The Fizz #70: Bruno Almeida sees a future for Portuguese wine in America
In this issue, Bruno and I talk about Portuguese wine, where the New York hospitality industry has room for growth, and how the optics around port are changing.
For the 70th issue of The Fizz, I spoke to New York City wine director, sommelier, and wine educator Bruno Almeida. Bruno comes to New York by way of Portugal, where he was born and raised. He came to New York as a drummer in a rock band, ready to make his American debut. Wine found him instead, and today, he’s a well known and loved educator, The Hue Society’s 2022 Wine Educator of the Year.
In this issue, Bruno and I focused on two topics—the hospitality industry in New York and where it can improve for parents, employees, and those new to the industry, and the state of Portuguese wine in America—specifically port and madeira, which is going through a phase of reinvention. I’m excited to see what this passionate wine educator will do in the future, to continue to connect consumers to the magic of wine.
Margot: Is wine a part of your family history? Did you grow up with it?
Bruno: Actually, no. I was born and raised in Lisbon, Portugal. It's actually a wine region. There's plenty of vines all over the place, but I was a city boy. My parents are from Africa, they came to the country in the mid sixties. Someone's family or someone's friends had vines. I would spend the summer in the country and came across big vineyards, but I didn't pay any attention to vineyards at that time, of course, I was a kid.
One of the traditions in Portugal is foot stomping the grapes. Someone close to the family was making wine and foot stomping. They gave me a cup of juice. I was looking at these old men with shorts and like hairy legs and stuff like that. I was like, what the heck is going on here? Funny. I had a little bit of a baptism in wine. When I was about sixteen or seventeen, I started becoming more aware of it.
Margot: How did you get into the wine industry? What spurred you there?
Bruno: I came to NYC in 2002 with the dream of being a rockstar. I was a drummer in a band—it was four of us. At that time, there was already a little bit of a collapse in the music industry with record labels. Soon enough I started working in hospitality, mopping floors, rocking the dish pit. I became a waiter and that triggered something in me. I was taking for granted something that was right next to me all of my life, vineyards and wine. I worked in a Portuguese restaurant in the city. Something clicked. I was like, oh man, let's do this. I found my second passion at that time.
I started going back to my roots, visiting Portuguese wine regions, studying Portuguese wine, and soon enough I got into Italian wine. In the mid 2000s, New York started seeing a lot of Italian restaurants. I worked on trying to understand the organized chaos of Italy and the Portuguese organized chaos and then jumping into France and on and on and on.
Margot: Why did you choose to get certified through the Court of Master Sommeliers?
Bruno: I started being really focused on wine around 2008, 2009. I was a wine director at this restaurant called Gusto in the West Village. Moving on to other places—it was still pretty rough. Being someone coming from a different background, with a different accent, coming from a different country, and of course, being of color, validation was key. Let's face it. It was not easy to get into the industry. It felt like a gap in my resume. I felt a little bit of the need to have that certification. I felt the need to have the pin. Nobody forced me, but it was clear I needed to have it to boost my resume.
I went toward the advanced course in 2014, and that's when I start to realize like, do I really need to do it? Some restaurants gave their staff support to go through that process. They were able to take days off or restaurants were even investing in them to go to the court, go to Houston or Las Vegas or wherever to do their certification. I didn’t necessarily ask, but I didn’t get that support. It is a lot of money—taking the week off work, the flight, the hotel, the course itself, it's a lot. And I'm a father. For us as parents in the industry, those kinds of things really matter.
So I had to make a choice not to move forward. Around 2016, I started to do wine education. I started to realize that this is the area I want to move forward in. I don’t wear my pin on the floor anymore. Certain guests will expect a sommelier to look a certain way, but times have changed a little bit. Still baby steps, but times have changed a little.
Margot: You've been in the New York wine industry for a little while. I'm from Brooklyn, and I've personally seen a lot of change in the industry. Can you talk about what change you've seen and what change you hope to see in the future?
Bruno: I think we're still fresh from COVID, us as New Yorkers and us in the hospitality setting. I'm very curious what's going to happen in New York now. People are going to go back to their neighborhood restaurants, to their neighborhood shops. Is outdoor seating really going to happen? Many restaurants are still trying to figure out, are we going to continue to invest in that?
What I've been seeing is that people are spending their time very locally. Going to that local restaurant because that's what they rely on. Wine shops before the pandemic, some of them were in a very shaky situation. We were just selling what we could to stay alive. I see this as a wake up call for new New York hospitality. You need to read your neighborhood, stay in touch with your neighborhood. People don't need to go to Manhattan to have fine dining, to have a great experience, to have a great brunch, to buy great wines.
If you are in Midtown, you cannot expect that you're going to be packed at 10 o'clock, because right now, with a great chunk of corporate working from home, it's not happening, and lunches are not happening as much as they were. I'm seeing a lot of people that want to be in the wine industry, they want to be in hospitality. That’s pretty cool because you're getting new ideas, new terminology. It's going in a good way. Challenging, it's a challenging way for sure, but fulfilling.
Margot: You feature talks with other people of color who are in the wine industry on your Instagram—it seems like something that's important to you. Why is it important to do that?
Bruno: For me, it's super important. I'm going to be very honest, unfortunately much is still the same in the industry. I just had a great talk with Lydia Richards about Hispanic women in wine. I'm featuring talks to celebrate the history of women during March and in February, Black wine professionals, Black winemakers. Unfortunately, we still have to box ourselves in around a month for this, for month for that.
My parents were African, and being raised in Portugal, I’ve experienced many of the challenges. I'm still experiencing another part of it—me as a father and as a professional. That’s another kind of discrimination. Now I'm seeing my son come up with all the challenges over crazy things that we are witnessing. That's why I'm all about the community and I've come across great inspiring minds.
During the pandemic I was at home with all these wines I brought back from Portugal from a wine trip. I was like what can I do now? Like, we just closed everything. I started doing those wine talks because I was trying to support smaller wine producers from Portugal where I know that their wines are only available in a restaurant setting. They're not retail. They were screwed—if you don't have your wines in retail, how are you going to make it?
Margot: The New York hospitality industry has always been pretty intense. Very late nights, very party forward. I have personal experience with that. What is it like being a parent in the wine industry? Now as a leader, are you fostering an environment where folks have a little bit more self-care opportunity?
Bruno: Great point. Parenthood and self care and mental healthcare in hospitality in New York, it's a big elephant in the room. Nobody wants to talk about it, and I don't think they ever will [to the extent that it needs to be]. When I interviewed at certain places, they’d say oh you are a parent? It's not that they told me, oh, I'm sorry we don’t hire parents, but I can tell, I can tell the vibe. You're a parent, you're going to take days off because of that. Like, it's just the way it is.
It's definitely an elephant in the room. Being a parent in the New York hospitality industry is difficult. There's long hours, but things are a little bit better now. There are more restrictions. People are not staying that long in restaurants right now.
In 2010 for example, it was crazy. A lot of us had two jobs in order to pay our bills and everything. It takes a lot from you and we give so much as hospitality workers. We want to bring the best experience possible to our guests, but then at the end of the night, we forget about ourselves. It becomes I need a couple of beers, now let's go karaoke and this and that. I saw people going in the wrong direction because it was just too much.
I think it's still too much. Welcome to hospitality. We need to address that. We really need better mental healthcare.
Margot: What could be done to create a healthier environment in the industry?
Bruno: It's opening up the conversation. It's making feel people welcomed and being honest with them. Hospitality is not easy. Not only because it's long shifts, there are high standards. It's about how we train people and how we back up our staff. Working in NYC will be different from the rest of the country, but it's a new unique opportunity to grow your skillset. You're coming across different realities.
There’ll be someone that works with you that is from Poland, that is from Ukraine, that is from Nicaragua, that is from Portugal, that is Brazilian. You have all these different takes on dishes or service. Having an open mind is important. It’s going to be challenging, and our job is to make it easier on our staff as much as possible.
A lot of times we forget about healing ourselves because we heal others, and at times it's two o'clock in the morning and you're just leaving. A lot of times I speak with my staff the next day, like I know like last night was rough, what do you guys think? What should we have done? Having that conversation opens us up and avoids constant repetition.
Margot: I look forward to the industry embracing the conversation around self-care and mental healthcare more. I know some folks are doing really important work around that. I want to ask you a bit about Portuguese wines. What do you hope Americans will learn about these wines?
Bruno: Portuguese wine is not as popular as it could be here. I think it's grown for sure over the years. Despite making wine for 2000 years, it’s pretty new. Portuguese wine only came up in the eighties when Portugal got in the European community. That's when Portuguese wine started to be accessible across the globe. There was not necessarily a perspective around marketing the wines, mostly Port and Madeira were marketed. We are competing in a very aggressive market.
Portuguese wines, they're doing great. They're growing. Especially wines from Vinho Verde. It’s a very social wine and it's a very easy drinking wine. Portuguese wines are very food friendly. Only in the eighties were still wines was starting to be recognized and regulated in the region instead of just making port. Now there are more still wines than fortified wines. Some producers are getting out of Portugal to do internships in Napa or in Chile. They're realizing their market is large. So it's little baby steps that are still happening.
In the past 10 or 15 years, there's been a huge investment in Portuguese wines, but it's still going to take time. Portugal is a beautiful country. From Boston, it takes less than six hours to get there—it’s closer than San Francisco. There's a cross of cultures in Portugal, and that reflects in the wines that are very diverse. They're very age worthy.
This generation is making a lot of—I won't say natural wines, but wines that were just being made like back in the day. This whole thing, natural wines, they’re nothing new. We’re just going back to the roots of winemaking with no makeup. In the nineties, there would be a handful of female winemakers in Portugal. Now 60%, 70% of wine school graduates are women. They’re embracing lower alcohol wines, like their grandparents used to make. I think we deliver everything. I don't think there's a style of wine we don't make.
Margot: I've read some articles recently about folks drinking fewer fortified wines. Is that something that folks are concerned about in regards to Portugal?
Bruno: Yes. Port and madeira were massive, mainly port. We’ve been boxing port in with dessert for so long. That makes it sweet over sweet. Wines go to 21% or 22% ABV. Once we start to learn that these wines can actually go with appetizers, they can go with cheeses, they can even go with steak. We just need to better understand the types and the styles of these wines.
People often ask me—I have this bottle of vintage port from the sixties, how do I store it? How do I open it, how do I drink this? Educating people around port can be a little bit challenging, since it hasn’t been done very much. Things change in NYC, though. When I got here, you would see a lot of rum bars around. There would be big whisky lists. I worked in a place that I had 60 grappas! It was hell when I had to do inventory for 60 grappas.
It's not only diet that people are concerned with. People don't want to drink high alcohol wines much anymore. At the very start of mixology, ports and sherries were part of mixology, [taking ABV down in cocktails]. Now we are not putting those same things in mixology, so we could open up the conversation with fortified wines in a cocktail again. Back in the day, cigars after dinner were a big thing, and you would have rums, whiskeys, ports and madeiras with them. We can’t do that anymore. People will spend $25 or $30 in for a cocktail, but if you bring a port that is 25 or 30, that's too much.
Training in restaurants is an issue as well. We're not necessarily backing employees up to understand how to manage a program with madeira and with port and how to store the bottles, how to serve pairings and everything. In my situation, of course, as someone who is Portuguese, I try to push it a lot.
Margot: Do you think port will survive in the next few generations?
Bruno: I think so. It's in their blood. It's just a matter of how they’re going to approach the region, because the region is suffering. When the old generations go, the traditions go with them. In the meantime, there's a lot of young folks that love port and want to continue with port because it's the DNA of the family, despite the fact that now it's 75% still wines and only like 25% of port.
How can we embrace a different, fresher style of a 10-20 year vintage? Some houses are already doing that, making a fresher approach of a vintage port. As long as the commission approves that style of vintage, which for me is something always very tricky.
You’re seeing houses becoming more focused on mixology, boxed ports, canned ports, pink port. It’s gaining traction. I introduced rosé pink ports during the summer and people were like wow I didn't know that I actually like port! It’s something that you can put in a cocktail, you can drink it on its own. We open up the conversation with the white port and tonic instead of just bringing a rich dense ruby port. A lot of people say it's too much. The diversity of these wines and styles and regions was never really approached and I think there's still time.
Margot: I love that. What about American wine is exciting for you?
Bruno: What's happening right now in California is pretty exciting. Central Coast, Paso Robles—they're understanding how to approach climate change, how to diversify the region.
You’re starting to see a lot of Italian varietals, southern French varietals. I think it's pretty exciting. And let's face it, American wine needs a lot of support. They've been going through a lot, and very similar to Portugal with the wildfires. It's a major problem in Portugal. Last year was massive, and then we had major floods. Same thing happened with California, so I see the struggle.
I support a lot of bubbles coming out of California, for instance. I love my bubbles. If we start the conversation by bringing California bubbles to the table, so be it. People right now, they wanna hear about bubbles. So if you talk about Gloria Ferrer, if you talk about Schramsberg, if you talk about McBride Sisters, the biggest Black female entrepreneurs with a wine company in the country—that’s important.
If that's going to open up the conversation to American wines, so be it. Virginia and The Finger Lakes are doing really interesting work. People say oh I want to go to Champagne, I want to go to Burgundy. I want to understand the terroir. If you want to understand terroir, go to the Finger Lakes. It’s right here! Why are there Italian or Georgian varieties here? Because there was migration. Once we understand migration, we understand ourselves as a country because that's what we are—migrants.
If you understand yourself in your backyard, that makes all the difference.
Margot: Absolutely. I love that. Thank you so much for your time. So excited to see the work you’re doing, and hope our paths will cross in person soon!
You can support Bruno by following him on Instagram, dropping by his Instagram Live wine classes, and stopping by Tocqueville in New York City.