Vintage Attraction (3 page)

Along with the scarce Semites in the room, I chuckled.

“The wine in your corresponding glass is a Pinot Gris from Alsace, actually one of my favorite wines,” she continued. I almost finished the tiny, elegant tartare before remembering to introduce some of it to the Pinot Gris. “You'll notice this very noble wine has sweetness, but, just to make sure you don't typecast it as a wine lacking in seriousness, there is an earthy quality here.”

I concentrated, with what little of my allotment remained, to pick up the flavors. The fruits eluded, but I could taste something sweet. I returned to Izzy mid-analysis: “ . . . peach, apricot, and honey, combined with the wine's residual sugar left over after fermentation, all of these play with the sweetness and earthiness of the beets. The goat cheese provides refreshing acidity.” Honey, I thought. Honey. What was the texture like? This wine had a more substantial weight than nonfat milk, like honey. Was I actually getting this?

As Izzy went on to tell everyone, you could ascertain many things about how a wine would taste before it even reached nose or palate, just by assessing the color of the juice. The Pinot Gris's brownish-gold tint resembled honey. Izzy next introduced a California Chardonnay. The Chardonnay's intense, dark-yellow tone was dramatic. “Reminds you of pineapples and guava and ripe peaches,” Izzy said. Those juicy tropical fruits were precisely the flavors of this style. A sip revealed it was definitely heavier than the Sauvignon Blanc. This Chardonnay also had a characteristic texture, or “mouth feel,” caused by a process during the winemaking, or vinification, called malolactic fermentation. Oh, did I love this terminology! Malolactic fermentation brought about the creaminess of the wine. “It tastes like butter, right?” Izzy asked the audience. “Here, too, there's complexity; the minerality gives that slight soil taste. This all plays off of the richness and earthiness of the mushrooms in the quenelle, which were sautéed in butter, garlic, and fresh thyme.”

And it was very good.

“Okay,” she said. “I know most of us are more familiar with red wines, so I'm sure you're raring to go with these.”

A few happy hecklers, whose ties had become loosened and whose suit jackets now hung on the shoulders of their chairs, hooted. I straightened my spine and cleared my throat warningly to compensate—and offer symbolic rebuke—for the gentlemen's lack of comportment.

“Just as we saw a progression of weights and differing concentrations of fruit and balancing acidity among the whites that we tasted, this group's corresponding categories are light reds, spicy reds, and heavy reds.”

I suspected I was one of few in the room who continued to watch Izzy intently, as everyone else had become so engrossed in personal tasting experiments. Some had even gone ahead of the group and begun the next sequence of wines, trying the Oregonian Pinot Noir and an Austrian-style Zweigelt, which had been cellared on Canada's Niagara Peninsula. It was a shame many ignored the duck pâté and roast beef–wrapped asparagus spear pairings on the plates. At least most were aerating and inhaling the scent compounds in their glasses before gulping.

But before long, I, too, found my mind wandering. Was I a little more inebriated than I realized? The contents of my brain were swimming in a sea of new denotations and sense-memories, tastes, smells, honey, earth, acid. I felt smarter for having undertaken this. I had to will myself to stay present, to fight the desire to just stare at Izzy, with whom I decided I was now unredeemably smitten. There were more wines to be evaluated. I took a restorative breath.

An unclaimed item loomed on the plates, like the solipsistic party guest who'd been yammering to his host for so long he'd failed to realize that everyone else had gone home. This was a chocolate dessert. “Lava cake,” Chef Dominique called out, from his new seat in the audience, fork in hand.

“Zinfandel and chocolate,” Izzy said to her smiling, serotonin-and-knowledge-and-alcohol-imbued admirers. “You can't do much better than that when it comes to dessert pairings.” I had only recently learned from a supermarket stocker that this heavy red was a legitimate grape variety, not stigmatized and repudiated like the notorious “white” version, a favorite of many an undergrad comp student. Those who'd begun working at their cakes had chocolate molten streaming out and down the sides. I brought my fork into the center of my cake and only found more cake. Nothing erupted.

“Americans consumed over seven hundred million gallons of wine last year,” Izzy told the room. “That's, like, the equivalent of almost four
billion
bottles. And yet wine is the one beverage, the one beverage out there, that requires a special tool to open. A special tool that only one out of every three kitchens has. I say, ‘Corkscrew that!' Wine isn't supposed to be about points and scores. And I don't really think it should be about collecting and aging. Nine out of every ten bottles are drunk within six days of purchase. I can tell you you'll enjoy that Silver Oak you've been saving a lot more in your glass tomorrow night than you will keeping it buried away in your cellar for millennia. Wine's not a big mystery. It's a journey. You've begun a journey tonight. It began here. But tonight is not where it ends.”

While we applauded, the houselights returned. Izzy stepped down from the dais to meet the growing multitude accumulating to confer with her. The chef followed behind. I stood on the periphery, back along the bank of windows. When the room had emptied out, Izzy came over to me. “I hope that wasn't too boring,” she said.

“No,” I replied. “Not at all. In fact, I thought it was quite fascinating.”

Chef Dominique appeared with his and Izzy's coats. He handed me hers, and I helped her into it. “Well, Peter Hapworth. You must be hungry. Why don't you join us?”

“Really?” I looked at Izzy. “I mean, you know, if it's all right. I wouldn't want to intrude.”

“Don't be silly,” she said. She leaned toward my ear. “We can get a drink later, too.”

“So, we go, then,” Chef said.

“Wollensky's?” she asked.

I couldn't tell if Izzy had directed the question to me or to Chef Dominique, but I replied anyway. “Sounds good to me.”

We trudged in the cold along Wacker, across the bridge, to Smith & Wollensky, which sat in Marina City and overlooked the river. I followed Izzy down the stairs to the grill below the expensive steakhouse, and revolved inside.

The place was packed. People with domestic beer bottles and mixed drinks were double-parked at the bar, watching the White Sox game from one or both of the screens. They talked, laughed, ordered more cocktails from the bartenders who never seemed to stop moving, and occasionally cheered on the baseball players. All the tables thrummed with conversations and the clinking of silver and glassware. I watched a fraternity of similarly sized and shaped servers, smiling tightly, emerge from the kitchen with a
slam
and a
creak
of the swinging door. They ported to the martini-sodden an endless parade of charred steaks and tall burgers beside heaps of fries and salads and plates of mashed potatoes and creamed spinach. I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten in a restaurant that wasn't a campus food stand.

A manager quickly came over and greeted us. “Miss Conway, Chef, step up, step up. Right this way. Sorry to keep you waiting. We just finished setting your favorite table.”

As much as I tried to pretend this was just a typical Friday night, it was still surreal. I was out, on a chaperoned date of sorts, with a celebrity. First dates were strange enough. The goal always was to pretend like the sudden juxtaposition of two strangers was the most ordinary, comfortable pairing in the world. But when your first date was with someone who was on television, and when there was another man at the table alongside you to oversee the proceedings and make sure you weren't a psycho stalker, there was little mistaking the situation for an everyday occurrence. Still, I enjoyed being here with Izzy and Chef Dominique. Somehow we made an effortless trio—then, anyway.

Izzy scanned her menu and selected a burger. “Rare,” she said, after the waiter inquired how she wanted it cooked. When it was my turn, I asked for the same. I figured the unusually low degree of doneness and choice of Swiss cheese instead of my cafeteria customary American would win me culinary sophistication points with Izzy and also with the chef.

“When did you first become interested in wine?” I asked. “It's not exactly something you can major in at college.”

“When I was six,” Izzy said.

Chef Dominique laughed. “Tell him, tell him,” he said.

“I grew up in Carbondale, Illinois,” Izzy began. “Three hundred and thirty three miles south of the city, population twenty-five thousand. And the people who raised me weren't wine drinkers. They knew one beverage for all occasions: beer. Football games, summer barbeques, weddings, wakes, birthday parties, Saturday nights, Monday nights, Tuesday nights. Beer, beer, beer. Classy, right? But at parties, our neighbor Shirley refused to partake. Absolutely refused. She said ladies only drank
wine
. My dad—my foster dad—Ernie ran a liquor store, so he'd always have something for her. This wasn't sophisticated wine, by any means. We're probably talking Bartles & Jaymes.”

“I think that's how a lot of us first got to know alcohol,” I said. The chef squinted at me.

“So, anyway, there was this one Super Bowl Sunday and Ernie had brought home these peach-flavored wine coolers. And I remember looking at the bottles and thinking this sounded like the most delicious drink I'd ever heard of. I snuck one out of the six-pack in the refrigerator, went off to my room, and had a sip. Well, as you can imagine, I didn't find the peach pie I was expecting, but instead discovered something that tasted . . . pretty unpalatable. Still, though, I couldn't get it out of my head that the label said ‘peach.' Who'd drink this and taste that? And what was wrong with me that I couldn't? I didn't pick up wine again for quite a few years, but I guess you could say the curiosity always stuck with me.

“I've worked in restaurants since I was sixteen. It's, like, the only world that's ever made sense to me. So, after I got waitressing down, I started attending staff trainings about wine. I memorized the lists and could recite all the descriptors better than anyone, but it took me forever to figure out how the other servers were getting all these peaches and apples and blueberries they said they were tasting. I was thinking very literally and just didn't understand it at all. I was like, ‘Do they put peaches and bananas and blueberries in the wine?'”

I smiled and nodded, miming my sympathy for the uninitiated, but was aware as I did that until a few hours ago, I might have asked the same question. I hadn't even realized—before tonight—there'd been a gap in my comprehension, that wine was supposed to taste like anything other than, well, wine.

“And then one day it just clicked,” she said.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Rallying to rejoin the discussion, Chef Dominique recited, in ascending order, the awards he and Bistro Dominique had won. The list referenced professional organizations, publications, and associations (some of which were now defunct). I'd never heard of many of them, but nodded after each as though I had. The last culinary distinction had been conferred four years prior. I got the feeling he was trying to downplay the enological accolades that Izzy had brought more recently.

As Izzy and the chef regaled each other and me with their stories, I periodically looked at those who sat around us. I sensed they were watching our table in return. I wondered how many of the patrons at the bar, waiters, and valet parkers huddled by the door had already seen the
Vintage Attraction
season premiere, which, Chef Dominique had reminded me as we walked, aired tonight. It might even have been played here before the baseball game tyrannized the screens. A woman peered in our direction, silently gasped, and threw her lips and cupped hands to her friend's ear. Was she whispering, “Oh my god, that's her! That's the girl from TV!”? It certainly appeared so. Were these people who recognized Izzy also sizing me up, speculating about who I was, what connection I had to a famous sommelier and her accomplished chef, what had brought me to sit at their table like this? These were the very same concerns that, if I allowed myself to sober up, would have perplexed me, too.

I was full after half a burger. I usually ate like an ascetic and subsisted on monastery fare devoid of garnishes and seasoning, bowls of oatmeal or condensed soups, peanut butter sandwiches on dry whole wheat. My former student and occasional paramour Talia, a vegan, occasionally made me Trader Joe's boxed organic mac and soy cheddar, which I'd become oddly fond of (both the product and the gesture). This sudden shift to brioche and ground beef and mayo and ketchup and lettuce and real cheese was an embarrassment of richness. On an adjunct instructor's salary, it made sense to eat out as seldom as possible, but I wasn't about to pass up the invitation tonight. When the check came, I didn't want to seem like I couldn't afford a share.

I dug out my moldering billfold and reached a gold American Express, largely unfamiliar to me, despite its bearing my name. My parents had opened the account for me when I graduated from the University of Chicago. They hadn't cancelled it and had been quietly paying the bills ever since. I only allowed myself to accrue charges in truly dire emergencies befitting a consummate bachelor of arts, like a foundering Craigslist Casual Encounter, or dining with a television celebrity. “We have the same card. It's a sign,” Izzy said. She randomly followed with, “Do you speak Spanish?”

“French,” I said. “I
took
French, through college, not that I have much to show for it now. I started in third grade. I had to choose between French and German, and my father thought French would be much handier in restaurants.”