Real Talk with Amanda Smeltz, Part II
As told to Jennifer Green | Photography by Kyle Johnson and Victor Garzon
Amanda Smeltz at Estela. Kyle Johnson for Glou Glou Magazine
In Part 1 we sat down with Amanda Smeltz to discuss the politics of learning wine in the Parker belt, invading restaurants for the 1% and exploring the in-between. We’ve now landed in her current habitats: the moody, noir Estela, crown jewel of Ignacio Mattos’ Matter House group, and Café Altro Paradiso, a luscious Mediterranean escape hatch, both restaurants of our quarantine dreams. Amanda is guiding our imaginations on a tour of their cellars.
Estela's wine list is perhaps a touch more challenging in some ways, as guests don’t recognize many of the wine regions and varieties. As the flagship restaurant in the group, I think it's possible at Estela to push boundaries.
There are a few focal points: one is to highlight places in the natural wine world that, at this point, haven't gotten as much shine. That means de-emphasizing the French producers who at this point are quite famous or culty, that you'll see on numerous wine lists in New York, and instead, trying to highlight producers in regions people don't care about as much: central and southern Austria, Catalonia, Germany, newcomer natural producers in the States and Australia. When we do list French stuff, I try really hard to showcase items that maybe don’t have as much clout or aren’t as well-known yet.
The other focus is to have lots of bottles to seduce or convert those guests who come in saying, “Oh I HATE natural wine,” which happens often. Regularly I’ll seek out wines that do not flaunt their natural-ness in terms of their profile, as I need to have those options so that a guest who’s been burned on wines that are just too “out there” for them have something lovely— something that will change their mind about what “natural” means.
That latter principle is definitely at work on the Altro list, too, but the regional focus is much tighter. The list is probably 75% Italian, much like the cuisine, with the latter quarter coming from Mediterranean France and Greece, plus a sprinkling of Champagne.
The list is in some ways even more obscure for a natural wine list in New York, because the lens is tightened through wanting to show all the amazing change that has happened in Italy and the Mediterranean rim in terms of revolutionizing farming and wine production. I had a friend recently describe the list as a little bit like “being on holiday,” breezy and exotic. I really loved that idea. You can definitely drink a whole bunch of wine from vacation-like wine regions of Europe.
Flipping the Switch
Now every once in a while, you'll get lucky and a guest will unlock on you. They’ll turn up and look at you—it’s one in ten times that happens here in service—where someone looks up at you and they're like, ‘I've never had anything like this before. It is so strange and so delicious.’ Or they'll just be like, ‘I don't really know what's going on — will you explain this to me?’
My somms have the same thing happen to them. Once a service, someone is like, ‘physically I can tell that this is really different. I don't understand it at all. Will you help?’ And then you have a moment where you say, okay, now I get to do the other part of my job which is where I explain why it tastes different, where it comes from, where I give them context because they asked. Otherwise it's too much. You're just browbeating.
[GG : But you have to wait for someone to be vulnerable to do that. With so many rules when it comes to dining — and people are so aware of those rules — when you think about it, it’s kind of a socially stressful experience to go to a restaurant.]
Oh my god, people are so anxious. Are you kidding me? How much you see anxiety in guests is unreal. I usually say that being a somm or a wine director, your job is 50/50. Half of your job is getting [guests] what they're looking for. Finding the right wine for them, helping with service to make sure that their whole dinner is lovely. The other fifty percent of your job is being a therapist. You are just helping these people fucking relaxxxxxx. Like, relaxxxxxxxx.
You’re not gonna do anything wrong.
You're not gonna be in bad taste.
You're not going to embarrass yourself in front of your friends.
You're not going to be had.
I'm not going to take your money for nothing.
I'm not gonna rob you. I'm not going to cheat you. I'm not gonna lie to you.
And people are anxious about that stuff, you know?
I think that in a lot of ways the natural stance of human beings is to be fearful. You know they're looking out for threat. And they're looking out for danger. We're still animals, after all. And I've noticed that there's nothing that people are more afraid of than looking like a fool. They're truly terrified of it and they will kill you before they let you do it.
Or they'll just scream at you, in place, at a restaurant. I've seen men and women do it. You're just like, at bottom all this is about is you not wanting to be made to look like a fool. Once you know that about people, you have the key. You're in my hands now because I know what you're most afraid of. And I promise I'm not going to do it to you so much so that I can even say shit like that to people in service, like: ‘I promise I'm not going to cheat you.’ I will say that out loud or they'll be on their phone frantically Googling wines and stuff, and I'll just kind of gently come over and be like, ‘I promise that we can have a nice conversation if you let me.’
I'll say it to people. They see that they've been caught, then their feathers ruffle a little bit. But then sometimes they relax and they're like, 'oh, OK.' And someone at the table will be like 'yeah John, let her do it.' Or someone's kid will be like, 'Mom I told you!!' You're like, can we do this together, people? And, you know, it's really about trying to move wine away from the place of commodity, class, access, and then terror: the terror that comes around feeling like you're not good enough, you don't know enough, you don't know how to behave, that you aren't wealthy enough or fancy enough, or the other way around — that this stuff is too fancy and it's too wealthy and it's for people who know things, and so I'm not willing to have a conversation because I don't even want to touch it.
Let's get back to being human beings together. Let's talk about how wine brings a lot of people joy. And so what I would like to be is a conduit for your joy. Please let me help you get there. I'm literally your drug dealer. Let me help you do it. I've got the good shit, I promise. But you have to trust me just a little. At the end of the meal if you come to me and you're like, ‘you know what, I didn't like that bottle, it was fucked, we didn't enjoy it with our meal,’ whatever, I’m gonna comp that shit off your check. Actually, I'm gonna catch it before it gets to the end of the meal.
You didn't want to take that kind of trip? No problem. There’s a little bit of negotiating that has to happen. I can help you dial in over time, but let’s just move it back to a place where it's [about having] a normal conversation together. I want to defang all the anxiety and the terror that's around the consumption of wine. All that shit has to do with class and privilege and luxury and stuff and I just find it repugnant.
Very little of this has to do with wine itself. It has to do more with the American problem [of] how we handle products. As opposed to being like, I am going to encounter this wine because of its sensate qualities and because of interest in the thing itself, instead we approach things as, 'this is gonna make me look cool.’ That's the same shit as oldhead at my table who’s like, ‘give me this brand name Napa Cab.’ It's the same motion: ‘this shit's gonna make me look cool or smart or that I have good taste’ or whatever. And anyone can fall prey to that regardless of what your interest is. It's like musicheads. They're the same. It doesn't matter if you're a classical music dork or if you're a sludge metal dork. All of those people can be pretentious.
METHOD ONE
There are some tricks. This is moving the needle way slower, but I find that one of the easiest ways is to teach the people who work with the products. If you wake them up I find that then you have a whole army of people who can wake other people up—so making sure that it's not just me and my somms but that everyone [in the restaurant] begins to have a way of thinking about how to taste.
I work with a really gifted Chef de Cuisine here. He does that with his line cooks all day. It's one of the better examples of a chef I've seen working because he's constantly saying, ‘what do you taste, how does that taste? Where's the citrus level in that? Should the vinegar be like this? It's not round enough on the palate, it's not this, it's not that.’ He's verbally coaching them through what they're tasting. ‘Does it taste bright or dark to you? This or that? This or that…’ and they do it every day. Essentially, you train people into having an awareness of what it is they smell, taste and feel.
Everyone can be taught how to sing. Everyone can be taught how to taste, but it takes a lot of work. If they feel confident and comfortable and aware of what it is they're working with, all of a sudden they can change the tone of the table. So empowering people to do that is really, really important to me. Also I fucking hate wine people who won't teach anyone but other wine people. It’s exclusionary. It’s gatekeeping. I can’t stand it. But I'm a huge commie proletariat lover so that's why I am the way I am.
METHOD TWO
So that's method one. Method two, and you have to be fast table-side to get people to be like this—sometimes I will tell someone what to expect on their palate before they taste the wine. So if I know that there's probably a challenge implicit in the wine or in the way the guest has asked about it, sometimes I'll be like, even before I pour it, ‘just so you know, this is a pretty light colored wine, but don't worry, there's a lot of texture there because of a ripe climate.’ So before you get it on your palate and tell me it's too light, because that's a complaint that comes up all the time—looking for richness because that's what's common—before you even taste it, I’m going to say to you, ‘be expecting pale color, lightness on the palate, and then also look for texture instead.' I give them a cue. Look for texture.
Then maybe I have an opportunity for them to be like, ‘oh, I think I see what she means’ if I can sneak that in sometimes before people get there. Or I'll say to them, ‘it's a pretty high acid, pretty nimble white wine, you know, it's definitely not about fruit on this one, it's more about a kind of rocky mineral quality and it's really zippy,’ that way no one will say to me, 'it's sweet.’ So I'm trying to head them off at the pass by giving them cues. It's leading the guest a little bit but it's also giving them a chance to compare what they taste to a thing that I've said. So that's a brief version of what I do at wine class or what our CDC does with his cooks. I'm going to help train your palate. You can argue with me. If they argue and they're like, ‘no way, it's way too light’ I'm like, ‘cool, no problem, conversation over.’ Then I'm not gonna try, you know what I mean?
I'm giving them vocabulary. I'm giving them words to compare what it is that they're sensing. I'm giving them an opportunity to compare one person's description of a wine with the impression that they have on their palate. If a somm doesn't talk, if they just lug the bottle over, pour the taste in the glass, you’re leaving this guest who has no knowledge at all — no experience at all, really — to make an assessment in front of everybody else that they're not prepared to make. So they either have to pretend, which sucks because this is how you get this blowhard thing going on, or they just go, ‘I don't know.’ And then they feel stupid.
Neither of those scenarios is good. That means that I have to be a lot more proactive, a lot more engaged, and I have to teach them to use their words.
[GG : But I also think tasting notes revolving around flavor can be very alienating because we all smell and taste completely different things, whereas texture we can kind of agree on. Structure. I’ve heard Ignacio [Mattos] talk about the contextual feelings around the food he makes: how many bites will it take to complete this dish, what does it sound like in your head as you’re chewing? I wish more wine people thought like that. ]
I think there are those that do. For example, I've always admired how Pascaline [Lepeltier], when she's teaching people how to taste, almost drags them away from tasting notes, meaning from aromatic descriptors and flavor descriptors because they can be so disconnected from the reality of what is happening in the wine. They're more associative and descriptive than they are identifiable.
So when I'm teaching people wine stuff, I'll ask them to find broad categories of flavors, like don't dial in past berries. If you've got berries, then you're good. Don't tell me what type of berry you grew up around in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not useful, except for to you. That's the emotional part of wine, which is lovely, but it's not going to help you get anything across to anybody else. You might be able to say, black berry, red berry or tart berry. You're talking about spectrums of ripeness, which actually happens in fruit and in climate. So that's useful, right?
[GG : Yeah, the color of the fruit. Again, you talked about this with Disgorgeous, but that’s kind of the synesthesia element of tasting wine…it’s a little bit subjective but it's also broad.]
It's broad enough, it's useful. It’s not like you said “chartreuse,” right? If you just say red or black fruit, a lot of people in a lot of places have an understanding of red or black fruit. That's enough that they'll remember whatever fruit it is that's local to them. Or if you're saying tropical fruit, depending on where you're from there might be 900 of those.
Where we're from, there's more stone fruit and berries. Where other people are from, there's a cajillion tropical fruits. So instead of them saying, it reminds me of this one or this one, they say pink or yellow, red or yellow tropical fruit. That's useful because everyone's like, ‘oh, I've had something like that before.’ So I try to teach for flavor profile through broad categories. And that way no one gets overwhelmed.
[GG : And going back to that quote from earlier, “taste is the residue of privilege” — everyone has tasted these things that are broad categories. ]
Yeah, you know, that's also what I mean. You don’t want to spend a lot of time describing different types of berries especially when you're like me, and half or a third of your staff is Latino. They're from all over the world, right? So I'm not going to sit here and keep talking about elderberry with you. You've never had ‘em. There aren't blueberries where you're from. You guys can talk to me all about dragon fruit…
So instead of working with that, working with structure, texture (physical feel), and then also broad flavor categories. If I can get a guest there — real quick, if I can give them three structural, textural, broad flavor notes — if I can get it to them before they start messing with the wines, I usually have a much better opportunity to, frankly, teach them.
Sometimes you get lucky and a guest just looks up at you and is like, ‘I feel like I have this thing going on, what is that…how do I say that…’ I'm just like, ‘I'm so glad you asked. It's literally my job to give you the language so that you can order the thing that you want.’ That's what Americans are missing. They don't know how to connect qualities of wine with language and it's just because our people don't learn this stuff growing up. That's all… it's a problem in every language, you know.
[GG : It’s a problem of language.]
There's always a disconnect between people who've been educated in wine and those who haven't. And the thing that gets you there is tasting and language together. It's just tasting and talking. That’s all it is. Books help, but tasting and talking is really the primary vehicle. So with guests, I'm trying to get that in a fifteen second interval, you know what I mean? And then sometimes, like I said, you get lucky and you have people who really respond to it and then you can have more conversation, right? And then other times people are completely shut down and there's no way you can get through, and then you're like, can't win 'em all.
Natural wine is such a new conversation — historically speaking, in the world. It's not going anywhere. Just the fact that we found an umbrella term for it, which is ‘natural wine’ — that's just a useful handle. But the conversation's not going anywhere because the conversation at bottom is about the means of production. So a lot of the guests who are encountering it for the first time need that handle so that they can describe how what they're tasting, seeing and encountering is different from what maybe they've seen before at other restaurants or wine shops.
But behind the scenes where the things are actually being made there's a global conversation about farming and it's incredibly important because of how, after World War II, ubiquitous industrial farming became across Europe and the United States. It was exported everywhere. That's incredibly historically important. And then to have a bunch of people in the 1980s say, ‘I don't want this. I don't like it. I don't want it.’ They see some chemical test in their property or travel somewhere and see monoculture, a failure of crops, or something happens and they just go, ‘I don't think this is right. I'm gonna throw it out.’
Don’t Blame Corn
This isn't just happening in wine. This has been going on in farming of all kinds for the last probably thirty years. And in the last twenty, it's really gained momentum — which is to say, we are challenging the chemical and we're challenging the mechanized versions of what it means to do agriculture. Our own country has a gigantic struggle. All the family farms in the last 100 years sold to massive conglomerates — something crazy like four property owners in the U.S. own seventy-five percent of the farmland. It’s incredibly corporate and really conglomerate, and so the only way that you can farm with that scale of land ownership is to industrialize.
So this is a problem with farming everywhere. It just so happens that wine is in the lucky position of being a premium product. You can sell it for infinitely more money than you can sell just grapes or corn. It's in a privileged position that way, as you can kind of push back on things a little bit more. And it has the fascinating inherent quality of being highly communicative of the place it was grown in, of the climate, of the year, and also the people who made it, the styles of production. It's incredibly communicative of all those things—so much so that a consumer can notice differences. Until you have heirloom corn nixtamalized and made up into really dope tortilla from different pockets of Mexico, all corn tastes the same. But that's not corn's fault. That's industrialization, right?
The truth is that corn and potatoes and berries and apples and wine grapes have all been as diverse over the face of the earth as any other plant. It's just that in doing agriculture the way we’ve been doing it for the last hundred years, we homogenized all of it. Except grapes. I mean, we have homogenized them some, but their natural diversity remains. So if you show someone a wine that's from a different place, from a very small farm, from a very different grape variety that maybe you haven't seen before, a lot of people can tell that it's different. That's not going to go anywhere. That process of having people wake up to how different food is, and how different agricultural products are, when they're not commercially produced — that’s a process where the momentum is never stopping. It's not going away.
If anything, the big interests will try to fight it politically. I'm sure they already are, because it is a genuine threat to their corporate systems. But it's to the point where certain European countries are giving subsidies to their farmers to move to organic farming— vitis vinifera-growing farmers are getting subsidies from a government level down. Kind of incredible. There's a lot of people even in the States saying maybe we should go back to the land and figure out how to do this, young people being like, ‘hey, I think I'm gonna go work on a dairy farm.’ Like, what the fuck? My grandmother and my grandfather forfeited their entire lives to get off the farm. Now eighty years later people are like, ‘I think we need to fix our farms.’ That's how bad the industrial devastation has been.
A lot of people are waking up to it and saying, this shit doesn't taste good. Everyone's unhealthy. I don't know what corn tastes like. And the moment you get one in your glass or on your plate that tastes so different you're like, holy shit. I had no idea things could taste this way. But wine is really lucky and it really does show those differences. So no, I don't think the push for natural wine is going anywhere. It's not at critical mass.
Don’t Blame Instagram
The thing that's at critical mass is the public image of it: the way it's been depicted and the way it's often talked about. I've had people come in and be like, ‘oh, I fucking hate natural wine.’ But I'm like, ‘I understand why you would feel that way, largely because you've probably been poured wines that don't taste very good because they're deeply flawed and everyone told you that that was fine. I'm here to tell you that it's not fine. There are lots of things that you probably really like the taste of because they taste a little bit more traditional or whatever. What it's really about is that these wines were made without a lot of heavy intervention in the vineyard or the cellar.’ Just getting it there. Now, what the end products taste like is really variant depending on how people are working, where the wines are from, whether or not they're experienced winemakers…
[GG : But there are a lot of people who are being armed with this idea that flaws are good and flaw is personality.]
Well, that’s stupid.
[GG : If you start at industrial wine, swing toward natural, or maybe even start at natural, the first exciting things you taste are probably going to be flaws. I remember the first bottle of natural wine I had, looking back on it, was a pure VA bomb. But my palate likes vinegar. I know because I used to come home from school and—this is so weird, I don't know how it didn't tear at my stomach lining— but I would drink vinegar as a snack.]
It's not strange. I mean, I've noticed over the years — people respond to difference. Just the same with the Niagara ice wine that blew my socks off because it was so radically different, so too does a VA bomb blow somebody's socks off. What they're responding to is the fact that for the first time ever they can smell and taste something different, right? Now different doesn't necessarily mean good. Obviously looking back, that Niagara ice wine was probably crap. I'm sure it was crap. But it was so different from my range of experience that it was a gateway drug. So you can coach people back away from this stuff that's not well made but the first thing you have to offer them is difference.
[GG : What happens when everything becomes a VA bomb? Then that's not different anymore.]
Of course, of course. But we have to allow for education. And the truth is that what is happening in our country is that for the first time ever, wine consumption is exploding and it’s people our age: in their 20s, their 30s, 40 and under. And the reason it's exploding is that a range of possibility has been opened up to them. It’s like…what Paul Grieco did which was to say, drink Gemischter Satz. Or drink anything except New Zealand Sauvignon blanc. You don't have to. You can drink Ribolla from Friuli. No one told you that before. No one said that for thirty fucking years. But you can.
A lot of the formality in dining has fallen away, which also opens wine up to people. Now a lot of people want to be in restaurants because they're not the way they used to be. There's a lot of opening up of doors happening and millions more people in our country are drinking wine than before. That also means you have millions and millions of people who don't know anything. That means they're learning. We have to make room for that!
Of course they don't know anything, they're twenty-six. Who gives a shit? I'm here to tell them this is Syrah and this is Carignan. We're going to do this together and you're going to like this VA bomb for the next couple of years and then you won't.
My whole staff can taste for mouse. Every single one tastes for mouse and they all uniformly hate it. That's not anything I told them. They just have enough experience with natural wine, because a lot of them been working here for several years, where they've seen lots of different versions of it and they all inevitably like the stuff that's a little bit cleaner and a little more stable. They all learned when they got here, or a little bit before and then got exposed to a bunch of stuff. You reach the conclusion on your own that flaws don't taste good. And that just takes time.
Blame History
[GG : Is it just because everything is so new that it can seem like flaws are at risk of being codified as a personality or attribute? Will that tendency fall away?]
With experience and time. It's just a thing that takes time. Just like considering radical overuse of sulfur dioxide as a preservative or, you know, oak chips added into a wine. That's also a flaw. But certain kinds of flaws are seen as more transgressive than others because American winemaking has come from such a scientific background. We're the best scientists in the world, period. Those people have figured out how to prevent, say for example, bacterial variation in wine. They've also sterilized the shit out of it so that it no longer tastes like anything. It's like fuckin' hand sanitizer. Dude, you're killing all the good stuff, too.
That's why those flaws that come from natural winemaking are seen as more egregious than the flaws that come from over-handling in the cellar. Again, there's historical perspectives on this shit. If it comes from science, it's no big deal. If it comes from a lack of science then you're fucking up. Then you're out here like Louis Pasteur with all your raw cheeses and your raw meats and you're gonna make your baby sick. Those are American attitudes. Really, they come from us. Europeans, by and large, don’t have as much trouble with it. Unless you're German and then you really do also. They are very scientific people as well.
So yeah, this shit's not going anywhere because it’s at bottom a global conversation about agriculture and the means of production.
In the States it's not going anywhere because you’ve got a couple million people drinking wine who weren't doing it before. And they want interesting things to drink because they're young.
This is the most powerful market in the world. So when they start drinking stuff and they call it 'Orange Wine,' ten years later in Catalunya they call it 'Vi Brisat.' They literally came up with a word to describe ‘orange’ in a place where they've been making wines like that for a long time, since seventy years ago. But they found a term for it that emulates the American term. What people start drinking here has ripple effect throughout the rest of the world.
So, no it's not going anywhere. It's mostly just a question of how it will be talked about and how it will be handled. Nuance is hard. People want to brand things. Journalists don't do a great job with this either.
[GG : Well, because it’s sensate. Sensate is nuance.]
It’s about qualities of attention, yeah — how to be paying attention to [your] own experiences to [your] own senses and then also to give help in articulating. That's the whole thing. That shit takes time.
Of course you've got a bunch of twenty-three year olds who drink natty mousy VA bombs. I don't care. I don't care because either those winemakers are going to get better or they're not going to succeed and everyone will stop buying those wines. Then all the winemakers that started out ten years ago and converted their vineyards to biodynamics…at the ten / fifteen / twenty year mark their vineyards come online. They're powerful. And you start getting more and more stable wines the longer you do this. So in our lifetime we're gonna see some of the best wines that have ever been made. It will be one of the best times for wine in probably 200 years because this will be the first time that you see a bulk of wines made across the world that aren't farmed industrially. That will give us a window on what things were like 120 years ago.
[GG : Some time travel shit.]
When you get the rare opportunity to taste Bordeaux from the early 1900s, you realize that they were all natural, all of them.
[GG : They couldn't help it.]
And they were beautiful. They were really, really, really beautiful. You're like, oh shit, we fucked that up really bad. This is a rediscovery of what we lost. And it's so powerful that it's not going anywhere.
[GG : When we're babies, we appreciate everything from a sensate quality and then we're taught to like brands which divorces us from ourselves… Instagram is admittedly a terrifying place to try and relearn —]
Oh it's a bottomless hole.
[GG : And so devoid of that sensate quality that you talk about.]
Look, don't get me wrong. An argument against vapidity is one I'm always behind. But when you wrongly associate it with young people who are out partying and you say, ‘you guys don't give a shit, you don't care about anything,’ you just become someone shaking your cane. Instead of being like, well if they don't give a shit, let's bring them in a little bit more. Let's be like, hey, let me compare the liter that you were just chugging with another thing that maybe was better made. Let's just look at them together. Let's talk 'em out.
You should not worry about all these peons running around on Houston Street slammin’ sans soufre Sangiovese. You should not worry about it. You are fine. The world is opening up. Just relax. Just relax. No gods, no managers, dude. Just chill.
All portraits of Amanda and second-to-last photo (Estela) by Kyle Johnson. Café Altro photos by Victor Garzon.