Christopher Barnum-Dann is the chef and owner of Localis, a One-MICHELIN-Star Sacramento restaurant with an always-changing, travel-inspired tasting menu. A deeply obsessed oenophile, he is also in charge of the wine list. He doesn’t see the responsibilities as separate roles.
“I see it as symbiosis, really,” Barnum-Dann says. “They flow into each other.”
The winner of this year’s MICHELIN Guide California Sommelier Award, presented in partnership with Franciacorta, Barnum-Dann’s pairings – spicy Thai food and an off-dry Riesling, an octopus piccata with an Austrian red – reflect a supremely sophisticated and creative palate. His full cellar of against-the-grain favorites and tableside persuasion has been known to create wine-lovers out of novices.
In an interview, edited for length and clarity, Barnum-Dann discusses the roots of his passion, the last bottle he’d drink before he dies and the way he approaches a table that can’t make heads or tails of a wine list.
Tell us about your wine list. How did you put it together?
It really just came out of wanting a wine list that had something for everybody. So often restaurants are focused on what they like, or what they want, or what they think customers will want. I just hope to have great wines at every price point and to share my love of wine. For me it was: how can we create something that no matter who you are, you will find something delicious on this list?
What are some of your favorites on the list?
I am at heart a massive Burgundy fan. It's my ‘last wine of my life’ if I was forced to choose one – probably white Burgundy, maybe red Burgundy, I don't know if I could decide between the two. Riesling is also a huge part of our list, all the different variations of sweet, not sweet, super sweet. It’s such a fun wine to pair with foods with spice and high acidity – a lot of Localis' cooking has those attributes.
How does being a chef influence your work as a sommelier in the restaurant?
I see it as symbiosis, really. They flow into each other. I see them as truly connected. It's almost intuitive when you're writing a menu or you're choosing the wine to think about what you know is going to be pairing well with those. And then you can get into the specifics of a certain wine. You can pair Burgundy with a chicken and mushroom dish. That part's easy. The harder part is the nuance of the dish, or the nuance of the wine. Is the wine from Meursault and does it have nutty characteristics to it? Well, maybe you should think about adding some chestnut or hazelnut to a porcini puree. There are little ways to really accent individual wines.
As I’m writing menus, I'm thinking about wines, but we also have cocktails and sakes and beers and ciders among our pairings as well. But for the wine list, I don't really think of it as separate. Much of the personal menu at Localis is what I love, the dishes I would want to eat, and then I try to stock the wine list full of those same things. I cook a lot of Thai food. For me, it's my soul food. It's the food I tend to want to eat the most and I want to cook the most. So we have a huge Riesling list because of that. Spicy Thai food and off-dry Riesling is, I think, the perfect pairing. I don't think it gets any better than that.
We have to have a massive arsenal of wines because we change our menu every five to six weeks and it could be a completely different style of cuisine. So I need to have a lot of different wines and wine knowledge to understand how to reach deep into pairings. And I have to have enough wine to really get outside the box and think differently about pairings.
What’s a standout pairing on the menu right now?
We've got a dish called the Sacred Dish for the Sacred Memory. It's from a chef who recently came on board. We did a piccata, because that's what he used to cook for his mom who passed away. We do it with octopus. On paper, you see piccata and octopus and obviously that's a white wine dish. But what we decided on was Zweigelt from Weingut Frank in Austria. It's this bouncy red wine with a lot of pyrazines in it, a lot of herbal greenness, and it just finds this impeccable home in that slight, kind of umami characteristic from the octopus. And then, of course, the layers of garlic and lemon and capers that are throughout the whole dish. It's a really fun pairing. It makes so much sense, but it doesn't make any sense on paper.
When did you first become passionate about wine?
The owner of the restaurant where I first worked as an executive chef, Café Zorro, was an ex-wine rep. I had never tried wine before that. I had zero interest in wine. My parents didn't drink wine. No one that I knew drank wine. And he said, ‘Why don't you sit down and taste with me?’ And I tasted a Ladera cabernet from Napa Valley, which is so funny, because I never drink Napa cabernet now, for the most part. But it just got me and I was like, ‘Wow, this is great.’ That one tasting launched my whole love of wine. Everyone who knows me knows that I'm massively OCD and kind of a little crazy when I find something new – I want to learn everything about it. So I kind of went crazy. And once you start diving into wine, you realize you'll never know everything. You'll just keep learning and learning forever. It's a fun prospect.
What do you tell a guest who has no idea where to start on the wine list?
When I get to a table and they don't know what they want, I start asking them what they drink usually. Traditionally, they're going to say something like Rombauer chardonnay, which is kind of like a somm's kryptonite. Everyone loves to hate this buttery, oaky chardonnay from California that a lot of California people like. So when they're looking for that, I steer them into an affordable Burgundy. It's similar, it's still chardonnay, it's still close, but it's just not as far into that realm. I get them a little out of their comfort zone. The next time they come in, or for the next bottle, they trust me, and I say, ‘Why don't you let me choose one?’ And then I choose something a little bit more out of their wheelhouse. You just kind of push people lightly.
That’s what I did at the beginning. At the beginning of Localis, we had 60 wines by the glass. That was unheard of, and it was also extremely wasteful and dumb. It was just my desire to be able to pour something for everyone. Over the years, I pushed people little by little. I never had the big wines on the list. We never went with the big name brands. We never went with the wines by the glass that everyone in Sacramento was using. We just pushed people and lightly educated them at their own pace. And then over the years, people will come in and do a pairing where there are wines they've never heard of and they love them.
Hero image: Christopher Barnum-Dann
