A crop of restaurant-winery collaborations is elevating the concept of house wine.
“Did you ever walk in the woods and lift up a log and the soil is damp and has this pure, pungent, earthy character? Or it rains and the leaves are rotting a little bit, but it smells good? That’s sous bois.”
Under the wood?
“Yes. That’s what great Pinot is all about.” And with that, Brent Karlicek, beverage director of Upward Projects, pours the restaurant group’s exclusive Stagedive Pinot Noir. We’re in Postino Arcadia, tasting our way through a tableful of bottles as Karlicek speaks sensuously and intoxicatingly about… house wine.
Wait – house wine? The Muzak of beverage menus? The Cream of Wheat of wine?
No, not that house wine. A growing number of Valley restaurants are quietly collaborating with wineries on thoughtfully crafted custom blends married to their food and philosophy. Some call it house wine, but many shy away from that term’s bland undertones.
It began 10 vintages ago, when corporate suits tried to persuade Regan Jasper, Fox Restaurant Concepts’ VP of beverage, to sell generic wine under the FRC brand. “I’m not going to put FRC’s name on a label we don’t own,” the sommelier told them. “I have far too much respect for the [vintners] who own their own land and are farmers first and are proud of what they do.”
Cue the entrance of one such vintner: Patty Green of Patricia Green Cellars. “You should come to Oregon and make Pinot Noir with me,” Green told Jasper. So he did, tasting from every barrel, creating his own blend and “blocking” off part of her cellar for his wines. A year later, the bottles bore Green’s label, plus a tiny notation that read “Fox Block.”
Jasper has since crafted nine more Fox Blocks for FRC eateries, including True Food and North. All are Pinot Noir. “It’s such an emotional grape,” he says. “Everywhere it grows it has a different attitude.” Each time he teams with a different vintner. He blended with Josh Jensen, a pink-bowtie-wearing iconoclast with a seven-tier gravity-flow winery on a limestone peak in California. In New Zealand, he made Pinot and proposed to his girlfriend at Misha’s, a glacier-fed vineyard cascading into a lake.
“This is a story for my staff to tell the guests,” Jasper says, pairing a Fox Block flight with a trio of tasty dishes at The Henry. “We’re commissioning wineries that we’re friends with. They love what they’re doing, and we love what we’re doing. It’s all about relationships.”
It’s also about food. At one Valley restaurant – modern-Asian hotspot Clever Koi – that posed a problem. Red wine is notoriously unchummy with hoisin and soy. So owners Joshua James and Jared Porter partnered with longtime friend Eric Glomski of Page Springs Cellars to craft a ramen-friendly red. Their unexpected inspiration was their bar program’s strength: cocktails. “We took a template of a Manhattan, where you have a dry spirit and an aromatic spirit,” James says. Sipping their way through Glomski’s barrels, they swapped the Manhattan’s whiskey for Montepulciano and the vermouth for Primitivo. “It hits all the points of a really awesome food wine,” James says, swirling a glass of My Fair Lady – a slang term for a fermentation process and a wink at the wine’s feminine traits.
Feminine was also the value sought by Upward’s Karlicek when he fashioned the first Stagedive three vintages ago. “We’re trying to create specific identities that are superior to what we’re finding in the marketplace,” he says. In response to the broad-shouldered Pinots muscling their way into the market, the company teamed with family-owned Banshee Wines in Sonoma to create sultry, elegant Stagedive. Next, the friends made Holly’s Way – a fresh, focused antidote to buttery Chardonnays.
The popularity of those wines at Postino, Federal Pizza, Windsor and Joyride Taco House led them to partner with Glomski on the Downtown duo – an aromatic white blend and a Rhône-style red. Then they ventured farther afield, shipping samples back and forth to create Chablis-style Upstate Chardonnay with Dr. Konstantin Frank of New York’s Finger Lakes; easy-drinking Espiritu Malbec from Argentina; and Perfekt Riesling with Dr. Loosen, meister of Germany’s Mosel Valley.
“We’re on this incredible journey,” Karlicek says, echoing all the restaurateurs. “The goal [is] to get more and more involved from the grape to the glass.”
Tasting Notes
Fox Block Ten: FRC’s collaboration with Dutton-Goldfield of the Russian River Valley beautifully balances Bing cherry with earthy minerality.
Last August: Upward Projects and Banshee Wines’ Sauvignon Blanc is as verdant and aromatic as a greenhouse.
Wrigley Mansion Brut: Geordie’s Steak restaurant collaborated with award-winning New Mexican winery Gruet on this Champenoise-style sparkling wine with a brioche-and-toasted-hazelnut nose and baked apple on the palate. Though not a proprietary blend, the bottle features art by late owner Geordie Hormel and the Wrigley Mansion’s romantic history.
