The Winemaker Apprentice

an intimate portrait of Sarah Goler, former Wine Director of Tannat

First, some housekeeping:

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As so many of the stories in this project will concern Sarah's winemaking journey, a proper introduction to this rare person is in order. What follows is the biased testimony of a lover, a wild interpretation of ungovernable fate, a humming of the haunting melody only I can hear in the daily noise of our domestic cohabitation, for there is no journalism of the heart and no thesis for passion.

Many have observed something childlike in genius. Some have located this quality in a preternatural seriousness, others in boundless enthusiasm. If there is truth to this insight, then “childlike” is likely as modal by nature as children themselves; one child's innocence is unlike another's. While this inability to assume the air of adulthood may not be necessary nor sufficient to genius, (Sarah, despite her many gifts would refute the moniker to her dying breath) it does set one apart. And in her capacity for joy and her ease of wonder, in her faith in fairy tales, in the absoluteness of concentration carried forth from her days of wooden block architecture, to her scientific work, to her ceramic arts, to the education of her palate, she is thus marked. Her rare nature is made more precious still by the bifurcation of her gifts; she is an artist; she is a scientist. Part of what draws her to winemaking, I believe, is the instinct that those two ways of being can be reconciled there.

Before I continue, let me summarize her impressive genealogy and CV. Her grandfather, who told stories of sledding down the unfinished off-ramps of the George Washington Bridge, was a WWII veteran and accomplished businessman. Her grandmother was a brilliant painter and sculptor, held back by her time, whose work adorned the walls of our restaurant. Her mother is a scientist who studied malaria, Ebola, and other diseases of global import, and helped develop life-saving medications. She has three uncles, a cellist, an engineer/mountaineer, and a psychologist/actor. She's lucky enough to have acquired extra parents from her mother's time at NYU, who are also scientists. Her sister has transformed herself from valedictorian at Stuyvesant High School to a small CSA farmer in the Hudson Valley via Cornell University. Her brother is a bassoonist at Julliard. Sarah’s own education took her from the Little Red School House in the Village, to LaGuardia for Fine Arts, to Columbia for Engineering, to Scuola Normale Superiore, which is a sort of European super-Harvard in Pisa established by Napoleon, where she received her PhD in Physics, with an emphasis on graphene. When I met her in 2015, she was back at Columbia working as a post-doctoral researcher, developing a non-destructive method for dating ancient manuscripts. She had bits of mummy wrapping in vials in her bag and showed them to me across the table at the late Inwood Local the first time we met.

Before literature tucked me in its pocket and carried me twisted and turnedly to here, I was convinced I would be a physicist, so to be dating one felt very fine indeed. But during the whirlwind first week of our relationship that concluded with Sarah's proposal, she confessed that she wanted to leave research. On Elissa the landscape painter's couch, for I was subletting a room there at the time and had been introduced to Sarah, ostensibly, as a potential roommate, she traced her dearest dream: she'd have a vineyard and a small winery. A restaurant, perhaps, open seasonally for a few days a week, that was more like a dinner party. She didn’t know that the decade before I came to NYC my life had been devoted to a very similar dream, but after many disappointments and false steps, I abandoned it in a desperate gambit to publish my way out of destitution and despair. Imagine my surprise hearing my dream on her lips. Imagine her surprise to hear me say: you may not believe it, but I already know how to do most of that.

She would have set out the moment she could but I was not ready to leave the city. I still believed some writerly future awaited me here. Besides, I knew a winery took resources we didn't have, and she'd rekindled my dream to create a kind, landed place, a system of abundance and interdependence, of material, tangible love, that would issue a good life and good books as naturally as a lilac bush sculpts the air with its perfume. So we created a business plan, found funding, and started Tannat. We hoped it would become a little redistribution engine that would funnel enough wealth back out of the city to let us make a winery one day.

Sarah had no idea what she was getting into. She'd never worked in restaurants, and although wine had settled like a lodestone in the compass of her heart, she knew almost nothing about it. In her five years of work and study at Tannat, she essentially earned another PhD. Her palate has become precise and unrelenting, always in the search for that particular electricity that makes her neurons dance that will guide her as a winemaker. In her characteristic thoroughness, now that her self-guided degree in wine-knowing has come to a crossroads, she's conceived a new course of study: a five year rotating apprenticeship with winemakers around the world. This path will assuredly be just as surprising as the last, but Sarah will follow it with all the energy, innocence, faith, and genius that she's followed every other.

(When I asked Sarah if this descriptions captured her, she said: “It says that I'm fun, silly, smart, and like all the expensive things.”)

In those early days I wrote a poem about the dream we shared before we knew each other.

in the shed a potter's wheel

one day
a mud porch
shoelaces eeling
thru the thick brittle
of taupe & earthclay

& clay

rain the Monday before
soft & thorough
as seal fur swept
the earth in a horde

a lone trident
of chicken track
the scar of grape
The Sound of
the Mountain bedside
& long from its shelf

I see you weeping cold as a cannon
at some irredeemable loss
some rough merchandise
some day after many bouquets of pages
rot & sunspot our table

in my pack
lavender concord & radish

I cling to your body and the memory of shipwreck

**

Chicken Liver Pate a la Abram

My son Abram turned ten years old this week. In honor of his first decade, I'm sharing the chicken liver pate recipe I developed at Tannat. Abram, like most children, can be picky about food, so it was especially pleasing when we found out he loved our pate so much that he wanted to help prepare it. Watching him stir the onions, standing on a stepstool, and seeing his delight at blending the mixture, make up some of my favorite kitchen memories.

It may surprise you to know that Tannat originally didn't use any spices. Our philosophy was to make “everything local but the salt.” I was concerned, at first, that the strong iron flavor would exempt the pate from this ethos, but the livers we sourced from pasture-raised chicken at Yellow Belle Farm were so delicate that I worried for nothing. For this recipe, only the best, freshest, local chicken livers will do. If you can't find any like that and are constrained by the supermarket, consider adding allspice, bay leaf, and just a touch of star anise to this recipe to cover the stronger flavors.