Cultivating a Wine Program

A great wine program offers wines that have been aged. Many restaurants simply purchase older wines to accomplish this.

Because of local laws, we don’t have the ability to purchase wine from auction or private collection and so we don’t have access to many older wines.This has always meant that in order for us to be able to share well-aged bottles of wine, we simply needed to buy the wine, tuck it away in our cellarand wait. Since we began our wine program here, that was exactly what we set out to do. We have always envisioned future generations pulling bottles ofwine from the cellar, wiping the layers of dust from the labels and enjoying those wines that we laid down years before. Hopefully they would do this witha sense of awe for the years that have passed since that wine was put into the cellar.

In that sense, wine is a time capsule. It has the ability to be laid down, brought out in the future and enjoyed. It is a snapshot of a single growingseason preserved through the efforts of a winemaker and put into bottle. That exact wine will never be made again which makes it special.

While that wine may be amazing in its youth, it will gain the benefit of complexity when it is properly cellared. This level of complexity brought aboutby long-term cellaring is rarely seen by wine drinkers in this age of immediate gratification. That makes these wines even more special than when theyare newly minted. As years pass, the wines that remain unconsumed become an even more rare commodity. We plan to have many well-aged wines in our cellarsin the future for our guests to enjoy.

To this end, we are excited that this August we will complete construction on our newest cellar room, The Keep. This is the cellar that will hold thosewines we want to put aside for future generations to enjoy. It is an exciting addition to our cellar program and we’re looking forward to the future.

Andy Chabot