Life as a Sommelier in Italy
Summer Wolff followed her nose to an old farmhouse in Tuscany
(01/13/2009) The journey that took Summer Wolff, whose roots are in East Hampton, to her life today as a foodie and sommelier living in an
At work in her Italian “office,” Summer Wolff made arrangements for clients of diVino Custom and Wine Tours.
|
old farmhouse in Montebenichi, Tuscany, leading tours to wineries, restaurants, and other Italian sites, and helping oenophiles build up their wine cellars, began with her nose, and with a bottle of brunello di Montalcino, a well-regarded sangiovese wine.
Ms. Wolff was in Italy on a college semester abroad when a friend’s father invited her to a four-star restaurant, where he ordered the wine. “Right away I was mesmerized,” she said recently at her parents’ house near Three Mile Harbor, “by the flavors and sensation of this wine that went into my mouth. I started talking to the sommelier.”
According to her mother, one way Ms. Wolff learned about her world as a child was through her sense of smell. “I always sniffed everything when I was a kid,” she said. Later, when she became a sommelier, the ability to discern layers of aromas and specific scents served her well, and has impressed those around her, who say that she is now following her calling.
Ms. Wolff is in the States until March, when she and Amy Wadman, her colleague and the founder of diVino Custom and Wine Tours, will return to Tuscany to lead clients on a new season of trips.
At the Sassetti winery in Montalcino, Tuscany, Summer Wolff, left, and Amy Wadman, sommeliers, raised a glass of brunello with Livio Sassetti and his son, Lorenzo, who made the wine.
|
The tours are often centered in Tuscany, with stops in the Chianti Classico region, Florence, Siena, and surrounding areas. But other itineraries are offered as well, to spots such as Lake Como, Cinque Terre, Piedmont, and the Veneto, and countries such as Slovenia and Croatia, where, Ms. Wolff said, some up-and-coming wineries are producing good wines.
After her semester in Italy, Ms. Wolff went back overseas a few times to visit, but began her postcollege life working in a restaurant in South Carolina. When the wine director there quit, they handed her the wine list to manage, and within six months she had moved back to New York to begin studying to be a sommelier.
She worked at Blue Fin, a restaurant at the W Hotel in Times Square that has an extensive wine list, and became an assistant to Paolo Villela, the sommelier there. “He took me under his wing,” she said. “He sort of became my mentor; he still is.”
As a sommelier at Teller’s, an Islip steak house in a 1927 Art Deco bank building, where the onetime vault contains two wine cellars of more than 10,000 bottles, Ms. Wolff presided over a wine list of more than 600 labels.
She added wine from Felsina, a wine estate in Chianti, to the list, and one day the vineyard owner stopped in. During their conversation, Ms. Wolff said, “Out of the blue, I just said, ‘Can I come over for a month and just watch you guys at harvest?’ ”
They said yes, and in September 2005 she took a monthlong leave of absence from her job and moved into an apartment above the wine cellar at the Felsina estate.
Ms. Wolff in Tuscany.
|
She did public relations and marketing for the vineyard, and with her bilingual skills helped them sell wines in the American market. She also took visitors on tours of the vineyard. “They saw I really like working with people,” Ms. Wolff said, and offered her a job.
Ms. Wadman fell in love with Italy after moving there as a teenager with her parents. When her family moved back to the States, she stayed on and became fully bilingual. She worked in restaurants and at a castle that became a four-star bed and breakfast, where answering queries from English-speaking tourists about where to go and what to do grew into accompanying them as a translator. In 2001 it led to the establishment of her own tour company, diVino. When she completed an intensive yearlong sommelier course, the trips began to focus on vineyards, wine, and food.
As two young American women living in neighboring medieval Italian villages, Ms. Wolff and Ms. Wadman kept hearing about each other. When they finally met, at VinItaly, a wine festival in Verona, “we just immediately became good friends,” Ms. Wolff said, and began referring English-speaking tourists to each other.
“We’re both total cork dorks, and we’re both super passionate,” Ms. Wolff said. A quirky practice cemented their friendship early on: Drinking a bottle of Valtellina Superiore Rocce Rosse Riservem, 1995, from Ar. Pe. Pe. Winery, they agreed the wine was like Clint Eastwood in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Now, the two often practice “wine personification,” naming someone who they believe matches the flavor, body, and spirit of a particular wine.
Ms. Wolff moved back to New York in 2006 and in 2007 became a sales broker and wine consultant for D. Sokolin Company wine merchants, which was based in Bridgehampton.
When the company moved to Yaphank, Ms. Wolff said, repeated calls from Ms. Wadman asking her, “Are you ready to move back yet?” began to resonate.
The women made plans to work together in Italy to offer tours, and Ms. Wolff developed a way to work with Sokolin to provide clients with an opportunity to order wines they have tasted on the tours, and to help collectors choose wines to add to their wine cellars. “Everybody wins,” she said.
From October to December the women led day trips in Italy and reconnected with friends, restaurateurs, and winemakers with whom they will arrange visits for their travelers.
“The wine world is pretty small,” Ms. Wolff said. “We got appointments at some of the greatest winemaking estates.” Unlike California, where many vineyards are open to the public, “you can’t get to most of those estates without knowing somebody,” she said. In Italy, “it’s a house. The cantina is their basement, and their family is upstairs.”
DiVino (the word means both “divine” and “of wine” in Italian) offers a host of customized tours, from a Wine Masters’ luxury guided wine tour or a trip centered on visits to “undiscovered gems” or medieval castles — along with sipping some wine, of course — to a “bike and wine tour” or an “active wine adventure” that might include hiking, whitewater rafting, or winter Alpine sports. The company will create tours for families or small groups, or develop custom itineraries for travelers to follow on their own.
The company’s Web site, divinotours. com, has lots of information and, be forewarned, a lot of tantalizing pictures, too.
In a typical day, Ms. Wolff said, a group will visit two or three wineries. After a vineyard tour, there is often a private lunch in the wine cellar with the leaders’ winemaker friends. After a trip to a scenic place, such as a castle, there is a trip to a second winery in the afternoon.
At dinner, Ms. Wolff said — “and again, we know the restaurant, and the owner” — they might take along wines from one of the wineries they’ve toured, and perhaps the winemaker, as well. The chefs design a menu to match.
The tour groups usually visit two or three major winemaking regions or destinations on trips lasting from 10 to 14 days. “Everywhere you look is a postcard,” Ms. Wolff said.
From now until they head back to Italy in March, where they each have apartments in the same renovated farmhouse on a dirt road in Montebenichi, Ms. Wolff and Ms. Wadman are doing wine and food tasting events for wine collectors and others at private residences and at restaurants in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, St. Louis, and California. Wines from the Capannelle winery in the Chianti Classico region of Tuscany and the Iuli winery in Piedmont are featured.
At a tasting event in East Hampton last month, guests learned about Italian winemaking and about the Capannelle winery, where there is a wine vault containing vintages owned by collectors from all over the world. They sipped Capannelle wine and ate palate-pleasing appetizers including Tuscan cheeses with Etruscan honey sauce, warm Turkish figs with blue cheese and pancetta, and crostini dipped in olive oil from the first press of olives grown on trees in the Italian village where Ms. Wolff and Ms. Wadman live.
On Feb. 12, they will preside over a wine dinner at Prime restaurant in Huntington, and on March 6 they will be pouring wines at the Tre Bicchieri, or “three glasses,” awards in Manhattan for the top 300 Italian wines produced in 2008. The awards are presented by the Gambero Rosso Italian wine guide and affiliated with the Slow Food movement. One of them, Ms. Wolff said, will go to a friend who produces wines in Piedmont. The diVino ladies intend to help him celebrate.