Carlitos Gardel - Wine & Spirits Magazine

Carlitos Gardel


The Bozoghlians came to LA from Argentina in the mid-1990s and established this bastion of Argentine beef in 1996. Son Max Bozoghlian got his wine training at Bodega Weinert in Mendoza, and has assembled the best collection of Argentine wines in the city, maybe the country, as well as an enviable selection of nebbiolo bottlings from Piedmont. Eat: Meat, obviously, like ojo de costilla a la criolla, a ribeye with chimichurri. Wash it down with any one of the many back-vintage malbecs from Achával Ferrer or Catena Zapata. “This is one of the most underestimated places in the city,” says Andrey Tolmachov at Maude. “It’s one of the aces up my sleeve when I need to impress someone.”

Karen started her career in wine as an enologist at Araujo in Napa Valley, having graduated with a BA in International Relations and French from UC Davis. She went on to handle education and sales support for Indie Wineries in California before joining the sommelier team at Spago for a year. For the past several years, she has been working with the publishing group behind the Somm Journal, part of the launch team for The Clever Root, where she served as Managing Editor for two years, then going freelance as a Senior Editor, to raise her daughter, who is now two years old. She also contributes to the Josephine Porter Institute’s newsletter on Applied Biodynamics. Karen has studied in Bordeaux and worked in the Rhône, led there by a glass of Domaine du Pegau, which sparked her interest in the Rhône. And it was a bottle of Diamond Creek’s Gravelly Meadow from the early 1990s that had shifted her view of Napa Valley—her family has been in the Valley for five generations, and once had a dairy farm on the land that became Lake Berryessa.


This story appears in the print issue of April 2019.
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