Pairing with perfect pitch

Meet the man behind the Pacific Life Open’s wines
“I’m careful about what’s going into my stomach,” Tony Terlato told me with a laugh as he prepared lunch in his kitchen at the Vintage. “Careful” might be considered an understatement. Whether it’s the food he cooks or the wine he pours, he gives it a loving respect that might be called perfectionist if the word didn’t suggest tension. Terlato is not tense; he is relaxed. But he doesn’t relax his standards.
    He was preparing sautéed clams to begin with, and already the magic aroma of garlic and a good olive oil were scenting the room, while the sounds of opera on the sound system added to the Italian ambience. The clams were to be followed by a pasta with tomato sauce. Simple, but the standards still applied. For seasoning he was using a
Sicilian sea salt, his favorite (though for the pasta water he sticks with
Morton’s because he can judge exactly the proper amount: “It’s the one
I’m most comfortable with,” he explained.)
    The canned tomatoes are carefully chosen too: There is an annual selection process at the Terlato office headquarters in Chicago, when 35 different cans are lined up, opened and sampled.
    The choice of brand changes from year to year. One brand, from Sicily, was chosen three years in succession, then lost its place because it seemed to have become a little too watery. A different brand was selected. Once the choice is made, then that brand is ordered in quantity and used in the Terlato kitchen for the rest of the year to ensure
consistency of quality.
    But it was the choice of wines that this lunch was really about. Terlato is chairman of the Terlato Wine Group and Paterno Wines International.
    Paterno Wines has joined the list of sponsors of the Pacific Life Open this year and with that sponsorship comes a new focus on food and wines at the tournament. There are going to be events with wine and food themes throughout the championship, with a four-course dinner on March 17, prepared by Chef Joachim Splichal, one of the leading chefs in the country and founder of the celebrated Patina Group of restaurants. The wines to pair with Splichal’s food will be selected by Terlato.
    Pairing wine with food is what made Terlato begin to cook. Early in his career as a wine distributor, he told me, “We would take our customers out to a restaurant and sometimes they didn’t have the vintage and sometimes there was something else you wanted to taste and they didn’t have it. Then I wanted everything cooked a particular
way, because when you’re doing a wine tasting the wine is the tenor and the food is the chorus. But at a restaurant the food is the tenor and the wine is the chorus.
    “So I thought, ‘You know what, let’s put a little kitchen in.’ We had a room with an old table and chairs and we could seat about 15 people and we started to do bread and cheese and salamis and things like that. We got the customers out of their stores and into our facility, shut off the phones, created a little cave environment. It was very
good, but it started to get where it was twice a week, three times a week. I said ‘Let’s grill a steak once in awhile, maybe I’d like to make a little tomato sauce, a dish of pasta.’”
    Cooking was new to him but once he had been shown how he was committed. “I thought, ‘Anybody can do this!’ Now I have a book with over 400 recipes. It’s endless what you can do, and the pastas are endless – we have pastas that are little pouches, some that look like cornucopia, and they all taste different – and they don’t all go with
the same sauces.
    Sometimes I do these sautéed clams with pasta – but not all pastas work equally well with it.”
    That doesn’t mean the pasta isn’t good, he said. It’s just the wrong choice so “you don’t get that wonderful clam-saucy taste.”
    Waiting for the clams, around the kitchen table, we sampled a light Fumé Blanc from Chimney Rock. It was a delicate and delightful way to begin. You don’t start a meal with a big wine, he said. The order of the wines should be a progression, an escalation. The Fumé Blanc started us off perfectly.
    Then, serving the clams, (redolent with garlic and perfectly cooked), he poured a Rutherford Hill Chardonnay of which he is justifiably proud. In 1996 Terlato became a winery owner himself and slowly (“like turning a battleship”) he has begun to move the wines in a direction that has resulted in the Wine Spectator scores rising from the 80s (which is pretty good) into the 90s (which is marvelous.)
    This 2002 Chardonnay had been given 90 points. If I hadn’t known in advance what it was I would have refused to believe it was a California Chardonnay. It was lean and minerally and I would have guessed it to be a Chablis – my favorite among Chardonnay grape wines.
    I asked him how he pairs his wines when he’s planning a meal. That depends on what comes first, he said.
    “If I’m going to cook tonight and I know the menu, then I’ll choose the wines to go with each course. But if I want to show off some particular wines, then I’ll plan the meal to complement the wines. Today the wine is the tenor.”
    On the kitchen table stood a jar of hot pickles that he uses, very delicately, as a condiment with his pasta. It’s a group product created by friends, he said.
    “Once a year, we’ll get together – five guys – and we start before lunch. We cut up the cauliflower, the olives, the garlic, everything, we eat and we drink wine. We all bring pots – everybody has five or six or seven pots – and we put the oil in then we put it all in. At six or seven we’ll put something on the grill and have a big red. Then we take it home, let it ferment for about 10 days until the bubbles stop, then we pack it into jars and put a vintage date on it. This is 2003’s.”
    I asked him a question that has always vexed me. How do you choose which wines to cook with? He told me a story. One night he was giving an important dinner that was being catered by a star chef. The chef asked him what wine he was going to be serving. It was a rare, vintage wine that he treasured.
    “If that’s what you’re going to drink that’s what we have to cook with,” the chef declared. It made Terlato wince but when perfectionist meets perfectionist, standards have to be upheld. The chef got his wine but at the dinner, Terlato told his guests: “I just want you to know my heart is in this meal.”
    The bottom line? “I don’t have any cheap wine around. What would be the reason? If I’m drinking it, I’ll cook with it. I won’t cook with a wine I wouldn’t drink. And after all, what’s the point of using a $5 wine with a $20 steak?” It’s an unarguable point.
    We moved to the table for the pasta course.
    “This pasta takes 4 minutes and 20 seconds to cook, so I need everybody in place ready for it when it’s served,” Terlato said. He is a stickler for pasta that’s at that exact state of al dente that is rarely found in restaurants. But when it’s served right – as this was – then the flavor and the texture of the pasta get their full due. With the pasta he poured a Rutherford Hill Reserve Merlot that had been given a 94 score by the Spectator. It sang like Caruso and the pasta gave it a blissful choral accompaniment.

©2005 by The Desert Sun.