News

The Wine Master

Continued from page 2

Many of the tasting groups Hoel has observed in St. Louis involve "a bunch of people sitting around and pontificating. You taste blind and you give points, and every bottle you bring has to be expensive. It's a who's-got-the-bigger-dick kind of thing."

Wine is a complex beverage, but simplifying the discourse, Hoel says, can help people relate to it. This populist approach has roots in Hoel's upbringing. "I didn't come from a wine family at all," says the Francis Howell North High School graduate. "My mom used to drink wine out of those old carafes with plastic tops like the lids on a can of Pringles."

Hoel worked in numerous restaurants while pursuing a finance degree, first at Southwest Missouri State University and later at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He caught his wine bug while working as the maître'd at Bellerive Country Club in 1996, when he and a colleague shared a nightcap of 1991 Sterling Vineyards Three Palms, a Napa Valley merlot.

This first sip launched his trajectory as a sommelier at area restaurants, including Faust's (under Bob Kabel) and Truffles. Soon after passing the Advanced Sommelier exam in 2005 — it took him three tries — Hoel left his position as a wine distributor and took over the beverage director's helm at Monarch, adding 150 wines to the restaurant's 700-bottle list.

More important, Hoel is dusting off his table-service skills. Legend has it that during the latter portion of the Master's exam, the judges intentionally spill glasses and surreptitiously light the tablecloth on fire, to see if the candidate responds with aplomb.

There's no substitute for a real restaurant setting when it comes to the gentle art of coddling high-maintenance patrons — the churlish types never satisfied with their cocktails, or the smart-alecks who offer up challenges, says Hoel, like, "If you're so good, match a wine to my personality."

Hoel gets excited by bad behavior: It means more chances to practice. "My servers at Monarch love the fact that they can come back to me on a crazy Saturday evening and say, 'Table 31: She's a bitch!'" says Hoel. "I'm like, 'Yes!'"

A private room with a wine cellar, a chef's table and a wine list teeming with pricy reserve vintages, say, a 1949, 1955 or 1961 Bordeaux. Those were the things Pat Shannon thought might set her steakhouse apart when she reopened Mike Shannon's last year.

But after three months of calling distributors, Shannon was only able to acquire a selection of special-occasion wines dating back to 1989. The Calgary Flames hockey team proceeded to buy up all of her oldest bottles — 1989 Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Margaux — in a single evening last month.

Because of a 70-year-old Missouri liquor law prohibiting retailers and restaurants from buying wines from anyone but a licensed wholesaler, it will take Pat Shannon many more months to replenish her supply.

Says Shannon, "It's such a stupid law. Obviously, I would have access to much, much more if I could purchase at auctions and on Web sites."

The decades-old regulation preserves what is known in the liquor business as the "three-tier system." Manufacturers must sell to wholesalers, who in turn are the only authorized vendors for retailers and restaurants. Nearly every state in the country enacted a similar law in the early 1930s, following the end of Prohibition.

Now, with the heightened thirst for wine, a growing number of state legislatures — including Illinois' — have made exceptions to the three-tier hegemony and allowed auction sales. This means both new and long-established restaurants in Chicago, for example, have an equal shot at procuring the oldest and most-coveted vintages. In St. Louis, though, sommeliers have scant hope of picking up a single bottle, let alone a case, of similar wines if the Missouri distributor is sold out.

"The only person that loses is the customer," says Hoel. "They aren't allowed to enjoy beautiful, aged wines."

The three-tier system rattles consultant Marc Lazar. "St. Louis can never have world-class restaurants without world-class wine programs," he says. "Because of this archaic law, there are so many wines — aged classic Cabernets, for example, like 1974 Heitz and 1980s Dominus — that are long gone from the St. Louis market and that a new generation of collectors have never had the opportunity to try."

New restaurants face the biggest barriers, since the only way to offer old bottles is to buy them young and fill the cellar. That explains why St. Louis' most sweeping wine selections are found at long-established haunts like Riddles Penultimate Café and Wine Bar and Starrs Market, whose owners, Andy Ayers and Bud Starr, have been laying back wines for decades.

"To do what I do requires significant capital," notes Ayers. "You invest money that you could have in a CD somewhere. My bookkeeper rails at me for it."

Lazar believes the retail market should have the opportunity to buy at auction as well as through vineyards and mailing lists, the typical distribution methods for newer boutique producers.

Wine aficionados like Jeff Lehman agree. Lehman dines out several nights a week, frequently bringing his own wine from his 2,500-bottle cellar. Every Tuesday night he and ten other "wine geeks" convene at Trattoria Marcella to share bottles from their collections over a four-course dinner.

At one recent gathering, there appears a 2001 Kongsgaard chardonnay from California, a mailing-list-only wine. "There might be one or two bottles of this that gets into the state," says Lehman. He also passes a 2005 Vare Bianco. After learning that Thomas Keller's highly-acclaimed French Laundry restaurant in the heart of the Napa Valley had purchased all of George Vare's 2004 vintage, Lehman paid a visit to the winemaker last fall and managed to get on the mailing list.

In such a controlled regulatory environment, a restaurant's so-called gray-market bottles (wines purchased outside the three-tier system) are a cinch for wine buffs to recognize. That was the case when the new Busch's Grove reopened after a multimillion-dollar renovation in late 2005. The local wine trade "got in a tizzy," says one sommelier, after noticing a cult cabernet called Screaming Eagle flying off the wine list.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
Next Page »