Page 22 - March & April

20 MYROUSESEVERYDAY MARCH | APRIL 2013
W ine originally piqued my interest because I didn’t know
a lot about it. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it
opened a whole new world for me and led me to where
I am today—running one of the top wine programs in the world
at Commander’s Palace. I’ve worked in restaurants most of my life,
but my wine career started when I became the captain in the private
wine room at Emeril’s. I did two turns a night, with customized
wine and food pairings. Emeril’s has one of the best wine lists in
America, and the more I tasted, and the more I learned, the more
I wanted to know.
I moved up the ranks to GM in Emeril’s organization, then went
to Café Adelaide, but I missed selling wine. Around here, wine is
taken seriously, but it’s also fun. Ella, Ti and Lally had talked for
years about building a wine room at Commander’s Palace, and I had
spent years working in a wine room—seemed like a good fit to me!
I called Ti, and she said, “Think world class.” Five years later, we
have 16,000 bottles of wine in Commander’s cellar, and a private
wine room that seats 12 lucky diners.
If you want to learn about wine, you have to taste it. I preach that
at Commander’s. Wine is a big part of our restaurant’s culture. We
have 5 certified sommeliers at Commander’s, and 20 more who
have passed their first level sommelier exams, including Ti and
Chef Tory McPhail. There are back waiters who have been with us
for only a few weeks who ask me when the next sommelier class will
be held. I don’t think people know that Rouses has sommeliers in
some of their stores. That’s New York. That’s next level.
We’re very lucky to have the collection we have at Commander’s,
but many guests don’t want to go through a 120-page list to find a
bottle of wine. And I think many people know what they want to
spend on wine before they sit down, so why make it difficult for
them to find a good value? (Not everyone wants one of the rare
bottles that can go for $5000 or more.) I take my cue on wine from
Ella Brennan. She realized you could take a restaurant in a grand
Creole Mansion, with white tablecloths and haute cuisine, and a
name like Commander’s Palace, and just by changing the way you
talk to your customers you can make it approachable for everyone.
You can have a causal but elegant experience, the very pinnacle of
fine wine and fine dining, or anything in between—whatever you
want. I’ve reserved the first four or five pages of our wine list for
wines I think really over-deliver for the value. There are 60 great
wines under $60 and they’re some of the best wines on the list.
My best piece of advice to people who want to learn about wine is ask.
When you are shopping for wine in a store, don’t be afraid to say, “Ex-
cuse me do you work in theWine Department?”The joy of working in
a wine department as great as Rouses isn’t lining up the bottles so that
the labels all face forward; it’s being able to interact with customers
and say, with confi-
dence, “You’re going
to love this wine.”
And when you do
ask for assistance, tell
the wine expert what
you would normally
drink, the price you
want to pay, and how
adventurous you are
feeling. You will al-
ways get a better bot-
tle than you’d pick on
your own.
The Wine List
by Dan Davis, the Wine Guy, Commander’s Palace + photos by Frank Aymami
Sommelier Christian
Havener, Rouses Wine
Expert, Tchoupitoulas
Chef Tory Mcphail and Dan Davis,The Wine Guy, Commander’s Palace