From Banker to Wine Connoisseur
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Something about Christy Canterbury’s polite demeanor made me suspect, at first meeting, that she might be a vegetarian, maybe even a vegan. But the right corner of the business card from her former job with Smith & Wollensky steakhouse appeared to have been chomped off by the incisors of a flesh-eating animal. A vegetarian, she is not.
Until last month, Ms. Canterbury, 32, was the national wine director of the nine-city Smith & Wollensky chain. But after the $95 million sale of the chain’s non-New York locations to a private restaurant group, she became the global beverage director of Culinary Concepts by Jean-Georges, a partnership between celebrated chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and the Starwood hotel chain. For now, Culinary Concepts consists of only a handful of restaurants, ranging from Spice Market in New York, to Lagoon at the St. Regis Resort in Bora Bora. But the number of new venues is slated to grow “exponentially,” according to Ms. Canterbury. “I’ll be trying to get Chappellet into Doha,” she said with a laugh during a recent interview at the International Wine Center, where she is studying to become a Master of Wine, the wine trade’s most prestigious credential, currently held by only three other American women. She’ll also be teaching restaurant staffs worldwide “what I want them to know about single-malt Scotch, local beers, how many times to shake a cocktail, and how to garnish it,” she said.
Growing up in Pleasantville, Texas, in a county where alcohol wasn’t sold, Ms. Canterbury’s destiny seemed like it would be anything but wine. “My father never in his life consumed alcohol, and my mother, who had a Southern Baptist background, never drank out of deference to my father except for an occasional wine cooler,” Ms. Canterbury said.
Ms. Canterbury’s own first taste of alcohol came as a college student visiting the Riviera, where she sipped a “fruity, pineapple-y, coconut-y concoction.” Her first real wine was “an extremely poorly made rosé. At that point, I couldn’t understand how people could think wine was good,” she said.
During a year-and-a-half stint as a young Paris-based investment banker in 1998, Ms. Canterbury left the bad wines behind. “I was going out to dinner nightly and trying different wine and food matches,” she said. “That’s when I really kind of caught on to wine.” On New Year’s Day, 2001, while working in New York, Ms. Canterbury saw a “Help Wanted” sign posted in a SoHo wine shop. She began working there on weekends, while keeping her day job. A year later, leaving the finance world altogether, she signed on full time at Italian Wine Merchants on East 16th Street — and she never looked back.
At Smith & Wollensky, “I thought quite a bit about steak and wine pairings,” Ms. Canterbury said. She shared some of her insights with The New York Sun.
Q: Before asking about steak, how about waiters? Their style can be quite gruff at Smith & Wollensky. Were they hard on you when you first arrived?
A: Some of the older ones were thinking that this is the new kid on the block and she’s going to get washed out. I tried to be patient and witty and snap back at them and be just as on the ball as they were. Sometimes, if a comment was made, I wouldn’t say anything back, and that made them feel that they had said something improper. Dignity is important.
Q: Cabernet sauvignon is what you see overwhelmingly on steak house tables. Is that always the correct choice for red meat?
A: To deny that a porterhouse or a sirloin goes best with cabernet would be like denying that oysters and Chablis go together. Dry aging a steak, which we did in-house at Smith & Wollensky, as well as butchering it, removes moisture and concentrates flavor. So you want to balance that intensity with a personality-driven wine, like a young cabernet, which has lots of tannin, alcohol, and body. But straight cab is not best. Blending it with a little merlot, cabernet franc, or other classic grape adds complexity and exotic aromatics.
Q: Does the same wine choice also go for a rib eye steak?
A: A rib eye has so much nice marbled fat that it can support a wine with more textural richness and less acidity and tannin than cabernet. Merlot is ideal. A terrific example is Georis merlot from the Carmel region in California. It has that yummy plumminess that you get from a cool climate merlot.
Q: Cabernet sauvignon is the classic wine for lamb. Agreed?
A: I’ve always thought of syrah as being ideal with lamb. It’s gamey like the meat. It can smell like sweaty animals. Syrah from the northern Rhone Valley is one of my heartthrobs!
Q: What about roast chicken?
A: I’d go with an older red wine because a bird is a perfect showcase for the subtleties that come with age. By older, I don’t mean a wine from a great Napa vintage like 1997, but something from back in the 1980s or even the 1970s. Another really good choice would be pinot noir in an earthier style, like Bergstrom or Patricia Green from Oregon. Pinot noir also works well with a filet of beef because it’s a finely textured cut that has so little fat in it. And it’s not aged. It calls for the silkiness of pinot noir.
Q: How about boiled or broiled lobster?
A: Chardonnay and lobster are destined for each other. So is an older Champagne, or a U.S. sparkling wine, such as Schramsberg, that has been aged on its lees to give it a bready, yeasty, buttery quality.
Q: Your last months were spent as beverage director of the highly successful Park Avenue Summer, which replaced the moribund Park Avenue Café and is now called Park Avenue Autumn. You inherited a fairly unimaginative wine list.
A: Yes, and I got pretty tired, for example, of seeing the same standard sauvignon blanc in three out of four table-side ice buckets. I want the customers to have what they want, but they could have had this wine anywhere. So I raised the price on it but that seemed like no deterrent. Then I took it off the list, period. Meanwhile, I had fallen head over heels for a little known Chilean sauvignon blanc called Casa Marin. It sold like crazy. Tiki Barber would come in and ask for it by name. Why be a wine director if you can’t show people something new?