EINSTEIN: LORIS LENZO’s LEGENDARY WINE CELLAR & MICHELIN PAIRING

When you hear the name Einstein, you probably think of a famous scientist, but Einstein to me is a very special place. It's a hotel located in the city of St. Gallen, the northeastern part of Switzerland. I'm Alexander and this is neutral oak, where we visit some incredible places for wine. Today, we're going to visit Einstein Gourmet, which is located in the fifth floor of Einstein Hotel. In the 80s, a very renowned family has bought the Einstein Hotel and the vision was to create an incredible wine cellar and a Michelin awarded restaurant. Next to Einstein Hotel is a wine shop called Weinstein. That's the place where the wine purchasing for the Einstein Gourmet starts. The restaurant wine list hosts more than 2000 references, so it's one of the most extensive wine lists in the country. But what really makes a difference at Einstein are the people. The people are incredibly dedicated. They have two chefs, one executive chef called Sebastian. Alongside Sebastian is Richard. Together, they create some incredible food for the gourmet restaurant. Loris is the wine director both for the wine shop Weinstein as well as for the Einstein Gourmet. Loris is one of Switzerland's most awarded sommeliers. He has done extensive studies curating and visiting numerous wine regions to discover new things as well as focusing on the traditional selection of the wine list. So now let's open the elevator, go to the fifth floor, and we're greeted by the restaurant manager Daniel. You can see that the restaurant is very traditional, paired with very high quality materials, lots of leather, carpet on the floor. We have a nice table in the corner of the restaurant. It's very private. There's lots of space, and because we're four people, we're going to go big on the wine list. My idea is to go with the pairing that Loris has put together, but alongside we order some rare bottles because it would be a shame not to use this incredible list. The list is vast. They have numerous vintage of the Men de la Romane Conti from all Grand Cru sites as well as some old Bordeaux in several vintages, but I always ask Loris for a recommendation what he has in the cellar. So we start off with Crustaceous, Pulpo, and Smoked Eel. With those snacks, we choose the first bottle that is not part of the wine pairing, but is part of the very rare allocations he gets from champagne Jacques Lasanne, Le Cor de Cre, and it's 100% Chardonnay from a very good vintage. Vintage champagnes are usually more intense, and they pair super well with the Smoked Eel. Rosengarten basically means flower garden. There they serve us a Norwegian king crab with dill and yuzo kosho. Loris has just been awarded one of the best selections of Spanish wines, and he celebrates that as well with the next wine. It's an Albarino from Riaz Baez, and the producer is Alba. This producer is located in Galicia, just on the coast of the Atlantic, and the interesting part is that the vines are pergola vines. They're trained this way above head height to fight the high humidity, which causes disease pressure to vent the vineyards more, and it's a really beautiful way of growing grapes. Next, we have an interesting combination of a tuna and duck liver. Tuna being more of a lighter fish flavor, but this one is a little bit more fatty. A very fatty dish needs a lot of acidity to cut through the fat, and Loris brings out two of the same wines with different vintages. We have an Austrian Sauvignon Blanc. Neumeister is one of the most celebrated producers in Styria, which is just located in Austria. This producer ages his Sauvignon Blanc incredibly long on lease, so you have a lot of character and intensity in the wine, which you need with the tuna as well as the duck liver. Next, we have a really intense dish, something I don't usually eat. It's a Wagyu tongue. It's a very unique texture with oyster, a lot of caviar on top, and sauerkraut. With the caviar, you get a lot of umami as well as iodine. You have a lot of acidity from the sauerkraut, so we have a combination of flavor explosions. This time, Loris brings out a Riesling from Germany from a really famous producer called 2018. A little bit of a riper vintage, not so much acidity, and the Riesling in this case is more of a palate cleanser and a complement to the freshness of the dish. The next course doesn't sound very charming on paper when you read veal head, but they use fish again in combination with veal head meat, very brave from the kitchen. Soul is a delicate fish. It's not a fatty dish paired with the veal, which is a little bit more intense in flavor, and the broccoli and lettuce gives me the crunch component in the dish. It's crunchy plus savory. We have a building of flavors now. Paired with that, we also have a more intense Chardonnay. In this case, Loris brings out one of my favorite vineyard sites, which is Combat located in the town of Puligny-Montrachet. It's classified as a Premier Cru, and the vintage is 2016, which was a rather difficult vintage. Anything they produced in that year was very intense in flavor. Alongside, Loris also serves Chenin Blanc Braisé 2018. Again, a little bit of a hotter vintage, less acidity. Chenin Blanc tends to have very high and sharp acidity, but in the case of 2018, it was very rich and round. So, both wines held up beautifully, and it was interesting to see also that Loris served the Puligny in a bigger glass. It meant that it was a little bit more acidic than in a smaller glass, and he chose a smaller glass for the Chenin Blanc. Now, again, we move on to the next course. It is considered a very German dish, a boiled beef. They use a Wagyu cut for that, so a more fattier and intense flavor of a meat, and also much more tender than the traditional Tafelspitz. With this dish, he serves our first red wine, Hermitage Les Miales, a very celebrated single plot on the hill of Hermitage. The wines from this appellation must always be 100% Syrah. As a bonus bottle, we ordered before the meal Chateau des Tours from the Southern Rhone, which was then a perfect complementary wine to the Syrah, the 21 vintage being a very balanced year, and the beautiful expression of the Grenache really came alive because Loris also decanted the wines before our arrival, and it was also the last bottle that was off the list. So, thank you for that, Loris. Now, we get into a bonus, an A5 Kobe that was prepared on a green egg, so you have incredibly tender meat with lots of intensity because A5 is the highest classification of Kobe with lots of fat in it, and being grilled on a green egg, you have that smoky component as well that paired beautifully with the Syrah and Grenache. The Syrah had a lot of peppery notes as well as a spicy component that really complemented the Wagyu beef. Now, we move into more elegant red wines again, and my favorite grape, as you know, is Pinot Noir, and I couldn't resist to order a Cécile Tremblay, which is a very hard producer to come by, and it was just really unfortunate that upon opening the first bottle, it was corked. What corked usually means is that the closure infected the wines with the bacteria, but Loris didn't hesitate at all. He went back to the cellar, he brought the second bottle, and that's the class of this restaurant, that they don't flinch and they have the know-how. Fortunately, the big cellars of Einstein allows him to have more than one reference per list of these rarities. The second bottle was from the private cellar of Loris. He recently traveled to Bordeaux, and what do you do in Bordeaux? You drink some Burgundy. After the Bordeaux tastings, sometimes you have too much intensity and you crave something a little bit more fresh. He brings out a Clos de Paris Nuit Saint-Georges 2014 by Henri Gouge. It's no coincidence that Loris and I share a lot of the same likings for producers. Henri Gouge is known to produce a very elegant expression of Nuit Saint-Georges, and the 2014 vintage is considered a rather cool vintage, and from the change of the heavy Syrah and Grenache wines, the Pinot Noir expressions, both from Cécile Tremblay and Henri Gouge, just gives you that lightness again, so you don't get tired of the intense flavors and you want to drink more. I actually preferred the Pinot Noir in combination with the A5 Wagyu dishes. It wasn't so much about pairing intensity. Loris explains to us that if you wait a little bit, when you take a bite of the dish, you let it settle a little bit and then take a sip of the wine. It can be a completely different experience. Any two-Michelin star has many courses. The flavor build-up was to the most intense course and now we have basically a palate cleanser, a pre-dessert. He serves a Grenoble from Valais, from a very celebrated producer called Marie-Thérèse Chappaz. Chappaz is known to pioneer biodynamic practices. Her sweet wines are affected by Botrytis, that is a fungus that builds around the grape. It is not a bad fungus, but it takes the water content out of the grapes to shrivel them and that allows her to produce a very flavorful sweet wine that is a nice preparation for the dessert. They serve kumquat with roasted sesame, quark and poppy seeds. Now we go back to Riesling. In this case, he chooses an Auslese. This one is off-dry, so you have very low alcohol levels paired with sweetness, paired with acidity that pairs beautifully with the dessert. Part of the experience at Einstein is always visiting the cellar and seeing some of the most spectacular bottles that you'll never see in your lifetime. They're fortunate enough to be one of the few places that get a direct Petrus allocation and you can see larger formats of Petrus in the cellar. But not only do you get to see some of the most sought-after Bordeauxs, you also have an incredible Burgundy section that is driven mostly by classic estates. He has one of the biggest bottles of Latache that goes for over a hundred thousand Swiss francs on the wine list. So not only can you find good value wines at Einstein, aged expressions of Bordeaux, verticals of Domaine de la Romane Conti, but you can also find bottles that far exceed the price of a hundred thousand Swiss francs. Overall, the kitchen did an incredible job. We got a lot of attention. The chefs always come out and present the dishes to us. But most importantly, what makes the experience great is Loris, who is a good friend of ours now and always chooses bottles that are not only pairing very well to the dishes they serve, but also bottles that are relevant to the customers he has in front of him. With the champagne choice in the beginning, we had a long conversation in what to go for because our friends, they happen to like Celos. I didn't want to have a Celos. I wanted something else and then Loris immediately corrected me and I was so happy that he brought the bottle of Jacques Lasagne, which combined both our preferences with the preferences of our friends and everybody just left the restaurant really happy. So it's a place that I like to come back for more than just one time per year. And the curiosity of the young team at Einstein is very inspiring. Thank you to the team of Sebastian and Richard. Thank you to the front of house service team, in particular Daniel, who is always very warm and Loris that has an incredible knowledge of wine and for me is one of the best, if not the best sommelier of Switzerland. Thank you for watching. I'm Alexander. Make sure you subscribe and follow this journey of ours.