Guess the Wine

San Diego had a few quiet days left. Comic-Con was almost on the city, and once it landed the Gaslamp would turn into something else, the sidewalks packed, the hotels stacked with guests who all needed something at the same time. The Pendry was already taking in the early arrivals, the ones who come ahead of the crowd. For now the bar at Fifth & Rose still had open stools and a bartender with time on his hands.

I took a seat at the bar. It was a slab of dark marble, veined pale, and behind it the bottles climbed the shelves in the usual order. Off to one side sat a wire bowl of lemons and oranges, bright against all that black stone. A brass lamp threw a small circle of warm light. Late sun came through the tall windows and caught the backbar, and a television murmured in a corner with the sound off. It was the kind of early evening a good bar gets before the night arrives, when the place belongs to the few people already in it.

The wine list read like a California road trip, mostly Paso Robles and Napa, the names a traveler recognizes without trying. DAOU showed up among the whites and again in the reds. Justin poured by the glass and sat again on the bottle list under Isosceles. There was a Caymus for the table that wanted the evening to feel like a celebration, and a Joseph Phelps Insignia near the bottom for the table that wanted to prove something. A hotel bar keeps a list like this on purpose. People order what they know when they are far from home.

One red on the whole page came from Healdsburg. An Aperture Cabernet, off the Montage Estate Vineyard, thirty-five dollars a glass, printed at the top of the reds. Aperture is Jesse Katz’s label, made a few miles from ground I have walked many times. Of everything on the list it was the one that read like my own backyard, which is exactly why I ordered it.

It came dark in the glass and drank the way good Healdsburg Cabernet drinks when nobody has rushed it, firm and unhurried. It tasted like home, poured a long way from it. There was a small private joke in it too. The Pendry and Montage are sister properties under the same company, and here was a wine with Montage printed across the label, poured at a Pendry bar, the coincidence sitting there for anyone who cared to notice.

Nico was working that end of the bar, and he was the one who brought up the Montage connection. When I told him I liked the Aperture, the conversation opened from there. It did not take him long to work out that I knew my way around a wine list. He started telling me about growing up in a family that took wine seriously, the kind of house where the bottle on the table was worth talking about, and the pleasure he took in it was plain.

I asked what he would recommend to eat. He warmed to the question. By the time he was done he had walked me through most of the menu, one dish after another, all of it sounding good and none of it narrowing to an answer. The server settled it as she passed behind him. The hummus. She was right.

None of the conversation was a pitch. Nico was not selling me the next glass or steering me toward the expensive bottle. He was a person behind a bar talking with a person in front of it, which is rarer than it should be.

Then he did something I did not expect. He poured a second glass I had not ordered, set it in front of me, and said one word.

“Guess.”

Most of the time the person pouring the wine tells you what it is before the glass lands, then waits to be admired for knowing. Nico poured it and left the knowing to me.

I had not tasted blind on the spot since my WSET exams, and the reflex came back before I decided to use it. I closed my eyes. Blackberry first, then a hint of espresso, and under those a third note I could not place at once, the one that finally told me what it was. Cedar, and behind the cedar a coolness like morning fog, the kind that sits over the west side of Paso Robles before the sun burns it off. I had been there exactly once and remembered it better than a single visit should allow. For a moment I was flat on my back in the vineyard rows, smiling, close to laughing.

Justin, I said. The Reserve. Then I named a vintage.

The smile was not only for the guess. I had sixty-four bottles of the same wine at home, a different vintage, bought at an estate sale. Of everything Nico could have poured me blind, he had landed on the one wine filling a rack in my own cellar. He had no way of knowing that, which made it better.

He turned the bottle around. Justin Reserve Cabernet, Paso Robles. My year was off by two.

He was grinning when he set the bottle down, and it was not the grin of a man who had caught someone out. He had wanted me to get it, and I had gotten most of it, and that was the part that pleased him.

He held every advantage in that exchange. The bottle was his and the list was his. He knew the vintage cold and could have led with it and taken the small satisfaction of being the most knowledgeable man at the bar. Instead he handed the guess across the marble and let me be the one who looked sharp. The wine stayed the point, and I came off well. He seemed genuinely glad about how it had landed.

I have spent a lot of years watching how places like that work, as a guest and as the person a property sometimes brings in to study why it does or doesn’t. The ones that stay with me are the ones where somebody read the person in front of them and adjusted before a word was said. Nico had me sorted inside of a few minutes. Someone who knew a little and wanted to play, who would take more from a game than from a lecture. Nico built the game and let me win it. The server read the same guest and answered the part he had left open, which was what to eat.

That kind of read is worth more than any sales training a winery could buy, and most rooms do not have it. I have sat in enough tasting rooms to watch good bottles go unsold because the person pouring them performed instead of paying attention. The club membership that never closes, the case that stays on the shelf, usually comes back to the same missing skill. Nico has it. If more people did, most of the sales trouble in this business would quietly solve itself.

None of that was printed on the menu. The menu had the Aperture and the Justin and the prices down the right margin, and it could say nothing about the people pouring them. In a few days the calm would break. Comic-Con would fill every stool and every table, the bar would run three deep, and there would be no room for a guessing game with a stranger. That evening there was room. When I settled up and stood to go, Nico had already turned to the next arrival, starting it over in whatever form that one needed.