Guests Karen Profita, Jim Horton and Bill Profita at the pre-dinner reception
By Jerry Ceppos • Photos by Lawles Bourque
One of the most ambitious culinary programs I’ve seen in the South takes place just to the left of the deli counter and the dairy case at a supermarket on Highland Road.
“The atmosphere is actually better for tasting than a restaurant or bar,” dinner guest Sharon Perez tells me at a July tasting of Decoy wines from Sonoma County in California. Decoy is the second label of hotshot producer Duckhorn Vineyards.
This dinner and tasting of six wines in the wine room at the Matherne’s market at Highland Road and Kenilworth Boulevard isn’t very different from others there. But it certainly is different from the froufrou fare at some tastings. This protein-heavy dinner, matched to the wines, included an arugula and endive salad, a roasted chicken thigh nested in mushroom and sage risotto, a spectacular New York strip steak with a sauce of peppercorns, brandy and heavy cream, and a chocolate brownie tiramisu.
The pre-dinner reception of fruit bruschetta drizzled with Grand Marnier honey cream along with sauvignon blanc was served in the aisles near the wine and beer selections.
The selected wine at a recent dinner at Matherne’s.
Not quite grocery-store cuisine. But none of the guests, who paid a bargain $75 for this dinner (the price of almost all the dinners), found the setting incongruous.
“I think you get a really down-to-earth perspective on the wines,” guest Michael Austin says. “It’s one on one.”
“I love that it’s a neighborhood market,” another guest tells me.
Bill Hounshell, who has run the dinners for close to two decades, isn’t surprised. They “aren’t stuffy; they’re not formal. We want people to try some new wines, maybe try some new vintages” of wines they’ve already tasted, he says.
What’s surprising, maybe even shocking, is that Hounshell and his wife Kathy, the chef, host 40 to 45 of the dinners a year, serving six to eight wines with five to six courses at each dinner. Perhaps someone somewhere rivals that schedule, but I’m not aware of any restaurant or wine shop—or grocery store—that does.
New York strip steak with a sauce of peppercorns, brandy and heavy cream
The Hounshells cook the food in a larger-than-restaurant kitchen behind the deli counter, creating an assembly line to ensure that the food comes out hot. (It does.) Hounshell and a winery representative or a wine distributor describe each wine.
The number of guests ranges from 20 to 56, leading me to call this the best-kept culinary secret in Baton Rouge. (See sidebar to learn about signing up.)
One of Hounshell’s secret ingredients is that guests never know who their seatmates will be, unless they come as a group. Hounshell says his wife has “an uncanny ability to seat people.” One of my LSU colleagues, architect Herschel Hoffpauir—who has been attending the dinners for years—agrees. “They really make an effort to group like people together,” he says.
At one of our first dinners, my wife and I were sent to a table already occupied by a couple we didn’t know. Before I could sit down, the woman said she recognized me—and within seconds remembered that it was from a Manship School session for high school counselors. (She is a counselor at Catholic High.)
Her friend made the mistake of telling us that he is a chemical plant manager in Geismar.
My wife pounced.
She said that our son, a chemistry student in Nevada with an interest in energy, would be home in a few weeks. Could he visit the plant? Of course, the answer was yes. Our son, Matt, and I got the complete tour and he got a bit of a mock job interview.
Hoffpauir of LSU calls the dinners “one of the best deals in town.” When you consider five courses, six to eight wines and career counseling for your child—all for just 75 bucks—he’s obviously right.
Jerry Ceppos is dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU and a fan of California wine.
Dessert dishes at a recent wine dinner.
What to expect at a Matherne’s wine dinner
To receive e-mail invitations to the Matherne’s wine dinners, drop a note to host Bill Hounshell at [email protected].
Just this year, I’ve received invitations to dinners featuring some of the best California and Oregon wine producers: Ferrari-Carano, Silverado, Adelsheim, Schramsberg, Trefethen, Beringer, Inglenook, Chateau Montelena, Frei Brothers, Fess Parker, Trinitas, Clos du Val, BR Cohn and others.
I’m told that the New Year’s Eve dinner—the only one with two seatings—is always memorable. The last one included sparkling wine from Moet & Chandon, Mumm, Roederer, Schramsberg, Banfi of Italy, Saint Hilaire and Castellblanch Cava of Spain.
The non-vintage Banfi Rosa Regale, a soft, sweet sparkling wine unlike anything I’ve tasted before, sticks in my mind nine months later. It’s made from a black-skinned Italian grape I hadn’t heard of, Brachetto. Legend has it that Marc Antony and Julius Caesar gave Cleopatra wine made of Brachetto to impress her, according to Wine-searcher.com. “The queen, so the story goes, found the wine unleashed her passions,” the site says. I saw nothing similar happen at Matherne’s on New Year’s Eve. Nonetheless, we bought two bottles for home. (The tasting wines are available for sale at a discount from regular prices.)
The wines were paired with sushi, a notable lobster bread pudding, wild mushroom cream ragu over fettuccini, beef tenderloin with vegetables and dark-chocolate cheesecake with raspberry coulis. The Banfi wine, which has notes of raspberry, paired beautifully with the dessert’s raspberry sauce.
All of that is different from the tastings that started nearly 20 years ago at Giovanni’s, near the Highland Road Matherne’s store, and continued at Matherne’s on Bluebonnet Boulevard. “It’s evolved,” Hounshell says, “from a barbecued bun in a piece of foil to a five- or six-course dinner.”
