In the Cellar at Tommaso's

With my October "In the Cellar" column at the New York Sun, I decided it was time to verture out of Manhattan. And so I took to subway to deepest Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to pay a visit on Tommaso Verdillo, owner of Tommaso restaurant and perhaps the finest wine collection in Kings County (River Cafe would be the only real competition).

Tommaso was a joy to talk to, and continued to chat with after the interview was over, while my wife and I enjoyed dinner at this place. The wife immediately took a shine to the place, which gladly lacks the glitz and pomp of most Manhattan restaurants. We may return for our anniversary with some dollars, so we can raid his low-priced collection of Barolos and Barbarescos.

Here is the text:

In the Cellar: Top Wines, Rock-Bottom Prices

Not every bottle in the three cluttered cellars of Tommaso's Restaurant, the improbably epicurean Bensonhurst haven of fine wine, is on the wine list. Owner and chef Tommaso Verdillo has received far too many gift bottles over the years to make a complete tally possible. Many of the presents have come from the winemakers themselves — offerings made during one of Mr. Verdillo's numerous tours of Italy and elsewhere.

Other estimable oenophiles have also been generous."Want to know who gave me this wine?" Mr. Verdillo said, pointing to a 1970 and a 1978 Barolo from Pio Cesare, the great Piedmont producer. "This is left over from one of Robert Parker's dinners. He just left it. I let him bring his own wines. He couldn't drink them all, and said ‘They're yours.'"

Mr. Parker, the world's most powerful wine critic, is a friend of Mr. Verdillo. "I used to meet him in Paris every January," Mr. Verdillo, a jolly figure of effusion and affability who has been known to serenade his clientele with operatic arias, said. "After he did his annual tastings in Bordeaux, we'd go on eating binges."

The critic has said Tommaso's serves possibly his favorite Italian food in America. Fairly often, the Maryland-based writer, with friends in tow, heads north for a night of choice imbibing at the eatery's windswept perch on 86th Street and Bay 8th Street.

Mr. Parker does not eat at Tommaso's simply because he is a loyal friend to the owner. He knows the same thing a lot of wine industry folks do: For top-shelf wines at rock-bottom prices, Tommaso's can't be beat. Long before the rest of the world hopped onto the Bacchus bandwagon, Mr. Verdillo decided his restaurant needed a serious wine program. He educated himself with courses in viticulture and vinification and attended early editions of Vinitaly, the Italian wine fair held every year in Verona. One by one, he befriended the great vintners of Piedmont, forging friendships with the likes of Bruno Giacosa. At a time when few people in New York cared much about Italian wines, Mr. Verdillo was investing deeply in fine vintages of Barolos, Barbarescos, and Super Tuscans.

Mr. Verdillo could charge steeply for his bottled treasures, but has chosen to keep the markup around 100% of what he initially paid (as opposed to what the wine is worth now). Thus, a magnum of Gaja Sori San Lorenzo 1990, which goes for $1,200 at the wine-centric Manhattan restaurant Veritas, can be found for less than half that amount at Tommaso's.

"If it cost me $50, I'd sell it for $100. I'd rather people drink," he said. "I'd rather share it with people. The Giacomo Conterno Monfortino 1990 for $400? That's an absolute steal! You won't find that for that price anywhere."

Of course, the bargains Mr. Verdillo uncovered in the '80s and early '90s are gone now, leading him to invest more selectively in recent vintages by his favorite makers. "Once they're gone, they're gone," he said of his cellar holdings. "I'm not buying them anymore. I don't have the clientele for it. Conterno doesn't need me to sell his wine, and I don't need to sell them at those prices."

Sometimes he despairs of the current runaway wine market. "I'm almost hurt by it. You can't share this stuff with people, it's so expensive. Wine was meant to be drunk! How can I say, You should drink this fabulous bottle of wine. But you have to give my $600 for it. It's a bargain, but you have to pay $600?'"

Even if Mr. Verdillo scraped together the money to buy a case of '89 Petrus, he said it wouldn't sell at Tommaso's. "Who's going to come here in Brooklyn to buy it?" he said. "Cru and Veritas, those are the places where people would go and spend $7,000 on a bottle."

While the customers at those restaurants may be willing to spend that kind of money, the people who work there know better; they grab the D train to the 18th Avenue stop in Bensonhurst. "The guys from Cru come here to drink," Mr. Verdillo laughed, referring to the Burgundy-rich Greenwich Village restaurant. "They raid my cellar quite often."

There is no end, in fact, to the list of wine-world heavyweights who have made the pilgrimage to Bensonhurst. Piedmont wine titan Angelo Gaja has been there many times. Bruno Giacosa's daughters have visited; one daughter roomed upstairs for a month one summer. Legendary Barolo wine producer Aldo Conterno has been a guest. The maker of the cognoscente's most favored wine glasses, Georg Riedel, dined there with his son. "He was very autocratic with that boy," Mr. Verdillo said of the Austrian glassmaker. "That kid sat up straight. Very dignified. And I'm the opposite of that. I'm not a dress-up kind of guy. Very casual." And then, of course, there are Tommaso's numerous less-celebrated regulars. "People want to drink old wines at reasonable prices," he said. "They come here for that."

The Pinot That Walks Like a Cab

In a few days, I'll be flying out to Sonoma County to visit my brother. In preparation for our visit to wine country, I thought I'd spend a few nights drinking wines from the area. I decided to focus on the Pinot Noirs of the Sonoma Coast, since it's not an area I spend a lot of time thinking about. I picked up a Chasseur Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast 2005 at Acker, Merrall & Condit on the Upper West Side and a Flowers Andreen-Gale Cuvee Pinot Noir 2004 at Beacon Wine & Spirits a couple blocks away. (That was my limit, since those two bottles put me in the hole to the tune of $90.) The unsmiling owner at Beacon always seems confident in his inventory. "You like this?" I said, holding up the Flowers. "I always like it," he monotoned, not looking up from his paperwork.

I drank them over the course of a few days and, while I admired them in the way a commoner admires a king, I can't say I loved them. Why? Well, let's just say they came on too strong. The Chasseur had an alcohol level of 14.5%, the Flowers 14.1% (though that seemed like a fib to me). They had all kinds of fruit, were majestic and balanced. Bright cherry, plum, perfume, all that jazz. A bit more spice and tobacco on the Chasseur, while the Flowers came off more polished and elegant.

But, in the end, as I enjoyed my glass with some approving nods, I felt I had been more bullied than seduced into a good opinion. To me, pinots this strong just seem out of whack with the varietal's inate character. The Flowers was so muscular, it had many of the characteristics of a California Cab. Both wineries brag of Burgundian methods, but their wines of Cali all over.

Once again I proved to myself, I'm just not a California boy.

Creme and Syrup

Every time I visit LeNell's liquor store in Red Hook, I seem to spy a bottle or two that I convince myself I need in order to have a complete liquor cabinet. Yesterday, I went in for some sweet vermouth, but exited not only with the vermouth but some Creme de Cassis and Fee Brothers Red Passion Fruit Cordial Syrup. I had been looking for a Creme de Cassis other than the typical brands founds in most shops, and LeNell's had a 375 ml bottle of Jules Theuriet that looked promising. As for the Fee's, I have plenty of their bitters, but had never before noticed this peculiar product.

I bought both not knowing what exactly I was going to do with them when I got home, but I was sure I'd come up with something. Everyone knows the classic Cassis cocktails the Kir and Kir Royale, but I didn't have any wine or Champagne on hand. Besides, I wanted to try something out of the ordinary. I leafed through my cocktail books and came up with the Arnaud, a drink dating to the 1920s and named after French actress Yvonne Arnaud. It required:

1 oz. gin
1 oz. dry vermouth
1 oz. creme de cassis.

Couldn't be simpler. I stirred the trio with ice and strained it into a chilled cocktail glass. The drink had a certain appeal, but was a bit too much on the syrupy side for me. The Cassis dominated without question. It still seemed like a liqueur, not a cocktail.


From there, I wasted no time experimenting with the Passion Fruit Syrup. Rather than raid the library once again, I decided to consult the bottle's label for ideas. The Fee Brothers suggested a Hurricane and a Tonga Punch, but both were a bit complex and required ingredients I didn't have. I wanted something simpler. So I tried the third option: something I'd never heard of called a Royal Romance. It asked for:

1/2 oz. Fee's Red Passion
1/2 oz. Grand Marnier
1 oz. Gin

For my stomach's sake, I was glad I was staying in the gin family. I shook the liquids as instructed and strained the mixture into a cocktail glass. The Passion Fruit Syrup, like the Cassis, was in the foreground of the drink's taste profile, with the orange of the Grand Marnier close behind. Again, it was somewhat enjoyable, but the mix of orange and passion fruit flavors made my stomach churn a little. The combination wasn't as harmonious as it ought to have been.

I can't say I cared for either of these drinks much, but I'll continue to play with my new toys. I rarely give up on any mixer. Cassis will come in handy, I have no doubt. The Fee's will be more of a challenge. There are all those tiki drinks, of course though they take patience and a ton of products. If nothing else, Fee's says it can also be used as a dessert topping, or to spice up my morning coffee.

Shades of Grayz

Grayz, the peculiar high-end restaurant on E. 54th Street run by celeb chef Gray Kuntz, is selling itself as a kind of non-stop, swanky cocktail party. So, of course, I had to go. Indeed, there isn't much food to speak of. A dozen small plates of fancy finger food and three entree-size offerings. The focus is the cocktail and wine lists.

The first page lists Grayz' "signature" cocktails and, to be frank, the descriptions of many of them made me feel a bit queasy. The Irish Day, for instance, is made of Jameson's Irish whiskey, pomegranate molasses, apple and lemon juice, cracked pepper. Sounds like a liquified spicy baked apple. And the Loretto is composed of Maker's Mark, Nieport 1986 colheita port, bliss maple syrup and (urp) bourbon-roasted pineapple. What's with all the fruit and tree sap?

I zeroed in on the drink that seemed most appealing, the Agave Agave. Herradura Silver, St. Germain elderflower syrup, agave, lime, mint. No surprise: it turned out to be Grayz' most popular cocktail. The concoction proved refreshing, piquant and light. It was served in a Martini glass and the lime slice floated on top. Just right for the Indian Summer New York is suffering through right now. From there I went on to the second-most-bouyant-sounding drink, the Tornja, made of Mac de Oro Cachaca, grapefruit marmalade and syrup, orange bitters, and lemon juice. This was served in a rocks glass with a huge wedge of orange stuck to the side, like the flag on a mailbox. I approved of this drink as well. Bracing, tart and sweet. Both drinks were $12.

The help was quite obliging and seemed rather nervous; the place has only been open a couple weeks and has been the focus of much snarky press. The bartender said their version of a Rockefeller Manhattan was also popular, but since it had a base of bourbon, I wasn't too keen. In fact, no rye-based drinks were featured, though they had (one) rye in stock, and there were too many vodka drinks for my taste.

My friend has two Cucumber Gimlets, which he enjoyed throughly. Made of Bulldog Gin, Cucumber, lime juice and simple syrup, it seemed to me to be a rip-off of the Cucumber Collins that Hedrick's rep Charlotte Voisey has been mixing up lately, just with lime in the place of lemon juice. But the use of lime instead of lemon really made a different, tipping it over to the far side of tartness. A drink in its own right, if essentially a riff.

Place has potential. I'll be back

The Brandy Old Fashioned

I am uniquely qualified to write about this very singular drink, since I grew up in the Milwaukee area. In almost every other place in the thinking world, if you order an Old Fashioned, you will get something made with a base of rye or bourbon. In Wisconsin, if you don't specify your poison, you will get an Old Fashioned made with brandy.

This has been the case as long as anyone can remember. The sweet, fruity drink (oranges, cherries and either Club Soda or Seven-Up are involved) may be Wisconsin's most popular cocktail. It's certainly popular. Wisconsinites also drink Manhattans made with brandy, and something called "Brandy and Seven." All, usually made with Korbel brandy. For many years, more brandy was drunk in the Badger State than in the rest of the other 49 United States combined.

People have puzzled for years over the origin of the sui generis mixture and been unable to come up with a plausible theory as to its history and popularity. My parents and relatives fell dumb when asked to explain the drink.

I was left wondering until I stumbled upon a 2006 article in the Isthmus, a Madison, Wisconsin, alternative newspaper, in which the author, one Jerry Minnich, makes a convincing case for unlocking the mystery. The money paragraphs are these:

I came upon the answer to this mystery in a most serendipitous way. I had
just finished reading The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. It is the story of
the building of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, a book enlivened by
the concurrent story of a psychopathic serial killer. (A real page-turner, if you're
looking for some good summer reading.) Several new products were introduced at
this fair, including Cracker Jack and Shredded Wheat. But the book says nothing
about brandy.

Then, in surfing the Internet, I came upon the single clue that broke the mystery
wide open. The California Korbel brothers—Francis, Josef and Antone—were lumbermen
who started making brandy in 1889. Business was slow until, four years later,
they introduced their brandy to the popular Columbian Expo. Popular? It drew 27
million visitors -- one quarter of the nation's population. According to the
Chicago-area Northwest Herald, June 8, 2004:

"Korbel's big break came in Chicago with his wine and brandy being featured at
the Columbian Exposition of 1893. The many Germans who saw the world's fair in
Chicago became Korbel's best brandy customers. Word certainly spread. Even
today, because of its large German population, neighboring Wisconsin buys the
most Korbel brandy of any state. The battleship Wisconsin was christened in 1899
with a bottle of Korbel Viking Champagne."

Eureka! This explains everything! The German population, which was much higher
in 1893 than it is today. The popularity of brandy. And the brand dominance of
Korbel. It might also be a marketing lesson in the importance of brand
identification.

As a Wisconsinite might say, "Well, thar you go." Strange as it may seem, until recently, I had never tasted this flagship drink from my native state. So, on my recent sojourn to the Midwest, I made a point of ordering up a Brandy Old Fashioned. The place was venerable old Nelson's Hall on remote Washington Island. I didn't think I could get more ur-Wisconsin than that. I asked the young waitress if the bartender knew how to make a Brandy Old Fashioned. She didn't bat an eye. "Of course," she said.

It came. It was colorful, sweet and topped with an orange slice and two maraschino cherries. And it wasn't a trashy, slop drink. It was actually quite delicious. Sure, too sweet. Sure, too eager to please. Sure, a drink for people unsure whether they want to taste the alcohol. But a tasty drink. I understood suddenly why they were drunk in such numbers. This cocktail should not be sneered at. It works, for what it is. It does have the class or sophistication of a Manhattan or the depth of a Sazerac. But it's a local delicacy, and in our time of increase homogenization, such things should not be sneezed at.

Here's the recipe recommended in the Isthmus article:

Brandy Old-Fashioned (From the Avenue Bar)

1 teaspoon granulated sugar
2 dashes bitters
1-1/2 ounces brandy
7-Up

Spoon sugar into one 6-ounce
cocktail glass. Add bitters. Dissolve
quickly with a splash of 7-Up, then
add brandy, followed by ice cubes.
Top off with 7-Up, and garnish with
an orange slice and a maraschino
on a toothpick. (Good bartenders
skewer the orange slice from
bottom to top with the cherry in
the middle, which they call a
"flag.")

See more here.

Read more about Brandy Old Fashioneds here.

Sampling the Sonoma Harvest

Last week, I attended a lunch at the James Beard House held by the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission and the Sonoma County Vintners. It was their way to show off the new harvest and possibly stir up some press and tourism. Tyler Colman of DrVino.com organized the event and Murphy Vineyards owner Jim Murphy and Ravenswood Winery winemaker Joel Peterson were the speakers.

The lunch itself was of interest in that it was composed mainly of ingredients flown in from Somoma. Drakes Bay Oysters were followed by Corn and Cauliflower Soup with Dungeness Crab and Coconut, then Liberty Duck Confit, Heirloom Tomato and Lavender Coulis and Merlot Jus Tierra Farm Marrowfat Bean Ragu and Braised Red Chard, and finally Crane Melon Sorbet with Wild Coastal Huckleberries and Florentine Crisps. These were served with a series of Sonoma wines, including a lovely Gloria Ferrer Royal Cuvee sparkler from Carneros, a full, grassy 2005 Baletto Pinot Gris from the Sonoma Coast (which went perfectly with the soup), a grassy, metallic 2003 Murphy Goode Fume Blanc Reserve from the Alexander Valley, and a series of Zinfandels from Ravenswood and Bucklin, including a 1995 from the former.

The most interesting part of the event, however, was the tasting of six sets of grapes flown in from Sonoma. Placed on individual long white plates in front of each guest, they included clusters of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Syrah from Dry Creek Valley, Zinfandel from Russian River Vally, Cab Sauv from Alexander Valley and Cab Sauv from Sonoma Mountain.

The grapes were uniformly delicious, sweet and complex in their flavors. They beat table grapes to hell. The Zin grapes were the biggest of the six, with a ripe, cherry-raspberry taste to them. The Sonoma Mountain Cab grapes were warmer, fuller and more tannic than the Alexander Valley ones, which were more neutral and soft in their flavor. If winemakers have to spend their fall days sampling grapes like these, their jobs are pretty sweet.

Cool as a Cucumber

I stopped in Smith & Vine wineshop in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, the other day and who did I see but mixologist and Hendrick's Gin rep Charlotte Voisey mixing up some Cucumber Collinses for the people. This was the second time in just a few months that I had caught Voisey in this act; she did the same service at LeNell's in Red Hook.

I liked the Cucumber Collins she made just as much as I had liked it in Red Hook. And I thought to myself: I can't very well count on Charlotte to turn up every few months at a neighborhood wine shop to keep me in Cucumber Collins. I better learn how to make the damn thing.

So I bought a cucumber, went home, and looked up the recipe on the web. This is what I found, courtesy of DrinkBoston.com:

Cucumber Collins
1½ oz Hendrick’s Gin
3 oz cucumber puree
Shake and strain over fresh ice in a Collins glass, garnish with a long cucumber rod.
(To make a batch of cucumber puree: blend 1 cucumber with 3 oz fresh lemon juice and 3½ oz simple syrup.)

I had all the ingredients, so went to work. It was a snap, and tasted just as refreshing as it had at Smith & Vine. I do have a confession to make. I didn't have Hendrick's on hand (which, as you all know, has a distinctive cucumber flavor to it), so I used Stoli. (Sorry, Charlotte. I was thirsty.) The Stoli did just fine. And it's easy to whip up a batch of the puree and just store it in the fridge for a few days.