What ‘The Bear’ Gets (Mostly) Right About Wine This Season
In season three of The Bear, Hulu’s drama about a dysfunctional clan of Chicago misfits who flip a sandwich joint into a fine-dining restaurant, one crucial element seemed to be missing: the wine.
In this latest season, which premiered on June 25, wine finally gets its due treatment. Gary “Sweeps” Woods, The Bear’s default wine director, comes into his own as he starts to learn about basic food and wine pairings. While he’s just a novice, he repeatedly attempts to unpack the nuances of vintage variation throughout the season, including with aged wines that aren’t generally on a beginning sommelier’s radar.
“The years are getting tricky,” he says, his first mention of wine this season. “How are you doing with what goes with what?” responds Sydney Adamu, the restaurant’s rising star sous chef.
Through Sweeps, The Bear dials in on several aspects of wine education and training that go beyond sensible pairing suggestions. However, the pairings, it should be said, are spot on.
Restaurateur and retired master sommelier Alpana Singh meets with Sweeps at her eponymous restaurant, where she gives him the kind of advice that’s a wink to any wine-savvy viewers, and easy enough to absorb for any neophytes: mushrooms and Pinot Noir are like peanut butter and jelly. Yes, you can pair red wine with fish. “What grows together goes together,” Singh explains, a tried-and-true adage for terroir-based pairings.
Naturally, the suggestions imparted here by an industry legend are excellent, but what the show captures especially well is the passion, sense of purpose and curiosity that can take hold so quickly for someone new to the field.
“When you first get into that nerdy wine status, and you’ve fallen head over heels with it, that’s when you can start falling down the rabbit hole of things like trying to pick out those vintage nuances,” says Alex Cuper, wine director of Chicago restaurants El Che Steakhouse and Brasero.
Widespread Imposter Syndrome
With that recognizable enthusiasm, however, often comes a less desirable sensation that The Bear also explores: self-doubt.
“Welcome to the never-ending impostor syndrome,” says Jelena Prodan, partner and beverage director of Chicago’s SMG Restaurants. This explains why Sweeps gets mired down in master-level details like vintage variation.
Imposter syndrome is a recurring theme all season. Carmy realizes that he’s being outshined by his prodigal sous and pastry chefs. Tina struggles to break the three-minute pasta barrier. Richie searches for some elegant monologue to motivate his front-of-house team. (“On my signal, unleash hell!”) Or, as comic relief goon Neil Fak puts it in a rare moment of introspection: “This place is fancy. The people that come in here are fancy. I’m not fancy.”
Singh recognizes this feeling of inadequacy is particularly present in wine, especially for a burgeoning professional like Sweeps who is charged with selling upmarket bottles to clientele. “I met with Corey Hendrix—the actor who plays Sweeps—and I explained the psyche of a sommelier,” says Singh. “You can feel like you don’t belong in the room, particularly if you’re a person of color. It brings its own ‘terroir’ to the situation.”
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She continues, “People are coming into the restaurant whose suit and tie is worth more than you’re making every month.”
The Joys of Wine
For ambitious people who find themselves in the restaurant industry, whether by choice or by circumstance, the wine world can also feel like a haven, imposter syndrome be damned.
I speak from personal experience. Though I chose front-of-house restaurant work very consciously as a post-masters-degree 35-year-old, wine was something that felt legitimizing, as armor to wear in front of those who thought I’d backslid.
Sweeps, a former minor league baseball player, has major league dreams thwarted by a brief experimentation with steroids. Wine is a place where he could potentially play for the (metaphorical) majors again, and his obsession with vintage variation demonstrates that he’s eager to get there. Fortunately, experimenting with aged Amarone is less likely to blow up his life than dabbling with steroids was.
There is a repeated physical gaffe, though, which makes Sweeps’ attempts to distinguish different vintages at this stage of his career more comical than true to the industry. Much like in season three, where we see him chipping away at a nearly extracted cork with a wine key, this season he keeps examining two unopened bottles for nuances of color, after reading that color is key to unlocking vintage. (It doesn’t take a wine education to know that you can’t properly assess color through a bottle.)
“It’s the exact same shit,” he says in episode five, holding up two bottles, with copies of The Oxford Companion to Wine and The World Atlas of Wine in the foreground. In episode eight he places two bottles of Serego Alighieri ‘Vaio Armaron’ Amarone della Valpolicella on the shelf, one dated 1988 and the other 2001. “I still can’t tell the damn difference,” he says.
Later, he attempts to literally blind taste them. Blindfolded. Where he can’t examine the color at all.
However, the show nails several other aspects of a burgeoning wine education, such as the giddyness about sharing what you’ve learned, and geeking out about under-the-radar finds. After Singh shows Sweeps how to examine a glass for color concentration, he parrots that exact moment to chef Sydney in the next episode.
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“You see how you can kind of read through this? That means it’s [thin-skinned] enough for a nice piece of fish,” he says. The moment reminded me of when I explained pyrazines to a friend and inadvertently unleashed hell onto every person he’d ever meet in a wine-drinking situation in the future.
In another moment seemingly designed for appreciative nods from beverage director viewers: “It only costs about 50 bucks a bottle,” Sweeps tells chef Sydney of his thin-skinned red find.
“Alright, but how does it taste?” she asks.
“It tastes like it’s about 200 bucks a bottle.”
Imposter syndrome may be at play for Sweeps and other characters in this season’s The Bear, but so is over-delivery, like a great value $50 wine, all of them punching above their weight class in the quest to protect a restaurant that they believe is worth fighting for.
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- We chatted with comedian Eric Wareheim on all things wine.
- Here’s a full timeline of how the NBA became so obsessed with wine.
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