The Second Glass

I am going to drink every bottle of wine on the Toro wine list.

One of the great privileges of employment at Toro ( 1704 Washington St, Boston, MA) is that we’re allowed to buy any of the non-reserve wines from the list at cost. Talking about the wine list and recommending bottles to guests is a job requirement. And what better way is there to really learn all of these bottles than to actually try them all, tasting every single bottle on the list one by one? I am starting at the top of the list with the roses, and will work my way through the whites, then the reds, breaking it up somewhere in between with sherry and cava.

When I began my waitressing career at the tender age of nineteen I knew literally nothing about wine. My family drank sweet blush wine at home, the kind that comes in massive screw-cap jugs, over ice to keep it nice and cold.

My first week as a waitress a senior server pulled me aside to teach me the proper method for opening wine at the table. I knew I was screwed. Presenting the bottle, cutting the foil off the top just so, twisting the corkscrew out and presenting it to the guest and waiting with anticipation as they passed judgment on that first sip – the whole ritual was so foreign to me, and the swirl of that first sip in the taster’s glass seemed insufferably pretentious – definitely a ritual designed for people of a different class. It struck fear in my little heart.

Eventually I stopped quaking with nerves every time a guest at one of my tables ordered a bottle of wine, and in time I became familiar enough with certain bottles to actually recommend them to guests. It would still be two years before I could legally taste anything on the wine list myself, and several more years before I could talk about wine with any real confidence.

Nine years later I love wine and thanks to working in restaurants, I now know a fair amount about the topic, but even today if I sense that I have a real wine aficionado at the table those old nerves will creep back in. Do I really remember what makes the Vall Llach “Embruix” Priorat different from the Zeta Z.? Is the Sonsierra Tempranillo more masculine than the Iporos? Or is it the other way around? I think with wine, the more you know the more you realize you don’t know.

Recently I’ve noticed that my palate is changing. I can get more than just citrus off the nose of the crisp Garnacha blanca that we pour by the glass and actually taste the nuanced imprint of aging in French versus American oak on the Garnacha/Cabernet blend from Priorat. But even more exhilarating than that, the smells and the flavors that I’m now picking up have begun to trigger real memories for me, visceral sensory moments that are tucked away in my brain. Like the day we tasted the new Mencia that just came on the list and I realized it smells exactly like the vanilla cupcakes I baked for a Memorial Day weekend barbecue. The delicious cupcake smell lingered in my apartment for an hour after they were done baking; there it was again in the glass. And the first mineral-y sip of a Provencal rose I tasted for a story I’m writing on for the upcoming Rose issue had me back on the beach outside the French seaside town of Sete, dipping a toe into the bath-tub warm Mediterranean for the very first time.

So, why not drink the entire wine list at Toro? One waitress. Eighty-two bottles of wine. Will my liver survive? And, more importantly, will I be able to recount the details of each by the time it’s said and done?

Check back here to find out.