Every March, wine makers, wine sellers, wine writers, wine lovers, and wine hangers-on converge on Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant for the California Vintners’ Barrel Tasting, to sample wines, to enjoy the extraordinary food and service, and to gossip among themselves. There are not actually any barrels at the Four Seasons’ tasting. What there are are wines of the most recent vintages, which have not yet been bottled (they come to New York in sample bottles); each of them is to be compared with an older vintage of the same producer’s version of the same wine. The Barrel Tasting, now an annual event, was instituted four years ago by the owners of the Four Seasons, Tom Margittai and Paul Kovi, along with Gerald Asher, a San Francisco wine merchant, to acquaint Easterners with the finest of California wines, some of which compare very favorably with their European counterparts.
Until very recently, Easterners were largely unfamiliar with the qualities and the styles of California’s newer wines. Thanks largely to the Four Seasons, that has completely turned around. The new excitement and interest in the California vintages is amply witnessed by the fact that more than two thousand people from the Eastern, Southern, and Midwestern United States applied for seats at the Four Seasons, which could accommodate only 225 souls personally and professionally fascinated by wine. And by food—the Four Seasons, for each Barrel Tasting, has created special 692 Na t io n a l Re v ie w
Comments