Spin The Bottle
by Jenna SchnuerPB&J FOR DINNER? PIZZA? MAC AND CHEESE? IF YOU CAN'T
THINK OF A GOOD WINE TO SERVE, YOU NEED TO TALK TO
JOSHUA
WESSON. . PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE MOORS.
IT ALL STARTED WITH HIS BAR MITZVAH GIFTS. The son
of a restaurant advertising guy,
Joshua Wesson was probably one of
the only kids at his temple to receive case upon case of French and
Italian wines for his bar mitzvah. But by the time his 18th
birthday came around (at that time, 18 was the legal drinking age),
there were just five or six bottles left. His father, the wine
bandit, "always insisted that he did it out of service to the wines
because [they] would not have lasted five years in our storage
condition," says Wesson, a former sommelier and the cofounder of
Best Cellars, a chain of snobbery-free wineshops. But he disputes
his pop's claim. "A lot of these bottles were vaunted bottles.
These wines probably would have made it to [my 18th] and probably
would have even lasted a lot longer, had the corks remained inside
of them."
Alas, his drinking loss is our gain. Wesson, now 51, went to grad
school to study public health, but memories of a postcollege stint
at a restaurant eventually made him reconsider. So he dropped out
to step into the front of the house at some of New York's top
dining spots. He eventually became a sommelier and, soon after
winning a French-government-sponsored contest for U.S. sommeliers,
went out on his own as a wine consultant and writer. He penned
books, starting with 1989's Red Wine with Fish: The New Art of
Matching Wine with Food, with David Rosengarten, who later became a
Food Network regular. Then, in 1996, Wesson opened his first Best
Cellars store. He has always had a "democratic and egalitarian view
of wine's place in the world," he says. "I never had my pinkie
out."
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