an opportunity for the owners—an unmarried couple in a tumultuous relationship—to communicate their feelings for each other. If they were compatible on tasting day, they found the wines “generous” and “sensual.” If they were arguing, the wines were “angry” and “closed.” In retrospect, this unconventional introduction to wine descriptions served as an interesting and ultimately beneficial lesson in the way we, as individuals, experience what we consume. It was at Tappo that I began to develop a language for discussing wines with restaurant guests; inexplicably, it was a way that resonated with them. A gorgeous Spanish Rioja reminded me of Penélope Cruz: voluptuous, striking (to my palate at the time), and full of beauty. A Sauvignon Blanc from Sancerre reminded me of Gwyneth Paltrow: lithe and steely, full of resolve.

My language for wine has evolved significantly since then. But as a young postgrad, these personas made wine easy to connect with, and they helped me make sense of the different expressions of regions and grapes. That eccentric wine education helped clarify that what speaks to us in a wine is intuitive and personal. Even after years of exams and analytical training, it’s more clear to me than ever that the wine descriptions that matter are ones that resonate with you.

I left Tappo to work at a restaurant called wd~50, an iconic molecular gastronomy restaurant on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, run by the chef Wylie Dufresne. Wylie valued curiosity and research and included anyone who showed signs of interest in menu tastings and conversations about meat glue, methylcellulose, and “soil” made of peas. It was at wd~50 that I began to consider a life in restaurants and redirected my dreams.

Eighteen months later, with elation, impostor syndrome, and a culinary degree from Johnson & Wales University, I moved to the Upper East Side to work in the kitchen at Daniel Boulud’s flagship restaurant, Daniel. In culinary school I’d read his book Letters to a Young Chef and had dreamed of someday working there. I began my job as a kitchen stagiaire (intern), and it would only be a few more months before I fell fully in love with wine.

Long before my time at Daniel, wine had already assumed an invisible pull, a connective and exhilarating quality I was not yet able to articulate. My father’s father, an Italian immigrant who died when my dad was thirteen, made wine in his basement in Waterbury, Connecticut. Making wine together is the only memory my father ever shares of his dad. When I was young, I tried sips of my parents’ wines at dinner, but they did not strike me as particularly special—just fermented grape juice, offering a promise to a world of mystery and romance—without that mystery or romance realized.

By the end of my six-month kitchen internship, my North Star had shifted. The change began gradually, with bottles I tasted during nights off. Then it was spurred by an impromptu conversation in the kitchen with Daniel Boulud himself over a glass of 1990 Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Hermitage Rouge. I had worked the garde-manger station and spent much of that evening wrapping fish fillets in potato strips for the restaurant’s signature dish at the time, the Black Bass en Paupiette. Before heading home, I’d swung by the kitchen to snack on abandoned pastries and happened to be carrying an out-of-print cookbook called Great French Chefs. Moments later, with seemingly divine timing, Daniel walked into the kitchen, holding a decanter.

“Hallo,” he said, eyeing me, then the book. “What do you do in my kitchen?” Followed by, “And, do you like wine?” He placed the decanter onto the pass and poured me a small glass while I handed him the book. The wine, made of Syrah and grown on the famed hill of Hermitage, in the Northern Rhône, tasted of bacon and leather, tobacco and licorice, black peppercorns, blackberries, and smoke. It was the first time I tasted a Syrah that made my heart stop. When Daniel landed on the page highlighting legendary chef Paul Bocuse’s recipe for Red Mullet with Potato Scales, his eyes lit like sparklers. Daniel grew reflective and explained he had flown to Lyon to gain inspiration at Restaurant Paul Bocuse between leaving his role helming the kitchen at Le Cirque and opening his own flagship restaurant, Daniel, in New York. That red mullet dish, shimmering up at us from the page on the pass, had inspired the very Paupiette I helped prepare every night. To further the synchronicity, the garnish for the dish in the book was a simple but striking sauce, velvety and rich, made of butter, shallots, fresh thyme, and Northern Rhône Syrah.

During my first summer of employment at Daniel, I began dating Robert, a man with whom I had been gradually falling in love with for a year and whom I would eventually marry. He was tall and handsome, with a sense of humor sharpened in Parsippany, New Jersey, an encyclopedic understanding of Burgundy and a closet full of Kiton...

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Verlag
Ten Speed Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1984858823
ISBN 13 
9781984858825
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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