VINTAGES
Italians make toast to that one great wine

By Randal Caporoso

I think I found the perfect restaurant wine list years ago during my first visit to Italy.

I remember being picked up at 9 p.m. at my hotel just a few feet away from Florence's famous store-lined bridge, the Ponte Vecchia. It was a crisp, clear late-October night, and seemingly the entire city was out strolling, arm in arm, but my hosts were determined to show me the way "real Italians" eat; and so after negotiating the narrow, twisting, cobblestoned streets, we headed out of the city.

The drive lasted nearly an hour, up and down hills, a round, yellow moon chasing us all the way between the silhouetted trees. Finally we reached a thick-walled farmhouse. We walked, our shoes sinking into gravel, the thinnish air now bitingly cold, and I was wishing that I had one of those soft, supple, black leather jackets, and thick brown cords, like my Italian friends.

But when we entered, we were greeted by a roaring fire inside one of the stone walls separating the main room from the kitchen, and I was thankful that our table — long, thick and gnarly, seemingly carved out of a tree, but polished from heavy usage — jutted right out from the hearth.

After a lot of movement of hands and eyebrows — the menu evidently being an oral rather than written affair — wave after wave of courses appeared over the next two hours, and I was shown that I shouldn't so much eat as taste: the proprietor's prosciutto with specks of fennel and cracked pepper; wild mushrooms and carpaccio rolled with white truffle from nearby forests; wood-roasted pork, boar and rabbit, dressed in little more than than sprigs of rosemary. Even the simplest dish — white beans doused in olive oil so round, green and fruity that you could drink it — seemed to reach the sublime.

The wine was a Chianti that was already waiting for us on the table even before we arrived. Its light, zippy yet warm and rounded flavors not only seemed to deepen through the 10th or 12th course, but somehow found a way to enhance every dish along the way.

By the time the grappa was carried out — warmed and spiced, a mysterious steam seeping from two spouts on either side of a covered, tortoise-shaped wooden bowl — I had counted eight empty wine bottles on the table (one for each of us). I asked my only English-speaking host if this was the only wine they sold. His reply: "As far as I know, or can remember."

"My goodness," I thought, "this is the perfect restaurant wine list — one wine, perfect inventory and cost control, everyone knows it and loves it, and it goes perfectly with all the dishes."

Why do we even bother with all the rigamarole we go through at home? Of course, we don't live in a Tuscan world, let alone a perfect one. Our food doesn't follow just one tradition, it's a fusion (or con-fusion) of dozens, and joyfully so. But still, I've never really understood why our restaurants need to bludgeon their customers with wine lists the size of phone books. There's something to be said for the minimalist Italian approach.

Even if it's not feasible for us, there are a lot of ideal elements. Think of the Buddha, and his methodology of yoga aimed at binding mind and "self." I can think of few instances in my life where wine and food were instantly and unconsciously bound as well as during that cold night in Italy, and I'm sure that the lack of distraction — that is, the absence of overcomplicated factors — had as much to do with my enjoyment as anything.

Which is why, for so many years, my own restaurant wine lists were written with as few as 65 or 75 wines at a time. Like a baseball player who hits a home run his first time ever at bat, I've been trying to do the same thing I found in Italy ever since — in my own fashion, of course. I think that even seriously wine savvy restaurateurs would admit that it's harder to make a short wine list interesting and exciting than it is to make a big one, but the idea is probably more feasible than ever, given these two factors:

• The in-house technology available today, making it possible for restaurants to compose new wine lists — incorporating the best, the latest, the most rare and exciting wines to be found — practically every day.
• The growing legitimacy of wine lists aimed at matching specific restaurant cuisines, as opposed to trying to be a representation of every basic wine from every wine region in the world. Why bother, when not all of them go with your food?

"Is the future of fine wine behind us?" I remember asking myself during the long ride back into Florence that night, my eyelids growing heavy with sleep. There is irony in the fact that certain foods, wines and ways of dining are so old that they seem frightfully more sophisticated than what we do.

Not that we are actually outdone, merely reminded: Great food and wine experiences are usually the ones that flow the easiest without stumbling over artifice and pretension.

Randal Caparoso, formerly of O'ahu, now operates Caparoso Wines in California. He recently wrote a book about his years as a restaurant sommelier.