- Michael Gebert
- Chalkboard over the kitchen pass at Vera
Two of my favorite people to talk to about the restaurant business are Liz and Mark Mendez, co-owners of the West Loop Spanish wine bar Vera. They are thoughtful, unafraid to be frank about the ups and downs—plus they run a place small enough that they can more easily put their ideas into practice. The Mendezes’ current object of much thought and debate can be read on the chalkboard over the pass in their kitchen—terroir, the French concept of wine (usually) being an expression of the place, climate, and soil that it’s grown in, which can be undeniable (you really can taste chalk in wines grown in limestone) or marketing-speak designed to justify a high price.
That summer I traveled to Charleston and Portugal. I went to Portugal first, and tried to really think about what he said. And then in Charleston, I went to Husk, and I opened up the wine list and it was organized by terroir. And I was like, this is awesome. This dude is organizing wine by dirt, and that sounds like a lot of fun.
One thing that doesn’t change is that you still have descriptions of all of the wines. I think that that’s very user friendly for someone who doesn’t want to talk to a sommelier.
But coming back to terroir, we don’t have a lot of those super-alcohol-heavy wines, and if we do, we make sure it’s coming from an elevation or a climate where it does have that high acid, so it’ll balance with the food. The funny thing about California wines being so high alcohol is—think about the food you have access to almost year-round in California, it’s very delicate. But there are some interesting things happening in California. There’s this whole “new California” movement where you have this group of winemakers that are saying, let’s make wines that do have a sense of place in California, that are a little more delicate, like Matthiasson Vineyard, or Dirty and Rowdy.
We don’t make wine special unless you’re paying $300 for a tasting menu. And I believe that is specific to Chicago and the midwest. You go to New York and you can go to almost any old place and have a great experience. They also have access to stuff that we will never ever have, because it’s New York. Same thing with San Francisco, they have wines that have been made forever that we’ll never see.
There are a lot of people who don’t like pinot noir from Oregon, because it’s volcanic soil, and they get kind of ashy. It’s the same thing with wines from Mount Etna [in Sicily]. And that makes sense, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like pinot noir. They might like pinot noir from Burgundy or from California, and terroir is why. It’s interesting to get people to talk about something that’s so unfamiliar that we don’t have a word for it. I mean, we have five words to describe this one word in French.
