Meditations in an Emergency :: In Conversation with Sam Anderson

Edited by Jennifer Green | Photography by Victor Garzon and Kyle Johnson

We first sat down with Sam Anderson, marathon runner, diehard vegetarian, Frank O’Hara enthusiast, mixology savant and natural wine figurehead behind the esteemed LES institutions Contra and Wildair in April of 2019. Back then the emergency was climate change, industrial alcohol and the shadow of addiction, but these truths still hold.

Below is part one of our conversation, transcribed in April of 2020.

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday…

Sam : I was actually driving on my way to the Boston Marathon with my girlfriend [now wife], which I ran a week and a half ago. We were driving up the concrete belt between here and Boston with all these construction projects, these massive corrugated metal and concrete malls that are just sitting still open, but more or less completely empty. 

Glou Glou : Oh, you mean like the graveyards of malls? 

Sam : Yeah. Just full of garbage. We went into one of them to use the bathroom at a Bed Bath & Beyond. 

Glou Glou : That's so apocalyptic. 

Sam : Totally. There's no one there. There's these weird playgrounds, with carousels and bumper cars. But there's no one there. Crazy. You know, I remember growing up, going to the mall was where you got to see people. It would be kind of like a hangout. And now we just hang out on our phones. 

Glou Glou : There are all these articles about how social media is destroying adolescence. Suicide rates are rising because people are just in their apartments, in their rooms on their phones, not leaving… so anyway, where are you from? And how did you get here?

Sam : I’m from—I was born in—California. I was born into a cult and I traveled all over the country when I was a child. It was an apocalyptic Christian cult. 

Glou Glou : So very fitting for all the malls that are dying around us. 

Sam : Yeah. It was based around the return of Jesus Christ in an apocalyptic exposure. Very much so end of the world. Communal living. I ran away from home when I was 16, lived in Providence, Rhode Island, in California primarily, and went to college in Nebraska. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I was on my own and I had a friend from childhood who lived there and was going to college. And I was like, hey, can I come and crash? He was a friend I had grown up with in the cult, but he also had left it. 

Glou Glou : Are you still in touch with your family? Is everyone still in the cult? 

Sam : They would be if the cult existed still, but it kind of combusted. 

Glou Glou : As cults tend to do. 

Sam : As they tend to do because they are based around false premises. But my parents are still absolutely apocalyptic Christians. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. 

Glou Glou : Damn. What part of California?

Sam : Fullerton, Orange County. There were a lot of these movements that kind of sprung up in the aftermath of, I mean the disappointment of, the hippie dissolution.

Glou Glou : The dystopian element of all of that.

Sam : So I hightailed it to New York City as soon as I could because I wanted to be among people who thought like me. 

Glou Glou : How did you know that there were people who thought like you if you grew up in a cult? What was your conception of life outside of the cult while you were in it? Like, how did you know what you didn't know? 

Sam : It was purely through books. I was a voracious reader. I read a ton of poetry. I really had my first conception of New York through Frank O'Hara's poems and, you know, some of the Beat poets and their conceptions of New York. 

Glou Glou : That poem The Day Lady Died is — holy shit... 

Sam : Yeah. And so you know my entrance into New York was very much through film and through poetry because that was all I could get my hands on, really. I would go to the Huntington Beach Library and just check books out and read and watch films... 

Glou Glou : Was that allowed in the cult? 

Sam : I mean, it was totally on my own. I was hiding it all. So I think it was a surprise for my family to find out that I wanted to move to New York City [laughs]. So, yeah, here I am. I studied film theory and poetry composition in college, and then I moved here after that. I had no intention of getting into wine.

Glou Glou : How did that enter the picture? I assume that wasn't a huge part of cult life.

Sam : No. Drinking was pretty much prohibited. Even though Jesus Christ, the last thing he ate and drank on Earth was wine. Bread. Yet it's more or less forbidden among American Christian fundamentalists. I find that to be a hilarious irony. 

Glou Glou : I mean it's rife with hypocrisy so it makes sense. 

Sam : Yeah the central figure is, like, turning water into wine. 

Glou Glou : That’s the most natural wine. 

Sam : That would have been some good shit, you know, like no cellar aging necessary, no élevage, just, you know…and so the central figure of Christianity is also probably the greatest vigneron of all time as well. 

Glou Glou : That’s a good soundbite right there. So when did you discover this sinful juice we call wine? 

Sam : Well, I started actually making coffee. I was working at Cafe Grumpy, part of the opening team at the Chelsea location and then I worked at the Greenpoint one, which was made famous by the show Girls. There were some people there who were actually very ahead of their time in the coffee world who were teaching us a lot about cupping and tasting—learning even back then, which was a very strange concept, I think, for a lot of people to be thinking about microclimates, micro cuvées of coffee. And so I started thinking about that pretty early on as we were making espresso — just exposure to the world through an ingredient. [But] then I couldn't really hang with the hours because I partied pretty hard, you know? 

Glou Glou : Nightowl? 

Sam : Yeah, I would just end up going to work having not slept. It would be a mess. So I started working at a restaurant called Freemans as a barback. I learned how to do a lot of cocktail bartending. And then I moved on to Hotel Delmano and I was the head bartender there for about three and a half years. They were really part of the inception of the Brooklyn cocktail movement, with Maison Première.

That was [also] my first exposure to a proper wine program. And to this day, someone who is very close to me and a real mentor is a guy named Alex Alan. He is one of the most graceful, humble, like not taking it seriously, but also just a wealth of knowledge in a very, very humble way. He's really one of the first people who was champion-ing Georgian wine ten years ago…He was just very open to new ways of representing these traditions that we didn't really know much about at that time. But then the same time, his Burgundy and Loire national selections were really great stuff. He focused a lot on Spanish wine as well. I was the cocktail guru at that place yet I was getting all of this feedback from him about wine.

Glou Glou : Which is in some ways the opposite of a cocktail. 

Sam : Oh, absolutely. I mean, at its basis, a cocktail is a spirit, which is very industrial—they're very industrial fluids. Some of the smaller village mezcals and rum, of course, those are their own category for me. But when you're talking about like, oh, here's this gin or— I think there's some really great micro focused gin makers like Forthave, for instance. They do amazing stuff.

But I think the base—your average London gin or your average tequila—there’s very little focus on fermentation, on really transmitting the organic submaterials that those spirits are made from.

It's all about increasing alcohol, boiling off terroir, getting clarity in your spirit and then maybe throwing it into a barrel and putting in a completely foreign flavor element. 

Glou Glou : Right, it's a laboratory procedure, even if there is an art to it. 

Sam : Yeah. And as a cocktail bartender, you're kind of always constrained by this. You can put your own spin or your infusions or take herbs from your garden or whatever, but it's always an overlay on this thing that over time I just became less enchanted with.

So I worked with Alex for three and a half years then I moved on and I worked for— it was a really interesting experience—I was working for Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield for nearly four years, opened a couple of venues doing cocktails for them, this rooftop cocktail place that was called Salvation Taco. Huge volume. There was a wine director for the company named Carla Rzeszewski and I started working with her a bit more. She was at the Breslin and I was doing the [cocktail] program there, so they were kind of like putting me in a position where I was going to do their whole company. 

Glou Glou : They were settin’ you up. 

Sam : Yeah. And for reasons that are probably pretty obvious now, ethically, I just decided to leave. It was time for me to move on. But during that time I got to work with Carla, who was a really influential person. Her energy and her knowledge—you could you could feel her learning along with you in a way… she was a year or two older than me and at that time. The staff at those places—I think Amanda Smeltz worked at the Breslin—there was a bunch of other people around Carla who were really feeding off of her interest and her energy and her ability to represent these farmers and these places that, you know, maybe she had been or she hadn't been. 

Glou Glou : It was a very personal thing she was sharing. 

Sam : So that was the very first time that I started buying wine. And I was doing it with Carla's insight and oversight at that time for this rooftop bar. It was a huge project. I went from there to Mission Chinese where I was the beverage director from day one. This would have been 2015, when Mission Chinese opened. 

Glou Glou : And what year did you first come to NY? 

Sam : 2006. I did the cocktail program but I worked alongside Bill Fitch. He wrote the first list, which lasted us for a month maybe. And then from there it was handed over to me to continue ordering.

Glou Glou : You were really tasked at this point with pairing wine with all sorts of cuisine. 

Sam : That dining experience, the first two years there, you know, with Danny and Angela Dimayuga, the owner and the executive chef at that time—the interesting thing about that program for me was that I was really starting to really dig into the wine aspect, finding my own voice and position on things. From the very beginning there, it was pretty hardcore natural. 

Glou Glou : In what sense, just very experimental cuvées?

Sam : No, not experimental, but just in terms of making sure that farming practices were well researched, to the best of my ability. It's not easy to when you're working sixty, seventy hours a week in a restaurant and someone comes in and tells you, ‘you know, this is not a certified organic producer, but they're following, you know, the same practices’…

Glou Glou : Short of visiting that producer it's kind of hard to undermine what the importer says. 

Sam : Right. And so, you know, it was a lot of, honestly, constantly being in there and not only researching but then talking to people who I trusted like Alex, Bill Fitch and then some other friends that I had. And just the constant dialogue of: what are you tasting, what do you know about this producer? If you're working sixty, seventy hours a week in a restaurant, this is your school. I mean, I think it's a nice thought to go and get a WSET certification… 

Glou Glou : If you have the time and the money. 

Sam : I don't know. I've never had that kind of time. I've always just been working in the restaurants. It's an ongoing experience.

Glou Glou : You keep talking about feedback and the kind of feedback that you've been getting that's really transformed you has been in the moment, on the job. 

Sam : Absolutely. Tasting with producers, when winemakers come and visit and getting to really spend time with them. And every vacation I take, my girlfriend and I are always going to visit someone along the way… I really push people in my restaurants. I'm rigorous in my research of the wines. I'll show you my current info sheets, ‘cause I spent a lot of time with them.

I don't expect my staff to necessarily retain all the information. I can't even retain all of it, you know. But the emphasis for me is that I'm rigorously seeking out every single detail that I possibly can get and making sure that is a focus. And to me, that is a far more proactive way for me to learn than to be on Wednesday nights sitting from 6 to 9 in a hall with twenty-five other people. 

Glou Glou : Also back in the day, you didn't need to go to school for Frank O'Hara to make sense to you.

Sam : We didn't have the Internet. Now you have to be very judicious with what you —there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet, not necessarily because people are putting the wrong information out but, you know, vintage to vintage, the wines are changing, especially with climate change. What you thought was Magic of Juju last year with Domaine Mosse, it's a completely new assemblage year to year.  So for me, it's really important that this information is something that is being provided to the staff. In a lot of ways, a restaurant isn't going to be a wine school, but we can do a lot to give very rigorous, precise, detailed information. 

I'm not someone who is here to vilify people who are coming from a more traditional pedagogical framework. I'm pushed to be this rigorous because I know that there isn't a pedagogical structure in the "natural wine world" that exists right now. 

Glou Glou : You have to make your own. 

Sam : You have to have that in-house and you have to be very diligent with it. You know, we are very diligent with our staff about knowing, where the grapes are from. What is the blend? How long has this been on the skins? Why is this carbonic maceration? And where is that influence coming from? And how does that play itself out? How does carbonic maceration play itself out in the northern Rhône as opposed to, you know, Fleurie in Beaujolais? 

So this is an education in the moment. And that's really how I have always learned. I'm completely autodidactic with this stuff. I have a lot of books at home, I spend a lot of time, this is where my head is. I know that it's fortunate that it worked out that way and I'm blessed to have a field of study where I can learn the way that I do. I don't have to go to school for what I'm doing. So I think it's great. 

Glou Glou : This wine class document you have here is 14 pages. Is that something that you recite? In what format does your staff receive that information? 

Sam : Well, this was a day that we sat down. So when we do a wine update when we're changing the menus, it's a lot shorter, maybe four or five lines that we'll go over that in lineup. This was a dedicated wine class for a two hour class. We hold wine classes roughly every two to three weeks, depending on the circumstances of the restaurant.

Glou Glou : Can you talk about the shift from Mission Chinese to Wildair / Contra?

Sam : Yeah, actually, so one of the things that I think is really defining about Mission Chinese and the wine program [we had] there is — you have actually quite a bit of natural wine focused restaurants now, Asian food, pan-Asian food, with a natural wine component. Night+Market is a really great example of that. But at the time I was like, holy shit. Chinese food. What am I going to do? So one of the things I learned early on was that you have a very extreme culinary marker with Szechuan, especially Danny Bowein's Szechuan. It's very, very spicy. There's no roadmap, there's no wine culture in Szechuan Province. It's very open. 

Glou Glou : It’s like the Wild Wild East. 

Sam : Every winemaker is sort of equidistant to the food because whether you're in Australia or whether you're in the Loire Valley or whether you're in northern California, everyone's equidistant to this particular style of food. So that actually was amazing because I was able to explore all of that. I was able to taste wines with a very global openness as long as they worked with the food. Skin macerated Malvasia with lots of acidity from, you know, Val Trebbia—that worked really great with Szechuan. Who would have known?

Glou Glou : Are there any things you thought might have worked but didn't end up working as a pairing?

Sam : I think there were things that actually work on paper, like a dry Riesling or a dry Sauvignon blanc that were just very linear…they cooled the palate down or whatever, but once I started discovering the potential for a sparkling Malvasia to work with Szechuan, that became my new high point. Then these other wines that were just kind of workmen doing their job felt less successful. Deeply tannic reds are not going to work with Szechuan; that was kind of a no brainer. I would say that the fullest bodied wines that we worked with there, the most unctuous, the most textural—the fullest—wines there would [have been] light to medium bodied anywhere else. But that was just because of the way those flavors at Mission Chinese would skew your palate so much.

Glou Glou : How did you connect with the guys here at Wildair / Contra?

Sam : Oh, I mean, the neighborhood. Six blocks away. They came in all time. We came here all the time. These are two of my favorite restaurants in the city. So, yeah, coming here was in a lot of ways for me like a dream situation. I don't care how hard the work is. I just want to be doing what I want to be doing. And being able to have a position where it's the bar is at the level it is and the expectation from the owners is to make this wine program as good as it possibly can be… you know, Jorge Riera was the wine director here, really put this place on the map.

Glou Glou : With Mission Chinese, you weren't inheriting some crazy program but here there's such a legacy with Jorge and the whole institution of Wildair / Contra. What sort of approach did you bring to that? 

Sam : I think the transition here for me was just learning what the footprint was with Jorge's influence and the culture that he created here as a continuation from 360, as a continuation from Ten Bells. 360 was a restaurant owned by a guy named Arnaud Erhart, arguably the godfather of the natural wine scene in New York; so that was his restaurant and Jorge worked there. Jorge and Arnaud and a lot of these people I have infinite respect for… stepping into a position where I’m  continuing that was sobering but also really exciting. 

Glou Glou : Interesting word for this industry. 

Sam : Yeah. But no, for real, though. I mean, I'm happy to talk more about that because it's something that people ask me a lot about.

Glou Glou : We’ll get to that in a minute. For now, you were stepping into that lineage…

Sam : I would say Catalonia and the Loire were Jorge's focus, I'm sort of speaking for him, but the list here reflects that. There's Rhône, Burgundy, some Austrian wine, some German, some Italian, but those were the real nodes of energy. Those are the wines that people really know are part of the tradition here. And those are all wines… Thierry Puzelat, Mosse, the Courtois, Heredia, Escoda, those are all producers that I really love.

My perspective is that those winemakers have influenced not only a new generation but there is also now more exposure to winemakers in Georgia, Turkey, South America. We're seeing this expansion. It’s really important for me to be open to all of that with my own ethical filter, palate filter, the things that I enjoy, the wines that really make me excited. 

Glou Glou : You don't strike me as someone who's prone to resting on his laurels. So you find something that you love but you don't stick with it. You're like ok, what's this platform, what's this vector that I can follow from this thing that I love? 

Sam : A thing for me that's just so beautiful about this world is that there is so much interconnection and reflected influence between producers. I mean, that's the nature of the natural wine market, too, is that there's only so much of this wine and then you're forced to move on to something else.

Glou Glou : Yeah. It’s a kind of forced moderation. Speaking of which—

Sam : You know I am not sober. I run marathons competitively. I spend probably nine months out of the year in a training cycle, so I'm running three marathons this year. Boston, New York City I'll be running for the sixth time, and then another one this fall— I'm trying to run around a two hour fifty minute marathon for that one. So that's like a 6:26 mile.

Glou Glou : What’s your record time so far? 

Sam : Two hours fifty four minutes, which is a 6:37 mile. But I spend about nine months of the year in a training cycle so what that means is that during the week, I don't drink at all. I'm tasting every day appointments are lined up, you know, like 11am till whenever. But because of the rigors of running eighty miles a week I just can't drink alcohol, but I'm tasting constantly. And I actually think I'm a lot better at my job and my palate is even sharper when I’m not swallowing. If you're doing that over the course of a 12-hour day—if you're swallowing early on—it’s kind of like diminished returns, right? On the weekends, I get my long runs in and I drink with my [wife] or with friends or go out to restaurants.

There was an article that came out in Vice about me [The Sober Bartender That Is Making One of New York's Most Inventive Cocktail Menus] four or five years ago. In typical Vice fashion, they were just trying to make a story, not listening to what I actually was saying. 

[Drinking on the job] just creates a lot of anxiety. That's sort of that. And then I take about a month or so in between each race to mellow out. I'm actually in that period right now where maybe I'm going to get beers with friends, you know. ‘Cause you need that. I spend a lot of time living a very monastic personal life. So it's fun to have a little bit of space in between. 

Photographs of Sam Anderson by Victor Garzon. All scenic photography by Kyle Johnson.

Stay tuned for Part II