Learning about #wine from #UnionSquareCafe

While I am absolutely terrible when it comes to remembering people’s names, for some strange reason I can often recall the label of a wine, where I was when I was drinking it and with whom. It's as if wines take on their own little stories inside my brain.

For example, last week my St. Louis Post-Dispatch column featured a sparkling wine produced by the New Mexico winery Gruet. In a related blog, I discussed having it for the first time at Tabla, the now defunct restaurant that had been owned by Danny Meyer. I remembered clearly that I had been sitting at the bar with my friend Marjorie when the bartender recommended the sparkling wine with the restaurant’s Indian spiced popcorn.  It was that experience that led me to start experimenting with pairing sparkling wines with all sorts of casual foods.

Since I had bought a bottle of Gruet for a July 4th celebration, it made me think about Tabla.  I couldn’t remember exactly what year the restaurant had closed, so I began to search the internet.  I found that it had closed in 2010, making it the first of Meyer’s restaurants to close after he launched his successful empire in 1985 with the famous Union Square Café.

As I was on the computer doing my research, a headline popped up that Meyer had just announced he was closing Union Square due to soaring rents in the neighborhood. Talk about a flood of memories. It made me realize how much I learned about wine from Meyer’s various restaurants.

Sometime early in Union Square’s history, a server recommended a Bedell Cellars Merlot from the North Fork of Long Island. The restaurant was a real champion of locally grown and produced foods and wine was part of its promotional efforts. However, I was extremely hesitant to order that Merlot because wines from Long Island were not particularly well known in the mid 1980s. In fact, Bedell itself is only about 30 years old. However, Union Square’s sommelier was on to something because Bedell wines are now highly respected and its Merlot became the first New York wine in history to be served at the inauguration of the President of the United States.

Another wine I can remember at Union Square is from South Africa’s Thelema Mountain Vineyards. It was a Sauvignon Blanc. It was June 23, 1995 and my mother and I were  celebrating her 73^rd birthday. The previous year she had survived a massive heart attack and emergency open heart surgery. Although the odds had not been good, she promised me she would live because she had to return to Union Square Café for her birthday. We chose the Thelema because my mother’s name was Thelma.

I wrote about the experience in a commentary that was published in the St. Louis Jewish Light.

At Meyer’s Gramercy Tavern, I remember tasting the 2010 "Viña Tondonia" Gran Reserva Rosado from Spain's Rioja region.  The year was 2011 and I was visiting my friend Marjorie Shaffer. Marj had tasted the wine previously and insisted I would love it. She was right.

This wine was  unique. A complex rosé that had been aged in oak, the wine  was a combination of two red grapes, Garnarcha and Tempranillo, and one white, Viura. It was by far the most delicious — and unusual — rosé I'd ever sipped.

So once again, thanks to Danny Meyer for introducing me and countless others to foods and wines we might not have ever experienced and enjoyed.

#wine #rosé #sparklingwine #dannymeyer #unionsquarecafe #rosado #gramercytavern #thelema #gruet #merlot #northforkoflongisland