A Wrinkle in Time with Lil’ Deb’s Oasis, Part I

Interview with Wheeler, as told to Jennifer Green | Photography by Josh Aldecoa

From left: Carla Perez-Gallardo, Wheeler, and Hannah Black of Lil’ Deb’s Oasis in Hudson, NY

It started like most things, out of necessity. I was twenty-two, trying to pay rent, working at this tasting menu spot, still cis, still in the closet, just trying my best. Hannah and Carla came in and I served them, then ran into Carla later. She was like, if you ever need a job, I just opened a restaurant, please let me know.

My friend found out that they were doing a whole fried fish special. No one in town was doing a whole fried fish— we were going!

At that point I had drank [only] two different natural wines, Cantina Giardino’s Vino Bianco 2015 vintage and the Le Mazel Cuvée Raoul. I've always had a sponge brain. I just get stuff in my brain and it doesn't come out. 

The Kick Inside

That was in 2016. I remember the interview; they [said], ‘we're looking for someone who's not our friend who has previous experience and you have both of those’ and I was like, great. I started working for them the day they got their beer and wine license. 

Hannah, Carla and I all built the wine vocabulary together, but it's also crazy to remember that none of us actually know anything, you know, we've been doing this for almost [four] years but every day it's like, oh my god. No one's driving the plane. And I think that's what's so crucial in fields of taste. It can get so colonial, like, this is my opinion, therefore it's the rule. And that's what I get frustrated with—how natural wine is becoming more and more like an institution. It's kind of becoming the thing that it tried to get away from.

It happens in any niche community that grows to the point of being more than niche. It's what happens in the queer community, especially the trans community. There's so many subdivisions and people start making rules about ‘you've got to go this way or you've got to go that way.'

And I think that's the funny irony that I've noticed with a lot of critics of natural wine, especially the people who are like, natural wine is dead, it’s exploded, it's too big, all the kids like their imperfect wines. Why can't people just let people have different tastes? Someone makes something and someone likes it. They’re a good match for each other. Why does it need to be this thing of miseducation? Why does it need to be this accessibility problem of ‘these people like bad stuff because they're idiots, these people like bad stuff because they don't know what the good stuff is’? And it's just putting so much privilege on the education you have, claiming that your education is the best. It's like someone who thinks that the French technique of cooking is the only technique.

People have this really uncanny ability to take change personally and to see the change of something as either being an attack against them or a decrease in value of the thing itself. It's just like saying that change equals weakness or that change means you can't trust something.

Lionheart

My taste isn't the taste. The wine list is not mine. And if I were to try to do the wine poems on my own, they would suck. The wine poems weren't even my original idea — that happened on a night that I wasn't even working. I am a bit like the custodian of them, the record keeper. I preside over the wine poems like I build the list, decide on pricing and do the ordering. But Hannah, Carla and I will go to the tastings. Hannah, Carla and I—and whoever else is around—makes the poem. Sometimes we'll give the wine to a customer and they'll write something.

There are people who get offended by that and who have come up to me and [expressed] they find it disrespectful to the winemakers that we don't say the same thing that everyone says at every wine fair, like three days on the skins, in this barrel, this soil, this that, this that.

We don't just rattle off a tech sheet because that's alienating. And also, most people don't know what that means and it's not the point. I mean, if you want to get academic about it, Roland Barthes killed the author. He killed the idea of authorial intent in the fucking 60s. Wine is art, right? Because just like music, it makes you feel something and everyone has a different reaction to it. People have different tastes. People like different things. Different things get different people going.

It really feels like this concept couldn't have existed without Hannah and Carla's approach to the way they do food. Their menu isn't from any one region. It's very other-worldly and that's criticism I've gotten about the list too, like, what's the point? What's your thesis with your wine list? What’s the thing that connects the wines? We just like them.

We don't like the word fusion; it’s so destructive. But we’re also aware of where things come from, the traditions and foodways. I think that there are certain traditions that we're really attracted to. Think about something like a plantain leaf. Think about all the different cultures that use plantain leaves in their cooking differently: South America, different tropical islands, Southeast Asia, regions of Africa. There’s so many different ways that people use a plantain leaf.

The plantain leaf can be from multiple places at once, just like people can be different things at once, just like a wine can have one quality one day and another quality another day and not be wrong. There's two wines of Fifi’s [now Steven Graf Imports] where I noticed a huge vintage difference. One of them is the the Domaine Léonine ‘Qué Pasa?’ Rosé. The first vintage I had was I think 2015. Hannah would always drink it and say, SOUR POWER! It's ruby red and one of the wine poem notes for it was Tank Girl. It was just a saucy rrrrrr [like revving an engine].

Would you rather have a wine that tastes like Sandy before the makeover or Sandy after the makeover?

One of our customers posted to Instagram something like, “overheard in Hudson, New York: someone ordering a rosé and [Wheeler saying], would you rather have a wine that tastes like Sandy before the makeover or Sandy after the makeover? In the movie Grease. Do you want the blushing bashful Sandra Dee, the poodle skirt moment? Or do you want the zip-up tight black pants and the perm kicking John Travolta's chest? Which one do you want?” And that helps me decide whether someone wants a more traditional, lighter French style rosé or a rosato.

Never For Ever

I think that such a toxic attitude that restaurants can have is: ‘what we think is important is the way to do it.’ I never want to be that TGI Fridays waiter with the flair being like, ‘don't you want a wine journey?’ That's not my vibe. I'm not gonna non-consensually force this quirky random woo-woo on people. I'm not evil. I'm not trying to go to waiter hell even though when someone's plate is clean I'll be like, ‘you didn't like it?!’ That's the waiter hell I'm going to, but I'm not going to force people to go on my journey. Most of the time what happens now is that I will be called over when someone says they don't really know what to get. And then one of the servers will be like, ‘well, we just happen to have a wine guy who can ask you some fun questions and then figure out what you need.’ Sometimes people don't want that and then I'll get them going where they need to go. Again, some people don't want the process. There's so much anxiety around needing help, wanting help, not knowing what you want in a restaurant. So shameful. Restaurants in general are so anxiety provoking.

I feel like that was a huge explosion that happened after niche restaurants started opening: ‘this is my expertise and you should know about my expertise.’ Instead of being excited about showing someone ‘look at all of this…it's fun. Things you don't know are fun’ it's like, ‘how do you not know? Why are you late to this party?’ That's an attitude that I have a problem with. And that was the attitude that I got trained in before I started working here and had to be like trained out of, like, ‘you should know that a steak should be done medium rare.’ There are these silent rules that customers in a restaurant feel like they're violating.

Going to a restaurant [can be] a way to feel good even though it feels bad. I mean, anyone who's ever had a complicated ex knows that often something that makes you feel good can also make you feel really bad.

But what we try to do is not make people feel stupid for not knowing stuff. You can't know everything. Why should anyone expect you to?

The Dreaming

And I think that's why I started doing the wine journeys. When we started doing our natural wine list and I had this crazy idea in my head that I would have this comparative network system of like, ‘oh you want a Malbec? What wine can I give you that's kind of like a Malbec?’ I would bring something else and they would be like, ‘this isn't a Malbec’ and I would say, ‘I know.’ Then we would just be stuck there forever and I would just die—like that moment when you say goodbye to someone and then you have to walk another block together.

And then one day I was trying to figure out if someone wanted a traditional red wine or a freaky one. And it was like, ‘ok, you have a log cabin in the woods. Would you rather have a Jacuzzi tub outside or a bearskin rug and a wood-burning stove inside?’ And it wasn't so much about traditional versus freaky, but it was mostly just, do you want to be warmed up and comforted right now? Do you want to have a Burt Reynolds of a wine or do you want to have a Prince of a wine? If someone answers jacuzzi tub outside, I'm like, ok, we can play around with temperature. You don't need your fireplace red wine. 

So then the questions started evolving from there. All of the questions have to do with getting people's comfort levels, also literally figuring out what temperature of wine they want. So a lot of the questions have to do with physical comfort.

The Sensual World

There’s this great book called Cruising Utopia by José Muñoz and it's about queerness and utopia, the kind of then-ness and there-ness. I feel queer people especially engage in this looking back or looking to the future, because the present always feels so uncertain and bad and attacked. But there's this beautiful kind of other world, this other time-ness that exists, that people have this imagining of. There's this yearning that I think so many queer people have. Carla and Hannah always joke because they're not romantically involved—we love to keep it ambiguous for people—but Hannah's straight and cis and married to a man, and Carla's queer. And they joke that we had this baby together and it just came out super gay. 

You want to have this utopia [but] it was never really an intention of, ‘it's going to be a queer safe space, here are our norms.’ It just happened because I think that if you find a space that can be like a window that you can put your yearning through, if you find an access point that can store that energy and reflect it, you pour it in. 

And that's what's happened to this space. It was open to receiving it because Carla and Hannah are such beautiful, generous, collaborative people that so many things started channeling through [it]. So I think it's less about set[ting] out with an intention and more of people [bringing] what they needed to this space because they knew this space could hold it. In the way that a plant grows towards the light, people find this space because this space can exist. 

They see the potentiality, [they] say, you’re a queer business, you're so radical. It's like, yeah, we’re also capitalists. We’re a business. We have to make money off of stuff. That's a constant issue we're dealing with. It’s not a utopia.

In the same way that the word ‘natural’ is problematic to talk about wine, queerness is already a brand… I get nervous [about] those bubbles bursting. 

Another element is that quite a lot of the people who work here are queer. In the same way that natural wine became this radical ‘oh, look at this, these radical people moving away from the status quo blah blah blah.’ But as something grows, it becomes systematized, and as something grows, there’s always problems. And I'm not saying that pessimistically. I'm just saying that as someone who has seen the utopic potential of this place.

I'm still drinking the Kool-Aid. I've given so much to this space and so much to Hannah and Carla and so much to this project. And it's not because I'm not aware of the difficulties and the drawbacks…. people fill this place with their yearning for what they want a restaurant dynamic to be. 

Things get labeled queer right now because queerness is a desirable thing. It's actually something that contributes to someone's social capital, which contributes to your actual capital. I'm always down to talk about what makes this restaurant queer and what makes this project queer and why natural wine is queer but in the same way that the word ‘natural’ is problematic to talk about wine—because you're marketing this thing like it's this consumable idea, it’s a brand that people like—queerness is already a brand… I get nervous [about] those bubbles bursting. 

It's kind of like, how do you solve a problem like Maria? You can't. That's kind of the thing. You can't pin a wave upon the sand.

How to Take Yourself on a Wine Journey Under Quarantine: Wheeler’s Guidelines

My only advice is to be nice to yourself and listen to what you want—my friend’s mom gave me the advice that when you’re sick, the right thing to eat is the thing you’re craving. We’re all a little heartsick right now—so be gentle. Don’t push yourself to have the Instagrammable bottle—don’t stretch your budget if it’s not the right thing to do. Just drink what sounds good, don’t worry about pairing, don’t worry about what’s hot right now. 

Stay tuned for Part II