! The Story of the Wine Cellar at Crabtree’s Kittle House Restaurant and Inn The year was 1988 and John Crabtree’s idea was to create one of the greatest restaurant wine lists in the world. Grounded in the belief that great winemakers make great wine, we set out to learn who the world’s greatest winemakers were - the talented people making the most compelling and delicious wines of their type, creating the greatest expressions of a special place, the grapes that grow there and that winemaker’s vision of how that wine should taste. When we started our wine journey, the Kittle House wine list had about 150 selections and the wine cellar held a few thousand bottles and took up a small fraction of the space compared to what it is today. Both the list and the cellar grew very fast. We invited winemakers to the Kittle House for winemaker dinners and travelled to meet them on their estates and in their vineyards. We started in California with the wines from legendary producers like Robert Mondavi, Caymus, Groth and Dunn and from the new guard like Marcassin, Peter Michael, Bryant, Colgin and Turley. We then went to France and procured wines from the big boys in Bordeaux and Burgundy – Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Mouton, DRC, Coche-Dury, Leflaive, Dujac and Drouhin. Then we moved on to the Rhone Valley, the Loire, Alsace, Champagne and the rest of France, then on to Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Northwest. So many great winemakers, so many great wines! In each place we would ask those great winemakers who, besides them, were making the best wines in the region. And they would direct us to a small winery or vineyard, usually unknown except only to those in the region, and we would track them down, taste them, buy them and put them on the list and in the cellar. The further off the beaten path they were the better as we loved turning our customers on to something they never had before – an obscure grape or remote wine region – as long as it was something special. The reputation of the list and cellar started to grow, and we became a wine and food destination for those who shared our passion. In 1994, the list had grown to 3000 selections and we had over 40,000 bottles in the cellar. We were selected as one of only 53 restaurants in the world to receive the Wine Spectator Grand Award – the highest level of recognition for a restaurant that is passionate and dedicated to presenting the very best wine, food and service. We flew to San Francisco to receive the award and stood among some of our favorite restaurants in the world and peers in the industry. We made time to visit a few of those great winemakers who, over the years, had become good friends of ours –Tony Soter of Etude, Helen Turley of Marcassin, Burt Williams and Ed Selyem of Williams-Selyem, the Novak Family at Spottswoode, who hosted an unforgettable dinner at their home in honor of our award. It was an amazing and wonderful time for Crabtree’s Kittle House and for us personally as our commitment to the marriage of great wine and food had put us on top of the restaurant world. The list would continue to grow over the next twenty years and the cellar would peak at 85,000 bottles and the list at 7500 selections. We had always bought more than we sold, amassing this huge collection of wine in the cellar. In 2008, we decided, for the first time in almost three decades, to focus our energy on selling more than buying and as a result, we now have about 40,000 bottles in the cellar and 4000 selections to choose from. We sold a lot of wine that was ready to drink, many at their peak of the evolution process and with full secondary flavor development, thanks to the slow, cold maturation process that our cellar affords – we provided many a wonderful, often profound, wine and food experience. Now it’s 2018, and we are still buying many of the greatest wines in the world. Not as many as once before – we have become a little more selective as we have gotten older – but enough to keep the deep verticals growing and to continue to provide the wonderful, often profound, wine and food experiences at Crabtree’s Kittle House. We look forward to the opportunity of providing one of those experiences for you. Glenn Vogt Wine Director !1 ! America’s Top Five Wine Pairing Meccas 1) La Toque, Napa Valley 2) Alinea, Chicago 3) Crabtree’s Kittle House, Chappaqua NY “Wine director Glenn Vogt’s 6,000-bottle wine list and 60,000-bottle cellar are almost insanely huge – a nice counterpoint to precise New American cooking.” 4) Quince, San Francisco 5) Frasca, Boulder CO ! !2 ! Saturday, September 24, 2011 As of 12:00 AM New York 78º NEW YORK FOOD HALF PRICE, FULL ENJOYMENT By LETTIE TEAGUE When the cheapest bottle on a wine list is an 11-year-old Chablis from a very good producer ($26) and the most expensive is a 2007 Domaine de la Romanée Conti Romanée Conti ($25,000), it's likely there will be some interesting options in between. In fact, there are 4,676 other compelling possibilities on the wine list of the Crabtree Kittle House in Chappaqua, N.Y. ! ! Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal Crabtree Kittle House's wine director Glenn Vogt, in the wine cellar. The exterior of the Chappaqua destination. This is not only the best wine list in Westchester County, but likely one of the very best in the state. Kittle House's wine director and general manager, Glenn Vogt, assembled the sprawling list in two stages. The first was during his tenure in the mid-'90s; the second began in 2008, when he returned to the restaurant to resume his post(s). While the wine list was impressive in its first incarnation (I visited a few times back then), it has developed into something even more prodigious Mr. Vogt's second time around. Not only are there all those thousands of selections currently on the list, but another 350 or so wines and some large-format bottles remain unlisted for one reason or another, according to Mr. Vogt. Until a few years ago, the cellar was famously—and, to the minds of many, delightfully—cluttered, so much so that even Mr. Vogt sometimes wasn't sure what he'd find. It was less professional storage than treasure hunt. Some famous treasure hunters have turned up some very nice bottles—such as the rare 1970 Beaulieu Vineyards Georges de Latour Cabernet that musician Steve Winwood snapped up during a cellar tour. (Mr. Winwood liked the wine so much that he hosted some Kittle House staffers at his next concert.) While the Kittle House has its share of celebrity diners, its customers are more commonly a mix of oenophiles and impassioned locals, like the woman sitting at the table next to me who directed me to "write something nice" about the Kittle House when she saw me taking notes. "We've been coming here for years. We love John Crabtree," she added, naming the proprietor whose family attached its name to the restaurant and inn following the purchase of the Kittle House in 1981. The Crabtree family restored and renovated the big Colonial house that was originally built in 1790 as a barn for the Ivy Hill Farm. (Earlier owners attached their names to the Kittle House, too; during the 1940s and '50s it was known as Carlson's Kittle House.) The Kittle House has also operated as an inn, a roadhouse and even a boarding school. Today, the Kittle House is an inn with 12 guest rooms, a restaurant that includes a tap room and a formal dining room; it is a special-occasion destination, especially for weddings. (Mr. Vogt estimates that there are about 100 held at Kittle House each year.) There are also various special menus and deals on different days of the week. The day I visited (a Monday) turned out to be half-price Chardonnay and BYOB night. Happily, I'd managed to time my visit to the cheapest night of the week—which would have been even more exciting if white Burgundy were part of the deal. It was not. "Only California Chardonnay," said the bespectacled, affable Mr. Vogt."But it's Chardonnay, too," I protested. "When is half-price white Burgundy night?" Mr. Vogt merely laughed and walked away, saying: "I find that if people want to drink Burgundy, they will drink Burgundy."There were a lot of Burgundy temptations—pages and pages of three- and four-figure Montrachets, Chassagne Montrachets and Meursualts, not to mention a lengthy list of Chablis producers that included many vintages of Dauvissaut and Raveneau—as well as that $26 Chablis from Jean Marc Brocard.But a special deal always holds an allure for me (I actually ordered a bottle of that $26 Brocard last year; it was good). So I thumbed through the 10 pages of California Chardonnays and found more than a few possibilities from star producers such as Dumol (whose 2004 Russian River Chardonnay was $60 at half-price) and Kistler (whose 1999 Les Noisetiers at $65 seemed worth a try), as well as a 2002 Mark Aubert Ritchie Vineyard—a wonderfully decadent Chardonnay from a top producer whose half price of $112.50 was less than retail.