The wine business in this city can change faster than a New York minute; the sommelier segment has been evolving at speed for the past decade. Forty years ago, very few top restaurants had a sommelier. Today, even the not-so-top ones do. Where once double white tablecloths meant a man with a tastevin would come forward formally to discuss the wines to be served and present the bottles, today it may very well be one of three or four men or women dressed a tad less formally offering suggestions.
Here are some of the most influential sommeliers in New York.
Kevin Zraly, Windows on the World Wine School
Before the Court of Master Sommeliers came to America, before the Wine and Spirits Education Trust opened its doors in New York, and long before the Society of Wine Educators was founded, there was Kevin Zraly. “It was pretty lonely,” at the top, said Zraly, who 40 years ago ruled over the Cellar in the Sky at Windows on the World, the legendary restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. “I had no peer group. There were no sommeliers. Roger [Dagorn] came later.”
If the spectre of September 11 still haunts New York, 15 years after the Towers came down, so too does Zraly’s legacy: hundreds of sommeliers and a fair number of Masters of Wine first got the wine bug from his course.
Back then, the course hadn’t yet become a bestselling book. It was simply a way to get people to come and eat and drink, “and learn something along the way. Remember, this was the ‘70s. We Americans were all interested in learning about wine. Most of us had never grown up with it at home.”
When Windows first opened, it was a private club. Several months on, Zraly, at the members’ and management’s urging, began wine classes. “I was a kid,” he remembers, having grown up in the Hudson Valley region due north of New York where he still lives. “What did I know? I was 25. But I always kept one step ahead of the class.” Zraly was self-taught. “I was a history buff” who discovered “that I could study everything I ever wanted if I just studied wine. It became my passion.”
Those classes continued and resulted in the eponymous Windows on the World Wine Course book that has sold 3m copies. After September 11, 2001 – and the subsequent destruction of Windows on the World – New York’s Marriott Marquis asked Zraly to teach the class and he did. “I’ve had more than 20,000 students over the years”, including Andrea Robinson MS, Emily Wines, now beverage director for Kimpton Hotels, and Dennis Kelly of The French Laundry.
Autumn 2016 will be Zraly’s final Windows on the World Wine Course. “It’s been going on for 40 years. Who would have thought that? But it’s time.”
Roger Dagorn, One Five Hospitality, and Laura Maniec, Corkbuzz
Roger Dagorn was destined for the restaurant business. “I’m French-born. My family owned a French restaurant. I basically grew up in the restaurant business,” he says. One of fewer than 240 Master Sommeliers in the world – “and there were a lot fewer when I first became one” in 1990 – the multi-award-winning Dagorn remains a rarity.
At 65, long after most sommeliers have left the floor, Dagorn continues to work at five restaurants owned by the One Five Hospitality group. Mostly, he is at Tocqueville, a restaurant that brings French technique to the seasonal ingredients from the nearby Union Square farmers’ market. But his skill as a Sake Samurai can also be tested at the nearby Japanese restaurant, 15 East, while the other three restaurants are also in the Union Square neighborhood. Like Kevin Zraly, Dagorn has had a hand in shaping New York’s sommeliers. In addition to his work at the International Culinary Center and the American Sommelier Association, he has taught at the New York City College of Technology for the past 17 years.
Then there was the “classroom” at Chanterelle, a famed eatery. Dagorn claims that it was he who convinced Laura Maniec – one of fewer than 30 women who hold the title Master Sommelier and now owner of Corkbuzz, a small chain of wine bars – to join the profession. “She had come into the restaurant with her uncle. And she saw me and we talked. She was very young; I don’t even think she was old enough to be consuming wine at the time. But that’s when she decided what she wanted to do. And she did.”
Maniec became a sommelier at New York’s Blue Fin restaurant when she was 21. Ten years later, after working the floor of some 20 restaurants across the country and becoming a Master Sommelier herself, she opened her first Corkbuzz in New York’s Greenwich Village. She confirmed Dagorn’s account. “I definitely recall the dinner and looking at Roger working and was like: ‘Wow, someone gets paid to take care of this kind of experience!’ He introduced me to a lovely Châteuneuf-du-Pape that night.”
These days Dagorn prefers to be introduced to new wines at “tastings where there are not a lot of people. Private tastings are good, but that limits my selections. I do travel quite a bit visiting the vineyards, and that’s also very helpful.”
Ivan Mitankin, HPH Hospitality Group
Born in Bulgaria, Ivan Mitankin says he’s always had an interest in food and wine. As a child, he recalls watching his great-grandfather making wine and grappa each autumn, and storing it in casks in the basement of their house. He would later try to help.
“My first restaurant job was back home in Sofia working every summer in the restaurant where my grandmother was the executive chef. Food and wine have always been a big part of our family’s tradition, and I fell in love with everything that has to do with cooking,” said Mitankin, 43, who came to New York in 1995.
One of his first jobs was working in Harry’s at Hanover Square, the iconic Wall Street restaurant where bold-faced names and financial titans rubbed shoulders. The owner, Harry Poulakakos, took Mitankin under his wing and out onto the floor. When Harry’s son Peter Poulakakos took over and expanded the restaurant empire, Mitankin followed.
He started working as a sommelier at Bayard’s restaurant, which opened in the same space Harry’s had occupied. In 2006, he became the general manager and wine director at the revamped Harry’s Cafe & Steak, known for its extensive wine list. Along the way, he took the Introductory course by the Court of Master Sommeliers and got his official Certified Sommelier License by the Court in the spring of 2006.
He considers his mentors, in addition to his great-grandfather, to be Master Sommeliers Roger Dagorn and Larry Stone (dean of the International Culinary Center). But “my biggest influence was and is Harry Poulakakos with his tremendous palate and an amazing wine collection, which I help manage now as part of my position as beverage director for the HPH Hospitality Group in NYC.” The group has several restaurants including Vintry Wine & Whiskey in the Financial District and Bathtub Gin in Chelsea.
Patrick Cappiello, Pearl & Ash, Rebelle
Patrick Cappiello, 43, is the operating partner and wine director of Pearl & Ash and Rebelle, two restaurants on the Bowery in lower Manhattan. Pearl & Ash, a restaurant that The New York Times dubbed the city’s “most exciting place to drink wines” has a 92-page wine list.
Cappiello shucked his impeccably tailored dark suits, black ties and crisp collared shirts that were his uniform when he was the sommelier at a Michelin two-star restaurant. While he still favours black, his sartorial splendour now consists of black tee-shirts and jeans, with no white collar shirts to cover up his tattoos.
He’s been in the restaurant business since he was 15, but became interested in wine while working as a waiter in an upscale Cleveland restaurant, after he noticed that other waiters frequently suggested expensive bottles to their customers. The result “was their take-home [money] was higher than mine. So if there was more money to make pouring all this wine, well I’d better learn about wine,” he said. He got a copy of Kevin Zraly’s book and “read it from cover to cover – and I still have the copy.”
Today, ironically, he has enhanced his restaurants’ reputation by lowering the wine markup. Most restaurants charge twice the retail price, but at Cappiello’s the “markup is more like 50% above retail. We make enough to keep the lights on and the water running.”
While he is working with collectors and going to auctions to sniff out older vintages, he leaves staff training and dealing with distributors to Kimberly Prokoshyn at Rebelle and Bryn Birkhahn at Pearl & Ash.
Kimberly Prokoshyn, Rebelle
Rebelle’s head sommelier Kimberly Prokoshyn, 29, grew up in a suburban Connecticut home where food was the big focus, not wine. “When my grandmother was cooking, we would have Rieslings from Germany with dinner. They were the first wines that I had, and I enjoyed them.”
The sommelier for Rebelle, Prokoshyn took a few classes with the American Sommelier Association, but learned most of what she knows about wine from Rebelle operating partner Patrick Cappiello. “I would definitely say I owe a lot to him,” she says.
“I’m the wine buyer” for the restaurant that concentrates almost entirely on French and American wines, Prokoshyn says, adding that Cappiello still offers advice once in a while and, “tells me what I’m missing. He’s really very helpful along the way. I see him as a mentor.”
Prokoshyn, like the restaurant’s three other sommeliers and three cellar rats, goes to a lot of tastings. “If I can’t make it, then one of them goes and they report back on what was interesting. We have a good relationship with a lot of different groups, including the Bordeaux Council.”
She also buys wines both from distributors and those she has an existing relationship with. “I have loyalty for people with whom I’ve worked with and formed a relationship. I try to take care of people. And when it comes to newer distributors, I really appreciate it if they have something that they really feel makes sense for the wine list here and I don’t know about it.”
Paul Grieco, Terroir
Paul Grieco got the wine bug “when I realized that everything I was interested in – history, religion, culture, civilization, geography, people – [are] all in a bottle of grape juice. So maybe I should study grape juice.”
A fiercely independent personality, complete with a greying Van Dyke beard, Grieco owns and operates Terroir, which has become a Tribeca institution. Another Terroir is open during ‘the season’ – that is, from late spring through early autumn – on the High Line, the ex-railway that’s become New York’s newest must-stroll landmark.
Grieco, a James Beard Award-winner, pioneered a by-the-glass bar packed with unusual wines, with offerings from Georgia, Greece and Macedonia, along with wines from more conventional regions.
Where sparkling wines would normally appear, he has Sherries and Madeiras. He is mad for Riesling and this summer intends to serve nothing but Riesling by the glass. “If you really believe in something, then you believe in it,” he says.
He remains a pied piper for the city’s sommeliers, who can be found in his place after their shifts end. And, in language that is much more salty than the dishes he serves, Grieco is mindful that “this is grape juice, with alcohol. But it’s just grape juice. There are so many other things to be so serious about. This, it’s f**kin’ easy. If we don’t have a smile on our face when you are drinking juice with your family and friends, than something is wrong.”
He’s always on the lookout for new wines, and will “take a sip” with a salesman, “then, maybe a second sip. If I take a third sip, we can talk.”
Rajeev Vaidya, Daniel and the Dinex Group
Rajeev Vaidya, the newly appointed head sommeiler at the Michelin-starred Daniel, has been in the restaurant business for 20 years, 15 of which are on the wine side. He grew up in India, where he lived in Bombay until 1990 and then moved to Singapore for five years before coming to the US.
Vaidya says he rose from waiter to sommelier fairly quickly and never really worked under a sommelier or as a cellar rat. Instead, he completed the WSET diploma.
Vaidya says the best part of being a sommelier is: “I get to taste the best wines in the world.” What he doesn’t like very much about the job is the term ‘somm’, nor the tendency of some to make the career and métier seem more like a rockstar vocation. We are just wine waiters or inventory managers.”
The best way for a producer to entice Vaidya to try their wine is for them “to drop off a bottle, open or otherwise, so I can taste it at the end of my shift”. While he tastes as much as possible and says he’s open to distributors turning him on to new wines, he also makes a point of learning from his colleagues. If someone whose preferences he knows he shares brings a wine to his attention, “I’m more likely to find the time to taste with them”.
