BellaLuca Café Italiano’s
Wine List Is World Class

By Tony A. Archuleta \
HERALD Reporter
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Italian restaurant aficionados throughout the world blithely dare you to give them one good reason to visit your BellaLuca Café  Italiano in Truth or Consequences (Sierra County), NM, USA.

For starters, Jessica Mackenzie, the BellaLuca’s official wine girl (yeah, she goes back), comes at you with two great reasons.

First, an impressive wine list for any café in any corner of the globe. Second, the 2009 (and, this just in, the 2010!) Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.

Necessarily in that order.

Roughly translated, BellaLuca is Italian for she who missed out on being a red wine-sampling altar boy/wine critic, but who was rewarded in her youth with a family of winemakers from the old country, Italy.

“I grew up in Colorado, but my family –the Italian part of my family– is from Back East, from Boston, so during holidays we were always drinking the family wine,” says Mackenzie, who along with her husband and celebrated chef, Byron, opened the popular Italian eatery in downtown TorC in 2008.

Mackenzie says all the youngsters in her family were treated to a quarter-glass of wine topped off by a full glass of Sprite at mealtime. “And that was the beginning of my appreciation for wine.”

This wine lover, this wine aficionado –she insists she’s anything but a connoisseur because she’s too immersed in the learning process to assume such a lofty title– has gone from sipping on the Sangiovese wine produced by her Old World relatives to offering a $1,500 bottle of Biondi Santi Brunello at her own restaurant.

Like an award-winning vintage itself, Mackenzie’s experience with fine wines is a well-balanced one.

Both Jessica and Byron have an extensive background in the restaurant business, but it wasn’t until they opened their own eatery, the BellaLuca Café Italiano, 303 Jones St., that Jessica had a chance to pair a wine list with a menu completely on her own terms.

“A certain amount of our customers are incredibly wine savvy, but my most favorite thing to do in the restaurant is when somebody says, ‘Here is what I want to eat for dinner, can you help guide me into a wine that’s going to pair well, and suit my palate?’” Mackenzie explains.

Wine Spectator magazine, with a readership of 2.58 million worldwide, honors the BellaLuca “for having one of the most outstanding restaurant wine lists in the world.”

“You basically qualify for it by applying,” Mackenzie says of the award selection process. Make no mistake about it, plenty of restaurants internationally are more than willing to pay the submission fee to earn such prestigious recognition.

Smart casual, which describes the BellaLuca, to fine dining establishments are eligible to compete for the coveted award.

“You have to have a certain number of wines on your list, and you have to have a certain number of Wine Spectator Award-winning wines on your list,” Mackenzie says of the submission criteria. “Wines have to fit your concept insofar as your menu offerings.”

A restaurant must also serve at least 100 different labels; the Bella Luca offers 145 at last count.

What’s more, the Bella Luca won the award on its first attempt, which is a rarity.

“Generally, second- or third-time applicants win,” says Mackenzie. “With the help of Southern Wine & Spirits, our primary wine vendor, we were able to win our first year out and we also won this year, so it was quite an accolade to win as a first-year applicant.”

Now about that $1,500 bottle of wine: “It was an incredibly good year. It’s a Brunello di Montalcino, which is a wine made out of Sangiovese Grosso grape and it’s a Biondi Santi, which is a winemaker with a stellar reputation,” says Mackenzie.

“It was an incredible grape growing year in the region in Tuscany and it just got incredible numbers as far as ratings from Wine Spectator and other wine magazines, and it was released very minimally, especially in this country.”

Mackenzie says she has neither sold nor helped herself to a bottle of the Biondi Santi Brunello. “I wish I had $1,500,” she says with a smile.

Mackenzie says a table of guests recently purchased two $300 bottles of wine, “but generally speaking we sell in the $30 to $70 range, and that’s where the majority of our wines (are priced). We have a couple of high-end wines for people who are celebrating something special, and honestly those high-end wines really kind of give weight to the wine list so far as the super wine savvy customer, so I expect sometime I will get to sell one of the $1,500 bottles.”

Bottles of wine start at $20, and of course it’s also available by the glass.

The BellaLuca also offers what’s called “wine flights.”

“It’s a nice way for a customer to try a variety of wines – essentially a 1-ounce pour of six different wines,” Mackenzie says. “Obviously you don’t want to come to dinner and drink six glasses of wine. This is a nice way for our customers to sample and play around with what might suit them best and try a lot of stuff.”

So how exactly does Mackenzie ensure that the wine list complements the menu?

“Essentially you kind of classify the flavor profiles of the dish, the heaviness of the dish,” she answers. “So if you have a heavy dish, a dish that’s cheesier, what have you, you are probably going to want an acidic wine to cut through some of the heaviness of the dish – a white wine, sauvignon blanc...

“And then you assess the strongest flavor profile of the dish,” she continues, “and you pair that with wine, with grape types that easily pair well.”

Mackenzie notes that the old wine maxim that says red wine goes with red meat, and white wine goes with seafood is an “older notion that has been changed somewhat; so the new connoisseur would say there’s some variation to that rule.”

Italian wines are obviously well represented on the wine list, but the entire spectrum of labels covers an array of wine producing countries including the United States (New Mexico, California, Washington, Oregon), Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and Spain.