The Wall Street Journal-20080119-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Food - Drink -- Profile- The Wine Antisnob
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080119
WEEKEND JOURNAL; Food & Drink -- Profile: The Wine Antisnob
[Maverick entrepreneur Tim Hanni is trying to reinvent the American wine business. Part of his secret -- he doesn't drink.]
Tim Hanni is one of the wine industry's top-tier experts. He is also a recovering alcoholic who hasn't had a drink in 14 years, rarely even "sipping and spitting" wine to taste it. He says that's part of the secret of his success.
A wine adviser to hotels and restaurants from Ruth's Chris to P.F. Chang's, Mr. Hanni, 55, is on a mission to combat snobbery in the wine industry -- and get more Americans to drink wine. Unlike many wine experts, he doesn't rely on the sophistication and sensitivity of his own palate, although he was one of the first two Americans to hold the highest credential in the field, Master of Wine. He argues that no one has a palate superior to anyone else's, and that there's nothing wrong with liking wines many experts consider tacky, like White Zinfandel. He also thinks traditional tasting notes comparing wine to berries or chocolate are useless in helping most consumers find wines they enjoy.
Instead, he has developed new systems that help customers choose wines based on factors like how they take their coffee and cocktails -- and how many taste buds they have.
His maverick approach is transforming the way that many Americans drink wine. Mr. Hanni's most widely used innovation is the "progressive wine list," a menu format that organizes wine from lightest to heaviest, rather than grouping Loire Bordeaux and Tuscan Brunellos together. WineQuest, a company Mr. Hanni founded in 1999, has categorized more than 80,000 wines by flavor characteristics, allowing them to be sorted into progressive wine lists. According to an estimate by Winemetrics, a Connecticut-based wine-market researcher, 30% of casual and upscale chains, including Olive Garden and Ruth's Chris Steak House, use some version of the progressive wine list. So do about 4% of fine dining restaurants, including Nobu in New York.
Some of Mr. Hanni's latest projects -- from the "budometer," a questionnaire for predicting what wines a person will like, to a condiment meant to make any dish pair well with any wine -- may seem more far-fetched. But they are aimed at solving the biggest challenge facing the $27.8 billion U.S. wine business: getting more Americans to drink wine regularly.
Only 17.8% of American adults drink wine once a week or more, according to the Wine Market Council, a wine trade group. While last year, 35% of U.S. adults drank at least some wine, up from 25% in 2000, according to WMC, beer is still more common, consumed by 45% of adults, according to Mintel, a market-research firm.
Mr. Hanni, who lives in Napa, Calif., believes the solution lies in discarding cherished wine conventions and drilling down the physiological, biological and psychological reasons people like the wines they do. It's an approach that reflects his fascination with wine, an abiding obsession that has been the source of joy and despair throughout his life.
He was introduced to gourmet food and drink by his father, John Hanni, who cooked meals such as Chinese red-clay-pot chicken and braised goose at their home in Miami. Though the younger Mr. Hanni was a C-student with a "class clown" personality, he says, he easily absorbed details about cuisine and wine from Julia Child's television shows and Larousse Gastronomique, a culinary encyclopedia. As a teenager, when his friends struck out trying to buy beer, Mr. Hanni could convince clerks at the local wine store that he was of age by rattling off requests for Corton or Volnay.
At the University of South Florida in Tampa, where he majored in "partying" and took business classes, Mr. Hanni made grilled duck and escargot at beach barbecues and once fattened a pheasant on Fritos in a dormitory closet. (A friend slaughtered it, and Mr. Hanni wrapped the breast in bacon and roasted it in a toaster oven.) At age 20, he dropped out of college to work as a kitchen gofer at Bern's Steak House, the start of five years of apprentice-style chef training in restaurants around south Florida.
Two constants anchored Mr. Hanni's youth: relentless focus on learning about food and wine, and abundant drinking. "I never thought I wasn't an alcoholic," he says. He could down two or three bottles of wine without appearing drunk -- many of his closest colleagues say they never realized he had a problem until he told them. His father, however, says he was "concerned" from the time Tim was a teenager, particularly because he and his own father were alcoholics. In 1977, the younger Mr. Hanni entered a tumultuous marriage marked by fights, drinking and poor finances.
After seven years in restaurants, Mr. Hanni changed tracks and managed wine programs at Atlanta's Happy Herman's gourmet store and then worked as an independent wine broker for three years. In 1988, he was hired by Wine World Estates, now known as Beringer Vineyards, in the Napa Valley, to promote the company's wines to restaurants and hotels.
In 1990 came the experience that would turn Mr. Hanni into a star in the wine world: the Masters of Wine exam. The four-day exam and dissertation are notoriously difficult, with challenges such as identifying the region, production method and alcohol levels for wines from a blind tasting. Out of about 80 people selected to take the exam annually, typically five to seven people become Masters of Wine each year, according to the British organization; currently 265 people world-wide hold the title. When Mr. Hanni and fellow American Joel Butler passed the exam, they became the first two American Masters of Wine.
Mr. Hanni was immediately "a god in the wine world," he says. The title gave him the credibility to start promoting two radical new ideas to the wine trade. The first he called the progressive wine list, a menu that arranges wines in order from lightest to heaviest. At P.F. Chang's China Bistro, a 170-unit chain that uses the system today, for instance, white wines are divided into three categories: "sweet white/blush," which includes a Riesling; "light-to-medium intensity" with some Sauvignon Blanc choices; and "medium to full intensity," which offers several Chardonnays.
But his personal life was in disarray: He had declared bankruptcy, finalized a divorce and noticed a change in his alcohol tolerance -- now, two or three bottles of wine made him much drunker than they had before. "If conditions were right, I could drink to a blackout," he says. His drinking didn't hurt his professional reputation -- he was disciplined about sipping and spitting at events, and then hit the bar after hours, he says. But a new marriage in 1993 was off to a rocky start.
While there is little data on alcohol abuse in the wine industry, national surveys indicate that people who work around alcohol have higher-than-average rates of abuse. A report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, using statistics from 2002 to 2004, found that 12% of hotel and food service workers reported drinking heavily in the past month compared to 8.8% of the general working population.
In late 1993, Mr. Hanni decided his drinking was a serious problem. He says he took his last drink -- a glass of Meridian Chardonnay -- on Dec. 16 and checked himself in for a month of rehabilitation at Crutcher's Serenity House in St. Helena, Calif.
Emerging from treatment, "I had to accept that I might never work in the industry again," he says. But Mr. Hanni opted to stay in the business. With an ability to control himself around alcohol that addiction researchers say is highly unusual, he can occasionally sip and spit at professional tastings without being tempted to imbibe, he says.
Not drinking forced Mr. Hanni to rethink his approach to wine. He decided that he had long propped up his ego with wine pretensions. "I was an arrogant ass. I completely looked down on people" who drank wine he considered inferior, he says.
In search of a better explanation for why different people prefer different wines, he consulted with sensory scientists at the University of California, Davis and the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, among others. He became convinced that some people prefer light, sweet wines to high-alcohol, high-intensity ones because of factors such as the number of taste buds they have -- and not because White Zinfandel drinkers are unsophisticated.
In 1999, Mr. Hanni left Beringer and founded WineQuest, a company based in El Cerrito, Calif. With more than $1 million in annual sales, WineQuest has created progressive wine lists for about 60 hotel and restaurant clients and trained more than 100,000 hospitality workers, says CEO David Bash.
Based on his sensory-science research, Mr. Hanni developed the "budometer," which consists of a series of questions about a drinker's preferences in coffee, beer, cocktails and soft drinks. The answers, Mr. Hanni says, predict what kind of wine the person will like.
In 2005, Mr. Hanni stepped down from the day-to-day management of WineQuest, retaining roughly a quarter of the company's ownership. Today, he works in an office a few minutes from his home, where he lives with his wife and their 12-year-old son, Landen. He has roughly 50 speaking engagements a year.
One concept he promotes to chefs and wineries is an approach he calls "flavor balancing." Rejecting the idea that wine pairing is a complex art, Mr. Hanni says that by adjusting the salt, acidity and sweetness in a dish, one can pair it with any wine. The Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, Calif., now teaches this approach in a class for wine-industry professionals, where Mr. Hanni guest lectures. As part of a consulting deal with China Grill Management, Mr. Hanni will teach his theories to the company's 27 fine-dining staffs, says director of operations Claude Roussel.
In late 2006, Mr. Hanni launched Napa Seasoning Co. and a new product: Vignon, a condiment designed to balance flavor in food so that it pairs well with any wine. The product is a mixture including salt, lemon juice, soy sauce, shiitake-mushroom powder and Parmesan cheese. Developed by Mr. Hanni with a food scientist, chef and former seasoning executives, it is sold in some gourmet stores and Web sites for $6 for a 2.75-ounce bottle.
On a recent sales call at Kendall-Jackson Wine Center in Fulton, Calif., Mr. Hanni demonstrated Vignon to nine winery chefs and executives. They took a sample of plain boiled asparagus, notorious for making wine taste bad, then a sip of the winery's Cabernet Sauvignon. Most tasters grimaced. Then Mr. Hanni asked them to try a piece of asparagus sprinkled with Vignon. This time the wine had no off-taste, the group agreed, though some quibbled with Vignon's flavor, which is salty and slightly lemony.
Back in his car, Mr. Hanni took both praise and criticism in stride. "I'm having a blast," he said, as he drove down roads flanked by hillside vineyards.
