How to Design an Award-Winning Italian Wine List
San Francisco sommelier Gianpaolo Paterlini built the list at
Acquerello, his father's restaurant
Gianpaolo Paterlini, wine director of San Francisco’s Acquerello, grew up around fine dining and Italian wine—his father, Giancarlo, founded the restaurant in 1989. But the younger Paterlini, 26, says the road to becoming a sommelier wasn’t an obvious choice: “I had never
considered that wine could be a career.” A stint at Michael Mina’s
flagship restaurant during college changed that. “There were multiple
sommeliers on the floor all the time,” he says, recalling his time at the
Wine Spectator Grand Award-winning
restaurant.
Paterlini decided to finish his studies in San Francisco while working
at Mina’s under the guidance of sommelier Rajat Parr, who also sent
him to work a harvest in the Central Coast with winemaker Sashi
Moorman, now of Evening Land. Upon returning to Acquerello, Paterlini
had a mission: to make a destination-worthy list, as Mina and Parr
had done, but with a focus on Italian wines.
Working off the solid list his father had built, Paterlini became
Acquerello’s first official sommelier and ramped up the wine list
from 600 selections to 2,000. This year, the restaurant won a Grand
Award from Wine Spectator. Recently, Paterlini spoke to
Wine Spectator about
the similarities between Burgundy and Piedmont, his process for
figuring out pairings and why he thinks Italian wines are exciting.
Wine Spectator: How did working at Michael
Mina’s inspire your list?
Gianpaolo Paterlini: There wasn't really anyone making a list like Michael Mina's, at least with Italian wine. I saw a parallel
between Burgundy and Barolo and Barbaresco—the wines are similar
in terms of style as they have a lot of acidity—but more in the way the
vineyards are laid out: In Burgundy, the vineyards are split up among
a lot of growers, and Piemonte is the same way. There are a lot of
great vineyards that have been around for hundreds of years and
now they’re kind of split up. No one thinks about them that way and I
thought it would be fun to play around with and expand on.
WS: How did you build your list?
GP: It’s grown really naturally, and it wasn’t
our intention to get it to this size. We noticed a huge difference in
wine sales once I began working as a sommelier there, just having
someone on the floor talking about wine. It quickly grew to the point
where I needed some help. It’s now myself and two paid sommeliers.
WS: How do you do pairings? Do you match
regional Italian wines to regional dishes?
GP: The food is contemporary Italian. We
don’t like to consider it classic or authentic. We interpret it our own
way, and we work extensively to get our pairings. It’s usually about
a two-week process. My two somms, the chef de cuisine and I all
sit down with a new dish and taste until we get it right. There was
one dish last fall that was a scallop dish served with pumpkin purée,
brown butter and radicchio. It literally took us 15 wines before we
found a Gewürztraminer from Alto Adige, which ended up being
perfect because it has that fruit, that little sweetness, the texture and
the bitterness on the finish.
WS: How knowledgeable are your
customers about regional Italian wines?
GP: We’ve seen a big change in clientele’s
knowledge over the past couple years. They’ve heard of esoteric
wines. Before A16 came around, no one knew anything from the
south of Italy. Now people say they like Greco di Tufo or Taurasi,
which is really cool.
WS: Do you travel to Italy a lot?
GP: I go at least twice a year to Piemonte,
and I usually tack on another region. For me, it’s about building
relationships, seeing vineyards and tasting with the producers in
their cellars. I feel like you get a different understanding when you do
that. My last trip was up to Valle d’Aosta and Valtellina, the extreme
mountain areas of the northwest. I knew it was going to be gorgeous,
but wasn’t prepared for how gorgeous and different it is. I was
shocked to find cactus growing in Valtellina. Apparently it is as dry as
North Africa. They get no rain up there. So you’d think it’s the same
climate as Piemonte, but it’s really different.
WS: Are you ever tempted to branch out
beyond Italian?
GP: Honestly no, not at all. I was worried
when I started because at Mina we had everything, even the southern
hemisphere, but Italy just has so many wines out there. It’s shocking
how many times we learn about a new varietal, and we’re tasting
50-plus wines a day and still I’m finding things I don’t know about.
There’s a wine from Le Marche called Biancello from producer
Claudio Morelli. Literally 5 cases came into Northern California and
no one knows what it is: a mineral, salty, fresh wine grown right on the
coast. There’s a plethora of wines to play around with.
WS: What’s it like to focus on Italian wines
when you live in California wine country?
GP: We have California wines on the list
because we are so close to wine country and we want to support
them. Our clientele is interesting in that we don’t sell California wines,
except to travelers. Europeans always want to drink California wines.
It’s easy to take for granted what we have here. The vineyards are
so close. We try to take field trips at the restaurant, pick a couple of
wineries and go and taste at the vineyards.
As the new (and first) Wine Committee Chairman of New York City's members-only, Italian-American club, Tiro A Segno, I truly enjoyed this article and am inspired by Mr. Paterlini's efforts.
There is a narrow focus that seems to exist when talking about Italian wines these days and it centers largely around those darned "Super Tuscans".
Sure, many of them are well-crafted, but it warms my heart to know people are ordering wines from other areas of Italy, and better yet, returning to tradition with respect to the DOC(G) wines, especially from Piemonte.
As a committed consumer of Italian wines (our list is ~85% Italian; 15% American, by design) I also see no reason to stray from my ancestral homeland with its far-reaching variety of textures, flavors and price points.
Thank you, W.S., for producing this article. Italian wines have truly arrived.