This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on October 7, 2022. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
Usually, when I’m invited to a meal under the guise of my job as a food and drink writer, I pretty much know what to expect.
If it’s for a restaurant article, I’ll be trying a few dishes while chatting with the chef, owner, or manager about the background on the business and its cuisine. If a winemaker is asking me out, we’ll enjoy the food, but the focus is on the wines that he or she is sharing, and our conversation revolves mostly around grapevines and cellar techniques.
If it’s a “winemaker dinner,” I expect to engage with the other diners in attendance and happily critique which pairing worked best as both the winemaker and chef take turns rambling on about this bottling or that sous vide preparation. And then there are those meals, most often as part of a conference or festival, where I am part of the show, tasked myself with rambling on about the wines on the table and winemakers seated around the room.
But every so often, I get an invite where I can’t quite get a grip on what’s supposed to be happening in advance. And sometimes, upon arrival, the situation only grows more uncertain, with fine food and drink the only familiar handholds for the uncharted voyage.
That was me on Monday, during what would eventually blossom into an excellent lunch at Via Maestra 42 on Upper State Street. The beloved trattoria and marketplace, which was opened in the year 2000 by Italian good importer Renato Moisio, was recently acquired by veteran wine dealers Georges and Nicole Bitar, who managed the restaurant when it opened almost 22 years ago.
I’d been invited to the affair by my friend Daniel Berman, who recently launched his own wine brokerage called Rincon Wine Group . I tell people that I helped Dan find his way into the wine business many years ago, and I think that’s at least partially true. However he got there, he’s been surrounding himself with top-shelf bottlings for years now, recently helped put on the first Santa Barbara Vintners Foundation golf tournament, and is a respected player in the regional wine scene.
Dan’s new venture is mostly focused on selling and promoting smaller Central Coast brands like Lepiane, Story of Soil, Dreamcôte, Fennel Family, and others. These are, by the way, the sorts of wines that you should mostly be drinking if you say you support regional farming, small carbon footprints, and quantifiable sustainability.
But Rincon Wine Group also works with a couple of importers focused on small European brands as well, most of which are also environmentally minded. One such importer is Alex Dessouky of Barrel Down Selections , who scours high-elevation regions, mostly near the Alps, in Italy, Austria, Germany, and France. I know Alex a little bit, having interviewed him a couple of months ago for my forthcoming article on his development of Ysidro , a canned spritz made from sake, grapefruit, and sea salt that’s been running through my fridge all summer long.
“Matt,” said the email from Dan on September 8, “Working on a Barrel Down Selections tasting with Alex Dessouky at Via Maestra, and would love to find a day that you could attend and do a little piece on it. Possible?”
This may sound weird to those not in this business, but my reflex when invited to almost anything is to find a polite and honest way to decline or, at the very least, to defer until a much later date. The reality is that I already have too much to write about, I don’t have enough time to do it, and adding anything new to my schedule in the near future tends to cause more delays on overdue deadlines.
But I wanted to support Dan, so I explained the stretched-out timing for a piece about this new wine pairing series at Via Maestra. “This would just be one event for now,” he responded. “Via Maestra would invite their top wine customers, and Alex would conduct a tasting over a family-style meal. Somewhat casual. No need to promote any successive tastings. Just more about Barrel Down Selections and Via Maestra.”
Seemed easy enough to me, if not the usual way things get done, so we batted around some dates and settled on this past Monday. As I walked up to Via Maestra, I saw a large table with about a dozen seats awaiting us and talked briefly to Dan before we sat down, squeezed between different parties who didn’t seem to know each other. Dan wasn’t exactly clear who anyone was either.
