Sommeliers Find Room to Breathe

SEBASTOPOL, Calif. — Over the past 15 years, Patrick Cappiello has been one of New York’s most accomplished sommeliers. Now, like so many of the country’s top wine servers, he has largely put that job behind him.

Instead, on a bright September morning here in this fast-growing city in western Sonoma County, he was immersed in plans for the 2018 vintage of Monte Rio Cellars, his new wine label, for which he expects to produce about 2,700 cases this year.

Making wine is the fulfillment of a long-held ambition, but it’s very much a side project for Cappiello, 46. His main job now, he says, is managing Renégat Wines, a portfolio of small-production wines that he is importing and distributing.

One of Renégat’s major assets is his own Forty Ounce Wines, a collection of good, inexpensive French wines packaged in unpretentious screw-cap bottles reminiscent of old, bottom-shelf-of-the-liquor-store 40-ounce malt liquors.

Cappiello’s journey from leading sommelier to wine entrepreneur is not unusual.

In the past 20 years, working as a sommelier or wine director has come to be seen as a glamorous job, with access to great wines and fascinating travel opportunities. Best-sellers like Bianca Bosker’s “Cork Dork” and movies like the “Somm” documentary series have chronicled the intellectual and competitive stimulation of sommeliers honing their blind-tasting skills and working to earn accreditation from the Court of Master Sommeliers.

Yet the actual hard work — schlepping boxes, stocking shelves, doing inventory and working nights on the restaurant floor — makes a career as a sommelier seem temporary at best, a means to another, longer-term job in wine or beyond.

A story like Cappiello’s typifies the career trajectory of the modern sommelier, who, after a decade or so of the intense, adrenaline-fueled restaurant life, capitalizes on reputation and a network of connections to find a possibly less demanding, more fulfilling niche in the wine business.

These men and women are following paths carved out by a pioneering generation of sommeliers who established the job as a necessity in modern American restaurants, while also demonstrating its potential as the beginning of a different career.

Through the 1980s, few restaurants in the United States had sommeliers. The popular notion of the job was of the formal French wine server, who condescended to insecure consumers while trying to upsell them.

This began to change in the late 1980s as personable American sommeliers — like Daniel Johnnes at Montrachet in New York and Larry Stone at Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, then at Rubicon in San Francisco — helped make wine seem more friendly, even fascinating.

Pretty soon no corner bistro worth its steak frites could be without a wine guru, and the status of sommeliers rose as they become crucial educators and influencers in the chain from vineyard to dining table.

These wine elders showed a way into the restaurant business for a generation of younger sommeliers, and they also demonstrated a way out. Johnnes established an importing business, then began organizing wine events, beginning with La Paulée de New York, which has become a perennially popular Burgundy celebration. He still keeps a hand in restaurants as corporate wine director for the Dinex Group, Daniel Boulud’s restaurant empire, but his days pouring wine at tables are largely behind him.

Stone left restaurants to work as a winery executive. More recently, he started his own winery, Lingua Franca, which produces excellent pinot noirs and chardonnays from the Eola-Amity Hills of the Willamette Valley in Oregon.

Their examples galvanized the ambitions of several generations of leading sommeliers. Tim Kopec, who worked for Johnnes at Montrachet and hired Cappiello in 2005 at Veritas, a leading New York wine restaurant before the 2008 financial crash, is now a private consultant with a wide array of clients. Dustin Wilson, the wine director at Eleven Madison Park until 2015, now is an owner of Verve Wine, with shops in Tribeca and San Francisco. The list of successful former sommeliers goes on and on.

“We saw the transition happening with all these people,” Cappiello said. Of New York’s pioneers, only a handful of stayed in dining rooms. Joseph DeLissio, the dean of New York sommeliers, joined the River Café in Brooklyn in 1977. He’s still there.

Recently, he hired Roger Dagorn, himself an influential sommelier of the 1980s, most identified with Chanterelle in Tribeca, and later on with Tocqueville and 15 East near Union Square.

But most sommeliers today seize on an exit strategy.

For Cappiello, the moment came unexpectedly, with the closing of two restaurants, Pearl & Ash in 2016 and Rebelle in 2017, that he had nurtured as a partner and beverage director. Though both were successful, Manhattan real estate issues doomed them.

“After Rebelle closed, I was kind of deflated,” he said. “I began to try to figure out what I was going to do with my life.”

Cappiello grew up in Greece, New York, a suburb of Rochester. As a child, he said, he never left the Eastern time zone. Only 10 years ago did he travel to California for the first time. He had worked in restaurants, though, and his interest in wine was stoked after he landed a job in 2001 as a server at TriBeCa Grill. Under the tutelage of wine director David Gordon (who is still listed as wine director, though he is also vice president of David Bowler Wine, an importer and distributor), Cappiello learned the job. In 2005, he was hired by Kopec at Veritas, and in 2009 he was put in charge of the wine program at Gilt.

When Gilt closed in 2012, Cappiello was already planning Pearl & Ash, which opened in 2013. Rebelle opened two doors away in 2015. By then, however, he had already seen how his mentors had begun to diversify their careers, particularly as they reached their 40s, often with young families.

“The diversity of the job can be joyous but also stressful,” he said. “Particularly as a manager, you’re driving customer service, doing Excel spreadsheets, inventory, accounting, it’s a lot of things, which is invigorating but difficult for young people who think it’s just talking about wine.”

In 2014, he began Renégat. Chris Desor of Verity Wine Partners, an importer and distributor in the New York area, had invited him to put together a small portfolio under its aegis. Through the connections he had developed as a sommelier, Cappiello looked for small family producers in Europe and the United States who were environmentally conscious and — despite his experience with the most coveted wines of the world — reflected his own unpretentious, wine-for-the-people spirit.

He branched out, starting Forty Ounce Wines and making a series of wine education videos for Playboy. But the focus had always been restaurants, until Rebelle closed.

“I had this ragtag company that I hadn’t done anything with,” he said of Renégat. Fortuitously, at this time, he met Sara Morgenstern, who was based in Sonoma County and worked in wine sales. Soon they were a team personally and professionally. She is now the director of operations for Renégat, and he splits his time between New York and Healdsburg, California.

Together, they sought to carve out a specific role for the company by asking the question, “What needs do our producers have that aren’t being met?” Their answer: logistics.

For small producers in particular, whether in Europe or California, selling wine in the United States is daunting. Each state has its own rules, its own bureaucracy.

“The reason wines are often hard to find has little to do with how little is made,” he said. “It’s paperwork. It’s overwhelming, and that’s why a lot of them give up. We can help small-production labels with that.”

The urge to make wine came through working harvests with one of his Renégat producers, Pax Wines, here in Sebastopol. The proprietors, Pax and Pamela Mahle, who make a variety of excellent wines, also operate a winemaking facility with room for several small producers they have nurtured, including Jolie-Laide, Martha Stoumen, Jaimee Motley and now Cappiello.

He says his philosophy is both California’s past and his own. His goal is simple: refreshing wines that can sell from $15 to $20 a bottle, a much-neglected price range in California. “I’m influenced by everything I drank as a kid: 40-ounce malt liquor, sneaking white zin from my parents’ fridge,” he said.

In addition to a fresh, savory syrah, he is making a white zinfandel — not the sweet, cloying mass-market kind, but a fresh, incisive style — and, most interestingly, a red made of the rubired, a little-known but common grape in the Central Valley, used primarily in cheap wines and coloring agents like Mega Purple, a ubiquitous tool in California for darkening pale reds.

He said he discovered rubired while seeking out wine for a canned project and was surprised how delicious it was.

While Cappiello is no longer working in restaurants, he does retain ties as a consultant, with Walnut Street Café in Philadelphia and Scampi in Manhattan. Both have excellent wine programs run day-to-day by up-and-coming sommeliers, Kaitlyn Caruke at Walnut Street and Kimberly Prokoshyn at Scampi. He counsels them both by word and example.

“When they feel the stresses,” he said, “they do see the future of working in a different way in the wine world.”