Happy Holliday

SCOTT
HOLLIDAY • 43
• Wine Buyer/Bar Manager • Chez Henri •
Cambridge, MA

The holiday
Monday (eve of The Fourth) is a day Scott Holliday suggests
to drop by for a chat at the bar at Chez Henri, because he
predicts it will be a ‘slow night’. Not really! By the time
we finish our first glass of Vin Mousseux, an hour after
their 6pm opening, bar and dining room are filling fast,
Scott has muddled a score of mojitos and the bar-waiter
served up a dozen mighty Cubano sandwiches. Holliday, a
versatile bartender, bar-manager and wine buyer for Paul and
Lisa O’Connell’s always-crowded Franco-Cuban Harvard Square
bistro, has a long history in Cambridge dating to Chris
Schlesinger’s original Salamander, a vintage BMW motorcycle,
excellent taste in value wines, and unusually informed views
on organic and biodynamic wines.

LIFELONG
RESTAURANT GUY Some
kids get paper routes when they’re kids; I washed dishes and
prepped in a restaurant. That was my college summer job,
full-time until I paid my bills. As I’d studied Biochemistry
and Russian, I never intended this work as a career. But I
got caught up with the crazy, idealistic super-talented
people who opened The Blue Room in 199O – Chris Schlesinger,
Stan Frankenthaler, Bob Sargent, Michael Peternel (Cafe;
Panisse, Oakland), Bridget Batson (Hawthorne Lane, San
Francisco), Jim Stringer (Salamander’s first chef de
cuisine). They had deep knowledge, good working and life
philosophies, and very strong opinions about food. When I
told Stan I wanted to work for him he said, ‘Great, you can
be my general manager.’

FIRST
LIST We opened
Salamander in 1994; the Globe wrote about us before we
opened! I was there five years; it was my first serious
wine-buying job. It was a combination graduate school and
finishing school for me. The list’s best sections were
Alsace whites and Spanish reds, then quite delicate and not
overly extracted – they really worked with Stan’s cuisine.
There was a beautiful transparency to Riojas back then,
literally translucent and texturally subtle. I remember in
particular a Vina Alberdi 1982 Rioja Gran Reserva, with a
high-toned spicy flavor profile. The cult of red wine was in
its ascendancy, and people wanted red wine with fish, and
Spanish worked well. I had to sell wine on the floor and
talk about it, to educate staff. I read a lot, took lots of
notes. As a high-profile account I had salesmen swarming
over me; it was an amazing experience as a buyer to be
rushed like that. I hope I’ve not forgotten too much, and
been able to build on it.

HEAD
‘EM OFF To me,
organic wines always had seemed a contrivance, a market
strategy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: this is
a business and people need to position themselves to make
money. While organics leave me indifferent, I came around to
biodynamics through the incremental process of discovering
that many of my favorite producers use biodynamic principles
and work with minimal organic intervention. They repeat
incessantly that their wines are made in the vineyard, not
the cellar. They include Marcel Deiss, Domaine La Romanee
Conti, Anne-Claude Leflaive, Gaston Huet. When I started
connecting the dots, I realized that they made better wines
biodynamically than they did conventionally or organically.

COMPLETING
THE ANALOGY I guess
you could say that I even sell the wines in this fashion: I
do all I can to assemble a good list, then step back, let
people discover them without prompting. I like wines with a
point of view, a sense of place. They’re not overly eager to
please – they have an air of mystery, hold something back,
something that needs to be teased or sussed out. I also like
wines that are true to varietal character. If I try a big,
rich California Pinot Noir that’s wonderful as wine, but
atypical for the grape, I won’t list it. Know why? Because I
can’t be there every time to explain to the customer that
it’s terrific but atypical.

SOFT
SELL People don’t
come in looking for organic/biodynamic wines. I only started
marking them on the list this year. I’m not stumping for
them, just calling attention to them. I want to start a
discussion so people may appreciate truly handcrafted
artisanal wines. I use biodynamics as shorthand for that. I
don’t proselytize the way I used to, but if a customer wants
to hear it, I’ll preach fire and brimstone about unheralded
wines. Most people don’t want a lesson, they just want to be
happy. Having said that, some wine lists that most impress
me are the preachy ones. I remember The Slanted Door, a
pan-Asian fusion place in San Francisco, had not a single
chardonnay, California or otherwise! Amazing! I give them
credit, but I don’t want to fight their battles. I don’t
want to challenge people that much. It’s not my style.

WAITER’S
DILEMMA The dilemma
in staff training is this: tasting is good, but you need to
talk more and taste less! They need a set of verbal tools to
convey info to customers. It may seem counterintuitive, but
tasting is less important than problem solving for a
customer’s needs and meeting his/her expectations. We’ve all
eaten apples, but how do you explain what it’s like to
someone who’s never had one? I’ve eaten bushels of apples,
but I still have to convey some idea of what it’s going to
be like. Training staff – like most learning – is best when
it’s conversational, low-key, on-going. I’ve been in
situations when there’s a huge once-a-year tasting, and two
days later nobody remembers anything. Eventually the staff
gets it on their own, and may tell customers what I’d have
said in their own words.

HOT
WINES I’m behind
the bar, but the wines our staff sells (or sell themselves)
are mostly Bordeaux and Burgundy. I have California
Cabernets, but they’re not big, maybe 1 for every 4 French
reds. Things you wouldn’t think would sell, sell: Saumur,
Faugeres, Languedoc. Even the Alsace wines, often
arm-twisters, sell. Wines by the glass are usually five reds
and five whites, with 11O to 12O bottles on the list. We’ve
met demands by slanting the list towards the reds, and put
our inventory dollar where the customers are likeliest to
appreciate it.

BIODYNAMIC
WINES Domaine de
Roquefort in Provence makes an amazing Clairette (retail $11
to $12) that’s so pretty and expressive. A German ex-hippie
couple in Languedoc, huge Jim Morrison fans, who call their
vineyard Les Portes (The Doors) make a phenomenal rose I
just tried at Green Street. Rateau (Cotes de Beaune) started
in the 197Os, even before Nicolas Joly, the big name in
biodynamic wines. Mike Benziger’s estate wines, like
Tribute, are biodynamic. Another reason why these wines tend
to be expensive is that to keep an ecosystem in balance
costs a lot of land – Benziger’s 85 acres are only 5O%
planted to vine; the rest makes room for swamp, pond, an
‘insectory’, and forest for beneficial predators. He pushes
his growers to achieve ‘sustainability’; that may not be
enough to benefit the wines, but from a humanistic
standpoint, it’s a great step. Bonterra, Lolonis, Frey,
Ceago del Lago also make biodynamic wines. Some achieve
fetish status.

TRUE
VALUE There are no
short-cut, bargain biodynamic wines. What these producers do
is labor-intensive, extra tasks. They value hand over
machine harvesting. They value slow, wild-yeast
fermentations (that tie up your equipment for weeks) over
boutique hot yeasts that ferment in seven days. We have a
$3OO wine, but when we get over $1OO honestly I get nervous
about inflated expectations. There’s diminishing returns on
everything in life. When I dine out, anything over $6O to
$7O is pretty expensive. I question whether I can get $1OO
worth of enjoyment out of a bottle of wine. For some people,
part of that enjoyment is bragging to your friends the next
day how much you spent. There’s more of that mindset in the
brassy, masculine – and more conventional – steak houses.
Most of Chez Henri’s 12O wines are in the $3O to $5O range.