- Welcome to Chicago. It's the Windy City, Chi town, the City of Big Shoulders. Wait a minute. This is a different kind of episode. Feels like it needs a different kind of introduction. - Good to be back. Welcome to my favorite city in the US of A, Chicago literally has it all. It's got the kind of friendly and genuine people you can find in the Midwest in a clean and accessible big city. I always sum up Chicago's size as such. You can definitely have a car here if you want one, but you don't necessarily need one. You can just take the bus or the L train. Chicago's also got a hand in just about every sports league, basketball on the house that Jordan built, which is also where the Blackhawks play, one of the original six NHL teams. Two major baseball teams, my Cubbies, who play at the world famous Wrigley Field and that other team on the south side, sorry, White Sox fans. And of course the Chicago Bears who introduced the world to the Super Bowl Shuffle back in '85. Nowadays, well, let's just say there's always next year. If you're into comedy, you've got the world famous "Second City" comedy club, whose alumni include Dan Aykroyd, Steve Carell, Chris Farley, Tina Fay, Amy Pohler, Mike Myers, Jim and John Belushi, you get the idea. And if you're into music, the Chicago blues scene is historic to say the least. If you like architecture and history, Chicago's got plenty for you to dive into. Sure, it's a bit touristy, but I always recommend taking a riverboat architecture tour if it's your first foray into Chicago, it really helps bring the city and its history into context. And yeah, I know I'm from Cleveland, but Chicago's always had a really special place in my heart. I came to school here at DePaul University and graduated here. I had my first restaurant job here and I fell in love with food and wine. I fell in love with my wife here, we met at DePaul and we got married here. And you know how there's some places that just always feel like home, even if you're not physically there? For me, that place has always been Chicago. At this point, you may be saying, well, that's all great, but why are we here? After all, they sure as hell don't grow grapes on Michigan Avenue. Well, first off, Chicago has one of the best food and wine scenes in the country. And second, wine isn't all about where it's grown, it's also about you. And so for this episode, that's exactly what we're focusing on. The consumer side of wine, the stores and restaurants that actually get the wine into your hands, how to ensure you're getting quality wines from these places and ways to improve your taste and pairing abilities. But before we get to all that, let's chat a bit about America's complicated history with wine and alcohol. Prohibition. It was known as the noble experiment here in the United States, but eventually turned into a failed experiment. Prohibition was essentially a 14-year ban on alcohol. Funny enough, prohibition didn't actually ban drinking alcohol, only manufacturing, selling and transporting it. Which means that if you had a stocked cellar that could last you 14 years when prohibition started, you were all set. For most people, however, this effectively constituted a ban on booze, the effects of which, believe it or not, are still being felt today. In the early 1900s, the Temperance Movement, as it was called, had been gaining steam for some time for a variety of reasons. Women wanted sober, less abusive husbands, various religions preached moderation, industrialists wanted more productive factory workers. And some people who were anti-European immigrant or anti-minority decided it wasn't so much about the drink itself as it was the people who were doing the drinking. It all came to a head through the passage of the 18th Amendment, which was put into effect in 1919. Alcohol consumption briefly went down, but like most things, if there's a will, there's a way. The void left from the lack of formal alcohol production and distribution gave birth to huge organized crime enterprises. One of which congregated here, this is the "Green Mill", one of the best jazz clubs in the city today. Back in the twenties though, this place was one of the many speakeasies that existed all over the country serving illegal booze. This one in particular was a favorite hangout of Al Capone, the most notorious prohibition gangster of all, In fact, right here was his favorite booth, eyes on the show and eyes on every door leading in and out of the joint, a perfect view for a mob boss. At the height of prohibition, Al Capone was making the equivalent of half a billion dollars a year in untaxed revenue. The mobs employed warehouse workers, truck drivers, accountants and bribed cops. - [Cartoon Character] Thank you. - [Vince] Politicians. - [Cartoon Character] Thank you. - [Vince] And even the prohibition agents themselves. - [Cartoon Character] Thank you. - [Vince] And of course, with any organized crime comes violence and Chicago was known for some of the worst fighting of all, with 729 people killed in Cook County alone during prohibition. Eventually the government realized that prohibition was unenforceable, doing nothing but costing them tax money, lives and increasing crime. So in 1932, FDR ran on a campaign to repeal prohibition and he became president in a landslide election. This is "The Berghoff", the place that received the very first liquor license in Chicago after FDR took office and prohibition was repealed. But the effects of prohibition are still here. Organized crime operations made millions, which they leveraged into loan sharking, prostitution and illegal gambling for decades. We lost thousands of great bartenders to other countries, which devastated our cocktail scene. Many wineries that could have had rich histories, went out of business. And the 21st Amendment, in response to organized crime, gave states the rights to set their own liquor laws. This is why some states have dry counties, government-run liquor shops, and more importantly, to many people's despise, why wine oftentimes can't be shipped to consumers across state lines. But here's to hoping that the effects of prohibition continue to fade. At the end of the day, we should all be able to buy and drink wine as we please. - [Vince] Just a heads up, we're gonna be doing a lot of eating while we're here. Now, even though some Chicagoans may try and tell you that deep dish pizza is just for tourists. Trust me, locals still can't get enough of it either. And they argue regularly about which spot is best. For me, it's not even a contest. Welcome to "Lou Malnati's". One of my crew members is Chicago native and when I told ' you were gonna be here, it was like I told him Beyonce was gonna be here. He was so excited because "Lou Malnati's" is. - Why? Do I look like Beyonce? - It's his royalty as far as Chicago food scene. So thank you for having us in the kitchen. - We're gonna make the real deal today. - I almost feel like I'm getting some secret that I shouldn't know. Don't tell my wife, I'm gonna take off my ring. - Really? I keep mine on 'cause my wife has an issue with that. - The dough is honestly the magical part of this pizza. - You know, when you pick it up and feel it, you'll feel it's kind of pillowy, right. Breathing, right. It's had a chance to rise. So we've got a little olive oil in the bottom and now what we're gonna do is just kind of press it out to the side. Just taste a little bit, yeasty kind of beer flavor, right? - Oh, it does taste like beer. - Gently pull up the sides. It's a thin dough with thin sides, but the sides have to come up enough to contain. - So that was my question. - Prodigious amounts of mozzarella and sausage. This is mozzarella from a little dairy in the middle of the state of Wisconsin, put a little more in your mouth. So we're gonna talk like this, like a couple guys from the back alley. We're gonna go a couple layers, important to get good coverage. Why? - [Vince] You don't want any bite without cheese. - You don't want any bites without cheese. - [Vince] Couple layers, all right. - Right, now you're gonna take some sausage. Now I like to just kind of take a little bit of time and just start working it down the sides. And as you notice, there's no fennel in this sausage. Now, you know who uses fennel in their sausage? Guys who buy flavorless bad meat. - Is there a secret to the sauce? Look at the size of the tomatoes on the sauce. - [Marc] Look at this. - [Vince] They're, almost, a lot of 'em are almost whole. - When I get these babies. - Perfect. - I mean, it's like eating peaches, isn't it? It's so sweet. - Is is, they're super sweet. - We send a crew out to California every year. And when the tomatoes are at their reddest, when they're at their fullest, we say, go. - [Vince] So you do this and then you can 'em up. - We can 'em up for the year. - [Vince] Yep. - And we can a couple hundred thousand cases of these things. - [Vince] Wow. - [Marc] We want to cover all the meat. These are ready. - [Vince] That's it. - We're gonna go right in here. - [Vince] Now we wait. - We're gonna leave it in the oven 'bout, you know, 25, 30 minutes. We don't wanna cook it too fast. I could get hotter, faster ovens, but this is a bread product and I wanna take it time. - You wanna drink some wine with me while we wait? - How 'bout that? - All right, let's do that. I'm in. - So I did syrah from Santa Barbara. Because if you get a cool climate syrah, like one from Santa Barbara, what you're gonna get is the acidity that you get from sangiovese and Chianti, but I like the meatiness that you're gonna get, 'cause the classic pizza here has the sausage on it, that meatiness of the syrah coming off the. - [Marc] I love that. - [Vince] The gaminess of the meat. Cheers. - Nice. Great color on this syrah. - [Vince] In addition to matching flavors, the acid in the wine likes the salty cheese, fatty sausage and the acidic tomatoes. - My father worked for my grandfather at another pizza place in the city. And he finally decided, you know what, I wanna have my own. And when he opened, holy cow, you know, they hadn't seen anything like that in the suburbs. There's people lined up at the door, down through the parking lot around the corner, into the neighbor's yard. - It blew up. - I was 15. - And you were probably dragged into the restaurant. - Oh yeah. And told to bring my friends. But then not too long after that, he gets cancer. Now I get outta school and try to turn things around in this third store that started out kind of ugly. One bad store can take two good ones down. So we closed that store. We kind of regroup. We owed people money. We started doing outdoor festivals and we get back on our feet financially. And then we start opening more stores and this time we do it a little smarter. - The best piece of advice I ever got was from another entrepreneur. And he said, there's gonna have to be someone in the business who is going to refuse to let it fail. And if you're the owner, it's probably gonna have to be you, like at any cost, that sounds like exactly what you did. - That's wisdom right there. - How many stores are there now? - 60, 70 stores. - Oh, congratulations. - We've been pretty blessed. - Yeah, absolutely. Well, to your father in it. - Yeah. Look at that. That's a fricking symphony right there. - [Vince] You can hear it too. There we go. It's like a commercial. This is absolutely tremendous. - Pizza toast, wine toast. - I'm so excited. Oh my God. It's as good as I remember. Every time. You think, oh, how many times could you have the same thing and it be as exciting as the last time and it truly is like that. - Now, you ever dunk yours in the wine? I mean, you ever just try to dunk it and? - You're an efficient guy. That's really what it. - It's a question I get all the time, how do I buy good wines at the store? Well, fret no more, because today we're breaking it down. Let's start with my most important and also most controversial piece of wine buying advice, stop buying wines from the grocery store. - [Crowd] Boo. - I know, I know, I'm challenging the status quo here, but let me explain. Number one, big grocery stores have to buy wines that they can stock in every single one of their hundreds or thousands of stores. This means they have to buy wines that are mass produced, but wine isn't a commodity like computers or plastic thingamajigs, it's a crop. So as production goes up, quality tend to decrease and corners get cut in order to fill the shelves at these stores. In America in particular, mass produced wines have all sorts of additives, which by the way, don't have to be listed on the label. Some additives aren't so bad, but some, like Mega Purple, which can be found in cheap wines, are. Number two, while it may look like there's a lot of options at the grocery store, most of these wines are actually owned by about two or three wine conglomerates. Number three, storage. This one's a no-brainer since you can actually see that wines in grocery stores are stored about as well as the two-liter of warm soda they stand right next to. And finally, number four. Most wines and grocery stores are ubiquitous and well, boring. They're purposely made that way so they'll be unoffensive to the general masses. A simple solution to all of this, a small independent wine shop, like this one. This is "Juice @ 1340". A local shop owned by my friend, Derrick C Westbrook, who used to be a Somm at some of the city's finest restaurants. We sat down to chat about why you should buy from local shops whenever possible. - I mean, just about every customer, like we have a relationship. - Yeah. - You know. And it. - I saw you tonight. I mean, everybody who came in, you're like, oh, I saw you last week. - Yeah. I mean, how many times are you gonna, your kids are gonna get a sucker and then your dog's gonna get a dog treat, like you're not gonna see that in a grocery store. You're not gonna see that in those big box places. - Yeah, in addition to the personal service that you offer, you know all the bottles here because you picked them out. - Yeah. I know all the wines. I know all the beers and all of us, the entire team, knows all the wines, all the beers, all the spirits, know what I mean and we can talk about them from our personal experience, more so than just talking to 'em from tasting notes, right? - [Vince] Yeah. - And so that's what's fun is and I can learn what you do and don't like. I care about the story. I care about where the wines come from. I care about what the wines represent. Being organic or biodynamic or being made by BIPOC people, it is our form of speaking about what we value in life and in the world. - What you can offer that I would say a grocery store does not, is you can get wines that are more, I would say, have more character. So a lot of the wines on grocery store shelves, they're gonna be very, very similar from wine to wine, even though they're different. They're gonna be very similar because they're meant to be very unoffensive to a large amount of people. - Yeah. Exactly. 'Cause there are wines that I'm buying that may not sell in 10 days or 20 days, right. It's because I'm not looking to purchase that wine for turn and burn. I'm looking to purchase that wine for the one weird thing that somebody comes in and they're like, I kind of like this, I don't know. And in my brain goes off, right, I go into my Rain Man mode, I'm like, oh, this is what you need. Yeah. I'm just picking out like, yeah. - 'Cause the other thing you can do is you can bring in stuff that is, maybe there's only a couple cases of it. - Yeah. - Right. So a grocery store can't buy it or even a big chain can't buy it. - Yeah. 'Cause it doesn't make sense, right? That shelf space is too valuable for a SKU that's only gonna be there for, you know, 10 days. So we take it on because we like, yo, we can run through this and show people something different and we get to buy stuff, especially when it comes to like our beer and spirits that like are here at Chicago, for sure. And when you buy those local things, you are supporting people who you can touch and see and feel, right. - Down the whole supply chain, right? - Yeah. - You personally are buying that and then the money is going here and people are spending their money here, well now the whole supply chain is local. - [Derrick] Yeah. - And it stays in your community. - A hundred percent, right. And it's like having those things, but still, yo, we're gonna have the dopest selection that we can find and we're gonna go and find the dopest stuff from everywhere else. - You know, the reality is as a smaller shop, you don't have unlimited budget for inventory. So you're only bringing in stuff you believe in, you can't fill the shelves. - I can't. And my mistakes cost me more, right? - I love this 'cause we're piling on the reasons why to shop at these places. The thing they say that every time you buy for local business, you're actually like physically making a person smile, get a sucker. - Yeah. A hundred percent. - And that person, whether that person's you or somebody else in their community, I think it just really helps out. - Yeah. Awesome. - Cheers. Thank you for having me man. - Thank you. Thank you for coming. Cheers. - Another solid accessible option is a medium sized store that specializes in wine and spirits. This is "Binny's", a local family owned store with about 44 locations. These stores offer a few things that smaller wine shops can't. Number one, bigger store means bigger selection. So if you're looking for something specific, you're more likely to find it here. And with that larger selection comes versatility. Whether you want a $15 weeknight wine or a $100 special occasion wine, there is more options for both your budget and palate. Number two, because the store specializes in wine, you're still getting professionally certified staff who know wine and do tastings, trainings and seminars regularly on the wines. And number three, because they're purchasing for a few dozen stores, they have strong relationships with producers and importers and they can usually offer some of the best prices. Your first line of defense at a wine shop is the staff, finding someone who can actually help you, who has actually tasted the wines. Most people at wine shops love wine, it's why they work there. Just be sure to share a few important pieces of info with them. Number one, the grapes and the places you normally drink. Both of those things, not just one. Number two, if you're pairing the wine with something. Number three, how much you're looking to spend. And number four, always mention if you're willing to try something new or off the beaten path, which by the way, I highly recommend doing, it'll allow them to find you something fun and of better value. Let's switch it up and say, you're buying wine out on your own with nobody to help you. Buckle up because here are my 10 tips. Number one, figure out how the store is laid out. It's usually by place or by grape or a combination of the two, but I've also seen wine shops organized by price, by body or by style. Number two, ignore awards and scores. Only bigger wineries have the money to enter these competitions and scores are completely subjective, anyway. Number three, ignore labels. There's nothing wrong with having a cool wine label, but some of the best wines in the world are in plain clothes, as they say. On a similar note, number four, ignore the wine descriptions on the bottle. The descriptions on the back of the bottle are meant to sell wine and consequently not offend anyone. So, many wines tend to have boring generic descriptors like smooth and dark, take 'em with a grain of salt, but some descriptors will clue you into the style of wine. Toast and vanilla mean oak influence. Rich, luscious and dark mean big warm climate wines. Whereas bright, zesty, crisp mean cool climate wines. Number five, there is a sweet spot on price, in my opinion, that gets you a good high quality, complex representation of most wines on the planet. And it's the 15 to $30 range. Some famed wine regions are gonna cost more, which leads me to my next point, number six. As the Thai people say, "Same, same but different". You're not gonna find champagne or Napa Cabernet or Barolo for around $30, but you will find Cava made in the champagne method, Chilean Cabernet and Lange Nebbiolo for $30. So don't be afraid to Google something like champagne alternatives if you have your heart set on something that's outta your budget. Number seven, get specific. The smaller, more specific the area is that you're buying, the more likely it is to have quality and yield controls in place. So don't buy California wine, buy Sonoma wine, better yet, buy Russian River or Alexander Valley wine, which are specific places in Sonoma. Don't buy French wine, buy Bordeaux or better yet Saint-Emilion, which is a specific place in Bordeaux. Number eight, pay attention to ABV or alcohol content. This is your best indication of the style of wine you're getting. And number nine, when in doubt, Spain, Portugal, South America, New Zealand and Australia all have tremendous bang for your buck. And finally, number 10, don't stress too hard. Part of the fun, for me anyway, is picking a bottle and then busting it open at home to see how right or wrong I was. In 2021, poorly produced wine that makes it all the way to commercial shelves is almost nonexistent. So enjoy the fun that is picking out bottles, knowing that good or bad, your next bottle is right around the corner. Hey, Vino fans. I want to talk to you about signing up for Vino VIP and since I don't wanna bother you with a ton of commercials while you're trying to watch the show, I'm gonna put all the cliche marketing angles into just this one. Here we go. I know we come off as a big production, but the reality is the entire operation is myself and a few other part-time employees. We're not affiliated with a studio or TV channel. We really wanna keep the show going, but literally can't do it without your help. So please, if the show has entertained you, helped you learn or pass a wine exam, if I've answered your DMs and questions, or if the show has just brought you value in any way, support the small business that provided it and join Vino VIP, which is our very own membership program. If you enjoy the show, joining Vino VIP is a must anyway. Membership starts at just $5 a month and here's some of the benefits. Early access to all our videos, including new episodes of the show. Every quarter I host a virtual tasting and Q&A just for VIP members. Every month we raffle off wine glasses and prizes. And once a year, we even have a big winner who gets a personalized tasting, where I send wine and food to your house and host a tasting for you and your friends. Plus, if you're a gold member or platinum member, you get your name in the credits of an episode, kind of like this. I never want to charge for individual episodes or worse yet, be unable to make the show at all, but that's why we need support from those of you who can. It's only $5 a month, which is less than a Starbucks coffee, so it's really in reach. Everybody assumes that their support won't make a difference, but I promise you, it does. Look at all this pretty members-only content you're missing out on. Behind the scenes videos, episode commentaries, and full length interviews that can be seen nowhere else but our members only section. The first month is free. You literally have nothing to lose. I know this was long, but everything I just said is a hundred percent true. We have tens of thousands of fans and even if a small percentage of you joined, we could keep making videos for you in the long term. And the last perk is that you can start watching episodes in the members section and you don't have to hear this pitch or see ads ever again. Thank you to our existing Vino VIP members and thanks for considering joining. - [Vince] I told you we were gonna eat a lot while we're here. Next up is a dish that's as iconic as the city itself, the Chicago hot dog. And Chicago does not play around when it comes to encased meats. The historic "Superdawg Drive-in", run by the second generation of the Berman family has been serving dogs for over 70 years and is many an aficionado's favorite hot dog in the city. Well, I feel like I've been transported back to the fifties. - Actually, 1948. Superdawg was started by my parents. My parents were high school sweethearts, grew up in Chicago. My dad went off to Europe, World War II. Came back from service, they got married. And my dad said to his young bride at the time, let's do this for the summer. - Let's do this for a summer. And this was the original location? - Original location, the Superdawg figures on the roof, named after my parents, Maurie and his adoring sweetheart, Flaurie. - Was he that muscular in real life? - Exactly, yeah. Oh yes. Summer of 1951 on, we've been continuous year round. - [Vince] You're open late. - [Lisa] We're open really late. So open until 1:00 AM, 2 on Fridays and Saturdays. - Wow. - We never close early. We are a drive-in restaurant with car hop service. We're gonna press the button. - Okay. - [Lisa] We're gonna wait for our order to be taken. - [Vince] Great. Who's in there taking the order? - [Lisa] My brother Scott. - Hi, ready to take your order. - I would love a Superdawg, please. - Everything on that Superdawg, including hot peppers? - [Vince] Yes. - That'd be mustard, relish, onion, pickle, peppers. - I love it. That sounds perfect. I'm gonna come in and meet you so I can see how we make this thing. - [Scott] Very good. See you in a couple minutes, thanks. - This is like a symphony. There is. The three sided monster, how many hot dog? How many Superdawgs? - [Don] There you go. - How many Superdawgs can you crank out here? It looks like a lot. - [Don] 240 on the side and we got three sides, so. - [Vince] wow. - The first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna start with a steamed poppy seed bun. Then we're gonna take the Superdawg, which is made for us to our recipe, so you can't get it anywhere else. - And that's a bigger, I think, dog than a lot of other ones. - Bigger dog than you find around the city of Chicago. The first thing that goes on is mustard. Golden mustard. - Only mustard, no ketchup. I'm sorry I even said the word. - Watch your language in the kitchen here, buddy. Then we're gonna put on the bright neon green relish. That's a Chicago trademark thing, you know? The nice, bright white Spanish onions, again, raw onions, kosher dill pickle. And we're gonna take our box, 'cause all of our Superdawgs come in a box. We're gonna just open that up. Put the dog in. All of our sandwiches come with Superfries, they're hand cut every day. Now most places around the city of Chicago use a red tomato. We're a little different. We use a green pickled tomato. - [Vince] Oh, okay. I like that. - People either lover, they're lovers or they're haters, so you must be a lover, I guess. Then if you'd like, the memorable hot sport peppers. - [Vince] Sure, those are must for me. - They go right up on top there. Then we're gonna close our box. That's easy. - Simple but complicated because the ingredients, I know you guys spend a lot of time picking out the proper ingredients. Like you said, down from the dog itself to the fries, which I heard you have a custom, what is it, slicer? - We have a slicer that is proprietary, custom made for us, that gives it the crinkle cut on all four sides of the fry. It gets the right amount of color and the right amount of crispiness to it. - Beautiful. Well, thank you. If you don't mind, I'm gonna go take this and have mine outside with some wine, is that okay? - Absolutely. - All right. Thank you so much. - [Don] Thanks for stopping. - This is my blue box. You get the red box. - Same thing. My dad just liked both colors. - [Vince] Okay. - So we have half a million of each, every year. So we. - Half a million boxes. - So they didn't wanna wrap 'em in just wax paper. So they designed this custom box that holds the Superdawg inside, the heat of the Superdawg, the crispiness of the fries, has air vents on the back, if you look here. - The problem with a lot of crinkle fries is they are soft, they have no texture and these have this great crunch. All right, I have to go in there on the dog now. - It has the same taste since 1948. - I've had a lot of Chicago style hot dogs. This is I think the best one I've had. - [Scott] Thank you. - And I'm not just saying that. A lot of times you get these dogs and they fall apart. - Correct. - And then you can't get a bite of everything in one bite. - [Scott] Right? - This is absolutely delicious. - [Scott] Thank you. Yes. - All right, so have you ever had anybody pair a Superdawg with wine? - Never. - All right, so I could be the first. I had a lot of fun picking what wine would go with a hot dog. A lot of people said rose, but I wanted to do something a little more off the beaten path, so this is a Gruner, which is an Austrian white wine. And it's known for having a lot of green, kind of vegetal flavors in it and can even have some white pepper flavors. I thought that that would pair really well with a lot of the green you have going on here, right? Green relish, green tomato, green sport pepper, green pickle. In addition to the matching flavors, the acidity in the Gruner Veltliner matches the acidity in the relish and tomato and mustard and cuts through the fat and saltiness of the dog. It's great to talk to Lisa and Don and now you and really get a sense of something I know you guys take a tremendous amount of pride in, which is your family business. - As we say, thanks for stopping. - Cheers. - There are heroes in every restaurant, capeless crusaders whose sole purpose is to make sure you get a bottle of wine you enjoy. These warriors are called sommeliers, the French word for wine steward. And while the title of Somm may seem like it's simply about opening bottles and pouring wine, like most jobs, there's so much more to it than meets the eye. So to learn a bit more about life behind the curtain, I head to "Gibson's Italia", a stunning three-floor Italian steakhouse in downtown and one of the top 20 highest grossing restaurants in the country. Donned in my coat and tie, I prepared to shadow Somm, Kelly Palmer, for a firsthand look into the life of a sommelier. Okay, so what did I walk in and you doing, what are we up to? - Okay, so I am going to do a little light stocking. We always do this at the beginning of the shift, so you don't have to do it at the end of the shift when you're tired, after you've been running around all day. - [Vince] Gotcha. - And your feet hurt. - [Vince] How many different wines do you guys carry? - 400. 450? - [Vince] Okay. And you have to make sure all of those are stocked at any given moment. - Yep. - [Vince] And then not only do you have to make sure they're in stocked and ordered, but you have to make sure they're organized because there's nothing worse than if you're working at a restaurant, you've sold 'em on a bottle. - [Kelly] Yeah. - [Vince] And then you come up and you realize it's outta stock. - Right. Exactly. And then they're waiting and then you can't find it. And it's super stressful. - Basically half your shift is managing everything else. - Yes. - Yeah. - Yeah, the service portion of it is actually pretty small. - This is also the big part of the job nobody thinks about is how much glassware. - Oh my gosh. - [Vince] You go through on a shift. - We're fortunate enough to have a person whose only job is to polish glassware. Except for these, these are. - These are the good ones. - Yeah, if I break one it's, I'm only mad at myself, you know? - I am notorious for breaking glasses, unfortunately. You know, when people come to a place like this and say, all right, well, the wine is expensive. Well, you're also paying not just for the wine, but you're paying for the Somm and the service. - Sure. - You're paying for the glassware. - The nice glassware, to sit in a nice chair, for the view. There's a lot of things that go into the price of the bottle. My favorite part of the job is just actually getting to talk about it. And when I have a customer that wants to talk back with me. Like, we have so much fun and we just get going and it's great. - Before service started, Kelly had a few moments to explain how she constructs the wine list and share some wine ordering tips. All right. So if I'm a guest and I'm coming in here, and I get this book, which is beautiful, it's like 50 plus pages, but where do I start as far as navigating? What are the tips we can give guests to kind of make sure they get a wine they're gonna like? - Tell your server that you would like to speak to the Somm. - That's why you're here. - That's my entire job. And don't be intimidated. We're not here to make you feel silly or to try and push something on you. We want you to get something that you really like. - Yeah and that's a big, I think misconception, a lot of people think, oh, the Somm just wants to upsell me. - No. Just tell me what you normally drink. - So my big thing is, I'm always like, don't try and be too complicated. You don't have to say, oh, I want a really tannic high acid this and get into wine descriptors. People will get in the weeds on that and say contradicting things. Just tell people, I think what you normally drink. - Say it's burgundy, okay. Burgundies tend to be really expensive, especially in a restaurant. Tell me what you wanna spend. - Yeah. - So I'll try to figure out what style of wine you like and the price range you want to be in. - And then when you want to tell us how much you want to spend, let's say I'm with, we're colleagues or I'm with a date and I don't want to say a number. Is there like a subtle way to do that? - For sure. I'll just pull you aside. And we just kind of go through the list together. You just point to what you. - Yeah, exactly. And that's what I tell people too. Like if you have a list in front of you be like, oh, I was thinking something similar to this and point to something that's in your price range. - Don't point to the name of the wine, point to the price of the wine. - My other don't that sometimes people do, they'll be like, well, give me a good bottle of Barolo. And then they won't open the list. - Yeah. - Well, just know if you do that, especially depending on the restaurant, they might only have one Barolo and it might be $300 and then they get the bill and they're like totally surprised. And they think the Somm ripped them off. - That's not what anybody wants. Especially Gibson's, one of our main things is not upsell. We undersell at every opportunity. - Yeah. - [Both] Undersell and over deliver. - I think a big thing is telling the Somm, do I want exactly what I'm asking for? Or am I open to try something off the beaten path that's similar. - Right. So you want like a Pinot noir or Nebbiolo, you wanna spend a hundred dollars. It's gonna be a good wine. Is it gonna be a great wine? Maybe not. But I could take you to say Sicily and get you an Etna Rosso, which is Nerello Mascalese and people don't really know about it and it's kind of the burgundy of Sicily and you get a lot of those same flavors and those same characteristics, and it's a great wine and it's not nearly as expensive as burgundy or Barbaresco or Barolo. - What is the etiquette on tasting? If you're like, oh, can I have a taste of this or that? - If it's by the glass, I'll bring you as many tastes as you want. - [Vince] Okay. - It's Gibson's. I'll find the time, we'll do this all night. - Sure, sure. - Sure. - Well, that's very kind, so I'll be the bad guy and say, try not to go like Baskin Robbins, like just don't like 10 of them. I usually try, if I'm asking for a taste, I'll ask for a taste of two wines and I'll do it at the same trip, so the Somm only has to make one trip. - [Kelly] Yeah. - And I'm picking between those two wines. - Yeah. - We landed on the bottle. Somm brings it over, presents it. Let's go over, kind of what is the etiquette there? - So I'm gonna bring it over. I'm gonna tell you where it's from, Chateau Palmer. It's from Margaux, which is in Bordeaux. I'm gonna tell you the vintage. - And why are you doing all this? - We wanna make sure that there aren't any mistakes before I open it. - [Vince] Right. - I want you to know exactly what this is. - But just make sure it's what you ordered. - Yeah. - Sometimes there's miscommunication. 'Cause once you open it. - Somebody's paying for it. - Yeah. - Either the restaurant's payin' for it or you're paying for it. You're gonna pour a taste. Now what is the taste for? - The taste is to see if the wine is flawed. - Because a lot of people do think the taste is to see if they like the wine and then people will send back the wine if they don't like it. - Yes. - I think most places will take back a bottle of wine if you don't like it, but that's not really what the taste is for. - Right. - Final piece of advice when you're ordering from a restaurant Somm. - Don't take it too seriously. - [Vince] Yeah, just have fun. - Have a good time. - All right. Well I guess we have to get ready. We have service in what? Like two hours? - Yeah. - All right. Let's do it. It was 4:00 PM. And you could sense the dinner rush looming in the air. If you're unfamiliar with a restaurant shift, let me fill you in. After pre-shift and prepping your mise en place a few hours before open, the happy hour crowd makes their way in between four and 5:00 PM. If it's a popular restaurant, they're usually fighting each other for bar seats and the staff gets to go from zero to a hundred, right at the outset. The early diners come around six, people come in right from work, the older crowd or people going to a show later. And the big rush, where you run the risk of getting in the weeds, as we say, is from seven to nine. As staff, dinner service is a lot of rinse and repeat. The controlled chaos of routine. On a good night, it goes as such, greet diners, take order, feed diners, turn the table. Happy customers, happy staff. But as my restaurant veterans know, it's almost never that simple. As a Somm, you're often flying solo or maybe with one other, which means unlike a server, the whole restaurant is your territory. Three tables just arrived at the same time and they all wanna talk to you about the wine list. The new server, Brad's, chatting your ear off while you run from table to computer about which glass of Merlot on the list is best, when you don't even have a Merlot by the glass to begin with. You misplaced your wine key, probably when you loaned it to Brad, because he forgot his and you also noticed that the busser dropped burgundy glasses off at a table that's about to get Bordeaux, a problem that'll take you more time to explain to the busser than to just go fix yourself. But on the way to fix it, your bartender tells you you're out of Chardonnay by the glass, even though you know she's just not looking hard enough in the cellar for it. And finally you serve table 32 their wine, but your manager wants you to greet a table of VIPs upstairs ASAP, you get the idea. But if we do our jobs right, the customer never knows any of this. The restaurant looks like a well-oiled machine and you never saw us without a smile on our faces. The shift ends, you do your side work and head home for the night or maybe a night cap, if your energy level allows. The restaurant experience may seem like classical music to you, but it's jazz to us. It's all day in the life of a sommelier. - Time to round out our Chicago food staple trifecta. Quite possibly, my favorite Chi Town dish is the Italian beef and where better to pair some beef and wine, than the place that invented the sandwich itself, "Al's Beef", the original location on Taylor Street. - We're gonna have an Italian beef sandwich today, our signature sandwich. - This is the place that invented the beef, correct? - My grandfather, he invented this in 1917. He was a peddler and he used to go on the streets and sell sandwiches. Gets invited to a wedding and the thing they had was a piece of roast beef. He said, listen, that piece of meat, that you're serving 15 or 20 people with, I can do 40, so they said, well, sure. And he comes up, since he's a sandwich guy, he's got the slicer. - Yeah. - So he slices this stuff paper thin. - [Vince] Super thin. - That's how he started the Italian beef sale. Now what we do is you can see the juice here. This is all natural. - [Vince] Okay. - [Chris] You can see how it holds together, it's a thin piece of meat. And what we do is just slap it on, holding on to. - What is this fork? This is. - That's our fork. We invented this fork because prongs don't grab everything. All the little particles, it won't grab it. So the forks do, they drag everything with it. - [Vince] Gotcha, all that flavor. - Then what we do, hold this like this, swirl this around. - [Vince] Look at that. - This is our mix, the jardiniere mix. - [Vince] Little spicy. - We make it ourselves here. Yeah, it's a spicy, hot mix. Wrap it in this paper here. Okay and that is how you do Italian beef sandwich. - [Vince] Do you drink Lambrusco? - I drink whatever you're gonna give me. - That's a good answer. So Lambrusco is a semi-sparkling red wine from Italy. It's a little bit sweet. Just a little. So you can go with the spicy food. Sweet spicy. - Oh, okay. - And it's fresh because it's chilled. It's bubbly, 'cause you know the beef's heavy. This one checks a lot of boxes. If your food is spicy, you need a little sugar in your wine. Like from this Italian Lambrusco. The acid and bubbles from the wine love the fatty beef, ditto for the tannin in the wine and the sweetness and acid in the wine love the salty beef and French fries. And I know these aren't technically from the same place, but could we say Italian beef and Italian wine are at least second cousins? Why not? So how do I eat this? - Ah, there's called an Italian stance. - Okay. - And what we do is put your forearms here, your legs back a little bit. - Back it up. - So anything falls, it falls down. Don't fall on you. - Okay. - And I got a stomach, so it usually hits my stomach. - All right. So back up. - So what we're gonna do is put our face into this. You gotta like to eat. - So good. - Vinny, you talk, I'm gonna eat. - You go, 'cause I can talk about what this tastes like. The spice, the sandwich with the kind of soggy bread and the French bread can hold up to the dip, which is nice too. And you're right with the stance, 'cause I'm losing stuff out the bottom here. - Right. - That's why you got the stance. - I like it with the wine. - How many sandwiches you eat a week? This has gotta be dangerous to be too close to this. - Guy asked me that one time. And I said I had more beef than John Wayne had on his cattle drives, trying to get away without pain and keep giving me this wine. - This is about the greatest afternoon I could ask for, if I'm being honest. - Oh, if Marilyn Monroe was here, we'd have more fun. - [Vince] Did you guys know that on our website, we've the places we visited listed on each episode's page, the wines we drank available for sale and our VIP section with bonus videos? I just thought I'd let you know. I first arrived in Chicago in 2006 as a student attending DePaul University, just a semi-awkward kid from Cleveland in awe of the big city, eager to learn. Fast forward 14 years, I hear that DePaul started a School of Hospitality Leadership, AKA a school tailor-made for people getting into the food and beverage industry. So I met with the director of the school, Nicholas Thomas, to hear more. - Welcome to the School of Hospitality Leadership. - Oh thanks. It's gonna be back in my alma mater. - We started with a very generous gift from the Hilton Foundation, since then we've received multiple gifts from the Marriott Foundation, individual, private and company donors, to do something really unique. We wanted to create a business program in the city of Chicago focused on hospitality leadership. And that's what we did. What we also really wanted to do was to follow the mission-driven aspect of DePaul. We do everything we can to support first generation college students. We do everything we can to support minority students. And we also provide a very, very significant amount of scholarship opportunities for our students. You know, really those scholarships mean that students that might not have had the opportunity to go to school, can. - Very nice. And so if you're wanting to get into, let's say hotel management, casino management, restaurant management, this is the place to go. - I think so. I think so for a couple reasons, one, we have a really strong co-curricular program here. Mentor programs, internship opportunities, student clubs, we have a huge study abroad portfolio. All of our faculty and staff here are passionate about what they do. The faculty, vast majority of them, are either still working or came from industry. - Very cool. Well, I have a Nerd Lab to do and I think I could use help from a professor. Can you help me out? - [Nicholas Thomas] I'd love to. - [Vince] All right. - Welcome to the V is for Vino Nerd Lab. We take complicated wine topics and make 'em simple. Today we're talking about how to taste wine. - [Movie Announcer] How to taste wine. - I know, I know, you taste wine all the time, but there is science to tasting that'll help you get more outta your glass. And while most occasions don't call for an in-depth analysis of wine. - She loves you. - There are times that you'll wanna properly identify what's in your glass. Tasting wine can basically be broken down into three parts, sight, nose and palate, or in layman's terms, look, smell and taste. Let's start with sight. Look at the color. For white wines, light colors like straw and greenish yellow probably mean a light fresh wine that doesn't have any oak presence. As wines age, or get exposed to oxygen, either from oak barrels or from time in the bottle, they get darker, more opaque and turn more gold, then amber, then brown. Red wines are the reverse. They get lighter as they age. They may start as a deep purple or ruby in color, but as time goes on, they'll become more transparent and start to turn tawny and then brown, basically all roads lead to brown. This is similar to how some fruit, as it gets oxidized and ages, gets old and starts to brown. With wine, this process just takes longer. The more translucent a wine is, the lighter in body it tends to be. Pinot noir from cool climates is usually see through and pale ruby and it's flavors tend to be tart, like cranberry and pomegranate. On the flip side, the more opaque the wine is, the bigger the wine will be and have more ripe fruit character. Cabernet Sauvignon from warm climates is deep ruby or purple in color and its flavors tend to be blackberry or cassis. Okay, on to the nose. So, I was just about to tell them that the nose is actually the most important part of wine tasting. Tell 'em why. - Absolutely. So we have 400 olfactory receptors that pick up over a trillion different odors. - Yeah. Compare that to like five tastes. So essentially most of what you're getting when you're talking about the flavors in wine, it's coming from the nose. - Absolutely. So this is why when you have a cold, for example, and your nose is stuffed up, you have trouble tasting. The same way, if you pinched your nose, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an apple and a potato if you took a bite of it. Which one's the apple? - [Announcer] Idiota. - So the first thing I'm definitely doing is giving a swirl. The reason we swirl is because alcohol and water evaporate at different rates. And so when you swirl, the alcohol evaporates up into the air and carries the flavor aromas up into your nose. - The first thing I want to do is I want to take a big smell of it. And I wanna try to identify the fruit. In this case, I'm really getting some strawberry, but that doesn't tell me all I need to know. I need to qualify that fruit. And in this case, strawberry can be lots of different things. You can have bruised strawberry, you can have ripe strawberry you can have jammy, dried, cooked. The second thing I'm doing is I'm looking at non-fruit aromas that I'm getting. That might be something like minerals. It might be something like flowers, it might be herbs. And then there's one final step to it. I wanna talk about oak, baking spices, cinnamon, tobacco, vanilla. This really helps me understand a lot about the wine. - And then a couple other pieces of advice I give when people are smelling. Number one, I keep my mouth open, helps me get more out of it. Number two, don't go too deep. If you get too far in there, you're gonna burn your nose with the alcohol. So just enough to smell. And then the third thing is that I'm trying to get as much information as I can out of the nose before I even go and taste it. So I'm gonna try and basically confirm everything that I smell on the palate, which is where I'm going now. We are here to talk about the palate or the taste of the wine. And if we've done everything right up until this point, we kind of already have an idea of what the wine is gonna taste like. We're really just tasting to confirm what we smelled and to learn about the structure. Now what is the structure of the wine? - Exactly. So there's five components to structure. Let's talk about sugar. Is it dry? Is it off dry? Is it sweet? - Sure. How much sugar are we getting? - Exactly. Then you've also got acid. So is it gonna be super tart, like a lime or a lemon? - So is it low, medium or high acid? Is it super tart and crisp and really makes your mouth salivate or maybe a little less so. - Exactly. And then tannin, low, medium or high. - Does it suck the moisture outta your mouth like a dark chocolate or like an over steeped tea? - Exactly. Then we also have alcohol. Does it make your throat burn? Is it hot? - Like a shot of vodka? - Exactly. And then we've got body. Is it like cream, where it's rich and creamy. - And full bodied? - Exactly. You feel this weight in your mouth or is it light and crisp and fresh? - Like skim milk. And then finally, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take all of this, everything we gathered from the nose, everything we gathered from the palate and say, okay, is this wine simple or complex? - And what we're looking for is the finish of the wine. - How long is the finish? How long is this staying in your palate? Hope people learned a little bit more about how to taste wine. It takes a little more time to taste this way, but I think you get a little bit more out of your glass if you do it like this. So cheers to DePaul and my alma mater and cheers to you guys, keep geeking out. Chicago isn't all comfort food and steakhouses. It's got some of the best contemporary cuisine around. So I had to make room for one final stop, "ABA", in the trendy West Loop neighborhood. As a Lebanese boy myself, I was more than excited to have some Mediterranean cooking from Top Chef alum, CJ Jacobson, at one of the hottest restaurants in town. - As a chef, I started in southern California. I was playing volleyball in Europe. I used my height, you can't tell right now, but well, you know, I'm. - [Vince] You're very tall. - I'm frickin' tall, yeah. Playing in Europe, I just kind of noticed a different, the way people eat differently. They didn't have as many sort of phobias, they're excited about things, so I got to see the world. - That gave you your kind of taste and you got the bug. You're like. - Oh yeah. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so great. First I started working at a restaurant on Abbott Kinney in Venice Beach. When I finally moved here to Chicago and joined, "Let Us Entertain You", Rich asked me, he goes, C, what do you think about Mediterranean food? And I said, I love it. You know, but I didn't grow up in the Mediterranean, didn't grow up in Beirut or Italy or anywhere else. I grew up in SoCal, so I know they have similar sensibility, so I'll go with that. But I wanna make it my own. - But similar climate, right. - For sure. Yeah. We have Mediterranean climate in Lake Forest, California, where I grew up. - So how did you learn Mediterranean cuisine? - YouTube. No, I'm just kidding. I think probably ideally, I mean, I did research and research and research and error. And I did live in Israel for 10 months in one of my volleyball seasons, so I recall a lot of stuff there. Seeing the sensibility of the people every day, getting their groceries and the way they would cook, how fresh and clean it was. It was very, very similar to Southern California, sort of farmer's market cuisine, I guess. It wasn't that much of a stretch, what was a stretch was understanding like ras el hanout and all these north African spice blends or Berber spice and becoming comfortable with those. Then they were maybe intimidating me in the beginning, but now they just seem like one more page in a book that you can kind of add or not add. I never thought I'd open a restaurant this big, this successful, doing food from the middle east, it's kind trippy. - If it's, I always say good will be good. - Yeah. - And that's obviously evident by how much of a reputation you have in the city. I mean, this is one of the hottest places in town right now. - [CJ] Thanks, man, I appreciate it. - Very cool, well, I'd love to cook some of the dishes, if you have a second. - Yeah, let's go do it. - [Vince] All right. Let's do it. - We're gonna start with the Greek style salad. You ready? - Yeah, let's do it. - All right. Cool. So first we need to make the dressing. I have a garlic clove here, so let's kind of crack it a little bit, cook it with a little bit of the vinegar and I'll just kind of hang out and we'll come back to this. Do some other stuff. - All right. So let's let that marinate. - This is just an onion, gonna go ahead and slice them. I mean, these are olives, okay. Don't know how to clean olive? This is a special time for you. So I'm gonna show you. Can't even believe how many like actually cooks we have, come in, they're just like slicing olives with their knives. I'm like, no, no. We're like a rustic train wrestling. Just press it down. And it all comes out. There'll be some oil there. - Do you marinate these yourself? These are good. - Yeah. So yeah. Have at it? - Yeah. I'm going for it. There's two types of people in the world. People who like olives and people who don't And I dunno if I can hang out with the people who don't. - Well, I mean, I was one who didn't. So, I mean, we would've had a rough run of this. They call these vine ripe. These are cherries though. That's what we do. Next up is cucumbers, an oblique cut, okay. All right, so we're getting pretty close here, right? - Yeah. Yeah. We've been letting that sit. - It's been sitting. Imagine it's been sitting for like an hour or so. Yay. It'd be really, really nice. - [Vince] Yay. - [CJ] I get a spoon, two parts vinegar to one part olive oil. - Two parts vinegar, one part less, more vinegar, more acid? - [CJ] I think so. So taste it. - Perfect. - [CJ] Good, right. - And you know what? Just good, good high quality olive oil. - Yeah. You taste that strong. - It tastes strong. - [CJ] And here is our vinaigrette. So, you wanna taste a tomato and see where we're at? - [Vince] Yeah. I love it. Oh, really good tomato. - Pretty money, right? - Sweet. Oh my God. - They're kind of coming to alive. Next, feta, right? We use a Bulgarian feta, we get from like a local Greek guy. Lots of Greek people here. I don't know where they get it, but you know, we have another restaurant in Austin and we don't have our Bulgarian hookup, so we got. - Yeah, you got a guy. - We don't have a guy. Anyone's in Austin, they know a guy? All right. So right here, you have to make a decision. Well, I'm making it for you. I'm not gonna add feta in here because I don't want this to be some weird salad bar. - Goofy mess. - Giant mess, you know. Flashbacks of some sort of weird buffet where you wouldn't wanna be in the first place. So I'm gonna add some feta. I'll probably put like two pieces on the ground right here, By the ground, I mean the bottom of this bowl here and I don't want a lot, I just want enough to be able to taste it with my eyes and olive oil. - I love that. Good finishing oil. - [CJ] Yeah. - [Vince] Right on top. - [CJ] Important. - Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Two different types of tomatoes. So two different textures, a little bit. - Yeah and if you taste one, side by side, the little guy's definitely sweeter. - Sweeter and these ones are a little more. - And it has a more like adult tomato flavor. All right, so dish number two is our lamb ragu hummus. So we're gonna do first is we're gonna heat this up and we're gonna keep it warm. We don't wanna like boil it because it'll kind of change what's happening inside the hummus. - Can I try it? - [CJ] Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. - But you know how like the French, like the omelet is the test? - [CJ] Yes. - For Mediterranean, it's hummus. Oh yeah. - [CJ] Is it good? - Delicious, delicious. - How are your eggs? - Now the recipe for the hummus is, without giving away any secrets, I guess. - Well, you can probably guess entirely what I do. So you got chickpeas, you got tahini, which is ground sesame seeds, right. Also you need to cook your chickpeas. We get ours from Washington state, also garlic, olive oil, lemon juice. So next up is making our ragu. So a little bit olive oil, garlic, flavor in chilies. - [Vince] Ah, okay. So we're making it, it's gonna have some heat, this dish. - [CJ] Oh yeah. - I love it, yeah. And the toasty garlic, just delicious. - [CJ] So this is a lamb that we roasted overnight. - [Vince] Okay. What cut? - [CJ] It's a shoulder. - [Vince] Okay. - That help you with the shoulder. - And the lamb, you just braised until it got tender? - We put a spice on it called lamb spice, which essentially chili de arbol, where we take all the seeds out. - [Vince] Yep. - And toasted cumin. I'm gonna add some harissa. - [Vince] And what is harissa? - [CJ] Harissa is a kind of like the north African, middle Eastern tomato sauce. Mostly chilis, garlic, cumin, coriander. All right, I think we're ready to plate now, if you are. - Yeah. Let's do it. - Gonna put our hummus here. Usually I go. - [Vince] And you got the little well in the middle just to kind of catch some of that sauce. - [CJ] Yeah. These are just parsley stems. Add a nice little bite to this dish. - [Vince] Oh, pita action, huh?. Yeah. A little pocket action. Oh my God. I see why that's one of the most popular dishes. - [CJ] Yeah. - The, whoo! And it's got some heat. - [CJ] Yeah. - But the creaminess from the hummus. - [CJ] Yeah. - [Vince] Kind of balances it out. I approve. This is absolutely incredible. - I'm so glad you like it. - Thank you for all this. - Thank you man. - Time to pair our dishes with some wines. So how do you select the wine list here? Because you have a lot of different foods and a lot of times they're on this table at the exact same time, right? The fish, the meat, all the appetizers, because that's the style of the cuisine. - So, I think that we always try to pick wines that are super versatile, obviously wines with like good acidity, not a lot of overly heavily oaked wines or anything like that, just because we want things to be super approachable. We try to keep the wines in Mediterranean. So somewhere near the ocean and the Mediterranean. - So what are we starting with? - So the Village Salad is kind of your classic, you could call it kind of classic Greek salad. So with this dish, I really like this wine. It's a rose from Corsica. - Corsica? - People are always kind of like, what do you think the next big wine region is? And I think Corsica is definitely one of those regions and for our kind of cuisine, it's amazing. It's ocean wine. It's briny, it's salty, it's high acid. It's refreshing, as you're sitting here on the patio, having a vegetable, kind of tomato-based salad. It's amazing. Especially with the olives. - The clean wine goes great with the clean salad while the acid matches the acid in the tomatoes and the dressing. And the salinity compliments the briny olives, plus Mediterranean food and Mediterranean wine go great together. All right, so now this is a challenging dish too, because spice and the lamb and not just spice, but spicy to an extent, there's harissa. - So this one, we went definitely unique. So Chateau Musar, the most famous winery in Lebanon. - [Vince] Yep. - This is their Musar Jeune Rouge, this is their entry level. It's Cinsault, syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon. Cinsault, I think, adds a little bit of fruit and structure to this wine, where the Cabernet gives it a little bit of that kind of like earthiness. And then syrah gives it that acidity and that spice. A little bit of like a chalky quality that sometimes I get where it's almost a Sweetart thing, which is a weird description for wine. - Yeah, this has that spice that you want, like you said, from the, must be the syrah. I get that spice. You already said it. But the Sweetart thing, because you get blue fruits and you know, the blue Sweetarts. I mean, it has so many of those parallels, which is really cool. The high acid wine cuts through the creamy hummus. And while this wine isn't sweet, it's fruity and low tannin, so compare with the spicy lamb. The medium bodied dish matches the medium bodied wine and again, the Lebanese dish and the Lebanese wine go great. I knew you were gonna like bring some fun wines that we hadn't had on the show, especially these regions. So you brought me exactly what I was hoping you would do. - Was glad to have you in, thanks for coming in. - Cheers. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed much of the city, 17,000 structures. So in 1893, the Chicago World's Fair, called "The Fair That Changed America", rose from the ashes and showed the world Chicago was back. And much of it happened here in the Midway Plaisance, in Jackson Park, a mile-long expanse, 20 minutes south of downtown. The fire and the fair gave Chicago a chance to rebuild the city for the 20th century and beyond, a clean slate to create an enduring modern metropolis. And 27 million people, came from all over the planet to attend, to see things like the world's first Ferris Wheel, eat new foods called Cracker Jacks and Juicy Fruit gum and see innovations in architecture. As you've seen, that mix of food, wine, history and fun still draws people here today. Chicago sometimes gets made fun of as the city of people who weren't brave enough to leave for New York or LA or shiny new cities like Austin or Denver, but guess what makes Chicago special? It's those people who've always called Chicago home. The food traditions run by diehard Chicagoans, born and raised, continuing their family's legacies, the people whose father's father's father never stopped believing in a Cubs championship. The people investing in the city because it's their own. People here are so kind, they're often called Midwest Nice. And why wouldn't they be? They're proud to show off their buildings, their homes, their food, their sports, their friends, their history, their city, Chicago. - Whoa! Hey, Vince here. Hope you enjoyed the episode. If you have a moment, follow us on Instagram. And if you really wanna support, please consider joining Vino VIP on VisforVino.com, it's our members only Patreon club with a ton of benefits. Thanks for watching and see you soon.