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The ‘Grand Cru Jew’ pours fine wine at Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant in the West Village

(New York Jewish Week) — Imagine an Upper West Side seder like any other: adults praying, haggadahs dappled with brisket juice, matzah ball soup a little too salty. Only that’s not a Manischewitz bottle on the table. That’s a magnum of Cru Beaujolais.

For this type of epicurean refinement, it helps to have someone in your family like Dean Fuerth, better known to his Instagram followers as the “Grand Cru Jew.” Though his nickname, derived from the highest designation for Burgundy wines, conjures up images of a “Seinfeld”-ian C-plot, Fuerth, 35, is a serious sommelier with extensive training in French fine dining. Since 2017, he has served as the beverage director for the Sushi Nakazawa empire, helming one of the most robust rare sake lists in the city, if not the world.

Fuerth’s handle comes from his time working as a young wine trainee at the Manhattan restaurant Bouley, where a senior sommelier set up challenges to sell unconventional bottles. One night, Fuerth ended up overselling his goal by about $4,000. “Oui, Grand Cru Jew,” Fuerth says the sommelier enthused — and the nickname stuck.

“It comes up in public,” Fuerth said of his moniker, with pride. “Especially in the wine community.”

Fuerth describes his family as falling into the “liberal Jew category” from the Upper West Side, attending synagogue on the High Holidays. “I have a very strong sense of family identity, personal identity,” he told the New York Jewish Week.

Fuerth was not predestined to become a sommelier — his family hardly consists of wine snobs. Via a phone interview, he tells the story of his aunt, who, at a seder in 2009, opened a bottle of Cupcake Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. The following year, Fuerth noticed she was pouring the same vintage — she had re-corked last year’s bottle. Fuerth could only laugh.

“I’m now the culinary director for the family,” said Fuerth, half-joking.

In a family of lawyers, pursuing a fine dining career was unheard of; what’s more, sommelier isn’t a traditional Jewish profession. As wine writer Alice Feiring said last year: “It’s hard to tell your parents ‘I’m not going to medical school or law school, I’m going to be a wine waiter.’”

In the mid-aughts, Fuerth was pursuing a degree in film at Hunter College, but he dropped out after a year to become a production assistant on shows like “Law and Order” and “30 Rock.” To pay his bills, he took a job as a barback and busboy at the Upper West Side restaurant Bella Blu, a job he readily admits — with typical service industry candor — he wasn’t particularly good at. But he was able to handle bottles, a skill that gave him some currency in the wine world.

In 2010, he was off to a higher-paying gig as a server at Bar Boulud, the Burgundy wine bar at Lincoln Center run by celebrity chef Daniel Boulud. Under the auspices of the beverage director Michael Madrigale, Fuerth opened new bottles every night, giving him a crash course in the catalog of French wines. Fuerth still has an encyclopedic knowledge of this time: He recounts the exact bottle — a 1999 Cornas August Clape from the Rhone Valley — that kickstarted his ambitions.

“I was having my mind blown by how complex and deep and soulful wine can be,” he said. “Having a curiosity and a passion opened up this whole world.”

That understanding of terroir, how microclimates can impart flavor, intoxicated him. He closed out his film industry chapter for good and embarked upon what he called “French military” fine dining training. The culture privileges conformity over creativity — but Fuerth didn’t conform.

“Dean had that pirate mentality,” said Madrigale. “He’s like a New  Yorker, straight up. When he gets it in his mind he wants to do something, he does it.”

Madrigale remembers a time when Fuerth, as a server, had sold enough wine to entitle him to a free meal at the upscale restaurant. He chose the decadent duck confit. “He was going to sit down and eat in the dining room, while other people are waiting for him to serve them,” Madrigale said, still astounded by Fuerth’s chutzpah. “I think even Daniel [Boulud] said, ‘Well he’s doing really well, let him do it.”’

Madrigale became a mentor to Fuerth, who began his formal wine training and accompanied Madrigale on a trip to Bordeaux. After Bar Boulud, Fuerth traversed through a Zagat list of the city’s Michelin-starred French fine dining outposts as a self-described wine “mercenary.” He landed one of his first sommelier gigs in 2014 at Bouley, the now-closed French joint from Chef David Bouley in Tribeca. His first beverage director gig came the following year at Betony, in Midtown.

“I was able to open up some of the craziest, most expensive bottles,” he said of his time at Bouley. “And I got my butt kicked.”

He arrived at Sushi Nakazawa first as a fan-boy diner. Nakazawa opened in the West Village in 2013 as a 10-seat omakase spot that was immediately lauded as one of the best Japanese restaurants in the city. Pete Wells, in his initial 4-star review for the New York Times, heralded Daisuke Nakazawa’s cookery: “The moment-to-moment joys of eating one mouthful of sushi after another can merge into a blur of fish bliss.”

He approached them for a job, and in 2017, became their beverage director. Fuerth was thrown into a new role: sake expert. “It’s a completely different animal,” Fuerth said of the rice alcohol; his French wine training proved non-transferrable.

How did the Grand Cru Jew fare? “It was a steep and harsh learning curve,” he admits. Fuerth began looking for low acid, richer grapes like Condrieu to compare with sake.

Buying sakes also proved opaque. The echelon of sake producers Fuerth was working with required a certain level of trust among buyers due to their microscopic scale. Take, for example, Dassai’s “Beyond the Beyond” Junmai Daiginjō. A known producer of high-end sake, Dassai started a contest in 2019 among Japanese farmers cultivating the very specific Yamada-Nishiki grain. After machine analysis and DNA testing, the company chose to buy just one plot of land for this sake. They made 23 bottles and sent just four to America. Nakazawa is selling their bottle for $19,000.

“Sake should be consumed at the right environment, at the right temperature and tell the story of what makes it special,” he said.

Fuerth has certaintly caught up: Just last week, World of Fine Wine selected Sushi Nakazawa as the best sake list in North America.

Now six years in, Fuerth’s conception of wine pairings has evolved, too. He matches high-ticket Burgundy and Champagne with new age bottles from places like Hungary and Quebec, all with a Japanese palate in mind. He has overseen Nakazawa’s expansion to Washington, D.C., as well as a pop-up in Aspen, Colorado, and will be continuing onto a new location in Los Angeles.

It’s not unusual for diners at Nakazawa to spend four figures on a bottle. Is it mind-blowing to regularly sell bottles the price of a used car? “I’m a little numb to it at this point,” Fuerth said.

It’s all a far cry from the Cupcake wine Fuerth’s aunt served at the seder years ago (although Fuerth admits to drinking Manischewitz at synagogue).

The day after our conversation, Fuerth was set to depart New York for Bordeaux, as part of a trip organized by a wine distributor to some of the most storied, cloistered chateaus of the region. There they would open decades-old bottles that had never left the vineyard.

“It never gets old,” Fuerth said. “I feel like a kid again.”


The post The ‘Grand Cru Jew’ pours fine wine at Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant in the West Village appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Israel Receives Shipment of Heavy Bombs Cleared by Trump

US President Donald Trump looks on as he signs an executive order in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, US, Jan. 31, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Israel has received a shipment of heavy MK-84 bombs from the United States, after US President Donald Trump lifted a block imposed on the export of the munitions by the administration of predecessor Joe Biden, the defense ministry said on Sunday.

The MK-84 is an unguided 2,000 pound bomb, which can rip through thick concrete and metal, creating a wide blast radius.

The Biden administration declined to clear them for export to Israel out of concern about the impact on densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip.

The Biden administration sent thousands of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian Hamas terrorists from Gaza but later held up one of the shipments. The hold was lifted by Trump last month.

“The munitions shipment that arrived in Israel tonight, released by the Trump Administration, represents a significant asset for the Air Force and the IDF and serves as further evidence of the strong alliance between Israel and the United States,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said late on Saturday.

The shipment arrived after days of concern about whether a fragile ceasefire in Gaza agreed last month would hold, after both sides accused each other of violating the terms of the deal to halt fighting to allow the exchange of hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails.

Washington has announced assistance for Israel worth billions of dollars since the war began.

The post Israel Receives Shipment of Heavy Bombs Cleared by Trump first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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US Mideast Envoy Says Phase Two Gaza Talks to Continue This Week

US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy-designate Steve Witkoff gives a speech at the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena on the inauguration day of Trump’s second presidential term, in Washington, DC, Jan. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria

US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said on Sunday that talks on phase two of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Palestinian terrorists Hamas would continue this week “at a location to be determined” to figure out how to reach a successful conclusion.

He told Fox News that he had “very productive and constructive” calls on Sunday with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and Egypt’s director of intelligence.

Witkoff said they spoke about “the sequencing of phase two, setting forth positions on both sides, so we can understand… where we are today, and then continuing talks this week at a location to be determined so that we can figure out how we get to the end of phase two successfully.”

The post US Mideast Envoy Says Phase Two Gaza Talks to Continue This Week first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Arab States to Reveal 5-Year Plan to Rebuild Gaza: No Hamas or Relocation

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi attends the Arab summit in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, May 31, 2019. Photo: REUTERS/Hamad l Mohammed/File Photo.

i24 NewsArab countries will unveil their plan for the reconstruction of Gaza on February 27 in Cairo. This initiative, developed by the Palestinians and handed over to the Egyptians for implementation, will be presented to the leaders of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The plan provides for reconstruction over three to five years, without the displacement of the Palestinian population and without Hamas control. The funding, estimated at several hundred million dollars, will come from Gulf countries. The work will be carried out by Egyptian companies, representing a significant source of income for Egypt, which is strongly opposed to any migration of Palestinians out of Gaza. The workforce will consist mainly of local Palestinians.

“The goal is to marginalize Hamas so that it understands that it has lost control of Gaza, and to completely eliminate the terrorist organization’s grip on the population and the territory within 5 years from the start of reconstruction,” a source involved in the plan said.

An independent “Palestinian administration,” separate from the Palestinian Authority but relying on it, will oversee the reconstruction. This power structure is designed to get the approval of Israel and the United States, who refuse direct management by the Palestinian Authority.

Arab countries fear a resurgence of fighting by Israel, which could, in their view, favor US President Donald Trump’s plan to move Palestinians to neighboring countries. The former US president said he wanted to see Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab countries welcome more displaced people from Gaza, so that the war-torn area can be “cleaned up.”

According to analyzed satellite images, approximately 65% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed during the war. Experts estimate that reconstruction could take more than a decade and cost several hundred billion dollars.

The post Arab States to Reveal 5-Year Plan to Rebuild Gaza: No Hamas or Relocation first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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