PRINTA vino invention
While Columbia's wine scene grows, Bleu's innovative globes keep the classic drink fresh
Mary Minchew
When Travis Tucker envisioned this wine system, he wanted something that was both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Despite the constant dust bunny battle, Tucker says it does just what it’s supposed to do. He tries to select wine for the globes from different grape varieties, different regions of the United States and different countries. Bleu currently has French, Australian, Spanish and New Zealand wine among others.
November 13, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
As America transitions to the land of the red, white and blush, Columbia is right along with her.
Since summer 2007, a trio of locales catering to Columbia’s growing wine scene have opened, including Encore Dessert and Wine Bar, Hemingway’s Wine and Bistro and, most recently, Bleu Restaurant and Wine Bar. “Our culture as a whole is beginning to drink more wine,” Bleu co-owner Travis Tucker explains. “In European countries, wine is served with every meal. You don’t even think about it, just like water. I think that the American culture is almost there.”
The wine wall at Hemingway’s displays the more than 100 bottles the retail store sells ...
The romance of bottle service wasn’t lost at this Hemingway’s wine-tasting dinner Oct. 30. Co-owner ...
To bring this cultural shift to America’s heartland, Tucker and other Columbia restaurant owners combine innovative ideas with old classics. Whether they serve their wine by the glass, from the bottle, with dinner or dessert, the wine bars and merchants of Columbia work together to make this town’s wine scene rich, robust and full-bodied.
Thinking globally
Inside Bleu, Tucker stands at the lip of his bar and admires his creation. Clinging to the wall behind the black granite countertop are two rows of large glass globes filled with wine. Each of the 19 individual capsules has its own spout and dispense a different kind of wine — as fresh as if it were poured from a newly corked bottle.For Tucker and the system’s builder, Don Lineback, the globes glow luminously with more than just the natural hues of the 600 bottles of wine they contain. They glow with a vision realized, a dream come true. The 627 bottles within the globes make this system comparable to some of the largest wine displays in the world.
Tucker and Lineback created a system that has the potential to fundamentally change the way wine bars serve their vino, and Tucker predicts it is only a matter of time until other wine bars adopt the idea. Their nitrous wine-dispensing machine will keep the oxygen-sensitive drink fresh for extensive amounts of time. “I told Don that I wanted the wine to last at least six months to a year,” Tucker says. “He said, ‘No problem.’ Some of it has already been up there since the beginning of August, and it tastes the same if you taste it right next to a brand new bottle of wine.”
Although Bleu has only been open since the beginning of September, its distinctive globes have already become a key element of Columbia’s wine scene. “They are a great testament to the forward-thinking wine culture here in Columbia,” wine enthusiast Tyler Stephens says.
At 30 years old, Stephens is a former bar manager at CC’s City Broiler and something of a wine expert. He’s been to Bleu multiple times since its opening and enjoys being able to get a 6-ounce pour of reserve-quality wine (wine that is usually found on by-the-bottle lists, rather than by the glass) at a reasonable price.
Adam Guy, owner of Encore Dessert and Wine Bar, thinks Bleu’s system is cool and innovative. “As far as serving wine by the glass, if you can justify the investment, these wine systems are great,” he says.
Different strokes
As Bleu continues to challenge the limitations of serving wine by the glass, other Columbia wine bars serve customers the traditional way — by the bottle.
Across town at Hemingway’s Wine and Bistro, Julie Allen smiles as she sips a long stem glass of red with her three fellow co-owners and 15 of their closest regulars. Tonight these four friends, Julie, her husband, Van, and Dawn and Dru Vaughn, will celebrate their business partnership, their regular guests who have become more like friends and the wine that binds them.
“This is a special night because we opened that bottle of wine,” Julie Allen explains as she nods toward a jumbo-sized, 3-foot-tall bottle. “That is a whole case of wine in one bottle. We brought it home from California about a year and a half ago.”
A moment later, Van Allen gives an impromptu speech. “I mean this from the bottom of my heart,” he begins. “You guys, the Wednesday night club, mean a lot to us four. Every Wednesday night, we can count on you guys to show up. We love having you here every week.”
According to the owners, the restaurant’s vast wine selection and welcoming aura keeps the customers coming back for another glass.
“We definitely have a family atmosphere here,” Van Allen says. “We know most of the people that come in, and the people that come in and aren’t part of the family want to fit in with the rest of the gang.”
Because Hemingway’s has an attached fine spirits and cigar shop, the restaurant is able to offer even more varieties of wine than an ordinary restaurant. Dawn Vaughn explains that they have retail wines and restaurant wines. “If I have 75 wines on my wine list, and I have a whole different 100 wines in my retail store, then combined we have masses of wine,” she says.
Although Hemingway’s might not have a state-of-the-art wine-dispensing system, it has found a way to implement variety into the wine it offers by the glass. Van Allen says they like for people to be exposed to different wines, so they offer 14 wines by the glass on a list that changes every 45 to 60 days.
In an effort to offer a variety of wines at an affordable price, Hemingway’s also has a 20 for $20 wine list. “Some people don’t want to go over 20 bucks,” Dawn Vaughn explains. “So we have this list: 20 bottles of wine, so many whites, so many reds, that we offer for $20 a bottle. They’re all fabulous wines.”
Have your cake and wine, too
Adam Guy speaks like a proud father when he discusses his Encore Dessert and Wine Bar, the alter ego of the Upper Crust Bakery on Elm Street. Encore is open Thursday through Saturday nights and prides itself on serving a variety of delicious desserts, not to mention multiple wines to wash them down.
Guy says Encore, which has been open since August 2007, has been on national television and featured in several different magazine and newspaper articles. In November 2007, CBS’ Sunday Morning News even highlighted it in a story about the growing dessert trend in America. Encore was featured alongside restaurants in New York City and Boston.
Because it is a dessert bar, Encore’s vino differs from traditional wine lists by offering more specialty dessert wines. Guy says the key is to select a wine that is sweeter than the dessert itself. “We are so incredibly unique in what we do, and a big part of our formula is the wine,” Guy says. “We’ve actually gone in and tasted hundreds of wines with the desserts and tried to pair them together. The main thing for us is the experience of a dessert and its complementing wine.”
To cork or not to cork
State-of-the-art globe system or not, some people just want to have their wine served from the bottle. “There are many people around that will not order wine by the glass because they don’t know how long the wine’s been sitting there,” Dawn Vaughn says.
Van agrees, adding, “You can’t replace the taste of a fresh corked bottle.”
When it comes to the romantic implications of serving wine by the bottle, Guy holds the old-fashioned methods with high esteem. “Bottle service at the table is a really traditional, upscale way to serve wine,” he says. “If someone buys a bottle from us, we present it to them and pour it at the table.”
Paul Vernon, the former owner of Cherry Street Wine Cellar and Bistro who now owns and operates Top Ten Wines, believes customers benefit from a smaller glass-service wine list and fewer corks. “I only do five reds and five whites because I think that a wine list that has more than 10 or 12 wines by the glass does the consumer a disservice,” he says. “They can’t keep the wine well enough.”
A new identity
As Tucker turns his head toward Bleu’s entrance, he says it is his job to make sure nearly everyone who walks through the door buys a glass of wine. That’s part of what sparked Tucker’s initial Internet search where he found Lineback, who lives in Florida. After months of brainstorming, creating, Internet correspondence and visits from Lineback, the wine-dispensing system was complete.
Formally named N2 Wine, a system of this caliber was bound to take on an alias of its own. “Everyone calls them the wine globes,” Tucker says. “I don’t know why. I didn’t tell them to start calling it that. That’s just what they all started calling it: ‘The globes,’ the ‘wine globes.’”
The 19 glass spheres, each sprouting from the wall like a wine-hued flower bud about to burst, might not look gigantic at 14 inches in diameter, but they do hold an extensive amount of liquid. Each globe contains 33 bottles of wine. “No one has ever done anything to this scale,” Lineback says. He has questioned other companies and restaurants, both locally and nationally, on other systems that are out there. “Not a single one has told me that the wine will stay fresh for longer than four weeks tops,” Lineback says. “This wine will last forever.”
If you build it, they will come
Once the globes were ready to go, Tucker could do nothing but wait until the bar opened to see if the system could pique the interest of Columbia wine drinkers. The result was a well-fermented success. He says people love it because it’s something they’ve never seen before, and they are intrigued. “When they see (the globes) they think ‘Oh my God! How does it get filled? How does it stay controlled? How does it stay fresh?’”
Not only are people amazed by the system, but they are also eager to test it out for themselves. “Everybody wants to have a glass of wine from the tap,” Bleu server Corinne Meloni explains. “On average, I sell at least one glass of wine at every table I serve.”
The success of wine sales even has Tucker surprised. It means people are enjoying the wine and coming back to try more than one type. He says most Friday and Saturday nights they pour more than 100 glasses of wine.
Give the people what they want
Such a wine system offers both Bleu owners and patrons many advantages. The service of the wine is faster because dispensing wine from the globes is as easy as pressing a wine glass against one of the globe’s nozzles and filling it, rather than having to unwrap and uncork a new bottle. The storage space necessary for cases and bottles of wine is reduced. Bleu never has to throw wine away, and Tucker says he passes the savings he receives for buying the wine in bulk to his customers by further reducing the price per glass.
Besides, Tucker, who has worked in the Columbia restaurant scene for nearly a decade, has grown to know Columbia quite well and prides himself in giving his town exactly what it wants. “I’ve been working in Columbia for a long time,” he says. “I worked at the University Club. I worked at Sophia’s and Addison’s. I worked at CC’s a long time ago. I’ve worked in a lot of places in town, and because of that, I got to see what the clientele in Columbia want to drink.”
Bleu and other local establishments seem to have figured out that whether it’s served by the glass or by the bottle, enjoyed with a meal, dessert or by itself, what Columbians want is wine.
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