A Love Letter to Wine (That Pretends to Be About Building a Wine List)
What is it about wine that is so captivating? I ask myself this a lot — not just because I made a career of it, but because nine times out of ten, it’s my beverage of choice. Sure, I love a crisp beer after a long hike, or a perfectly balanced cocktail (before a bottle of wine), but what is it about wine exactly…
But before you go any further, I’d like to disclose two things:
I’ve been a copywriter for a long time and a ghostwriter for longer. Words come easily to me — they make sense of whatever topic or dream or product is at hand. But one thing I’ve always pushed up against is writing in my own voice, about my own experience. I would expound further, but that’s not why we’re here today — this is only to wave a small flag that while I desperately wanted to edit the hell out of this, I didn’t.
So, back to the drink.
For me, wine is just like food. Some people are mad for it, and I’m one of them. My dad lives with me and my husband, and after an experimental few years, we’ve really found our rhythm. It’s a funny thing living with a child or a parent (I’ve never done the former, but I imagine it’s similar in many ways). My dad and I are more alike than I think I realized — we get up and the first thing we talk about is what’s for dinner. We have a cellar full of beautiful cuts of meat, frozen bone broths, loads of wine, canned tomatoes, dried pasta… We’re giddy about treats (the special panettone I splurge on once a year), and the birthday meal we each get to choose every year.
He probably wasn’t shocked (or was careful not to show it) when I dropped out of university to go to culinary school. It was there I took my first wine class at 19 (God bless that instructor — I can’t fathom teaching the appellation system to a bunch of raging line cooks in the age of Anthony Bourdain). It was there I met one of my best friends, Jimmy Serlin (Kari’s husband and owner of Revel Meat Co.). There I learned about mirepoix and mother sauces, distillation and braising. What a wild time. This could be a job?!?!
Like dining, like cooking, wine is about history, provenance, trends, skill, intuition, art, and flavor. It’s agriculture and alchemy. It’s science and story. It’s literally and metaphorically intoxicating.
But wow. A career in this field is not for the faint of heart nor for the weak of back. That first decade was a series of jobs, apartments, and cities that had me on the move. It was less jumping from one thing to another than being blown by a big gust of wind.
After many years behind the stove, my brain (and body) needed a change. I got a job at a little Sicilian restaurant in Seattle and found a mentor in the owner. She taught me how to welcome guests into her restaurant like it was our home; how to make a bunch of tulips fall just so in a vase so it looked like we had a resident florist on staff. And when she had to step away for a family emergency, she handed me the baton and said go (and thank you). That was my first wine list, and I can still name some of the bottles on it. I have a sharp memory of trying two Oregon wines — one, a 1997 Belle Pente Pinot, and Tony Soter’s Mineral Springs Ranch, with its iconic green label. Little did I know then how much I would come to know about that wine and that place.
But of course, not all wine is created equal. Like food, like any craft really, some producers chase marketing and margins and lose the charm — the subtle, beautiful variation that only small-batch work can carry.
It was in Seattle, in between running a restaurant and living the life of a twenty-something in a new city 3,000 miles from home, that I learned about wine.
In some ways, I feel fortunate to have started my studies in Europe. It’s where I learned that wine culture has structure and scope. There, wine felt both ancient and bureaucratic. Strict standards for growing: vine variety, yields, training systems, soil amendments, delimited areas — that is to say, boundaries drawn carefully so you may use the name Champagne, or Barolo. Each region with its ruling body, governing the laws around growing, making, bottling. For something so artful, it can appear at first glance more business than poetry.
In the United States, growers are afforded more freedom — that is, until you discover the knot of taxes that binds all wine law here. It seems silly we have the same governing body over wine regions and firearms alike. The red tape doesn’t thrill me, but it is part of the process. Structure exists even in beauty, I suppose.
But food and wine have been my beam of light — my little delicious flashlight pointing me through life. It has guided where I vacation, where I studied, and of course, where I have worked. But a straight line it was not. I didn’t know what a career in wine could look like.
In those early years, I spent weekends in Seattle at a friend’s urban winery, crushing Cabernet Sauvignon. Hand-sorting fruit before it headed to tank. Working alongside Tim Sorenson — economics professor turned winemaker — perhaps the most fastidiously clean human to ever breathe air on Earth.
And after a healthy (and hedonistic) decade in the restaurant industry, I swapped gears and worked my first harvest in 2012. That decision brought me to the Willamette Valley, now where I call home.
Being in the cellar reminded me of my days as a line cook. You have your tools. Your recipes. You must be clean. Harvest carries a chaos that mirrors a Saturday night service — the cicada-like clicking of the ticket machine as the dining room fills. That sense of urgency, coupled with tangible problems to solve, was appealing.
The romance is there, yes. But so is the work.
And then there is the wine list.
Putting together a restaurant wine list is, or can be, much more than it appears.
Sure, some hand over creative control to distributors who fill the book with what needs to move. No sommelier. No buyer. Just inventory and invoices.
Others build novels. Deep cellars. Deeper pockets. Pages that require patience and reverence to read. Maybe you serve Italian food and your scope narrows. Maybe you live in wine country and source exclusively from your neighbors.
For me? There are too many stories not to tell. Too many obscure bottles to share. But it’s easy to go off the rails. I have a stash of bottles in my office with no real home on the list — it’s like my packrat corner of shiny things. Occasionally I’ll see a coworker wander in and pick one up, read a label, and glance over at me. Hmmm…
And yet at Hayward, I do keep guardrails — for my Aquarian brain and for the integrity of the list (and for your patience as a diner!).
I choose wines that tread lightly on the earth. (Wine is food, after all, so you should know how it’s grown and made.) I love a diverse list of regions — some familiar, others offering something new. We highlight local producers making modest amounts of wine, side projects, passion projects, little dreams in bottle form.
I look for wines that can dance with the food without stepping on too many toes.
Like the menu, the list is always changing. Vintages move forward. Some years are less compelling than others — let’s table that bottle for now. And maybe I’ve been holding onto two bottles of Brunello, waiting for Kari to add a new dish robust enough to match them.
There are cult favorites — Thomas Pinot Noir, a defining Oregon wine. Boundary-pushers like Limited Addition. The shimmering-in-the-eyes-of-wine-pros bottles that lighten wallets (Didier Dagueneau). Or Carcavelos — from the tiniest region in Portugal, one producer keeping the style alive.
And then there is the bottle I’d reach for if you said: you may only choose one.
That one always has a story. Or it’s just a crisp white, which is my kryptonite. One of my coworkers recently said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drink a red wine.” I have been accused of worse.
I learned young to trust my palate. Cooking helped me identify structure. Acid. Fat. Tannin. It helped me understand pairing — the invisible architecture between glass and plate. I credit those early years in the kitchen with so much — not just shaping my palate and understanding of food and the world, but pushing me toward a maturity I wasn’t expecting. There’s so much communication, trust, skill required.
And wine just always seemed cool. Whether in the cellar, watching winemakers arc their samples gracefully into cellar drains (a skill I never mastered without looking like my lips were leaking).
In the kitchen: blue aprons and clogs. Staff lined up before service, learning about a new dish or new bottle on the list. Musing over minutiae. Oooh yes, I smell the cherry wood in this. Won’t this go great with the cod with that new dulse butter sauce?
Wine was an aspiration for me. Something I felt I could really lean into.
Lately, wine has been riding a bad-news wave. Too bad for your health. (Even one glass!) Too expensive. No one cares. Everyone wants seltzers now. Low carb, low sugar, tailgate-friendly.
And suddenly I’m defensive.
No — you must not know wine like I do to dismiss her so casually.
Don’t you care about the new grape they just approved to be in Champagne? Haven’t you ever sat with a dog by the fireplace with a glass of Pinot Noir while snow falls outside, a little Clifford Brown in the background? Or snuck proper stemware into a movie theater to elevate the cinematic experience (okay, to be fair, that one didn’t end well). You haven’t saved for that bottle of Champagne to share with friends and ooohhhh-ed and ahhhh-ed while cracking open oysters, wind pelting you in the face on the Oregon coast.
I set out to write about building a wine list.
But maybe I’ve written a love letter instead. And now you know a thing or two about me, I suppose.
So next time you come into the restaurant, I’d love to help you choose a bottle. We can share a story or two. Or we’ll simply pull the cork and pour — leaving you to linger over conversation and good food.
Because whether you want to dive into the details or simply wash down the day, wine doesn’t mind.