Which Wine? Ask a Pro

As quandaries go, here’s a pretty one: You’re in a celebrated Paris restaurant. The menu is titillating. You decide on duck with a morel reduction sauce, but what to drink? You open the wine list. There are no familiar names, no user-friendly descriptions.

No problem. Within seconds, you’re on the cell phone with your personal wine consultant in Los Angeles, quietly reading each entry off the list.

“I picked a Rhone wine,” says Christian Navarro, the man who took this very call not long ago. “It was a perfect match,” he adds, though he admits he didn’t taste it himself.

Navarro, who counts Tom Cruise, Sydney Pollack and Danny DeVito among his clients, is one of several local personal wine consultants (sometimes called personalized wine buyers or cellar masters). Some are affiliated with a particular wine shop; Navarro works at Wally’s in West L.A. Others, such as Siegfried Mueller, are independent. Mueller, who has managed some of the city’s top restaurants, including Fenix at the Argyle and L’Ermitage, started his own company, Vin Valet, last March.

Taking calls from anxious clients traveling abroad is one small part of a personal wine consultant’s job. Most of the work--the work that pays the bills--involves buying wine for clients.

These are usually people who are new to wine and are anxious to buy the “right” names, even though they may not know what they are.

Especially lucrative is creating insta-cellars (filling entire cellars), or what Navarro half-jokingly calls dot-com cellars. Los Angeles is ripe for such work.

“There are a lot of new homes being built that have wine cellars,” says Mark Sparling, a restaurant veteran who recently started his own wine-consulting business called Wine Cellar Masters. “And people may not have the time or depth of knowledge [to fill them].”

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But even some veteran wine collectors use consultants--especially when it comes to tracking down hard-to-find treasures.

Forget the thrill of the hunt, says Joe Smith, former chief executive of Warner Bros., Elektra and Capitol Records. A wine collector for 36 years, he says, “The hunt is: I go after someone who can get [the wine I want]. If you want a lion, you go find a lion hunter.”

Lion hunters do not come cheap. Sparling, like Mueller, typically charges his clients an hourly fee. In Sparling’s case, it is $75 to $100, depending on the nature of the particular job.

While it’s convenient to have somebody buy your wine, that is hardly the end of it. Having someone stock your cellar is quite different from having somebody buy your groceries. Anybody knows an apple from an orange. But imagine walking into your own cellar full of wine you know nothing about.

“One of the primary duties [of a personal wine consultant] is to educate about the bottle,” says Kim Jackson, director of education and marketing at the Wine Vault, a wine storage facility in Glendale; “the things that are invisible you can’t see by looking at the label.” Not to mention worthwhile tidbits such as the difference between Pinot Noir and Zinfandel.

“It’s an education process,” Jackson says. “Otherwise, I can’t imagine it being any fun to just snatch a random bottle off the shelf. Not all wine goes well with pizza. That’s for sure.”

Before personal wine consultants begin to help clients spend their money, they usually try to learn as much as possible about them--specifically their taste in and relationship with wine. “I try to find out what their lifestyles are like,” says Navarro, who often has several meals with a client before diving in. “How much do they entertain? Is [the cellar] a showplace or just a working cellar?”

Mueller has created a simple questionnaire for his clients. It asks them to name their favorite varietals and regions, list four wines they have enjoyed recently and, if possible, tell why they felt these wines stood out.

For clients who are interested, a personal wine consultant will create a detailed catalog of the cellar’s contents. Navarro, for example, can rate the wines, evaluate the collection for insurance purposes and give descriptors of drinkability, tasting notes and food matches.

“The hard part,” he says, “is matching the wine to the client. What is Bob going to like?”

Nearly all personal wine consultants claim to have special connections and a nose for the next trend. “If I were just regurgitating press,” says Navarro, “then there’d be no reason for people to come to me.”

Besides, Mueller adds, “By the time [a wine] gets to common periodicals like Wine Spectator, it’s too late. Not only is it astronomical, but it’s very difficult to find. So you get someone like myself who has the inside scoop.”

However, points out Dennis Overstreet, owner of the Wine Merchant in Beverly Hills, everyone is trying to get their hands on the same rare bottles and cult wines. “We’re all in this game together,” he says. No one person has special access. “There’s no such thing as anyone being that smart.”

So what can a consultant do that any good, experienced employee of any decent wine store can’t?

“The emphasis has to be on ‘good’ and ‘experienced,’ because not all employees are equal,” says Chris Sandin, wine director at the Wine Cask in Santa Barbara. “You don’t need a private wine consultant to fill up a cellar so you can serve wine at parties. You can just call up your favorite store and say, ‘Send me five cases of Montrachet.’ ”

Roger Rogness, creative director of Wine Expo in Santa Monica, agrees. “People say, ‘I want two cases of everyday pizza and pasta reds. I want half a case of serious special-dinner big reds, some Champagne to make mimosas, and some to drink.’ ”

And he and his staff fill the order. “Our M.O. from square one,” he explains, “is we’re going to learn about you and what you like and what you don’t like.”

And for beginners who splurge on an insta-cellar because they can or think they should, Navarro says that suddenly having all that good wine around does compel people to “take hold of what they’ve created and start to learn about it.”

Offers Sparling, “Maybe you get them started, and they’re off on their own in a year exploring their own wine passion.”

It’s a bittersweet victory: one more wine lover, one less client.

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Vin Valet, 2821 Westbrook Ave., Los Angeles. (323) 874-3463 or (323) 822-0262.

Wally’s, 2107 Westwood Blvd. West Los Angeles. (310) 475-0606.

Wine Cask, 813 Anacapa St., Santa Barbara. (805) 966-9463.

Wine Cellar Masters, 12747 Pacific Ave., Los Angeles. (310) 600-5982.

Wine Expo, 2933 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 828-4428.

Wine Merchant, 9701 Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 278-7322.

Wine Vault, 929 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale. (818) 545-0597.