In Part 1 of the Brian Owens interview, we introduced this savant oenophile who has contributed so much depth to the outstanding wine community in Austin Texas and beyond. As mentioned, one of his greatest contributions to wine was his creation of the Austin Wine Salon, where each month collectors, sommeliers, restaurateurs, and wine industry people get together to share great, important, and interesting bottles of wine, compare notes, and generally propagate wine knowledge in a planned and organized format. I have had the pleasure to contribute wine to and attend these great events for about the past two years or so and I can say, there’s just no better way to learn about wine than to do it with a group like this!

So lets talk about Wine Salon . . . 

Wine Salon is unique in that there are wine professionals and there are collectors and it’s very rare that wine professionals actually have the wine experience that collectors have. So if we have sommeliers that have learned about Lafite but never tasted it, the question becomes, ‘is it really useful for them to have tasted Lafite? Is it really necessary?’ In a way it is important. It’s like being a rock and roll musician and asking if you should really understand Beethoven? Well, you probably should at some point and most musicians, and especially jazz musicians, learned Bach and Mozart but they didn’t do it until they wanted to go to the next step. 

With Wine Salon I sometimes worry though that I have opened Pandora’s Box because I take someone that’s doing their job really well, maybe studying for their sommelier exam, they can identify Pinot Noir and Grenache and then they come into Wine Salon and pour up something that’s 25 years old and it’s great but in some ways it throws them off because tasting Grenache and then tasting a 25 year old Vacqueyras or Gigondas would completely throw anybody off. Is it helpful? Maybe not always but when a sommelier pours a glass of wine from their maybe limited menu, it gives them the experience to say, “By the way, this grape can do all sorts of things from different regions, different soils, and different winemakers so don’t limit yourself by thinking it can only taste like this. And that has value.” 

Wine Salon opens up wine professionals in a way that says, ‘I’m not just in the everyday business of serving wine or selling wine but there really is this grand art to it all and it’s so much bigger than I imagined.’ Wine Salon implies that the professionals that attend are not just into wine as a career, but they attend because there’s something bigger and more important about wine. We can pull collectors in to donate the wine each month and provide wines that a lot of people wouldn’t otherwise have had an opportunity to drink. We’ve had Lafite, Mouton, Margaux, Haut Brion; we’ve had d’Yquem so I can’t tell you how many people said, “Thank you! I really always wanted to know what d’Yquem tasted like and now I know, but I can’t afford a $400 or $800 bottle.” So I get a lot of thanks, some for what they know and some for what they didn’t know. There’s a lot of discovery of wine and even self-discovery – I’d like to think it’s helpful and even motivating in some way.

But Brian, you look at Mark Sayre, Bill Esley, and so many more, and Wine Salon really has an impressive alumni . . . [Mark Sayre is the Wine Director and sommelier at the Austin Four Seasons Hotel, named ‘Best Sommelier in Texas’ in ’07 and named one of the ‘7 Best New Sommeliers in 2010’ by Wine & Spirits Magazine. Bill Esley is a sommelier at Duchman Family Winery and named ‘Best Sommelier in Texas’ in ’11.] 

Marco passed his test, Dirk and Paul just passed their sommelier test; we have about a dozen sommeliers now. And Austin has a group of young people studying wine as well as anywhere in the country, including New York and San Francisco. The proof is in the pudding: five people just got their MS in the entire United States and two of them are from Austin, Craig Collins and Devon Broglie, both of which came to Wine Salons. Craig came to the early ones and Devon came until he had to study so much he couldn’t come anymore. And they still come back when they can. And Mark (Sayre) will take his MS test in another four or five months and June is doing really well, and I’m really impressed with Lauren and Paula, but it’s just a matter of them having the time to come to Wine Salon. 

We have a lot of talent here . . . 

And they’re feeding each other. They’re all very supportive of each other. We can say that Austin may be the Live Music Capital but it’s actually kind of a sommelier capital too. We do have a very strong and knowledgeable base of wine people here. If you go to Uchiko, Fino, or Wink, the wait people really know wines. I spent a lot of time in San Francisco this summer and I was amazed at how many wait staff didn’t know their wines or wine service so I think we have many more sophisticated wait people here. Restaurants in Austin that have a sommelier or are working on a wine program are committed to good wines with excellent wine service and it shows. 

So when you came up with the whole Wine Salon idea, how did that come about? 

I had been on the board of the Texas Wine and Food Foundation for about six or seven years and was giving a lot of wine to the Foundation for their auctions to help bring in money [the Texas Wine and Food Foundation is a non-profit organization] plus, around the holidays I was taking bottles of wine to my favorite waiters and restaurant staff. So it kind of hit me after a while, “why not just drink with them?” and I started inviting them to my house. I had been a part of salons in the 70s, which were kind of intellectual, we would have food, discussion . . . it was the kind of salon Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein had - it was that whole idea of getting a bunch of people together on a Sunday afternoon and hanging out. Well, this became the same thing except that wine was the central focus.

So we started it at my house with about six to eight people, which consisted of wait staff, cooks, and restaurant owners, as well as with four or five friends who had cellars, and it just expanded from there. It was a way to thank the wait people, who as you know, a lot of times would let us bring in our own bottles for free and these restaurants and people would actually appreciate that we were bringing in good wine. The restaurant owners and managers get that they’re not making much money from us because they’re not selling us wine from their list, but they come to understand that we believe their food is that much better and we’re celebrating it by bringing in really good wines. We’re the ones that really appreciate good food and put it on a pedestal like art or something. 

I had Wine Salon at my house until it grew too large and I couldn’t handle more than 24 people. We started going to restaurants on Sundays because about three quarters of the good restaurants are closed then, and we had the very people that worked at those restaurants coming to Wine Salon anyway so they gave us access to these places. It becomes a shared experience and I like that idea. 

The Salon started almost as a seminar. The first one we did was Pinot Noir from Burgundy. We talked about the wines and presented them in a way that went through the grapes, here’s the Côte de Beaune versus the Côte de Nuits, here’s their appellation system where you have village wine, the Premier Cru, the Grand Cru, and then here’s what old wines taste like. Then we did the same thing for Bordeaux and the Rhone. The seminar format was interesting but at some point, I think that people already knew about 2/3 of the information being imparted. We were learning about the regions and tasting the wines but the next stage was to go into a kind of laboratory setting and really understand why Barolo tastes different than Barbaresco. The best way to go in to a lab is to just start writing tasting notes about these wines and comparing notes. We eventually expanded the format and started doing things like blind tastings or pairings with cheese, so we keep throwing in different things, which is how we learn instead of just always doing the same format all the time. 

We’ve done 30 Wine Salons to date. We’ve tasted more than 1200 bottles, we’ve posted tasting notes for about 450 wines on CellarTracker, [posted as events under “Austin Wine Salon”], and many of these were what we called ‘Definitive’ like Definitive Bordeaux, Definitive Rhone, and we can’t taste them all but we bring the most important ones into these events. About a third of the people that come to Wine Salon own cellars and out of the remaining two thirds, about half are sommeliers and the other half are people in the wine business or very close to it - maybe chefs or restaurant owners or some that work for a wine distributor. So we have about 70 people on a list but I can only get about 36 people into a Wine Salon at any given time. 

Do you have a vision for the future of Wine Salon or do you want to keep the status quo? 

If I were younger I’d be doing a blog and maybe even more Wine Salons. They could be replicated and done in other cities - that would be fun! People with cellars like sharing and after some years of sharing with your friends it’s actually thrilling to share them with younger people and, at times, see how wide their eyes get tasting some of these wines that they may not otherwise have had an opportunity to taste. But for now, I like the idea of just continuing it the way it is and let it evolve and just enjoy it. Maybe someday it will become an adjunct to some other program but there’s never a lack of topics. In fact sometimes the wines may not always be the greatest in the world, but it’s the topic that keeps me interested. 

What are your views about wine critics? 

I like scores in a lot of ways because we go through life with scores. We took tests and wrote term papers and had a sense of where we stood, so it’s a cultural thing that we grew up with. If you’re going to buy a car you look at Consumer Reports and you check out what Car & Driver thinks, so am I really going to go out and buy a car without checking in on what the experts think? I know scores make it easier than reading a whole page of tasting notes. But it’s interesting that at Wine Salon I tell everyone as they’re tasting that if they want to enter scores, please do because I’ll enter them on CellarTracker, but half the people write down scores and half don’t. I think some people don’t feel comfortable scoring wine. 

What is useful are the wines that are scored. If I’m going to drink a Pichon-Lalande and I can choose between a 1990 or an ’89, I’m going to look it up. Maybe this one scored a 93 and the other one scored a 96 so which one am I going to drink? The very people that say they don’t believe in wine scores are the same people that go to CellarTracker to find out what the best vintage of Pichon-Lalande is from those years. They use it, but they don’t want to score wine. At Wine Salon scores might come from ten or more people that are pretty sophisticated and I’ll average them out and use them because I trust them.

The important thing for me in wine reviews isn’t always the score, but more importantly is, when do I drink it? I don’t like drinking wine that isn’t ready to drink because it’s a waste of money and so is drinking them too late. So the first reason for me reading reviews is so that I can drink wines when they’re at their best. And then it goes into value, quality and cost, and then if you read a little more you might find out it has two grapes in it that you haven’t had before or it will tell you what the blend is. 

I wish all reviewers were more flexible though. It’s very difficult for Parker to explain why one year he rates all these Australian wines at 97 or 98 points and four years later they’re 90 or 91. As a critic, you owe it to a lot of people that spend a lot of money, to explain what was going on with your palate. A great example is, day in and day out Parker will say the 1990 Pichon-Lalande is a 79 point wine. He said it fifteen years ago and he’ll say it today but it’s never been a 79 point wine! It might be an 86 or 88 but it’s not a 79. And Spectator gave it a 97, which it’s also not, so why are they so different? 

They’re different because they insist that their palates discern something the other does not and I’ve had that wine enough to know that they’re just making their own point of view. They need to loosen up and start explaining more and be able to say, “I made a mistake, I was wrong about this, and this is what I think now,” and to always understand that it’s not the absolute final word on the subject. But I’ve sat next to Parker a couple of times at dinner and he’s a nice guy, down to earth. 

What about ordering wines at restaurants? 

Well almost all restaurants sell their good wine too young so I don’t order expensive wines at restaurants. And I also get served wines too cold or vise versa. From experience, I’ll order rosé because they’re good when served cold or I’ll order a German wine because they don’t need to be warmed up that much. Often I’ll order wine based on temperature! 

I went to a restaurant two weeks ago and ordered a half bottle of Meursault, a really nice wine. I was sitting outside in 60 degree weather in San Francisco and I had to wrap my hands around it for an hour to warm it up, otherwise it would have been a waste of money. It was so sharp and minerally and I thought it was just off, except finally the last three sips were great. But why in the world would they pull this out of a refrigerator and serve it at 40 degrees? There’s still a lot of work that restaurants need to do but it’s really fun to go to a place that does it right – they have the right wines and serve them in the right glass at the right temperature. 

The biggest jump in the US and in Austin has been with food and wine pairings so restaurants are more and more carrying the wines that pair with their food, or they’re more often preparing their foods that go with their wines. It’s admirably noticeable. It’s interesting that many chefs are beer drinkers because they work in hot kitchens, and the end of the day beer cools them off a bit, but a lot of chefs have been making a big effort to understand wine better, so we’re seeing a big change from five years ago. 

How important is it to have food with wine? 

I think it’s totally important. Except for maybe Champagne or rosé to start with, I can’t imagine drinking any wine without food. A good example is drinking a Chianti on its own and then drinking it with food, it almost doesn’t matter what the food is, and the wine is so much better. Chianti is not a very pleasurable drink on its own but it’s a completely different experience with food. I don’t think you can taste wine real well with food but if you have some food and go back and taste wine, it’s a lot better. 

But if I’m academic and drinking a great wine, one of my favorite wines is a ’90 St Emilion or a La Tache, no, I’ll go straight, I won’t insist on food because I really want to understand those wines. I can jump over that need for food. If I’m drinking a great d’Yquem though, and pair it with Roquefort or foie gras, I think it actually gets better. I’m amazed at those pairings; they’re almost mystical. But Italian wines almost always need food. I think Burgundy and Bordeaux lend themselves to drinking better on their own, especially when they get older and do stand on their own. Even some old American Cabernet Sauvignon can do that. Last night I drank an ’86 Cornas and is was beautiful on its own but I think that most wine historically came about to be vinified to have with food so when I’m drinking Côte Rôtie or something like that, I find that drinking it with food is a better experience. 

Are there any particular wines or wine regions you tend to favor? I know you’re really diverse . . . 

Well, I’m kind of encyclopedic when it comes to enjoying wine, as are most of us, but I prefer French and Italian and within France, it’s typical with the three regions [referring to Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Rhone in no particular order]. I love old Bordeaux, I can’t imagine not loving old Bordeaux, because they are just tremendous when they’re ready to drink and with a tremendous nose. Sometimes I think with older Bordeaux or Burgundy I don’t even need to drink them – the aromas are just so fascinating that I just want to smell them. Sometimes it’s like, okay I’ll drink it but I don’t have to, and in fact, sometimes I don’t want to be disappointed by drinking it. And sometimes these aromas are not taking me back to childhood memories of smells, but instead they’re taking me back to the first time I had Pauillac or understood it. So I like that. And I prefer France versus Italy. 

Any predictions about where the wine industry is going? 

Well wine as a whole has never been better than it is today. I think global warming is helping wine, sadly enough, due to more regions that can now make better wine because they can grow riper grapes. Burgundy is a good example: it used to be that there would be maybe two out of ten vintages that were good because the climate was just so cool, same with Germany, and now it’s warmed up enough that most years are pretty good. So I think wine is very exciting today. There’s so much choice and it’s never been as good. 

On the other hand, what’s going on in business is that business itself is being driven by not having inventory, like if you want a Dell computer, they’ll build it for you. So we don’t have wine aging and it’s more focused on immediate gratification, which is why we have so many wines that are ready to drink as soon as they are released. That’s kind of disappointing. The best example is California Cabernet Sauvignon, where some of them from the 60s are absolutely wonderful, a lot of times better than their Bordeaux counterparts, and I’m not sure that’s happening much anymore. I’m not sure there are any California winemakers that are making wine that will drink well forty years from now. 

With all the technology being used in winemaking today, that leads to the question of intervention. How far can we go with this before we end up with wine that’s as non-expressive or is as homogenized as Coca-Cola? 

I’m always amazed. Take the number of vintages, times the number of grape varieties, times the number of winemakers and what do you have? Let’s just throw out a number of a million different wines out there. And yet I can drink a wine and tell you this is a 1985 La Tache [Domaine de la Romanée-Conti] or a 1985 Silver Oak, Napa Valley, or I’ll know it’s a 1995 Ornelia, and even with a billion different tastes, there are wines you just know. Some people don’t care. They want the same thing every night like Budweiser or they want Kendall Jackson Chardonnay, and there’s nothing wrong with this. But then there are other people that just want the larger experience – they want to read different books and see different kinds of movies, take in independent films. So with wine there will be people that drink the same Kendall Jackson forever that’s been manufactured for twenty years, then you have others that love the Paolo Bea di Montefalco Sagrantino and if you started screwing around with Sagrantino and made it in a different style, they wouldn’t like it. 

So I think there are a lot of us that appreciate differences. I think there is more differentiation happening today with Oregon Pinot Noir than there was ten years ago, I think for California Pinot Noir and Chardonnay too, so there is more individualization and it shows. But people need to find those wines because there’s so much clutter that even if you make the greatest wine, if people can’t find it, you’ll go out of business. But there has never been so many wine bars, wine classes, or wine tastings. Today there are probably more people going to wine tastings than going to book clubs – it’s a social phenomena. 

Last question. Any three people, living or not, that you could have dinner with, who would they be?

Well a lot of people I like are rascals so I don’t think I’d like to have dinner with them (laughs). I like Krishnamurti who was an Indian philosopher, an anti-religion, but spiritual person, and then I could deal with anybody because he can deal with anybody (more laughter). Maybe James Joyce but I probably wouldn’t enjoy having dinner with him. 

Sorry, I don’t know who that is Brian.

He an Irish writer that wrote ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, ‘Ulysses’, and ‘Dubliners.’ There are so many musicians . . . I’ve got a philosopher, a writer . . . and then John Lennon. Lennon would love to have dinner with Krishnamurti and he’d actually love to have dinner with James Joyce too. ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ is kind of like ‘A Day in the Life’. That’s only one dinner – I’m sure I could think of a lot more! 

Awesome interview Brian. You have been very generous with your time and I really appreciate this interview. Thank you again – I look forward to seeing you at Wine Salon and other wine events soon.

Photo by George Edwards, presumably used with permission: Brian Owens at Austin Wine Salon (Great French Wines – May 2010).