What to expect at Philly's first ever Wine Week

FLIGHTS OF FANCY: Tria’s Sande Friedman is ready for Wine Week.
Neal Santos

Back in the fall, after an industry wine tasting at a.bar, Kate Moroney of Vintage Wine Bar and Bill Eccleston of Ristorante Panorama thought about rolling out a Philadelphia Wine Week event in 2015. But then, really, why wait? “We work in restaurants, we throw parties every week,” Moroney explains. “So that’s pretty much the idea, this is a citywide party celebrating wine and we figured we’d just go for it.”

Moroney sees Wine Week, which starts Sunday, as an opportunity to start a conversation about wine in a city where beer is more often in the spotlight.

Along with Eccleston, she’s brought more than 20 restaurants on board, hosting a solid eight days worth of events — casual happy-hour tastings, full-on pairing dinners, wine trivia nights and classes for those with varied levels of wine knowledge. 

Sande Friedman heads up staff education and classes for all three of Tria locations, making wine and cheese education a full-time job. “For us, it’s what we try to do at all of our restaurants anyway,” she says. “There are all of these products that are sort of hard to pronounce and have these crazy stories behind them.”

And of course, there’s the inevitable Beer Week comparison, Friedman says, “Philly Beer Week was an excuse to get beer geeks to go out and drink. It’s about accessibility. It’s just about making things more familiar.” 

For Friedman, it’s also about shedding wine’s sometimes stuffy stigma. In the past, she’s hosted PLCB safaris, leading Tria classes around the Fine Wine and Good Spirits store on Chestnut near 12th and explaining where to find the hidden gems. 

And for Wine Week, the two magic words for Friedman are themes and alliteration. 

Alliteration comes in the form of Madiera Mondays, with sips of fortified wine of dating back to 1969, and $10 Tuesdays, when the Washington West location will be serving $10 pours of 10-year-old wines like a Tulocay cabernet sauvignon and a Sagrantino from Umbria.  

Terence Lewis, beverage director for Marcie Turney’s and Val Safran’s 13th Street empire, has focused his Wine Week efforts on putting together an accessible lineup of events at Barbuzzo and Jamonera that embrace the archaeology and sociology that initially sparked his interest in wine. 

Before opening Jamonera, Lewis “got a lost in Spain for a while,” researching the beverage program for the Spanish restaurant. He’s highlighting lesser-known Spanish wines with a tasting Sunday, featuring red and white vermouths paired with complimentary snacks for $20. He’s also offering an in-depth sherry-tasting class on Sunday, March 30, pouring seven distinct styles, none of which fit familiar grandma-sipping stereotypes. 

Major Wine Week players keep echoing that education and accessibilty are the key factors behind the event — along with access to samples of so many wines not often seen around the city.

“Beer intrinsically is less expensive. In America, it’s part of our culture. We look at beer as an everyday beverage and everywhere else in the world, wine is your everyday beverage. I think it’s a cultural thing. I don’t think it’s something that can’t change,” Moroney enthusiastically explains. 

Selling wine at Vintage has given her a unique perspective on the climate of drinking in Philadelphia, a place where ordering a pint of gueuze is more common than a glass of gamay. If someone sits at her bar and says that India Pale Ales are their thing, she’ll steer them toward a grassy, bright New Zealand sauvignon blanc, a wine that possesses the same herbaceousness and acidity. “It’s a natural transition for someone who drinks an IPA,” she says.

It’s that sense of discovery that wine importer Megan Storm is looking forward to with the launch of Wine Week. “It only takes a sip. It only takes that first time that something makes you go ‘Aha!’ for you to fall in love with it,” Storm says. “Maybe someone will stumble into Tria where they’re pouring something from the Jura and say, ‘I’ve never tasted chardonnay like that. It’s not oaked out. Maybe I actually like chardonnay.’”

Storm, who brings in small-production wines through The Artisan’s Cellar of West Chester, talks about removing the pretensions surrounding wine by breaking it down into its base elements: “It’s farmers and it’s grapes. It can also be big corporations. It can be a status thing, but it can also be a simple thing. Or it can literally be just a farmer and his family and their cellar that has very little technology. For the longest time, wine has been seen as a luxury item or as a jug but there’s definitely a cool place in between.”

That “cool place in between” is exactly what Philadelphia Wine Week is aiming for. It’s kicking off on Sunday night with Bubbles and Barrels, a collection of global sparklers and local wines at Ristorante Panorama (14 N. Front St.) from 5 to 8 p.m. and is continuing though the following Sunday, March 30. For more information and a complete listing of events, go to www.phillywineweek.org.