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Master Sommelier Jesse Becker has over two decades of experience in nearly every aspect of the wine and hospitality industries in the United States. He is a VDP.Ambassador and the first American to pass the Deutsches Weininstitut German Wine Professional exam. Jesse is a portfolio director for The German Wine Collection, an importer of iconic German wine estates, and co-owner at Rockwerk Grüner Veltliner. Jesse resides in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their beloved Frenchie, Tate.
I began my journey in wine as a college student, picking up an early edition of Kevin Zraly's Windows on the World Complete Wine Course while waiting tables in Lincoln, Nebraska. That was the late 1990s, and the now-iconic book was without a cover and thinner compared to today's 35th edition. It wouldn't be the last wine book I'd consume before the binding disintegrated and pages became loose. That was twenty-five years ago, and my wine story keeps writing itself.
I was already obsessed with wine when I packed my car and drove from Nebraska to the Napa Valley in 2001, looking for harvest work. I don't remember why I chose Joseph Phelps as my destination; perhaps I just knew it was famous. I walked into the cellar unannounced and found winemaker Sarah Gott in the middle of preparing a tank. She had a complete crew for harvest, but directed me to Miner Family Winery just down the Silverado Trail, where Gary Brookman took me on, and I settled in for the harvest.
Strangely, I was on the crush pad at Miner on 9/11 when Gary told us to stop what we were doing and to go home. Windows on the World Wine Course was one of my sole possessions, and here I was in Napa watching all the devastation in New York and those towers coming down on TV.
My first sommelier job was at Cantinetta Tre Vigne in St Helena. 2001 was the peak of Robert Parker's Cult Cabernets, and Cantinetta offered a flight of Harlan, Dalle Valle, Screaming Eagle, Colgin, and Bryant Family. David Stevens ran this incredible wine program. He and Chef Michael Chiarello offered me my first glance into what great wine, food, and hospitality were all about.
I spent a few years in wine retail with K&L, a major California wine retailer based in the Bay Area, and an early adopter of wine e-commerce. The Zucker and Beffa families are major players in Bordeaux, and I found it quite fun to pick up the phone and sell Bordeaux futures to enthusiastic collectors. Besides the extensive tasting sessions, I met lifelong friends like Gregory Condes, Martin Reyes MW, and Champagne expert Gary Westby, who would years later witness my wedding to Elizabeth.
The secret to Camille Giroud's excellent 2004s.
Becky Wasserman walked into K&L one day to taste the staff on her outstanding Burgundy portfolio and made an open-ended invitation to Burgundy for a harvest. I followed up and found myself working in Côte d'Or for the 2004 vintage with Maison Camille Giroud. I spent most of this cold and rainy vintage shivering on the table de tri, but I lived in Burgundy for four months, first in an apartment in Beaune and later with Becky and Russell in Bouilland, and will never forget the lessons Burgundy and Becky taught me.
One night, I met another English-speaking stagiaire, Justin Leone, at a party at Nicolas Potel. The Canadian-born sommelier Leone suggested I take his old job in Chicago after harvest, and I did. I worked briefly for legendary Chicago Chef Charlie Trotter, and later as a sommelier for NoMi at the Park Hyatt Chicago. While at NoMi, an importer named Seth Allen made a life-changing sales presentation. His company, VinDivino, was one of the first to introduce the new generation of Austrian wines after their notorious mid-80s wine scandal. I've been enamored with Austrian wine ever since.
No oak, no ML, no botrytis. No objections in 2008 with Rudi Pichler, Wachau, Austria:
It was during this time in Chicago that I became aware of the Court of Master Sommeliers, and I passed my Certified and Advanced exams in 2005 and 2006. The Master Sommelier exam consists of three parts: theory, tasting, and practical. I went into my first attempt in 2007 with the mindset that I'd pass all three parts on the first go. I passed the blind tasting with the feedback that practical was my weakest part. I sought out the tutelage of Master Sommelier Bobby Stucky and his Friulian-inspired restaurant, Frasca Food and Wine, in Boulder, Colorado, where I worked alongside the most excellent floor sommelier I've ever known Matthew Mathers, Dustin Wilson MS, and too many talented "Hospitalians" to name here. I passed the remaining parts of the Master Sommelier exam in 2008.
Standing on the edge of the Berg with winemaker Eva Fricke, Rheingau 2008.
Elizabeth and I embarked on a four-month tour around the Alps in the fall of 2008, working another harvest, this time at Domaine Alphonse Mellot in Sancerre, and visiting 130 wine estates around Europe. Germany and Austria were significant parts of this tour, deepening my affection for the wines of these two countries. Heinrich Breuer, Rudi Pichler, Steffen Christmann, Willi Bründlmayer, Fritz Hasselbach, and Christoph Tyrell, to name just a few, made lasting impressions with their time and generosity. Matt Kramer's Making Sense of Burgundy, another impactful book read many times over, uses the analogy of a stylus picking up the undulations of a record's grooves to describe how Pinot Noir expresses its terroir in Burgundy. Riesling does this in Germany with such exacting nuance that it requires visiting the vineyards to appreciate fully. Once you've seen the light, it is not easy to see wine any other way but through the lens of terroir. I'm sure it's part of why I do what I do today.
After a few more years of writing restaurant wine lists, I joined the import side of our industry in 2013, where I've remained since. Something Gary Westby once said was, "You have to decide how close you want to be with the wine." What he meant was that you could spend a career in this business, detached from the vignerons and places that make this exceptional beverage, and make a fine living doing so. I knew then, as I do now, that I wanted an intimate connection to the people, places, climate, and market conditions that shape the wines and our industry. I did just that, first with Winebow Imports for 8 1/2 years, then with Veritable Wines & Estates, a small portfolio of German and Austrian wineries I represented nationally for three years.
At one point, I had a hardened stance on any winemaking style that I felt worked against a wine's terroir expression, be it ripeness, alcohol, residual sugar, SO2 levels, and especially new oak. A Burgundy that does not capture a sense of place misses the whole point of Burgundy after all. One could then argue that the trend toward controlled reduction to achieve a positive "Le Matchstick" quality in some popular white Burgundies undermines terroir. However, I adore Leflaive and PYCM, so my puristic thinking quickly goes out the window. New oak, though, well, I cannot stand for it with Nebbiolo, or, egads, Riesling, and then you taste in the Von Winning cellar with Stephan Attmann and realize you had that wrong too. One day, with the "Barolo Wars" still brewing, I challenged Leonardo LoCasico to explain to me how he could accept the new oak employed by some of his imports. "Great wine is great wine," he answered. A few years later, I'd be tasting in the cellar of Roberto Voerzio with the Winebow team, rendered speechless by the undeniable greatness of those Nebbiolos, lavishly bathed in new oak.
Tasting Barolo with Leonardo LoCascio circa 2012.
A new German Wine Professional with Deutsches Weininstituts Florian Koch in 2023.
In 2022, I joined Veritable Wines & Estates, an export group based in Hattenheim, Germany, representing a small portfolio of German and Austrian estates. These included VDP.Weingüter Balthasar Ress, Heitlinger, Burg Ravensburg, Von Othegraven, and other family-owned wineries, expanding their US distribution from 2 to 25 states. I also co-founded Rockwerk, a Grüner Veltliner brand with Austrian vintner Markus Huber and German winery owner Christian Ress. As I steered my way towards German and Austrian wine, I pursued another challenge: the German Wine Professional, a program put on by Germany's Deutsches Weininstitut, studying in all 13 of Germany's Weinanbaugebiete over two years, culminating in a long-form essay and blind-tasting exams—a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
...and my wine story keeps writing itself.
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