Learning to Serve
When the Culinary Institute of America opened its Greystone campus, the school decided to offer a wine program in addition to the normal food classes. The campus is well positioned for a comprehensive program: it's in St. Helena in the Napa Valley, close to some of California's most famous wine makers.
I took a class there recently called "State of the Art Professional Wine Service." This restaurant-focused class may seem an odd choice, but it is tangentially related to an article I'm working on for The Wine News. While I'm not the target audience, I found the class totally fascinating. The instructor recently resigned from three years as the wine director at Restaurant Gary Danko, and clearly knows her stuff. She seems a good person to have on staff: though fairly petite, she had a commanding presence that left no doubt about her ability to do just fine in the male-dominated wine industry. She lectured on how to do classic, elegant wine service in a restaurant, and I gained a new appreciation for how difficult this is, and how delightful it is to see it done properly.
The class started at 9:00 in the morning (we had a lunch break, and what a treat that was) in one of the lecture halls in the Rudd Center. The school designed this campus building soup to nuts as a wine education facility. Carbon filters in the air ducts keep out unwanted smells. Each of the lecture halls is a small ampitheater with video screens and built-in wine storage refrigerators. Each seat has its own sink for pouring out wine, paper towels, ample counter room for glassware, and even a light in the counter you can turn on when you want a really good sense of the color of your wine. We students, about fifteen or so, introduced ourselves. Not surprisingly, a lot of people were in the wine or restaurant industries, though there were people from other industries as well.
Our instructor started with "equipment basics". She brought out, explained and demoed the various tools a sommelier should have at the restaurant: different kinds of corkscrews, wine cradles, decanters, and the second-most useful accessory of a wine server, the side cloth (the first is the corkscrew). She is classically trained, but she's also working in modern society, so she left out the tastevin, the out-of-fashion silver cup a sommelier uses to "pre-taste" the wine. She talked about how to treat the customers, and then she moved on to various practical, interactive demonstrations. First up, opening sparkling wine.
Most people know how to open sparkling wine in general. But we learned how to do it elegantly and safely (you want very little pop from the cork; hers hissed more than it popped) and how to serve it to the customers (you still present the cork to inspect and you present the cage, since some people collect the little discs on top). I volunteered to practice in front of the class, and let me just tell you that opening a bottle in a classic wine service is lots harder than it looks. Her demo was smooth and flawless, mine was fumbling and awkward and time-consuming. The class decided that some good-natured ribbing of the wine writer was in order here (some quotes: "I have no sympathy for wine writers"; "Wine writers don't know how to open wine because they expect other people to open it for them"). I fumbled through, and was told charitably that with practice I could only get better.
We learned about opening standard wine bottles (again, there's a lot more going on when a server opens a bottle than you realize), and then moved on to decanting over a candle flame. Our instructor is not only well-trained, she clearly loves her work. She waxed euphoric several times describing the dignity of a great bottle of wine and the beauty of wine served properly. But she also reminded people that a sommelier is working for the restaurant, and offered advice on making the wine service a profitable component of the restaurant (there's a 3-day class that covers just that topic in depth).
I had a great time at the class and though I'm not working tableside, I'll still be practicing proper wine service as often as I can.
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