An appreciation of one of the most ambitious and exciting wine dinners I've hosted... and the remarkable Master Sommelier behind it
May 11, 2025
I just got back from two weeks on the east coast. This most recent week I was in Washington DC representing the members of WineAmerica, meeting with the offices of our senators and representatives, advocating for policies that will help American wineries. The week before, I was in New York, spending three days working with our Vineyard Brands team members there and hosting two evening events that were open to the public. The first was a lovely wine tasting at a very cool wine shop in Manhattan's Waterline Square neighborhood. The second was maybe the most ambitious and exciting wine dinner I’ve ever done.
This remarkable four-course, fourteen-wine dinner was organized and hosted by the incomparable Pascaline Lepeltier at her restaurant Chambers in Tribeca. If you don’t know Pascaline, she is one of the world’s most celebrated Master Sommeliers. She oversaw the Michelin-starred wine program at Rouge Tomate in Manhattan before opening her own restaurants. She was named Best French Sommelier in 2018, has represented France in international contests and earned fourth place at the ASI Best Sommelier in the World Competition in 2023. She’s an outstanding follow on social media, whose advocacy for and interest in the world’s under-recognized wines led her to publish the terrific book One Thousand Vines, published in both French and English and named a New York Times Best Wine Book of 2024.
Yes, I’m a fan.
So when, a few months ago, Pascaline agreed to host a Tablas Creek dinner at Chambers, I couldn’t have been more excited. That excitement grew when I learned the format that she chooses for her wine dinners. Each course is crafted to tell a different piece of the winery’s story, and Pascaline likes to feature three wines at a time, offering small pours of each to keep from overwhelming guests while allowing a deeper dive into the winery’s portfolio. She hosts the dinners at a single long table at the front of the restaurant. I’ve written about why I think communal tables are such a positive asset for a wine dinner: they bring people together, encourage deeper conversations, and emphasize the community-building capacity of wine. Let me take you through Pascaline’s orchestration of our dinner.
Scene 1: Welcome. As the participants arrived, they were greeted with a glass of our Dianthus. Yes, it’s a relatively rare wine in wholesale, but up to this point, nothing extraordinary, But it breaks the ice, and gives the group (all singles or doubles) a chance to get to know each other a bit before the first food course is served.
Scene 2: A Diversity of Red Wines. For our first food course, Pascaline chose a deceptively simple dish of spaetzle, mushrooms, and green garlic, and paired it with three of our small-production varietal red wines: our 2020 Cinsaut, 2020 Vaccarese, and 2021 Mourvedre. This gave me a chance to talk about our connection to the Perrin family, Jacques Perrin’s quest to bring all the traditional Chateauneuf-du-Pape grapes to Beaucastel in the 1950s, and our ongoing work to bring them into California. Showing these three rare monovarietal wines side by side was a treat.
Scene 3: Esprit de Tablas Through the Years. The next course was a classic southern French dish: a boudin blanc sausage with sunchokes and lightly pickled ramps. The wines were three vintages of our Esprit de Tablas: our current release from 2022, and two vintages out of our library: 2015 and 2013. The 2022 was youthful and exuberant, while the 2015 showed the weightless elegance I have always noted in that extreme drought year and the 2013 was starting to show some of the mature characteristics of leather and meat. The deep dive into our flagship wine allowed me to talk about our blending process, how we adjust to different vintages, and how different grapes play greater or lesser roles depending on the year.
Scene 4: A Diversity of White Wines. The main protein course was a lovely fillet of black sea bass, with broccoli rabe and a tangy meyer lemon hollandaise. Like the first course, it was paired with three of our small-production varietal wines, but on the white side: 2021 Picardan, 2021 Bourboulenc, and 2023 Grenache Blanc. We introduced all three grapes to California viticulture through our grapevine nursery, and it included our rarest: Picardan, which is so scarce that when we planted our half-acre in 2013, it increased the world’s total Picardan footprint by 40%. Putting these rare varietal bottlings in such a high-profile position in the dinner encouraged the guests to take them seriously, and they were up to the task, with all three showing vibrant citrus notes that bounced off the hollandaise and gave relief to the enveloping richness of the fish. A masterpiece.
Scene 5: Esprit de Tablas Blanc Through the Years. Unlike most wine dinners, which move from white to red, Pascaline chose this menu to begin with reds then move to whites. She did so largely because of this pairing. She wanted a cheese course and believes that cheeses are better matches with white wines than reds. The cheeses she chose (Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Uplands Cheese Company in Wisconsin and Reading Raclette from Spring Brook Farm in my home state of Vermont) were lovely in their own right. They also provided outstanding foils for three vintages of our Esprit de Tablas Blanc. The first was the current 2022 vintage, evenly balanced between the beeswax and poached pear richness of Roussanne and the brighter notes of the five other higher-toned varieties that make up the blend. The older wines, from 2015 and 2012, showed the rewards of aging Roussanne into its caramel and hazelnut maturity.
Scene 6: Wine Dessert. I find often that after multiple courses and multiple wines, a substantial dessert is often too much. In fact, in the two other dinners that I hosted this week, I only ate a bite or two of each dessert. Pascaline solved that problem by serving the dessert wine as the sweet course in itself. For a wine, we provided our 2018 Vin de Paille Quintessence, made from 100% Roussanne. It’s a beautiful wine anyway, but having it be the full show rather than a sidekick to a dessert allowed it to shine in all its glory.
Scene 7: Aftermath. We were two and a half hours in, but no one was ready to leave. So after the last wine had been poured and the dishes cleared, Pascaline’s team put all the fourteen bottles back down the center of the table, with about a third of each bottle left, and everyone revisited their favorites. By this point, the table had become a single unit. Everyone was sharing stories and enthusiasms, comparing notes and making plans to get together again. By the time people started to leave, it was 11:30pm and only after we got several photos together.
The dinner had a quiet confidence to it that is quintessentially Pascaline. The food wasn’t showy, but it was delicious. All of the dishes were restrained enough to let the wines play a starring role. The pacing was flawless, with wines poured first, giving me a chance to introduce them, and then the food appearing as if conjured from the kitchen the moment I started to wind down.
Contributing to the evening’s easy flow was its modest quantity. I didn’t get up from the table feeling overstuffed, or over-wined. That’s a surprising rarity in wine dinners, in my experience. Most of them pour too much wine and serve too much food. I always feel bad sending back my plates half-eaten and my glasses half-drunk, but if I consumed everything that was served at most wine dinners, I’d need assistance walking out. At this dinner, I finished every bite and every drop of the small (one ounce) pours and felt perfectly satisfied.
But ultimately, as I reflect, what made the dinner so compelling was its intimacy. I’ve done much larger dinners, as many as 110 people. This was a table for twelve. But at twelve it didn’t feel underpopulated. Instead, it felt curated, personal, and human-scaled. Twelve is pretty much the maximum number you can put at a single table and expect everyone to be able to talk to everyone else. And that was what this felt like: a conversation rather than a performance.
Here's to more intimately-scaled wine conversations in 2025. Thanks, Pascaline, for lighting the way.