99 Bottles: A Black Sheep's Guide to Life-Changing Wines

By André Hueston Mack

A highly opinionated, vibrantly illustrated wine guide from one of the country’s most celebrated—and unorthodox—sommeliers and winemakers.

 

In this entertaining, informative, and thoroughly unconventional wine guide, award-winning sommelier, winemaker, and wine educator Andre Mack presents readers with the 99 bottles that have most impacted his life. Instead of just pairing wines with foods, Mack pairs practical information with personal stories, offering up recommendations alongside reflections on being one of the only African-Americans to ever work at the top level of the American wine industry.

Mack’s 99 bottles range from highly accessible commercial wines to the most rarefied Bordeaux on the wine list at The French Laundry, and each bottle offers readers something to learn about wine. This window into Mack’s life combines a maverick’s perspective on the wine industry with an insider’s advice on navigating wine lists, purchasing wine, and drinking more diverse and interesting selections at home. 99 Bottles is a one-of-a-kind exploration of wine culture today from a true trailblazer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683354925

Book preview

I GET IT, at least to a certain extent.

For example, when was the last time you saw a sommelier, winemaker, and overall wine and beverage expert in Air Jordans, sporting earrings in both of his ears, a Mickey Mouse wristwatch, thick-rimmed spectacles, a graphic T-shirt, and a baseball cap? The stereotype of a wine dude is a man who wears, at the very least, a tailored three-piece suit and wingtips, with cuff links and a Tag Heuer. That’s not really how I roll—although the watch would be cool.

There’s another thing I guess I should mention. I also happen to be African American. According to Wine & Spirits, my skin tone alone makes me rare as a unicorn when it comes to working in the wine business. I’m mostly a lone presence in a profession once described in the media as so, so dominated by white people. What does that mean? Not much, really, except for one thing: My perspective on what I do and the world that I work in is, in a word, unique. The way I came up in this business is very different from the way most other folks did.

I hope the fact that I’m an exception to the norm is exactly the thing that brings you to the book that’s in your hands right now. I wrote this book for one key reason, and it’s that I want to show people who love to drink that there’s a different, and an even better, way to think about beer, wine, and spirits. For example, perhaps there’s a way to think about drinking, and to discover what you like to drink, that doesn’t involve anyone telling you what to do. Maybe, instead, learning about wine and spirits could be a fun experience rather than a daunting one. Sounds good, right? So I think it’s time to put away those same-old, musty wine guides, the ones stuffed with the same tired winespeak that describes fruit forward flavors of wet horse blanket with notes of tobacco that regular people can’t relate to, in favor of a more exciting and yet chill method.

black sheep |'blak shēp|

NOUN (INFORMAL)

a member of a family or group who is regarded as a disgrace to them: the black sheep of the family

ORIGIN

late eighteenth century: from the proverb There is a black sheep in every flock

If that sounds good to you, then I’m your guy and here’s who I am: My first restaurant job was in a McDonald’s. My first introduction to fine wine was on an episode of Frasier. The fact that I am where I am now, that I’ve been able to acquire so much knowledge of wine and spirits and so much experience working with it, making it, and teaching people about it, speaks to the fact that the universe of wine and spirits is not entirely impenetrable—in fact, far from it. That I’m still a lone wolf when it comes to people who work in the wine and beverage industry just speaks to the fact that we need new ways of teaching people about it.

I am passionate about helping people who love wine and want to learn more without feeling too intimidated to do so. That’s why an overhaul of dry, dense wine guides is in order. And I’ve felt this way from the time I was getting started as a sommelier in San Antonio, Texas. I was waiting tables at a steak house, trying to taste as much wine as I could to figure out its nuances of flavor and understand the way grapes from different regions are grown and all the rest of it. But for someone who hadn’t grown up in a world with regular wine drinking or in a household with any kind of wine knowledge, the information was not easy to find—and it was even harder to access.

What do you do when you want to know more about something? You try to read as much about it as you can, of course. I remember thinking to myself even then that there had to be not only a better but, more important, a more enjoyable way to learn about wine and spirits than what was out there. Because I couldn’t relate to the way in which wine education was performed in those days, I became determined to find my own path. All I could do then, of course, was just hope—hope that I had what it took to learn about this exciting foreign world of wine, and hope that if I made it and became a wine-world professional, that someday I’d be able to share the path I’d forged for myself with all kinds of other people, including the ones who happened to look a little more like me.

As you can easily see, phenotype, fashion sense, and circumstances of upbringing are just the beginning of the ways in which I differ from other people who work in the world of wine. I look at wine and spirits from a new angle than they do not in spite of my differences but because of them, and I think that’s a good thing—a great thing. Way back when other restaurant workers first called me the black sheep, I felt offended—I wanted to fit in, not be singled out because of my skin tone. Now I embrace that nickname and all the individuality that comes with it. And I think the fact that I look different and think different, too, is what helps me turn other people on to the pleasures of drinking delicious wines and spirits. One of the ways I get people excited to learn about wine is to invite them along on my journey to the highest heights of the wine world. To see how I became a sommelier in one of the most exclusive restaurants on earth, and then transitioned into making my own wines and teaching folks about entrepreneurship. Come with me and I can promise you a solid ride, one full of ups and downs—because it was by no means a conventional climb to the top, and it was definitely not an easy one. It was, however, delicious. And one of the best parts was that, along the way, I stopped trying to fit other people’s ideas about what a wine guy should be, and began creating my own.

What does my story have to do with you, a person interested in wine who wants to learn how to enjoy it more? Wine is personal, and by following my story, you’ll learn the 99 bottles that have been important to me throughout my life, for one reason or another, and that will hopefully free you from the old-school drinking recommendations based on arbitrary, allegedly objective, and impersonal points-and-rankings systems. Those point ratings and scales were made without taking your life and your tastes into account, so what do you need them for? What I can offer you instead is access to the hard-won knowledge I have gathered during my years of working in the restaurant and beverage industry, and my stories of what that has been like.

Now, we both already know that most wine guides do not include stories. Instead, they’re lists of bottles with rankings next to them, which indicate what the expert author thinks you should drink. Those lists don’t even explain anything about who makes the wine, or suggest an occasion on which it might be great to enjoy it. I want to know about those stories behind the wines. I want to know why an author thinks I should try them. So to me the stories about the circumstances under which I came to know and appreciate the 99 selections in this book are just as important as the notes about where to buy them. Why? The stories and anecdotes are a window onto a new philosophy about wine, a new way to think about it. Wine is intuitive, and your love for it belongs to you. Most wine guides are designed to make readers like you feel insecure and dependent on specialists like me for advice on what to drink. Nah. Instead, I want to empower you to trust your own palate, and to be your own judge of what tastes good to you—and part of doing that is showing you how that exact process happened for me.

ABOUT

THE

TRADING CARDS

Get this: I’ve organized all of the basic information about the wines—the full name, price range, tasting notes, and some pairing suggestions—in the form of trading cards. I have a couple of reasons for this. One, I like ganging all the stats you’ll need when you’re ready to buy in one convenient place. Two, I think trading cards are fun. When I started thinking about creating a new kind of wine guide, one with stories and anecdotes in addition to real-world wine info, I thought hard about how to get the details you’d need across in the best way—in a new way that was easy for you and, yes, fun, too. You’ll notice I don’t conform to typical winespeak in terms of pairing and tasting notes, because my goal is for the cards to be evocative and memorable, not stuffy and serious. Wine trading cards, people. Enjoy them.

1. VINTAGE DESIGNS

(just like the wine cards you collected as a kid)

2. HELPFUL INFORMATION

(such as tasting notes, pricing & where to find a bottle)

3. ILLUSTRATED BOTTLES

(so you know what you’re drinking)

4. CORRECTLY SPELLED NAMES

5. NUMBERED (for your convenience)

I didn’t have to put my heart and soul into 99 Bottles because they were already there. In every story, in every sip, you’ll find me. So I am taking you on a journey of my own wine-world education. And I’m going to give you tasting notes. This is the best way I can think of for combining a drinking guide with the details of how I went from growing up in a house with virtually no alcohol drinking of any kind to becoming the first African American to win the title of America’s Best Young Sommelier. Don’t worry about the rest, because I’ll also offer you all of the traditional wine and beverage notes you need for each selection, including advice on serving, sourcing, and purchasing. And in turn you’ll come with me as I wait tables in a steak house in Texas, practice pouring wine in my tiny apartment’s even tinier kitchen, find myself employed in the empire of Thomas Keller at one of America’s top-rated haute cuisine restaurants, and—eventually—becoming an Oregon winemaker in my own right. We will laugh together, like when I tell you about the time I was mistaken for a drug dealer named Pepper by Jennifer Aniston (this page). And we’re probably going to cry together a little bit, like when I recall what I was pouring when I found out my father died (this page). Each of the 99 entries represents something significant I was drinking during an important time in my life—some are short reminiscences and others are longer essays. All of the entries mark important steps in my path to wine and spirits knowledge while also offering up plenty of so-called traditional educational material.

I can’t think of a better way for you to learn more about wine than this one—because, of course, this is exactly the way I learned about it. From the time I waited on my first table and even before I realized it myself, I was building a life in wine. Now I’m ready to tell you what that was like so that you can get ideas about what to drink in your own life as you build your own path, your own cellar, and your own bar. I waited a long time to produce a wine guide, mostly because I wanted to make sure what I wrote would go beyond just the usual routine—that it would be helpful, that you’d be able to learn something from it, and that it would be fun to read. More than anything, I want to tell people like me who love to drink that they can embrace whatever their version of a black sheep might be.

ON SOURCING

WINES

Many of the wines I write about here are available at most wine shops around the country. Some are not—either because they’re super rare or, in a couple of cases, because they’re not even made anymore. To me, that’s just part of the beauty of wine, that it’s not infinite. In that sense, some parts of this book function as a guide that will lead you to exact wines to taste; other listings are there simply to tell my story (and, hey, even the wines that are unavailable might tell you enough about a particular wine that you’ll be inclined to find one like it and try something new). With this book, I want to encourage folks to embrace their own story through the wines that they’ve experienced or will experience in the future—and some of those are not going to be the same exact wines as the ones that influence my story. So if I recommend a bottle of wine to you that changed my life in some way, you can look for the newest vintage of it and give it a shot, or perhaps try a wine from a similar region or the same producer. Some are splurges, while others are very reasonably priced. I’m here to encourage you to find the wines you’re going to love, and you can use my recommendations as a great jumping-off point to get yourself started.

CHAPTER 1

THE EARLY YEARS,

OR HOW I GREW UP

AND FIRST LEARNED THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS WINE & SPIRITS

THE

BOTTLES

NO 1

OLDE ENGLISH 800 MALT LIQUOR

NO 2

BOONE’S FARM

NO 3

CUTTY SARK BLENDED SCOTS WHISKEY

NO 4

TIO PEPE SHERRY PALOMINO FINO

BOTTLE

NO 1

OLDE ENGLISH 800 MALT LIQUOR

My parents were officers in the military, and we lived all over the world when I was growing up. But my mom did her basic training in Texas and fell in love with the state, so she moved us back when she could—which was during my teenage years. I ended up going to high school in San Antonio, where I was a jock—I played all sports, but my greatest love was basketball. During my off-season in freshman year, I had my first drink while riding around with friends wearing a cast on my cracked ankle.

Of course, when I was coming up, Olde English was it. There were plenty of options to quench your thirst for malt liquor—Mickey’s, Country Club, Colt 45, Steel Reserve, King Cobra, St. Ides—but we stuck to OE in my hood. Ever since I heard Easy E say, Olde English 800, because that’s my brand. Take it in a bottle, forty, quart, or can, in the song 8 Ball, I knew what I would select. And besides, any hip-hop fan can tell you that Ice Cube holds a forty of OE on the cover of the classic 1987 album N.W.A. and the Posse.

It cost a buck fifty for that glass bottle. But it certainly wasn’t good. As one friend said as he passed the bottle to me, It tastes like Ice Cube pissed on charcoal.

The People’s Brewing Company of Duluth, Minnesota, introduced the brand Olde English to the public in 1964, initially calling the beer Olde English Stout. The brand was bought and sold a number of times since then, including to the Pabst Brewing Company in 1979, who pretty much immediately began focusing on selling the beer to what was then referred to as the urban contemporary market. What this meant was targeting inner-city blacks and Latinos with aggressive marketing campaigns. And it worked, which anyone growing up when I did could see in the large number of rap videos featuring top artists guzzling the product, or else rapping about doing the same.

Flash forward twenty years, and I’m the sommelier at one of the top restaurants in the world, Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York City. If you think about that trajectory, it can make your head spin. On the night before each five-hour inventory of Per Se’s wine cellar, I began a tradition: I’d drink an Olde English forty. Now, this wasn’t an easy task, believe it or not. Shops near where I lived on Central Park West and Sixty-ninth Street didn’t sell it—the area was way too bougie. But it was worth the trip to another neighborhood to find an OE. Drinking it allowed me to reflect on so much of my past, and on the emotions that were associated with my move to New York City. That bottle calmed me when I was anxious about being in a wildly different locale, and reminded me of home. But it also reminded me of just how far this journey had taken me.

BOTTLE

NO 2

BOONE’S FARM

I started college in San Antonio with the dream of playing basketball. As Biggie Smalls said, Either you’re slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot. I had a sweet jump shot, but it wasn’t enough, and slinging rock wasn’t an option. I was stuck in a moment at that point, trying to figure out what to do with my life: What path should I take?

I was comfortably middle-class, but I was not wealthy—I needed to work while I was going to college. So one day while I happened to be looking for a job, a friend of mine told me about an ad he’d seen in the paper for a gig in sales. We called the number, and the guy on the phone told us to drive up to Austin for an interview. The dude on the phone even promised to give us gas money for our trouble when we got there. My friend and I thought: Why not? But when we met the guy in Austin, it turned out the job was about trying to sell knockoff cologne.