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Hosted by a Toronto-based sommelier Tasting Notes Toronto explores the people shaping the city’s food and wine culture—from Michelin-starred chefs and master sommeliers to restaurant operators and winemakers. Each episode goes behind the scenes of hospitality careers, restaurant culture, and the decisions that shape what we eat and drink in Toronto today.
Eating together is something that is common in every culture and every group of people on earth. There's nowhere that you go where people don't sit down and eat together. It's just the fundamental language of our species. Wine ties into that. Alcohol, maybe in a larger sense, ties into that because not every nation drinks wine.
Patrick Habchi:A lot of places drink beer or drink whiskeys or gin or vodka or whatever the case might be. But wine and alcohol in a general sense ties in because it's still part of the same familiar connection, which is people sitting down, sharing a meal together, sharing a time and a moment in their lives together.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Hey, everyone. Welcome to Tasting Notes Toronto. I'm Alex Abbott Boyd. In this episode, I sit down with Patrick Habchi, wine director, Restaurant, a Michelin recommended restaurant in Downtown Toronto with over 600 wines on its list. Patrick talks about how he approaches wine pairings as telling a story with twists and turns, how small changes to the way a wine list is laid out can dramatically change the way a guest navigates it, and which great value wine regions he thinks should be on the radar of every wine lover.
Alex Abbott Boyd:If you're building a list, running pairings, or just on the hunt for the next great wine region, this is an episode for you. Here's my conversation with Patrick Habchi. Patrick. Yep. Thank you so much for being here.
Patrick Habchi:My pleasure.
Alex Abbott Boyd:To to kick things off, could you share just a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you came to work in wine and hospitality?
Patrick Habchi:Of course. Yeah. So my name is Patrick Habchi. I've been here for about three years now at George Restaurant. I took over the wine director position roughly a year ago.
Patrick Habchi:And how did I get into hospitality? I was 16 when I got my first hospitality job. I worked in a small mom and pop restaurant in Orleans, which is the East End Of Ottawa where I grew up.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Could you share just a little bit about George Restaurant and what it's all about both from a food and a wine perspective?
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. Of course. So the restaurant was opened in 2003 and concurrently opened with the Verity Women's Club, which is, as far as I know, the largest female only club in the country. And the restaurant is focused on fine dining, tasting menus, some a la carte options, lots of corporate events, lots of weddings. Of course, it's a very popular wedding venue as well.
Patrick Habchi:We focus on multiple tasting menus and wine pairings in the dining room. Five, seven, and ten have anchored the offerings for a long time with lots of special menus.
Alex Abbott Boyd:So five, seven, and 10 is that number of Yeah.
Patrick Habchi:Five, seven, and 10 courses with multiple special menus anchored throughout as well. The food is very seasonally focused. I was talking to Chef this morning. He goes to the market every Tuesday. We were talking about what he purchased and what he's seeing and what he's anticipating as well.
Patrick Habchi:There's a focus on fresh quality ingredients as local as possible, but doesn't have to only be from within the borders. So for instance, fiddleheads will come soon. White asparagus is gonna come soon. The first bunches of rhubarb have shut started showing up, and those get worked into savory as well as sweet. And in terms of wine, the wine is in parallel to what the cuisine is offering.
Patrick Habchi:So as seasonal as he is, we're trying to offer wines that are working for the current season that we're in. So in colder weather, people generally want warmer toned wines, whether it's whites or reds. And for me, especially, it's really important to have a wide diversity of wines as well. I want the experience on the wine pairings to be as diverse as what people are getting in terms of the cuisine. So a large variety of textures, a large variety of countries of origin, a mix and match of grapes that are familiar and things that are not as familiar so that people are getting a little bit of stuff that they know, and then getting some things that they don't know, and getting a really fun, robust experience that way.
Patrick Habchi:And it's the same way with the menu. People come in and maybe they don't know what a squab is, but they definitely know what scallops are. So there's that really fun counterbalance between those two different two different styles going on, and I try to make the wine pairings especially emulate that.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And is there a certain cuisine or a country of origin? Is it French inspired? Is it would you say it's just Canadian cuisine? How would you describe the style of the food?
Patrick Habchi:The chef is Italian. Right. So there's certainly some Italian influences in the menu, but it's very global cuisine. You'll see flavors that remind you of Japan. You'll see flavors that remind you of Africa, of European countries.
Patrick Habchi:You'll see distinctly Canadian ingredients on the menu. So there's quite a wide variety. It's not one singular focus, but it's incorporating all of the experiences and the things that the chef has gone through to to put onto the plate.
Alex Abbott Boyd:How many wines do you currently have on your list?
Patrick Habchi:We currently have roughly 600 SKUs, which encompasses everything from sparkling wine to sweet wine and everything in between. So there's quite quite a lot to work with.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. I know white asparagus, you mentioned it coming in soon. What's your go to, or do you have a couple go to wines for a dish with white asparagus? Obviously, the sauce is relevant to Yeah. The
Patrick Habchi:For sure. There's it really depends on the overall composition of the dish. So when I come up with pairings, I distill the dish down to the most simple singular style that I can think of for the dish. Is it a warm seafood dish? Is it a cold seafood dish?
Patrick Habchi:Is it a warm vegetable dish? And so on. And that informs the direction of the wine. So I like to pair warm with warm, cold with cold. For instance, last year, we did white asparagus with English peas and black truffles.
Patrick Habchi:And I had a Daniel Etienne Defe Cote de Leche Premier Cru Chablis from 2009. A very interesting wine on its own, very oxidative style, very intense. I would say it's very challenging to the average palate, but the combination with the dish was really exceptional. I'm sure the black truffle has a lot to do with that. It makes it it makes it really pop in that sense, but white asparagus actually goes really beautifully with that.
Patrick Habchi:There's whites from Central Italy, especially to the Eastern Coastline, that fit really beautifully with asparagus as well, grecchato being primarily one of them. But, again, it really depends on the overall style and composition of the plate. It has to fit the whole tone of the dish before we get into balancing out specific flavors, because flavor is very subjective. But the objective things like texture, alcohol presentation, sugar content, acidity, even tannin if we're pairing a red wine, and even someone white wines with it, It really makes a big difference. That's something that everybody can understand very easily.
Alex Abbott Boyd:How do people respond to the aged Chablis? For me, that would be such a treat to try that Chablis with some age. How how is it? Took a
Patrick Habchi:lot of it it took some, we'll call it some cajoling to to get people to buy into the idea. And ultimately, there's a big difference between a wine you drink on its own and a wine that's in a pairing, specifically, that will change the characteristics of the wine and the food that you're enjoying at the same time. And those are two completely different things. A wine that you might enjoy sipping on its own might not be the best style of wine to suit complex cuisine. So it it did take some convincing for some people.
Patrick Habchi:And even for me, I put the wine to my nose and it's just not really what I would want on its own. But with the dish, it was unbelievable. And sure enough, every single person that tried it said the same thing. I wasn't sure about the wine on its own. With the dish, it was a home run.
Patrick Habchi:Just goes to show you.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Right? Yeah. You're pushing people a little bit out of their comfort zone. When you do something like that on a wine pairing, I guess, how do you think about building the trust first? Were there some more safe classic pairings, like, earlier in that lineup?
Alex Abbott Boyd:Did you only bust that out for returning guests who you already knew? How did you think about that?
Patrick Habchi:No. We used it for everyone who was doing that dish combination specifically. Generally speaking, people who go for blind menus, blind tasting, blind wine pairings, there is a sense of implicit trust between them and you. It doesn't mean that you take advantage of that trust and pour them all kinds of wacky, fringe grapes from regions that people wouldn't recognize. But you need to have a balance of both.
Patrick Habchi:You need to be able to present a story as you're going through the menu, as they're going through the tasting. And a story always has twists and turns along the way, as at least really good ones do. And so the wine pairing has to emulate that as well. And in the beginning part of the tasting, we'll pour familiar stuff, sparkling wines. It might be a welcome cocktail, for instance.
Patrick Habchi:We'll often start with some kind of white wine that is a little bit more classic in style. It doesn't have to necessarily be a classic region or a classic grape, but it has to have a characteristic that's really familiar for people. And then you can change the dynamic a little bit that way and go to something like a really aged Chubbly and challenge people's perception of what it is that they're eating and drinking together. And over time, I think once they recognize that it seemed maybe a little bit hard to get their head around at first, they have it with the dish, and then that really helps build the trust. So first and foremost, you just have to get the pairing right if you're gonna do something like that, if you're really gonna challenge people's palates.
Patrick Habchi:And from then, it just it buys you a lot of latitude with them.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Okay. That's awesome. Yeah. You mentioned wanting to just have a very broad range of wines. How does the list split out between old world, new world?
Alex Abbott Boyd:Is there certain countries that are very heavily represented, some that you're even growing, some that you're pairing back? I'd love to just get a sense of what the list looks like from that perspective.
Patrick Habchi:It's very diverse. There's wines from all over the place. The list splits pretty heavily to France and Italy. First and foremost, those two countries dominate in a big way. There are wines from Germany, from Croatia, from Greece.
Patrick Habchi:We had wines from Moldova. There are wines from Lebanon. We had wine from Syria, which was really exceptionally fascinating just from a story perspective. What
Alex Abbott Boyd:was it a international grape? Was it like an indigenous grape to Syria?
Patrick Habchi:It was international grapes. Okay. And very challenging production, very challenging to even get the wines out of the country to ship them. So it's one of those wines that really it it's really fascinating to tell the story of how it even came to be, and the product is very good as well. We've had wines from Jordan.
Patrick Habchi:I'm currently building out Canadian selection, which as soon as I took over, for me, was really important to expand the offering there, especially in Ontario, specifically focusing on Ontario. Australia is another big one for me because it's a very large, very diverse country, and historically, it's been treated in a very homogenous way as if Australia is one wine region producing one kind of wine, and that's almost exactly the same thing as when people say, oh, I don't like Canadian wine. To say that is almost absurd because this is a massive landmass, and the wines in BC are not the same as the wines in Ontario or Quebec or going out to the East Coast. And finally, the ones that I have a personal interest in are Bordeaux and Rioja as well. Okay.
Patrick Habchi:I love Bordeaux. I love Rioja. I buy lots for myself, and I think they're seeing an incredible renaissance lately for people who are looking to fill a gap maybe.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. Could you talk about that? I feel like Bordeaux and Rioja are often they're often gateway regions. They're regions where when you're new into wine, you can walk into the LCBO and buy something, especially with Rioja with 10 or 15 years of age or $50 or less. There's, like, this incredible value.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I also feel like many somms move on and then never come back to Bordeaux. Totally.
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. And I'll focus on a word you just said, which is value, which I think has really benefited Spain and has also hurt it in some way, because the association with value is that generally you get a cheaper product, but you get a good quality for the price that you're paying. And Spain is really again, it's another one of those countries that doesn't get the same at least in our market, specifically in Ontario, doesn't get the same shine that France and Italy do. Most people know about Bordeaux and Burgundy and Champagne. Most people know about Tuscany and Prosecco and let let's say Nebbiolo or something like that.
Patrick Habchi:Whereas Spain, a lot of people, their understanding of it begins and ends with Rioja. And again, it's another extremely diverse country. What they're doing in the very South with sherry production, which is another one of my absolute favorites. And if we're talking quality price ratio, sherry is, I think, the first ballot hall of famer. Right.
Patrick Habchi:It really crushes across the board. But for most people, they're familiar with a specific type of Spanish wine, which is the Reserva, Gran Reserva styles that you can buy at the LCBO. But there is a lot of development in Spain, a lot of development even in Rioja, the way that the wines are changing, the production methods, a lot of it's like how in restaurants, chefs left, traveled all over the world, worked in kitchens in many different countries, many Michelin quality kitchens, and then came back and brought those techniques, brought that understanding of ingredient, of cuisine, of culture back to where they were from. And it really boosted the profile of that local cuisine. It's the same thing with winemaking.
Patrick Habchi:And for me, especially Rioja has been a beneficiary of that with winemakers traveling all over the place, much less classical styles of Rioja, the ones that don't have crianza and ricerfa and gran ricerfa on the label. It's just Tempranillo. It just has a designation, a specific part of Rioja where it comes from, and there's something super super exciting about that. Bordeaux is almost the polar opposite. Very little in the way of innovation, very traditional styles, but I think things have really come full circle.
Patrick Habchi:They were for a while too expensive, and now it's really starting to come back around. I think, of course, having a gap in American wine has really helped get people back into French Cabernet as opposed to American Cabernet, and people are almost appreciating a little bit of that softness, that supple character that the wines are really known for.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That's really interesting. So you think some people that were more used to California Cabernet are converting? Because they're quite different
Patrick Habchi:in flavor Very. Yeah. Absolutely. And yeah. In the absence of that, the categories that I've seen people gravitate towards are Bordeaux and Brunello.
Patrick Habchi:Surprisingly. Yeah. I think people are just okay with having a little touch less intensity, a little touch less of that overripe character of a finer, more elegant style of wine. I think people are okay with that.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Shifting gears just very slightly, has there been a rise of nonalcoholic pairing in popularity compared to how it used to
Patrick Habchi:I would say, generally, as a whole, nonalcoholic offerings, It was something that restaurants realized that they could invest a little more effort into to give people nicer, more premium options as opposed to just juice, soft drinks, the kinda classic mocktails like Shirley Temple's and whatever else. So there's a lot more investment in that side of the offering.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Do you experiment at all with combination pairings? Like, sometimes I personally, I love to do wine pairings, but I also don't always wanna drink six or seven wines. Like, maybe four with two non alk options in there. Is that ever something that you experiment with or offer?
Patrick Habchi:We haven't yet. No. Okay. No. Not yet.
Patrick Habchi:We're offering split pairings specifically for couples who are feeling like it's too much alcohol or maybe even it's too much financially. Pining out is very expensive. There's no question about it. We're trying to target our guests in that sense to give them a little bit more of an off ramp for less alcohol, maybe a slightly reduced price point. But we haven't really experimented with introducing nonalcoholic.
Patrick Habchi:For me, nonalcoholic wine is still a little bit too a little bit too much of a low quality product. No. Just can't capture the essence of alcohol in any way. The flavors are or at least the aromatics are in the ballpark, but they just don't satisfy from a texture perspective, which is extremely important to me. Texture more than flavor in wine for me matters on the palate.
Patrick Habchi:Nonalcoholic spirits, though, I think are much, much closer than they've ever been. So we're working with expanding more of our nonalcoholic offerings. We're offering a welcome cocktail. We used to do sparkling wine, and now I try to find wine based liquors, things like Amaro, things like Sherry, and turn them into cocktails that we can give people at the beginning of the meal, something that can really brighten and liven the palate before we get into the wines. Give them something a little bit different.
Patrick Habchi:I bought this Amaro that was infused with genshin and rosemary and lemon peel and super aromatic, beautiful texture. And then we thought, what can we do with this? We added gold rum to it. We made a simple syrup with rosemary and lemon. We made a little touch of citric acid to go into it.
Patrick Habchi:We top it up with a little, like a quarter to a half ounce of tonic water just to give it a little bit of that pop of fizz right off Absolutely the delicious. Everybody likes it. The next thing I'm gonna be looking for is probably a sherry, a fino, mensinilla, something like that, and then turn that into a welcome cocktail. But brighter, more vegetative, more spring inspired
Alex Abbott Boyd:is the next step. Oh, that sounds great.
Patrick Habchi:Yeah.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Shifting gears just a little bit to how you found your way in wine. Was wine a part of your family life growing up? Was it something that your parents had on the table? How did you come to wine?
Patrick Habchi:No. My family didn't drink wine. They drank hard spirits, mostly liquors, like blended whiskeys, scotch, Lebanese drink called Ada, which is made with anise. In the same family as like ouzo and pastis and those kinds of things. You add it with ice and a little touch of water, and it turns cloudy white.
Patrick Habchi:Very strong, very intense anise flavor. Not one of my favorites, personally, but that's a very traditional Lebanese thing. We add a lot of that. To get into wine, I got hired in a restaurant in 2013, and I had been working in the industry for a little while, but no wine experience. And I knew nothing about wine.
Patrick Habchi:I knew that there was red and white. I didn't know that there was sparkling and rose and sweet wines and orange wine and all that kind of stuff. And more than anything else, I was lucky that the head sommelier wanted to mentor me. So when I first started, I bought myself one of those little wine journal notebooks, and it had all the little breaks on the page. So you would write down the name of the wine up here, and then here was vintage, and etcetera, etcetera.
Patrick Habchi:And so I would write down with her all the things I was tasting. She would help guide my palate. So if I said, I taste this, she would say, why? Why do you think you're tasting that? Or what do you think about if you're tasting this instead?
Patrick Habchi:So we would do three to four wines after service every day for a couple months. And the style of the restaurant was actually really unique, because we did all small plates, and then every single dish had a wine pairing to it. And you could do a small glass or a large glass. And for the most part, we recommended, say, two to three different dishes per person, depending on your appetite. Some people would get a little bit more, some people would stick to two.
Patrick Habchi:And so you had to really know what the wines were, because people were going to ask, and you were the one pouring it. It was maybe 150 seats, two levels. So the somme couldn't be in in both levels at the same time. And they're small plates, so service goes really quick and things move very quickly. So you have to get up to speed very quickly.
Patrick Habchi:And I was very lucky that there was a lot of people there who were also interested in wine at the same time. And so we started tasting together, which I think is probably the best thing you can do if you're just getting into wine. Find a group of people who are situated in the same knowledge level. Yeah. You probably need like someone who's a little bit more knowledgeable, but for the most part, if you're all around the same thing.
Patrick Habchi:And just taste, just go out and taste, go out for drinks afterward, get a wine, taste it together, talk about it, organize time on your own. We started tasting with we had a wonderful sommelier right across the river in Gatineau, who had world class sommelier credentials, beautiful restaurant, big seller. So we would organize these tastings with her, all industry people during the day. Would Veronik? Go Veronik, yeah.
Patrick Habchi:And she would organize the entire tasting for us. She would charge us pretty much the minimum. She was so generous and so wonderful, and she would walk us through the wines. We would talk about them. And it really made a huge difference for me.
Patrick Habchi:Big difference.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What was it that made you open to that? Like, I I guess I could see getting that job, not knowing anything about one, just being like, oh, I have to learn all of this just to do my job? That's such a hassle. What was it that made that clip?
Patrick Habchi:Natural curiosity. Yeah. More than anything, I'm I don't have any other good reason for it. I love food. I grew up in a family that loved to eat.
Patrick Habchi:We loved to eat all different kinds of food and cuisines. Both of my parents cooked. So I had already a love for eating. And so it didn't feel that far of a reach for me to get into wine, Especially once I started realizing how much diversity there was in the wine world, and just how overwhelming it was at the beginning. Was like a puzzle that you wanted to solve in a lot of ways.
Patrick Habchi:You took a lot of time to figure out. Still working on it. It never stops.
Alex Abbott Boyd:No. No. Never does.
Patrick Habchi:And it's really hard. But curiosity initially. And I just wanted to be good at my job as well, if for nothing else. So you mentioned
Alex Abbott Boyd:so you grew up in Ottawa. You also mentioned your parents are Lebanese. Did you spend some time there as a kid?
Patrick Habchi:I was born there. Okay. I was born in Beirut. I moved we moved here when I was a baby. We lived here for a few years, and then eventually we moved back.
Patrick Habchi:We lived there for,
Alex Abbott Boyd:oh, five years. We came back in 2000. Is Lebanese wine something that you can speak to? I feel like here in Ontario, we have Chateau Musard, and there's just not a ton else. But is it something that you have on the list here?
Alex Abbott Boyd:Is that something that you like to explore?
Patrick Habchi:I have Chateau Musard. I have Chateau Xada. There are a few other producers, to be honest. I only learned about how cool and coveted Musard was when I got into wine. Seriously.
Patrick Habchi:And people kept talking about Chateau Musard and Chateau Musard, and everybody wanted to buy old vintages and, all that kind of stuff. But there is a fairly robust wine industry there. It is extremely well suited to growing grapes. Table grapes, as opposed to Penifera grapes, are very common. People eat tons of grapes throughout the year in Lebanon, so it is very well suited from a climate perspective for it.
Alex Abbott Boyd:You mentioned having this little group and going across into Gatineau for wine tastings. Did you end up doing any more formal education? Did you do Court of Master Psalms or WCET or anything like that?
Patrick Habchi:It just never felt like I needed it. And I think if you think about it from a cooking parallel, I think if the industry only existed on people who had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America or Le Cordon Bleu or any of the other really famous cooking schools, I think there would be, like, 20 restaurants in the city. There would not be enough talent to go around. So I think wine is in the same sense. I think if you're going to pursue the maximum level of accreditation, if you're going to be an MS or an MW, those are completely different career paths when you're done.
Patrick Habchi:What you end up doing with wine is very different from what we do on a day to day basis. But for the purposes of this job, I think it's a combination of experience, intuition, curiosity, always being open to learning new stuff, being open to receiving information from people who come and sell wine at the restaurant, going to lots of tastings, lots of industry tastings, should say, formal seminars, winemaker meetings, hosting winemakers when they're visiting in town, etcetera. I think that in and of itself is a huge part of what we do. And then there's also the business side. You have to learn how to manage your budget, how to manage margins, how to price things on the list, how to build out a list, what are the specific areas.
Patrick Habchi:Formatting as well, which I've seen formatting lead to some very unfortunate errors bef before. Can you give an example? So I worked at this restaurant. We had a huge wine list, and we had a table of three guys, and they started with Screaming Eagle.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Okay.
Patrick Habchi:And then they had a bottle of, I believe it was Scarecrow was their second. For people who don't know, these are as especially Screaming Eagle is one of the cult wineries of Californian of the world
Alex Abbott Boyd:at large. Guessing that cost them a few thousand dollars.
Patrick Habchi:Massive price tag. But the way that the menu was formatted, you had the price on the right hand side, and then you had the bin location, which was just numeric on the left hand side, in very small print, especially relative to the rest of the type font on the page. So they got the bill at the end of the night, and the guy immediately is, I, what is this? We didn't order this. And sir, we brought the bottle.
Patrick Habchi:We confirmed with you. You saw the label. And he asked for the wine list. We brought the wine list back. He said, I thought it was gonna be this.
Patrick Habchi:And I remember distinctly that the BIN number for that, for Screaming Eagle, was 110. And he basically thought that he was buying Screaming Eagle for a $110 Yeah. As opposed to whatever it was, several thousand dollars at the time. And the scarecrow was also pretty expensive. It was obviously not as expensive as the Screaming Eagle, but it was certainly very expensive in and of itself.
Patrick Habchi:And they thought that they were getting it again for maybe a 100 something dollars. And so it just, it created very difficult situation. You can understand both sides. The restaurant has a cost into the wine that they have to recoup. The guests thought that they were getting something for some specific price that despite the fact you might think there's no way.
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. They could have not, they couldn't have known, but stuff like that where you learn to, if you're putting the numbers on your list, they should be alphanumeric. Yeah. So that there's really no confusion. Stuff like that, and the formatting breakdown of how you lay out the different countries, the different regions.
Patrick Habchi:What do you put to the front? What do you put to the back? How do you structure it? All that kind of stuff. I think there's a lot that goes into how people read a menu as well, and you can concentrate their focus into specific areas, and just by the way that you lay out the list, how much information you put, how much text is on there, what kind of font you choose, what size, etcetera.
Patrick Habchi:All of those things, think, from a psychological perspective, will impact how people navigate the list and then choose what they wanna get.
Alex Abbott Boyd:A 100%. Are there any things that you've seen along those lines of just how you literally lay out a list that you've implemented and then seen an increase in sales?
Patrick Habchi:Our list used to have all of the major regions blocked together. So Bordeaux was just one long running list, and the appellations were on the side. And then you had the price in the far right hand column. And I felt like it made a lot more sense to break up the lists by appellation or putting all of the saints and yang together, putting all of the margo together, transitioning to a right bank with a solid break, then etcetera, etcetera. And I find that has really helped people navigating the list much easier.
Patrick Habchi:It also used to be, it used to be in ascending order. So the prices, the cheapest was at the top. And I changed that. Now the prices are all jumbled around with each other. And I think that creates less of people shying away from the bottom part where all the expensive stuff is and more gravitating to the section that they want it to be in the first place, especially for people who really know what they like to drink.
Patrick Habchi:Burgundy is a great example. Burgundy drinkers, especially the collectors, they know exactly where they want to be. And when you have all of it lumped together, and it's also in that kind of like cascading order where you have all the really expensive stuff at the bottom, makes it a little bit more awkward for people, because they're intentionally avoiding, maybe. And that's fine. Really expensive wines are big commitments, so it's totally understandable.
Patrick Habchi:But I think this new way that I've laid out the menu has really let people get to the section they want to get to, and then navigate within that. And I try to also have a lot of price balance in there. I don't want one section to only have wines that are $800 and up. That I don't think that's a really good representation of what that specific part is. But there's some areas where it's inevitable.
Patrick Habchi:Burgundy again is another great example, where you have concentration of premier crew and ground crew in certain areas, and those prices are just naturally high. It's hard to find stuff to sell for relatively reasonable prices, and so you end up with a lot of high price concentration in there. But it doesn't deter people, I don't think, the way it used to. And now I'm sectioning out Canada. I break down some areas, for instance, by the most common grape type, or common grape types.
Patrick Habchi:Like, you're in the white wine part of the list, if an area has a great representation of chardonnay, I'll have the chardonnays grouped together and then broken down by the different subregions that they come from or the appellations. And then I'll
Alex Abbott Boyd:list it's everything not just it's not every region is not by subregion.
Patrick Habchi:I love that. Yeah. Austria is a good example. I put all the gruners together, and then I put everything else that I have from Austria together. Because if you're looking for Gruner, I think you probably just want to get Gruner.
Patrick Habchi:You're not really interested in, as cool as they might be, Chardonnay and Riesling and all the other cool stuff that comes from there. For me, Chardonnay and Quino from Ontario get the same kind of treatment, because I think those are two grapes that really excel in Ontario, and they should have their own sections as well. And that gives people a lot more opportunity to focus on those specific things. And it also makes it easier from when we're recommending wines to guests to get to a specific section quickly, as opposed to holding up a list with 30 wines listed in one region, all bunched up together, and you're trying to pick out all of the ones that you want to try to show them. This is where all the Chardonnay is.
Patrick Habchi:Let's talk chardonnay. Let's talk specifically about Eastern Niagara chardonnay versus Western Niagara chardonnay. Yeah. And so on. Just one example, but it's pretty common in a few other regions on the list.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. Sorting it by the most important thing that people are looking for as they zoom in.
Patrick Habchi:Or at least what I think should be the most important stuff. Especially for for Ontario, I think Chardonnay and Pinot should have a distinction on the list of being what I consider to be the best quality grapes that we produce, and should therefore have that same kind of representation. I've finally gotten enough Australian wines that next month's list is gonna have a breakdown. So I'm gonna have a separation of wines from Victoria, wines from South Australia, like around Adelaide, wines from Western Australia, like Margaret River, Great Southern, so on. I like that.
Patrick Habchi:I like the way that it breaks out. It makes it easier to navigate. It also shows that there's concentration of specific styles in areas, like a lot of Shiraz in
Alex Abbott Boyd:South Australia, big, plush. Victoria, you're getting pinot, chard Exactly. For much more savory Shiraz.
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. And that's what the list looks like as well. You see a lot of Shiraz, and even some Cabernet and Grenache coming from around Adelaide, Pinots coming from Victoria. You see, actually, a few different things coming from Western Australia, which is very diverse. Cab and Malbec blends, and some Shiraz is labeled as Syrah and so on.
Patrick Habchi:Good. The on the topic of Australia,
Alex Abbott Boyd:I know I know it's a region you've been to. I always love to talk about travel with people. Do you think that was a key to opening just your own understanding up to a region like Australia and its diversity? Do you think you'd probably still have quite so deep a list now if you hadn't gone on that trip? And
Patrick Habchi:Absolutely. I would not have as many labels from Australia as I do now if I hadn't gone. Because my understanding, even though I feel like I might have had slightly more openness to Australian wine than maybe the average person does, But going and seeing the diversity of the region, seeing the diversity of the growing conditions, the climate, all of that kind of stuff, it really calcified for me how big of a country it is, first of all. We traveled from landed in Adelaide, spent a week in Adelaide, flew out to Perth, which is several hours of flying, plus several hours of time difference. Then we flew back to Melbourne, went into Victoria a little bit, and there was so much change landscape wise, climate wise, the type of wines we were drinking, the kind of producers we were meeting, it was so varied from one place to another.
Patrick Habchi:And for me, it really opened my eyes more than I think if you do a trip to Tuscany. There's lots of great wine in Tuscany, of course, but it's not so varied. It
Alex Abbott Boyd:is So, like, when you you're gonna drink good Chianti and good Brunello and maybe some Super Tuscans, are you?
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. Exactly. And you might maybe you might get to see some Syrah from Cortona or whatever. But Austra like, the fact that we say Australian wine is it's actually very funny because the styles are completely different.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Patrick Habchi:We wouldn't say that about French wine. No. Nobody ever says, I like French wine. Okay. As a general statement, great.
Patrick Habchi:But what does that actually mean? Which of the regions do you like? Yeah. What style of wine do you like? And that's the same thing for me with Australia.
Patrick Habchi:And people forget, I think, probably because maps are drawn so weirdly, that they really change, especially especially the size of countries, visually speaking. So if you've never been out there, you probably only know Australia from seeing it on some kind of map, or seeing pictures of it, or videos on the internet. You don't realize just how massive of a country it is. I mean, it's not that much smaller than Canada is, and Canada is enormous.
Alex Abbott Boyd:A 100%. Yeah. Do you think not having gone through the formal education that many SOMs do, which tend to focus on certain classic or benchmark regions, has helped you stay open to the great wines that are produced everywhere even if they aren't the classic benchmarks that that everyone else studies and memorizes and thinks are important?
Patrick Habchi:I think I have always enjoyed traveling, and I've always enjoyed cuisine, and I've always tied those two two things together. I love to travel to places where I wanna eat the food, for instance. So I think from that sense, I maybe have a predisposition to being open to stuff, because that's how I like to experience the world when I do those kinds of things. And I also like trying new foods. I like to try different cuisines when I can.
Patrick Habchi:So maybe I have a predisposition to being open to lots of different wines because of that. There are more than enough tastings for Burgundy and Bordeaux and Brunello and Brolo and Chianti and all of those great things. I don't think there's quite as many for some of the lesser known places. So maybe I like an underdog story a little bit, in a sense. But I always want the wine to be great.
Patrick Habchi:I want it to be really distinctive. I want it to be really high quality. I want it to present on the palate for the person drinking it an expression that is really enjoyable. And I never try to force things in just because I have to get a wine from Bolivia and figure out how to make it work in our list. Like, that doesn't enter my mind.
Patrick Habchi:But if I come across a wine that is from a country or from a place that is not on the list, and I think, wow, this is a great wine, and provided that the price also makes sense so that I can sell it, I'm always really open to that. What we're doing here is selling wine to people. At the end of the day, it's that simple. We're creating an experience. People are coming in to eat chef's food, to enjoy the wines, whether they're doing something by the glass or by the bottle or doing the wine pairing.
Patrick Habchi:But we're charging money for it. We're asking people, as I mentioned at the beginning, for their implicit trust. You're gonna choose blind, or you're gonna take the Saum's recommendation about a bottle of wine to go with your dinner. There there is this implicit understanding between us that you will put money up for it, and we will put expertise behind whatever we give you. So it it's still really important that the wines are great regardless of the price point, whether it's a wine that we sell for $60 or a wine that we sell for $600.
Patrick Habchi:You have to get the same kind of sensation of enjoyment out of it, relatively speaking.
Alex Abbott Boyd:On that topic of what we do, what do you think is the meaning of wine? Or maybe more directly, I'm wondering first why wine is meaningful to you and then how you try to communicate that.
Patrick Habchi:There's a lot of answers. There are I'll say there's two fundamental things for me. One is storytelling, and one is how it brings people together. And how it brings people together ties into the larger overall sense of dining. Dining is very communal by nature.
Patrick Habchi:People eat together for all kinds of reasons. Work outings, friends getting together, celebrating anniversaries or birthdays, grieving families, baby showers. There's just weddings, obviously. There's so many different components, and eating together is something that is common in every culture and every group of people on earth. There's nowhere that you go where people don't sit down and eat together.
Patrick Habchi:It's just the fundamental language of our species. Wine ties into that. Alcohol, maybe in a larger sense, ties into that because not every nation drinks wine. A lot of places drink beer or drink whiskeys or gin or vodka or whatever the case might be. But wine and alcohol in a general sense ties in because it's still part of the same familiar connection, which is people sitting down, sharing a meal together, sharing a time and a moment in their lives together.
Patrick Habchi:I'm sure you've had this, but I have lots of dinners and lunches that come to mind where I was with people, or I had a standout meal, or we did something and we're celebrating afterwards. And then the second piece of it is storytelling. The places that wine comes from, the people who make it, it's so compelling. It's so interesting. It can get bogged down in technical terminology a lot of the time, and it can feel very difficult for novice wine drinkers or inexperienced wine drinkers to get into it.
Patrick Habchi:Some people like wine just to drink, to unwind in the same way that some people like to smoke cigarettes. Broadly the same kind of idea. It helps you relax, maybe settles your nerves, or whatever the case might be. But there are so many cool places and so many cool people making wine, and the stories that come from those and the stories that come from the specific years that some of these wines can be made, the conditions that led to the wine, and then you add on top of that the development that happens in bottle, which is not every wine, but especially for the wines that we collect and the wines that are in the premium, super premium, and luxury segments, there is that added layer that they will develop. They will change.
Patrick Habchi:They are a glimpse in looking back in time to when the wine was made, when it was harvested. So I think those are two things that really bring wine front and center, especially in fine dining restaurants and fine dining where people are coming in to intentionally have a nice long dinner, to have a relaxed experience, to take their time savoring and enjoying their bites, to enjoy the sips of wine that we give them with every course or from the bottle that they're sharing, I think it is extraordinary from that perspective. Yeah.
Alex Abbott Boyd:How do you communicate those stories? You have so little time at the table. How do you communicate the richness behind each bottle of wine succinctly to people?
Patrick Habchi:It takes a lot of time. You have to really you have to really learn a couple of things. One, how to read people. You have to understand when at the table they want your presence, and when they just want you to do the service, and to let them enjoy their time. So understanding how to navigate those situations will give you an understanding of how much time you have to talk about something.
Patrick Habchi:And also within the context of your service, you're busy, how many people are in the restaurant, how many wine fairings do you have going on at the same time, Is someone waiting for you to come by and open a bottle of wine for them, etcetera, etcetera? I it is hard for sure. There's only so much time. I think you have to give a variation of your spiels about the wine to people. Sometimes you have to just focus on the nitty gritty.
Patrick Habchi:You have to know before you go in how much time you have to speak and what you want to focus on. So if you're doing a pairing, you probably want to focus on how does the wine tie into the pairing. What is it that you're trying to achieve in a broad sense? And probably just focus on that. Other times, you might want to give a little bit of background about the wine, where it's from, maybe geographically, if it's an interesting place that people are not familiar with, that is probably something that they'll get value out of, is that little bit of education from that sense.
Patrick Habchi:I try not to go too much into very technical details about winemaking and so on. I just think that's where you lose people. You will get people who are really interested in that, and that's when you guys can have a fun nerd out session. But for the most part, most people just want to understand a little bit about the wine, where it comes from, and what they're going to taste in the glass. And if you can do that in twenty to thirty seconds, if that's all you have, then you have to just edit down until you have exactly what you need to say.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That's such a challenge. I feel lucky as an agent. I get a little bit more time when I'm meeting with you share why I'm excited about a wine. Yeah. Doing it in thirty seconds is tough.
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. We almost distill it down into the ethanol vapors of storytelling. Concentrate as much of it as we can, and then give it to people. Because sometimes that's all the time you have. Yep.
Patrick Habchi:It's busy. You've gotta be at many different tables at the same time. People are waiting for you. You can't just make people wait because you wanna tell someone a four minute story about the winemaker and his family's history, and what happened in 1945, and so on. You just sometimes you just have to get to it.
Patrick Habchi:But I always try to be cognizant of when I give people a short, kind of, a short amount of my time. So when I come back, I try to give them a little bit more of my time. And people always want to chat. They always want to chat with the sommelier. There's so many questions to ask, so many different things.
Patrick Habchi:They want to know how do you buy the wine? How do you decide on the wine pairings? How do you decide which wines to buy? Where do you travel? What do you eat?
Patrick Habchi:Etcetera, etcetera. They just they wanna know so much about what we do. So great.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What do you find most challenging about your job? Is it is it what we're just talking about? Is it that challenge of distilling the richness of a wine into thirty seconds? Is it the business side of things? What do you find the most challenging?
Patrick Habchi:I don't think it's no. I don't think it's the service side. The service side is always really fun. It's very dynamic. There's always lots of stuff going on, and it really it adds a lot of variety to what you're doing on a day to day basis.
Patrick Habchi:So there's never any there's always the stress of service when it's super busy, and there's a million different things going on, and this is a massive space. There's a lot of square footage to cover, so it can be stressful from that perspective sometimes, but I don't see it as a downside to the job. Putting a wine list together, it should be fun. If you're someone who does this job and that is a stressful thing for you, then you're probably not in the right kind of job. Managing inventory shouldn't be that much trouble.
Patrick Habchi:If that is something that is trouble for you, you probably need to either reevaluate the systems that you use, or maybe add an extra layer into how you manage your inventory, whether it's having someone else be part of it with you, or whatever the case might be, whatever kind of solution. Yeah. But it's just really like the few times where you're counting on a line being there, and then it's not there, and then you've got to find something else, and maybe you don't have something that's in the same style and same price point, so you have to give them something a little bit less or try to sell them on something a little bit more expensive, which I think psychologically always bothers people. But it doesn't happen that often, thankfully.
Alex Abbott Boyd:So you mentioned two regions earlier, Bordeaux and Rioja, that that you love and you think have great value. What do you think are the best value regions?
Patrick Habchi:Best value regions. I think there's extraordinary pinots and chardonnays coming from Victoria, which for the price point are humbly it's really hard to understand how good the wines are. Extraordinary. I think Northwest Of Spain, there's so much stuff going on. Really exciting, really beautiful wines.
Patrick Habchi:Portugal is another place where you can get a ton of crazy good value. Really beautiful, texturally diverse styles. I think those are probably the few that really stand out to me. And then I think even in Bordeaux, like you can get a lot of really banging wines from the Ahmed duck for pretty reasonable prices. It's pretty great.
Patrick Habchi:Oh, a 100%.
Alex Abbott Boyd:They have way too much wine there.
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. No. They do. They absolutely do.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. You can get something ten, fifteen years old for, well, export price €6 without too without looking too hard.
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. Yeah. Really. It it is really an area that I've been able to gravitate towards to really help populate a lot of the Bordeaux part of the wine list and to give people access to older wines from that region. Nothing too crazy.
Patrick Habchi:Even stuff going back to 2010 where people will get a really great representation of what aged Bordeaux is. Why is it so sought after by collectors? Why do so many people love it? For me, Bordeaux is the iconic region of consistently high quality. I think if you narrow it down, Burgundy probably has the highest highs, but also has consistently more lows than Bordeaux.
Patrick Habchi:And Bordeaux, it just there's just so many good wines year after year, and with the aging are just astonishing. So I think even that region can be considered undervalued in a lot of ways, especially with so many people who left Bordeaux, stopped buying, stopped drinking, gravitated to new regions or new places. I think people are coming back and saying, oh, yeah. I remember why I like it so much.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. A 100%. I think if you avoid first, second, third growths, you can probably just get such good wines there. And it is one of the regions that I feel like the LCBO actually does really well. So the Ontario vidsummer is pretty spoiled that way.
Patrick Habchi:Very much. It is easy to access, which is great.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What would be your Desert Island wine? So if you could drink just one wine forever. I would
Patrick Habchi:probably do Bordeaux for red, and then I would want something like Riesling, German Riesling for white, because you can get the super bone dry styles and all the way going to the super sweet style. So it covers a really wide spectrum of different drinking profiles. Yeah. So I guess you you got a loophole in a way in the question.
Alex Abbott Boyd:As a final question, what keeps you excited about working in the world of wine?
Patrick Habchi:The world of wine is extremely complicated. And the more time you spend in it, the less you understand, if I'm frankly There is so much variation from vintage to vintage. Huge estates get sold, and especially with how much money has poured in from private equity and so on into states in France and Italy and all the major players, you have to always be on top of it because the styles of the wines will change over time. And there are distinct years where pre purchase and post purchase, the wines are just completely different, in my opinion. So you're always on your toes.
Patrick Habchi:You're always trying to navigate even the familiar, because it becomes unfamiliar inevitably. Or a family sells their property to another family, and then they go start a new property. And so you try to stay abreast of those opportunities. There is a ton of stuff to learn all the time about indigenous varietals, winemaking technique, meeting winemakers, going to industry tastings, and networking with people who do the same kind of work, getting a chance to discuss with them the things that they're going through, the things that they're seeing, the trends that they're seeing. So that certainly for me is the thing that I just love how much variety there is in wine.
Patrick Habchi:It never stops evolving, ever. Even a bottle that you've already bought can be something completely different from when you bought it six years later, five years later, twenty years later. So there's just it's just a ride that you never get off.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I think for the intellectually curious person, it is one of the deepest wells you could try to dive down into.
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. It's very stimulating, very challenging. It really suits my brain. There's part of my brain that likes recall, likes solving puzzles and so on. It really hits that part.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Super. Thank you so much for your time.
Patrick Habchi:Yeah. Thank you.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Thank you all so much for listening. If you've been enjoying these episodes, a quick rating or review will only take a few seconds, and it helps so much more than you'd think. Until next time. Cheers.