Part 1 of 2

It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.

 - Eric Hoffer

Austin has, maybe surprisingly to some, many excellent wine resources in terms of wine collectors, wine erudition, wine bars, retailers, wine trade people, and wine friendly restaurants. There are probably few people from the preceding list that haven’t been to Mirabelle Restaurant to enjoy its fine food, its excellent wine menu, and its great wine dinners with some of the world’s most celebrated winemakers and winery owners. Although there are many things that could be said about Mr. Vilim, what I hear most often is that he is a genius when it comes to pairing wine and food; he is widely regarded as Austin’s best source for combining the elements on your plate with the elements in your glass to create magic on your palate.

Having experienced this for myself on numerous occasions, I set out to interview Michael to get more information about what makes him tick and why he’s so good at what he does. Michael is at once a firestorm of energy, intelligent, confident, charming, and ever passionate about wine and food. He has twenty-five years of serious tasting experience and a photographic memory, so to speak, when it comes to wine tasting recall. In his usual generous nature, he gave me two hours of interview time and then chuckled on his way out the door with, “Good luck editing all of that into a useable story.” Did I mention also that he’s media savvy and hilarious too? Little did I know how much work it would take to get this done, which partially explains my long absence from the blog; I expect this interview to be in two or three segments.

Some background is in order: Michael Vilim has been in the business for pretty much his whole adult life beginning with a restaurant on the River Walk in San Antonio while he was in college, along with his formidable eight year tenure at The Four Seasons as a sommelier. He is past President and a long-time member of the Board of the Wine and Food Foundation of Texas, a non-profit statewide organization whose mission is to enhance the quality of culinary and viticultural arts through education and scholarships. He has owned Mirabelle Restaurant for years and recently opened StrEat, both in Austin. While Mirabelle is about upscale dinning, StrEat puts forth a very extensive and diversified offering of street food from many regions around the world and, being close to the University of Texas campus, caters to a younger crowd but is easily worth going to if you’re any kind of foodie at all.

We met at a Starbucks because meeting anywhere at either of his restaurants would mean constant interruption. Here’s what I came away with:

So tell me about your newest addition, StrEat. I love the food there.

I didn’t initially expect to create so complicated of a restaurant. A big part of the StrEat concept was to function on multiple levels with the idea that you can get ethnic regional food that is served fast. We’re also a coffee shop and a secret bakery, much to my surprise! I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, happy hour, I have take out, I have delivery, we have grab and go – we have it all. It’s a lot more complicated than I thought it would be, but for better or worse . . .

Then there’s the street food concept, which is an interesting twist from tradition for food lovers, and then there’s the street food for college kids. I mean there’s nothing in their fridge except beer and water. So we function on that level and being close to campus is great - the whole area is in development. These days dining is such a casual, quick fare, especially being around the university. Some kids came in bought their food and walked down to the bus stop. They sat on the bench eating their food, waiting for the bus. I relate to that. When I was young and working at the River Walk in San Antonio I’d be eating after work and waiting for the bus, and when it pulled up I’d get on the bus and go – I always paid for my food first.

What is the connection to San Antonio for you?

I was born there.

So when you first started out in the industry you worked in San Antonio?

Yes, I worked on the River Walk. The River Walk wasn’t quite so pretty in the early days and they had some clubs with dancers and things – it was a little seedy and back then the barges would take away all of the trash from downtown buildings, which was one of the functions of the river. It was an attraction of sorts but is also functioned as way to move things. There was a club next to where I worked and dancers would come into the restaurant and eat before they went to work. But I was young and it was fun.

I have a true story about one of my experiences there. I was the wine buyer for the restaurant. Back then we were known as a margarita place. What happened was that I bought the wine for the place because I liked wine – I’ve never been big on beer or liquor, I have always liked wine. So I was the wine ‘expert’ just because I knew anything about it. We only had one brand: Robert Mondavi. We had the Chardonnay, we had the White Zinfandel, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot and we had what I thought was a Burgundy. And we sold a fair amount of it, it being the only brand we had.

One day these guys come in and sit down and they ask if I can come out and talk to them so of course I go out and talk to them. They asked, “what kinda of wine ‘ya got?” So I tell them we’ve got all of this Robert Mondovi wine and I mentioned the Burgundy. This guy looks up and says Robert Mondavi doesn’t make Burgundy and I say, “I think they do.” Then I remember the wine and say, “I’m so sorry. I was thinking of a Cabernet Sauvignon”, and the guy says, “Right! I’m Robert Mondavi”. Needless to say I was pretty embarrassed.

Wow, what a great story! Give me a year approximately when this happened. Of course Robert Mondavi is the undisputed icon of American wine.

Early 80s – probably ’81 or 82’ somewhere around there. I was in college. The reason they were there was that we were one of the top accounts, selling more Robert Mondavi than anyone else on the River Walk, so they came in to see the place. The next week I got a case of Cabernet Sauvignon delivered to me from the winery. Talk about sealing a deal, I’ll never forget that so I always had some sort of Mondavi on my wine lists until they sold the winery.

Well Tim Mondavi is still making great wine with his Continuum label.

Yes, and Michael is too with his Folio Wine Partners. They’re all doing something. I mean they got a billion dollars when they sold the winery – you sure can’t feel sad about that. So that’s kind of how it happened, I just loved wine and learned about it.

But you got formally educated and you’re a sommelier, yes?

Well not exactly. Back then there wasn’t that kind of formal education available. I competed in a lot of competitions across the country. Like Larry Stone the world famous Master Sommelier that in Paris, won the French title of International Best Sommelier in French Wines and Spirits and is the only American ever to have earned the title of French Maitre Sommelier from France. I knew him when I worked at the Four Seasons in Chicago and he’s now at one of the finest restaurants in San Francisco and making wine.

He was never formally trained but he is considered to be one of the best in the world  - there just wasn’t a program then. There were only about 20 or 25 Master Sommeliers in the country in 1990 and a lot of them got their MS around 1988 through 1994 – all old school people and mostly in Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. But formal training only kicked in about the early ‘90s.

So most of them received the Master Sommelier designation in London back then?

No most of them received their MS here in the US and now there are about 150 people here that are Master Sommeliers. But when I competed in all of those competitions I had to go to Los Angeles and New York. There just weren’t really any other venues for it.

So wine competition then was mostly about blind tasting wine?

Usually it was four stages. It was wine theory, writing, blind tasting, and a wine service test. I went to five or six of them and it was a lot of fun. But back then you really learned by hanging out with the old guys. I hung out with this famous guy here, Cliff Alsup, and he’s the one that introduced my generation to a lot of wine, inviting us to tastings and teaching us about great wine. My friend Brian Owens, he does the Austin Wine Salon events, and what we’re doing with that is kind of the same thing – we have the old guys and the young guys getting together to taste wine and learn about it.

Certainly the Wine Salon is a very worthy pursuit, especially when it comes to young sommeliers that have the book knowledge but have never actually tasted some of the great wines of the world. You can talk about First Growth Bordeaux, for example, but your world doesn’t change until you actually taste them.

Well part of the issue is that it’s gotten so expensive. When I competed I used to have all five First Growths lined up at my house for a week and every day I tasted them – they’re as different as your children and once you taste them, especially next to each other, there’s no way you can get them wrong. They’re that easy because they are so distinctive but until you’ve had one, you wouldn’t know any better. So that’s the way it got done, we had all these guys that would share wine with us and that’s what we’re doing with the Wine Salon.

The Wine and Food Foundation of Texas has this charity wine auction at the Four Seasons every year and Donald Patz who is the operating partner at Patz and Hall donated a six liter bottle of their Patz & Hall Pisoni one year – a beautiful bottle of wine. I had a ’91 Richebourg, Domaine Leroy, a very special bottle, and ’91 was a somewhat maligned year that emerged as a great year, especially with wine from some of the better houses. This bottle was worth $2000 dollars but I had bought it a long time ago for $150, which was still expensive back then. But I bought it a long time ago and I’m thinking, “Who am I going to drink it with?”  So he donated this six liter to the auction and he came, we put him at a special table, and I brought him the bottle and said, ”I have a bottle for you to drink tonight”, and he was so excited – this is a wine he loves and it seemed worth it to me to do this. I didn’t say anything about getting a taste of the wine or anything. So an hour or so later one of the sommeliers came running up to the stage at the auction saying, “You gotta try this! This is Richebourg, Leroy from ’91!” So I gave him a great bottle of wine and he shared it with a bunch of people, and then the sommelier wanted to share it with me. It was like this big circle!

But these bottles are meant to be shared and it was great to watch someone really enjoying this Leroy. That’s as big of a pay off as drinking it yourself! It’s just that kind of generosity and sharing of the treasures that makes the wine experience great. And restaurants too. We want to make you happy. Mirabelle is at a certain continental level and StrEat is real casual but no less valid.

Are your wine lists the same?

Not at all. The wine list at StrEat is about 22 to 28 selections, all of them regional wines of the world. I want wines that are representative of a particular place, just like the food is representative, which is the theme of the place. So I have very little California wine at StrEat. Mirabelle’s concept is the most value oriented, ‘best-of-type’ kind of wine list regardless of where the wine is from. The wine list has the best of its type and from California we have Lewis, Shafer, and wines like that.

I have never tasted a bad wine in your restaurant.

We taste them all of the time. We do something a lot of people and even many retailers don’t do: we pour out wine that is on its way out, or if it’s still somewhat usable, we might cook with it or use it in sangria or a spirit fortified wine punch. But you can’t just put it on the bottom shelf and try to sell it. When wines start getting dumb or fading they end up in the closeout bin and they get moved out but you have to taste these wines all of the time to know where they’re at. That’s why good wine guys stay around. Jack Daniels doesn’t change but wine does so you find a lot of the same people as wine buyers for various places. They’ve been buying wine for twenty years for places all over town. If you have the talent and palate to buy wine, you’ll always have a job. I mean it’s not always a great job in terms of pay but you can always work.

How many bottles do you go through to find one good one?

I’d say ten to one. For every ten bottles of wine we taste, only one will be good enough to make it through to our wine list. But the detail is you have to taste if you’re going to find the values and the wines that are drinking well now.

Do you consider yourself a new world or old world aficionado or are you kind of in the middle on that?

Ahhh . . . probably my personal taste runs old world. I’ve bought about $40 million dollars worth of wine so what I buy and what I like don’t necessarily go together hand-in-hand.

What are some of your personal favorites?

My personal favorite is probably Côte-Rôtie [red wine from France’s Northern Rhone region made with Syrah but as much as 20% Viognier can also be added]. I won a blind tasting at one of these sommelier competitions – I picked it up and said, “It’s my favorite wine.” I knew it like I would know my own sister if she walked into the room. So how could I not recognize it?

But I really like all kinds of things. I like old Cabernet [Sauvignon], I like Bordeaux, I love Burgundy, I love all sorts of Pinot Noir from California – they all have their places. I love Zinfandel, I love Syrah in the old world and I love Shiraz in the new world if they’re not overdone. Ojai is a good example of making a great new world Syrah, so is Manfred Krankl’s cuvee [Sine Qua Non], and Washington is doing a good job with their Syrah. It’s been said that Syrah is the ultimate grape that will emerge from Washington. I don’t know if that will be true; you know their Cab and Merlot are pretty good too, but it could be. A number of people are saying Syrah is the grape to watch.

But Syrah is still not getting the respect it deserves at retail. If you look at the Cabernet Sauvignon and even Merlot sections in a wine store, Syrah is still kind of underground by comparison – it hasn’t hit the mainstream.

Well you have some Côte-Rôtie like the La Las [E. Guigal’s La Mouline, La Turque, and La Landonne, often referred to as the La Las] selling for $700 to $1000 or so, and then you have the Shiraz in Australia of that certain rank which pulls in $250 to $700 per bottle and then you have California. 

I’m talking mainstream kind of wines though, you know the under $50 wines?

Well Syrah needs to be treated like Pinot Noir, not like Zinfandel or Cab. In California they get Syrah too ripe, too tarry, too bitter and the cooler climate in Washington prevents that, so that’s part of it. And then you have a few California guys [Rhone Rangers] and Manfred Krankl doing amazing stuff with this grape. So they’re there in the marketplace but the great ones are expensive.

If you have a Syrah from southern France you have primarily a Côte du Rhone or you go to like St. Joseph and have a 100% Syrah, which is a baby Côte-Rôtie, then you’re going to find something where the climate works with the grape. When you talk about a noble grape variety, that’s a term that has never appeared in any wine dictionary related to Syrah, but it’s a wine that improves with age - that’s the best way of defining it. And Syrah is one of those. But Syrah, like Pinot Noir doesn’t perform well easily – it needs particular climates and soils to perform well. So Cabernet Sauvignon is a little more ‘user friendly’, as is Chardonnay, as is Sauvignon Blanc; they are much easier to grow so a wine estate gets a much more prolific return. If you understand the difficulty of Pinot Noir and apply that to Syrah, you get a better understanding.

Check back for Part 2!

David Boyer

Visit Mirabelle at: http://www.mirabellerestaurant.com/

Visit StrEat at: http://www.eatatstreat.com/