Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [51]
Gary kept the wine coming. After offering up a toast to Michelle and Phil, he poured glass after glass, his voice echoing through the room in staccato sentences, interrupted by his own laughter. Gary’s the sort of person who goes up to eleven—he’s full of a frenetic enthusiasm that catches other people up in it—so that as the night wore on (and the glasses continued to be filled), we became just as loud as he was.
The greatest thing about Gary, when it comes to wine, is that he insists on celebration. There’s nothing pretentious or snooty about him—this is a man who takes his enjoyment of his wine just as seriously as he does the wine itself. The first time he came into the Bakery, he and Mike drank wine out of canning jars, and Mike likes to say that Gary looked happier drinking out of that jar than most people do sipping wine from the fanciest stemware.
Photographs by Sara Remington
The Hospitality Business
In addition to running the front of the house, Mike’s in charge of the Bakery’s wines. Some people refer to him as sommelier, but he prefers the title “wine guy” since it sounds less snobbish. Regardless of what he’s called, though, Mike has a big responsibility: selecting wines that will complement the menu, season by season, day by day.
The resulting list is pretty long: we stock anywhere from about 50 wines in the slow winter months to 150 during the summer high season. Mike picks wine from all over the globe, but he places a strong emphasis on vintages from the central coast of California. We tend to have a good selection of Grüner Veltliner and Rhone varietals—and we also like to keep a variety of local pinot noirs on hand.
Mike first started getting into wines back when he was a waiter at Joe’s Restaurant in Venice, California. The manager used to let the waiters go in on a bottle of wine at wholesale cost as the evening wound down, which gave the waiters a great education and provided the restaurant with a knowledgeable sales force. So Mike does something similar here in Big Sur: wine reps come by on Thursday with samples, and later in the evening, once the restaurant’s closed, we pull out some bread and cheese and olives and taste wines together. That way everyone learns about the wines on our list firsthand, and Mike has a chance to get second opinions on those he’s thinking of buying.
But actually, Mike’s relationship with Big Sur hospitality and wine goes back years before the Bakery was started—before Phil and Michelle had even heard of Big Sur. He’s been traveling up here since the early ’80s to visit Terry, whom he met nearly thirty years ago in Manhattan Beach. Since then, their paths have crossed in places as far away as New Zealand and Thailand, and Terry has always had his door open for Mike, greeting him with a boisterous shout of “kettle on!” An eccentric Englishman, sandalmaker, master storyteller, and eternal optimist, Terry loves the Big Sur tradition of trading goods and services rather than exchanging money. Every time Mike showed up, Terry would have some fresh-caught local fish he’d gotten in exchange for repairing someone’s sandals, or fruits and vegetables from a garden he was caretaking, and a fresh loaf of his legendary Hide bread.
Mike started off trying to reciprocate by bringing food too, but soon realized that whatever local products Terry had on hand always seemed better than anything he could come up with. Rare cheeses from France? “Try this from over the hill, Gilly,” Hide would say, putting a little local honey in their tea as Mike