Jake Bennie grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and began working in restaurants when he was young. As he was approaching 30 he decided, “If I’m going to keep doing this, I probably should see more outside of Nebraska.” So, he went to New Orleans, and found himself working with front-of-the-house legend Joe Briand of Herbsaint. “Man, these people really know French wine,” he remembers thinking. And even though it was the busiest dining room in New Orleans, there was always time for education. “Joe would come up in the middle of service and say, ‘Oh, you know, somebody brought such and such and you should try it.’ Every time I thought I knew something, another world would open.” Eventually Bennie made his way to Chicago and did stints at Acadia, Girl and the Goat, and Purple Pig before joining the opening team at Rose Mary, a restaurant devoted to what Chef Joe Flamm calls “Adriatic drinking food.” Flamm’s menu obliges Bennie to devote a great deal of his list to lesser-known Italian, Slovenian and Croatian wines—which somehow fits Chicago to a ‘t’. —Patrick J. Comiskey
What’s exciting now?
It’s Istria, the Dalmatian Coast—It’s kind of a gateway, from Italy into Croatia and into the Balkans. There are so many cool wines there, the Teran and Malvasias…as well as Friulian whites, like friulano and their super-mineral expressions of sauvignon blanc.
Christian Patat, the winemaker at Ronco del Gnemiz, has this way with sauvignon blanc, super expressive and very aromatic cool, super lean, austere vibrant fruit but then it’s texturally really interesting. That’s a really cool expression of sauvignon that I hadn’t seen in Italy.
And for reds?
With Dalmatia, babic and plavac mali are definitely the big varieties for us, because of that zinfandel connection with plavac mali. It’s fun to be able to show people, “Okay, here’s your Turley and Grgich, the names you know, but if you’re interested in that stuff, let’s go to the Dalmatian Coast.”
I like this winery called Saint Hills; it’s run by a guy named Ernest Tolj; he’s one of the wealthiest guys in Croatia, but they have some really cool expressions of a plavac mali, lots of black cherry pie going on. Those have been a lot of fun. Babic, too—there’s a babic from Venas Mora that I’ve really been excited about.
If I can get somebody out of their comfort zone, outside of Tuscany or Piedmont and talk about Abruzzo and Umbria then I’m doing my job. I feel like that plays well for us because it’s still Adriatic.
We have Christiana Tiberio Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo by the glass, and we just got in ‘Archivio,’ a red of hers from an old-vine plot of Montepulciano that’s not a lot of bucks, just a $100 price point. So it’s not crazy, but I feel like the people who are interested in Brunello, this is an easy gateway to try something different.
What category or region of wine would you like to be able to sell but can’t?
Dessert wines. It’s funny because we ended up draining off a little bit of the Tawny Port and Late Bottled Vintage Port…we wanted to go more Italian. So servers will say, “Hey, if you like Tawny Port then you’ve really got to try the Marco De Bartoli Marsala. It’s a little drier, but it still has that oxidative flavor to anchor things to it.” And if it’s Vintage Port they want, we can get them to look at a Recioto della Valpolicella.
I feel like we’ve had decent luck with amari. We put on Cappellano’s Barolo Chinato, and that’s been kind of like, “Hey, if you like amari, this is a wine-based amaro in that category that still gives you that herbaceous, woodsy, bark kind of character.” It’s a fun thing to end on.
Patrick J. Comiskey covers US wines for Wine & Spirits magazine, focusing on the Pacific Northwest, California’s Central Coast and New York’s Finger Lakes.
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