Learning How to Teach Wine. Interview with Dan Amatuzzi

Tell us about your Italian roots and what they have to do with your passion for wine.
My family is from Calabria and Puglia. Wine was always a constant in the house, although it was never exhaustively discussed or debated among my parents and relatives. It was kind of just there all the time - one or two bottles on the table surrounded by bowls of pasta, loaves of bread, and vegetable options. But my unyielding thirst for wine and the desire to learn more about it came during a semester in Italy. I really liked how it was interpreted differently by each and every person and how it was simply ingrained in daily life. 

Dan Amatuzzi

Eataly New York

You started at Mario Batali’s flagship restaurant, Babbo, moving very quickly from wine glass polisher to wine director…. Was it tough?

At the time, Babbo was the most ambitious Italian wine program in the city and the team there was doing really cool things and the restaurant had this inexplicable pull on me. I didn’t know anyone there. I didn’t have an inside track. I didn’t have any experience. Given these shortcomings of mine, all they were willing to do was offer me a glass and silverware polisher position (industry lingo: “Stocker”) with the agreement that if I performed well, and if there was an opening in the future, I could learn from the ground up how to be a sommelier. I happily accepted and for six months I polished those glasses to a high shine taking pride in knowing that each and every buffed glass would go on to be the vessel to serve wine and bring happiness to each and every guest. Or so I told myself. Luckily, things move fast in the resto world and sure enough positions opened up.

Then you developed a passion for wine education. You have published two books and manage your own blog called Wine for the Student. What does it take to educate Americans about wine culture? And what role does Italian wine play in all of this?

I self-published my first book, Italian Wine for the Student, in 2010. I sell it directly on my website and still bind each and every copy made to order. It became a good tool to use for incoming servers and sommeliers with a limited knowledge of Italian wine. Teaching consumer classes and staff training is a big part of the job at Eataly, and over time, I learned a bit more about the inclusive and participatory aspect of wine education.

These findings helped me write my second book, A First Course in Wine, published by Race Point Publishers in 2013. It’s an across-the-board book for the beginning wine enthusiast that focuses on appreciating your tastes and learning how to interpret wine, along with quite a bit of information on major wine regions from around the world. We followed this up shortly after in early 2014 with a wine kit called How to Host A Wine Tasting Party: The Complete Kit, an abridged version of the book with aroma wheels, tasting pads, wine/cheese pairing wheels and blind tasting bags.

After all this writing and learning, I still feel that teaching about wine is best done by tasting and sharing our observations. You can only learn so much by reading and looking at maps or winegrowing areas. One must taste to understand, one must understand in order to appreciate, and one must appreciate in order to remember. 

Your job at Eataly involves several sectors, from the Scuola to the general management of the store. I imagine you must be particularly proud of the new wine shop too...

For the school we collectively design classes and host speakers that illustrate the bounty of Italy’s cuisine. We focus on fresh pasta, risotto, regional dishes, seasonal dishes, and ultimately tie them all into the concept that these things are best made with simple and high-quality ingredients. We take pride in hosting luminaries in the food and wine sectors where consumers have the opportunity to meet and talk with their favorite chefs and winemakers.

The school is a great space to re-connect with Italian food and wine in a pretty relaxed environment – a deeply entrenched concept in Eataly culture. The new and improved wine shop focuses on our appreciation for natural wines. Our main offering is from a small group of producers who collectively label their wines Vino Libero, or Free Wine. In this sense, the wines are “free” of fertilizers, pesticides and other invasive measures of commercial wine production that can have long-term negative health effects on the vine and the soil. At any time we probably have around 100 different wines from this line. In addition, we have about 800 wines from all over Italy, a temperature-controlled room for rare, collectible and cult wines, along with a deep and varied list of grappa and amari. 
 

Anything you’d care to share about your plans for the future?

I’d like to make wine some day. But rather than do it traditionally here on the ground, I’d like to make wine up in the sky, in orbit someday. Live in space for a whole year and tend to the vines and make the first inter-stellar wine on a space station, orbiting the earth from above. I still need to reach out to Musk, Branson and the other players in the space tourism world. We’ll see what they say.