In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
In 1994, weeks before I was born, my father drove up Sunset Boulevard in a powder-blue Jetta selling international and domestic wines to upscale restaurants and hotels. He was new to town, a salesperson for American Wine & Spirits. Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch, still recovering from the Northridge earthquake. The O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.
Meanwhile, my father roamed from the Beverly Hills Hilton to Chateau Marmont, arguing the case for his best Chardonnays. He did not own a cell phone, only a pager and good taste. He sold wine at Mezzaluna Trattoria — where Nicole Simpson had dined and Ron Goldman waited tables. He schlepped wine to the House of Blues, to the red leather booths at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, to Morton’s Steakhouse.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was in what my father would refer to as “the wine boom.” It still garners a title as one of the largest wine markets in the world. The largest is Vatican City, which, like Hollywood, is drunk off its own ancient melodramas.
The city was ripe territory for convincing men they needed something they could not pronounce. The year 1994 — my birth year — marked the much-anticipated arrival of the 1989 Bordeaux first-growth collectible wines, the best vintage since 1982. I have never asked him which event he deems more consequential.
Los Angeles is a wine city. Sure, there’s no dearth of cocktails — dive bar margaritas, gin martini bars in Hollywood and micheladas served at Dodgers games. Yet, it’s wine that’s stolen Sunset Boulevard’s heart.
Take it from its famous enthusiasts like Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to my dad, is a winemaker who happens to also be a legendary filmmaker. In his classic film, “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone watches a waiter uncork a 1938 table wine with tense anticipation. Coppola knows each glass represents tradition, honor and family. All glasses of wine do, really. The reasons we drink — to bask in one moment for eternity, relish in the euphoria and pain of it all — are the same reasons we watch films.
If you wanted to ruin your life on Sunset Boulevard — and quickly — my father might recommend a white Zinfandel. “The gateway drug of the ’90s,” he calls it, affectionately. Bubblegum pink, sweet, easy to gulp down. Its admirers would then find their way to Chardonnays — then perhaps even cocaine, credit card debt, an appetite for infidelity.
This euphoric era reached a crescendo, followed by an inevitable backlash. In the hangover, Zinfandels were considered trashy and cheap. You can only be a star in Hollywood for so long.
More good advice to follow at Chateau Marmont: Don’t be such a snob. Drink wine like the Europeans. They drink with casualness, without pomp and circumstance. Also, older doesn’t always mean better. Not all wines appreciate over time. In fact, my father often says the best bottle of wine might be the screwtop that never makes it into your home.
In this time of his life, I imagine my father as a rolling stone and wine as his passport. His fluency on vintage wines beckoned him into dining rooms across Los Angeles, and later villages across France and Italy. I sometimes wonder if my father was lonely in the way I am occasionally, the way everyone is in Los Angeles. The old Ernest Hemingway chestnut is: “A bottle of wine is good company.”
Naturally, wine took up a lot of space in my childhood home. Bottles and cork packed any communal living space. At 12 years old, I would often design wine labels with colored pencils. I drew landscapes of vineyards and animals. I cut them out and affixed them to empty bottles, lining them along the fireplace mantle at my father’s eye level.
The Sunset Boulevard that my father prowled is not the one I inherited from him in my 20s. Many of the restaurants have vanished. Hollywood glamour has grown stale and faded into kitsch. Iconic rock venues in Hollywood have since closed, their last glass of wine poured decades ago. There are no good parties anymore, my father might argue. Chateau Marmont, which was once synonymous with pleasure and late nights, today functions as a golden-aged mausoleum.
Hollywood and the wine industry were sometimes quarreling bedfellows. You might have assumed this, but my father has a pithy take on the 2004 film “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about two men drifting through wine country. (It’s a movie you might mention to my dad if you were, say, an idiot.) The film delivers a few quippy insults about Merlot — one of the noble grapes, my dad adds. That year, Merlot sales plummeted, so much so that wineries were tearing out the grapes from vineyards in Napa. Naturally, this instance of life imitating art distresses my dad.
Still, he is not easily offended. My father is intelligent, sentimental, a smooth talker — characteristics that lend themselves well to wine sales. He is proudly not a snob. According to him, every bottle of wine tells a romantic story. Wine is innately sentimental. Consider, for example, the harvest year on a bottle of wine. Then ask yourself: Where were you then? Was it the year of your first love? What have you lost since? A wine bottle is a time capsule of the past, my dad argues. It’s a time machine in 24.5 fluid ounces. To enjoy the bottle is to stare down the past, to be seduced by nostalgia with every sip.
Everyone asks the sommelier the wrong question, according to my father. Here’s one: Will a white Burgundy pair well with a pan-seared monkfish? My father would say this is the better question: Do you enjoy the wine? Do you like the meal? Do you like your company? If so, you’re on course to have a beautiful evening. If not, no variation of Grand Cru will save you. This is the closest my father comes to discussing his own personal doctrine. Life — like enjoying a bottle of wine — comes down to picking good company to share it with.
Today, wine is less popular than ever. The U.S. wine industry, which has been facing a significant downturn for years, lost $1 billion in 2025. It’s due in part, I imagine, to its reputation as being a stuffy, out-of-touch concern of tedious people.
Wine bars in L.A. have adopted a new affect — one arguably more offensive. They are cool. Their menus are skin-contact wines, the labels are neon blobs. The wine selection champions approachability over tradition, an attempt to abandon the smugness of previous generations. In the process, it stumbled on an entirely new vanity. I think there is inherent romance in the pursuit of trying to understand something as elusive as wine. As generations begin to neglect wine, they disregard entire seasons, heritages, patience — the bounty of a harvest after a long winter.
When I am homesick, I find myself in the wine section of a liquor store on Hillhurst Avenue, pointing out the wines harvested on Gehricke Road, where I grew up. Occasionally, I feel a pang of sadness to see my idyllic childhood reduced to a chintzy wine label in the dead of night. However, once the bottle is open, I know that everything once difficult will be impossibly sweet.
