Brian Duncan

Brian Duncan is leaning low at a table, hiding among a cluster of open wine bottles, whispering about his search for new clothes. “Yesterday, I was going to go buy a different shirt or something,” he says. “I went to Gucci. I went to Ferragamo. I went to Barneys.”

He slaps his palm against the table.

“Everything was gray, white and black. Everything!”

Duncan doesn’t see in gray, white or black, and he doesn’t dress that way, either. (His search for a shirt ended, not surprisingly, in vain.) He pairs polka dot ties with rainbow-striped shirts and tops the look with a blue fedora. Limits aren’t his thing. If they were, he’d never have gone from pouring wines to co-owning the restaurants he pours them in (he is a partner of BIN 36, bin wine café and A Mano). And he’d never have come to make the wines he pours.

Making wine has always been a part of BIN 36’s business plan, and Duncan started when the restaurant opened in 1999. (Not that you’d notice—back then, the label read “BIN 36 blend” in tiny letters at the bottom of the label.) But it wasn’t until recently that the BIN 36 wines—now slapped with their own sporty labels—have become a bona-fide brand. The bottles are no longer sold only at Duncan’s restaurants; they’re sold retail and in restaurants in 26 markets across the country.

And that happened because Duncan is different. For one thing, he lives 2,000 miles from his grapes. A partnership with Hahn Vineyards, which grows the grapes for him, allows him to make wine without overseeing a vineyard or buying winemaking equipment. (Nevertheless, he’s in California regularly, tasting the grapes while they’re on the vine and then again once they’ve been crushed, fermented and turned into juice. He gets first pick of the lots he wants, and he decides how the juice is aged, in what type of barrels and how it’s blended.)

Plenty of winemakers—more than they’d like you to know—make wine that way; Duncan can drop the name of several famous (and famously pricey) wineries that do the same thing. What separates Duncan from these guys isn’t his absence from California; it’s his absence of bullshit.

Duncan has resisted the word sommelier for his entire career. It’s too lofty, he says, and it’s antithetical to his goal, which has always been to demystify wine and make it accessible. By the same token, winemaker isn’t the best word to describe him either. He prefers the term “wine chef.”

“If you have a piece of fish, and you don’t season it, are you making it the best that it possibly can be? You’re not. But if you take fruit—great merlot—and you know that by adding syrah or petite syrah you can create a more complex wine, you owe it to that wine to produce the best wine. This whole noninterventionist bullshit that winemakers love to talk about? It’s all for PR sake. ‘Wine is made in the vineyard’? That’s a goddamn lie. You know? That’s like a cook saying: ‘Oh, this dish was made in the fields,’ and they bring the squash in and put it on the plate and say, ‘Here’s dinner!’ You wanna pay for that? It’s the same. The parallel is so the same.”

And he extends the metaphor even further: “You only get one chance in the pan,” he says, by which he means that when deciding his blends, he takes only one shot. He tastes the various merlots, syrahs, pinot noirs, etc., available and rattles off a formula—90 percent merlot, 5 percent syrah, 5 percent petite syrah. And that’s it. “Some people do multiple [blending] trials. I don’t do that. Some of it is intuition, some of it is instinct,” he says. But the rest of it is his understanding of how grapes work together, an understanding he’s sharpened after evaluating thousands of wines for his restaurants.

The proof of his blending skills is in the wines: a sleek pinot noir with endless notes of cherries and plums, an intricate merlot bursting with dark berries. Duncan, who is the primary marketer of his wines, pours glasses of this stuff all over the country, and retailers shake their heads and whisper in his ear. “You know,” they say, “you could be charging a lot more for this stuff.”

But those guys don’t get Duncan’s commitment to accessibility. He’s a polite guy, so he just nods in agreement. But in his head he’s thinking: Why would I do that?

• More Restaurants & Bars articles