Seth Mandeville is the sommelier at Sel de la Terre/Back Bay Boston. He shares his expertise in a
passionate and energetic manner, and at a mile-a-minute pace. I am pleased that he agreed to slow down long
enough for this interview.
Eat Drink Travel
Write (EDTW): What got you first
interested in wine?
Seth Mandeville (SM): I was bartending at Ten Prime Steak and Sushi
in Providence and a person at the bar asked me the stylistic differences
between two of the Pinots and at the time I had absolutely no wine knowledge and
I froze. I don’t usually freeze when I’m
behind a bar you know, so I made it a point to never let that happen again. And that decision kind of grew out of control
from there and turned into something completely different. I had a kid, Scott Brenner, working for me
who later told me he was one of Charlie Palmer’s sommeliers at Aureole. He taught me about wine while we were closing
the bar at night. We’d be sitting there
smoking butts and drinking beers, and I’d be taking notes on Cabernet and
Shiraz and it kind of snowballed into a whole other aspect of bartending. It gave me a better working knowledge of wine
and I didn’t have to look like an idiot in front of anyone again. That is basically what started it.
And so when I learned about how to deal with wine, and how
to deal with people with wine, I found that people tend to be less comfortable with
wine than when they’re talking about beer or cocktails. I found that you could easily start talking
over people’s heads and so from Scott I learned how to present it in a way
which was loose and kind of informal, because at the end of the day you are
only talking about booze – that’s it. So,
you can’t take it too seriously because when you do you start getting into that
realm of do I enjoy my job or am I just sitting there preaching to people. Fortunately, in the position that I’m
currently in I get to deal with all aspects of bar management, not just wine. So whether it be putting together a cocktail list or running the beer list, I
have the luxury of not burning myself out only doing one thing. I think that dealing with recommendations and
food pairings is all about how you talk to people, how comfortable they feel
around you. If you start talking to them
like a scientist you lose them and they’ll just stop you and say “I’ll have the
Malbec.” Then you have no chance. Scott taught me you have about ten seconds at
the table before the customers make a decision about how you are as a person – and that’s it. You have ten or twelve
seconds before they either think this guy is a snooty, pretentious jerk or he
is cool about it and they may want to try something new and learn.
EDTW: What sort of formal training did you have?
SM: Well, Scott was working his way through the
Court of Master Sommeliers’ education levels and he kept the materials and
would teach me each level as he passed it.
He would white-out his answers from the tests and he wouldn’t let me
move forward until I passed the tests.
And when you did pass each level you’d get a different colored pin. We wouldn’t go any further into any other
kinds of wine like the really esoteric reds and the white burgundies that grow
in shade on the sides of hills, until I passed the previous test. I never even passed the third test – it was ridiculously
difficult – I didn’t learn enough about Portuguese wines and I had no idea what
the hell I was talking about with Greek wines.
I got to question 30 and I just stopped because I just didn’t know
enough. I had to take the second level test
twice, but I passed it.
I had the luxury of being able to drink my way through my
formal training, and not in a gross getting hammered sort of way. Now you could read about a wine in a book,
but I actually had the wine in front of me and a teacher who had already read
the books. We worked through every
single wine that was in the test, plus each little offshoot of it. We’d do blind tastings where he asked me to
identify the wine – not where was it from or what year it was, just what was it
– just eliminate what it’s not. And
that’s what I did. I did not take the
classes but I was tutored one-on-one with someone who had done the training. And he was forward thinking enough to keep
his tests. I got to see how I would
stack up to someone who did the training.
It was really a cool experience to learn that way.
EDTW: Being at that restaurant was your first job
in wine?
SM: It was my first job where I dealt with wine
at a serious level and had to talk to people who knew about wine – not just
people simply asking for a white zin or a cab.
It was where I had customers with discerning palates who were paying a
lot of money and they wanted you to tell them why they should pay $400 for a
bottle of wine. Looking back at earlier
jobs, I hate to say I half-assed my way through it: here’s your red, here’s your white, here’s
your Pinot, your Cab, your Shiraz. Then
at Ten it was "here’s your Shiraz," but there were 15 of them; "here’s your Merlot" – there were 25 of
them. There were 285-300 wines on the
list, plus the Captain’s list. It was
daunting for someone who was a first time fine dining bartender. But, in six months I went from being a
glorified bar back to being the bar manager running a multimillion dollar wine room
and doing all of the wine ordering, the tastings, and all the pairings. I don’t know how that happened – it just did. You know, I just didn’t realize how good
Scott was at his job, how many skills he had in his bag, and how much I learned
from him. A great man.
EDTW: What is your official title here at Sel de la
Terre?
SM: Sommelier.
Now most of the guys next door (at L’Espalier, the sister restaurant)
don’t have their pins either. We work
together and do tastings and take notes and study hard.
EDTW: What advice would you give to someone
interested in working in wine?
SM: If you are not a reader, become one. Keep at book on your coffee table and, this
is really crass, keep a book in the bathroom at all times. If you’re interested in wine then learn it, read
about it, study it. Get the World Atlas
of Wine. If you really want to learn the
basic level get the Everything Wine Book, it's like a wine for dummies type of
book, a fantastic place to start. It
reads like a book, not like a documentary – it’s really well done. Then you get to the boring stuff – the books
with 1500 pages on the Rhone Valley with no pictures, no maps. You’ve got old school books from Mitchell Beazley
and Rosemary George that can be painful to read, but you have to do it. They were the final say for a while – theirs
were the books that Scott had at that time.
You have to read a lot, learn a lot.
I asked a lot of questions.
Don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions, because a lot of them are not
stupid, you’re just asking the questions someone else is afraid to ask. If someone knows more than you, you just have
to get your ego to back down and you have to be able to let someone teach you
and just absorb it. And you have to be
able to do that for someone else the next time around. You have to remember that if someone is interested
in wine they are getting into an extremely vast arena – you can’t go too hard
on them. You have to understand that
people have a lot of questions and not get too aggravated hearing the same
questions over and over again from different people. You just have to teach.
EDTW: Would you also consider yourself the beer
meister here?
SM: YES! I
would! [Laughter]
EDTW: How did you learn about beer?
SM: Well, the thing that started me with beer was
that when I was working at the State Street location I was living in Allston near
the Sunset Grill and Tap, a big beer bar there.
The bartenders there were as passionate about beer as I was about
wine. Obviously I loved beer so it was
awesome that I lived nearby. Paul and
Alex were two of the bartenders and they would sit me down and give me 2 ounce
tastings and they’d start at the top corner of the beer list and work down one
page and ask me why I liked it or didn’t like it. I would go in on off nights and I got to be
good friends with these guys. They did
for me what Scott Brenner did, but less formally because I didn’t take
notes. Beer just clicked. You have large genres of beer that fit into
one style and have little variations from there. Like IPA - you don’t have to worry about regions
or villages, about grand cru or how the sun hits the field - you just don’t. It’s a lot easier to block it and learn about
it in chunks. Also, growing up my Dad
did a lot of home brewing and I got into it with him. To this day he still makes the best brown ale
I’ve ever had and I’m a huge brown ale fan.
It’s very cool. It’s fun to seek out
a new brown ale, but they never turn out as good as my father made back in 2002 – I can still taste it in my head. It
was also a nice departure from the wine stuff.
Back then the fine beer market was at a trickle, but now it’s becoming
huge. It’s out of control – you can’t
taste them all, so you have to cut it down and whittle it away. But it’s easier with beer because it’s more
accessible.
EDTW: Tell me about your beer nights.
SM: The beer nights happen every Tuesday night at
7:00 pm. It’s easier to talk to people
about beer because they don’t feel outgunned.
I dress informally with no tie, and if I can fit the people at the bar
I’ll do it so it’s even more comfortable and relaxed. But even if I have to do it at tables, I’ll
sit down to answer questions and tell them why I paired the food and the
beer. It’s cool. It’s nicer than always doing the wine dinners
over and over again. And to this day I’m
still more comfortable with beer than I am with wine because you know how
snooty and weird wine can get. I’m not
at the snooty point yet and I don’t know how to deal with people who are like
that about it. And with beer I find that
I never ever have to deal with that snootiness.
People just tend to chill out – especially when they’re at the bar and
they’re rubbing elbows. It’s amazing
that you’ll sit twelve people together at the bar and in five minutes they’ll
all be talking to each other. If you sit
the same twelve people at tables they won’t speak with each other – it’s
outrageous to see. But still I try to
make it comfortable for everyone. I
tried to do the same with wine, but people weren’t really receptive to it. People will say something like: “I only like Pinots from only here or there,
but now I like beers from everywhere – France, Germany, Poland – everywhere.” A lot of people are open to more funky ideas
with beer. It’s been a lot of fun doing
it. I was originally going to do
seventeen themes, end with Seth’s Favorites, and then start over, but there are
so many beers out there that I had to expand to thirty-five themes and then I
can start over. The business can be
really hectic and crazy, but I’ve been having a really good time with it.
EDTW: What is your favorite wine, and favorite beer?
SM: My favorite wine of all time was the 1997
Coriole Redstone Blend from Coriole Vineyards in McLaren Vale (Australia),
followed closely by the 1996 Whitehall Lane Cabernet from Whitehall Lane Winery
in Napa (California) – it’s really tough to choose – it’s a coin flip. And for beer, there are two and I can’t say
one is better than the other. The first is the Tripel Karmeliet from BrouwerijBosteels (Belgium) which is a three grain (wheat, barley and oat) brew. Brasserie Dupont (Belgium) makes a saison or farm-brew and it’s organic and I
hate to use ethereal terms, but it’s sublime - you could pair it with
anything. Those are my favorites as of
right now.
EDTW: What does the future hold for you?
SM: To be honest I’d really like to run my own
beverage program: to run the tastings, create
the lists, and make the recommendations.
Because here the guy who does it is one of the best in the country and he is only 40 years old, so
he’s not going anywhere. I still have a
lot to learn from him. What he has done
for me is to teach me the specifics about wine and the wine business and the markups. I never thought my memory was that good, but
this stuff sticks. Now it’s second
nature to me. I can mentally do
mark-ups, and keep the wine and beer orders in my head - it’s nuts! I probably should have gone to college for
something I'd really enjoy doing, I probably would have been a lot better
off. [Laughter]
EDTW: Well, I think that was my last question, so
thank you.
SM: You’re welcome. You should come in for one of the beer
dinners some time.
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