Sommelier
Michael Denney uncorks a new use for the humble rubber band.
By Lisa Snider
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| Photography by Mariana Schulze |
I’d
watched him with an intense curiosity over the years as he sauntered in and out
of the arched barrel door with trays of wine. A couple of years ago, I finally
got up the nerve to ask if he ever allows guests into the cellar. With a smile,
he proudly escorted me into a room roughly the size of a shoebox, where some
5,000 bottles are stacked floor to ceiling (many are, in fact, strapped to the
ceiling) using a network of colorful rubber bands. It’s an impression that
stays with me to this day.
Sommelier
Michael Denney started pouring wine at the Ranch House in 1980, after pulling
the late shift as a bartender for a few years at the Ojai Valley Inn. “I
wouldn’t get off work until two in the morning,” he recalled.
A friend
heard his laments and encouraged him to take a wine steward job at the historic
restaurant, a destination for wine connoisseurs since 1953. But Denny was
mainly drawn by the lure of work hours that got him home before midnight.
Without
any specialized training, he acquired his wine knowledge on the job. “In those
days, we’d have up to five wine stewards on the floor,” he explained, “and
every Saturday night, we’d pull out six or seven wines and bag them up.” The
stewards were expected to spend 15 or 20 minutes alone with the wines making
their own personal notes. They couldn’t see the labels until they were done.
“When you compare things side by side like that, you learn really quickly.”
Now, he
says, they do it a little differently: “We taste every night instead of once a
week. We play a game. What would you be willing to pay for this wine? What am I
tasting? What does it remind me of?”
Wine, he
says, mirrors scores of other flavors, and so he encourages his staff to seek
out those comparisons. “A banana tastes like a banana. You’ll never get a
little apple or a little blackberry out of a banana. And you’ll never get
banana out of a blackberry. They taste like what they are. But wine imitates
thousands of flavors, and that’s what’s so fascinating about it,” he said.
Denney
feels that so much of enjoying wine is noticing its subtleties, which is
something he not only shares with his staff, but his customers, too. “If you’re
paying attention, it’s really fascinating.”
With
arguably the best wine list in the Tri-Counties, featuring 700 selections on 53
pages, Denney has, over his 32 years at the Ranch House, successfully evolved
his award-winning list to suit new trends as well as the recent economic
downturn. “When I started buying the wines, we only had 250 on the list,” he
explained. “At one time, we had as many as 900. With the recession, I scaled it
down to 700, which is still a big list.”
As a
result, Denney has become more discerning about what goes on that list, no
longer buying a trusted purveyor’s entire line, but instead looking for the
exceptional gems. “Sometimes I taste something that’s so good, it deserves to
be on the list. And there are those wines out there that remind you how good
wine can be. That’s what I’m looking for.”
He’s also
keenly aware of how different the customers’ preferences are today. “People
used to be more interested in vertical selections of Bordeauxs,” he said, “but
those have priced themselves out of the market we have here in Ojai. This isn’t
Las Vegas or Paris. People [today] don’t seem to require drinking older wines,
as they might have at one time, because palates now are geared toward
California and younger wines.”
Denney’s
list seems daunting, perhaps intimidating, but he’ll be quick to tell you it offers
something for everyone’s taste and budget, with prices starting at just 25
dollars. “We like to keep our wine mark-up low,” he said. “We want to see
people enjoy the wine, and we want them to come back.”
It’s a
handful of bottles hovering above the thousand-dollar mark that raises
eyebrows, and although those bottles don’t sell very often, customers expect to
see them on the list. And once in a while, one of those rare bottles gets
dusted off and uncorked. “A year ago last summer a guy came in and bought
several,” Denney recalled. “He drank one here and took some with him.”
Among the
cellar’s high-end vintages are a 1953 Chateau Cheval Blanc for $1,950 and a
1986 Chateau Petrus Bordeaux for $2,200. Once in a blue moon, customers will
let Denney sample their wine. He stills remembers one of his first nights on
the floor; the diners offered him a taste of a 1966 Chateau d’Yquem, long
considered the finest dessert wine in France. “It’s a transcendent experience,
just because it just goes on and on and on on your palate, and the flavors are
myriad and magnificent.”
Every
bottle Denney delivers to the table comes with a story and his verbal
tasting notes. At age 65, he says though his memory may fail him with other
details, it’s reliably accurate when it comes to wine. “Wine, at this point, is
probably the one thing I can still remember. I remember what things taste
like.”
And he remembers the stories that came with the wine. Like the time he accidentally sprayed Pol Roger Champagne all over Herb Alpert and his wife. Or the time Alan Hooker, the restaurant’s original owner, fell into the creek. And he can tell you anything you want to know about every bottle on his list.
“I think the stories behind the wine are interesting,” said Denney. “Things that interest you are easy to remember. It’s worthwhile, and that’s how you make it more enjoyable for the customer, by telling them the story. They get into it more; they pay more attention.”
He also remembers the 1994 Northridge earthquake. “I went to my kids’ bedrooms and saw that they were OK, and the next thing I thought about was the wine room.”
Though only one bottle was lost, it spurred him to go to work on the web of rubber bands now crisscrossing the bins. “It was the cheapest, easiest thing to do,” he explained. “It works.”
For Denney, it’s the stories, memories, and wines all coming together that give him pause to share his epiphany:
“It’s a relationship. And [it becomes] a three-way relationship: the people, the server, and the wine itself. That’s the fun part of this job—getting someone excited about something I’m excited about.”
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102 Besant Rd., Ojai
805.646.2360, theranchhouse.com
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photos, visit http://ventanamonthly.com/article.php?id=719&IssueNum=81
