BARTENDER'S WINE EXPERT:  JOSEPH DELISSIO

   
Meet our Wine Expert: 
Read what the media has to say about the author, 
Mr. DeLissio, and his first book, The River Café Wine Primer.

"The River Café Wine Primer, written by Joseph DeLissio, wine director of New York's renowned River Café and one of the country's undisputed experts in the field, is a no-nonsense, easy-to-understand introduction to the joys of wine.  It is designed to give even the most uncertain novice confidence about a too-often mysterious pleasure." -- Book jacket cover introduction for The River Café Wine Primer.

A CELLAR MASTER OF A CERTAIN VINTAGE
by Frank J. Prial

It's easy to get tired of New York in midwinter:  the crowds, the angry drivers, the dirty snow.  Some people head for Miami, Me, I take the A Train to Brooklyn.  With the sun on the water, the Brooklyn Bridge soaring overhead and Lower Manhattan a thousand yards away, there is no place like it to see New York.  It's a John Sloan painting and an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem and an afternoon spent taking it in will get you through to April better than a weekend in Paris.

In fact, I had a second agenda when I walked down Old Fulton Street last week from the subway stop to the River Cage, the restaurant nearly under the bridge.  Someone had told me that the average time a California winemaker stays at any one job is four years.  With new restaurants opening almost hourly, sommeliers in California and everywhere else seem to move every six weeks.  I've heard that "Excellent choice, sir" line from wine stewardess I'd swear were not old enough to drink two years ago.  Joe DeLissio has been the wine director at the River Café for 23 years.  That has to be some sort of record, and I was curious to see how he was holding up.

Mr. DeLissio started out as one of those "excellent choice" kids:  He was 23 when Buzzy O'Keeffe, who owns the River Café, hired him as wine director.  He has literally grown up with the wine boom.

"My father owned a saloon in Brooklyn," said Mr. DeLissio, who is 46, "but I knew nothing about wine, nothing.  It was what the guys drank in my father's place when they were off the hard stuff."

Mr. O'Keeffe didn't know much about wine either, and the Frenchman who had been buying wine for him had his own way of adding up bills.  "I was working as a psychiatric therapist during the day and an aspiring rock musician at night," Mr. DeLissio recalled.  "Buzzy hired me because my mother, who did his books, vouched for me.  Actually, it wasn't hard.  I bought the wine and I sold it.  It's like Pete Rose used to say when someone would ask him how he did what he did -- 'I see the ball,' he'd say, 'and I hit the ball.'"

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