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Wine Spectator (September, 2000)
Market Watch (October 1999)
Wine Spectator (September 1999)
Food Arts (May 1999)
The New York Times (March 17, 1999)
Wine Spectator (September 2000)
“Tower of Power” by Harvey Steiman
Aureole Raises the Ante in Las Vegas
Aureole Las Vegas lets you know how important it considers wine from the moment you walk through the door. The entrance staircase winds around a 42-foot-tall glass-enclosed "wine
tower" filled with Lucite wine bins. Two "wine angels," young women clad in black cat suits, retrieve the bottles inside.
"I took one look, and I knew we had to open with a great wine program, or this would be a laughingstock," says Steven Geddes, Aureole's wine director and a 25-year veteran of
the Las Vegas restaurant scene.
If anyone is laughing now, it is with pure joy. Geddes purchased two extensive cellars, rich in mature Bordeaux and California Cabernet Sauvignon, to supplement an extensive range of current
vintages from all over the world. The result was an opening-day list of 1,900 wines. That has grown to 2,300 selections as of June 1.
Highlights include verticals of major Champagnes back to the 1960s, 23 Montrachets back to 1979 and Lafite, Latour, Mouton, Margaux, PÈtrus and Yquem back to 1900. There are 18 Turley
Zinfandels, 23 Williams Selyem Pinot Noirs and scads of cult California Cabernets: Araujo, Colgin, Maya, Harlan and Screaming Eagle. There is a 22-vintage vertical of Penfolds Grange back to 1964 and an
extraordinary range of dessert wines from which to choose.
Geddes is particularly proud of his extensive offerings from Austria, Germany and Alsace. He feels they are perfect matches for Aureole's boldly flavored American cuisine, developed and
overseen by Charlie Palmer, who founded the original Aureole in New York. In Las Vegas, Palmer's menu is ably executed by chef Joe Romano and his wife, pastry chef Megan Romano.
Geddes must be on the right track. In less than a year and a half, some 1,500 wines have disappeared from the list because they sold out. Meanwhile, more than 2,000 wines have been added, and
the cellar continues to grow.
Actually, there are three cellars. The wine tower, kept at 59ƒ F, has about 1,000 bins holding current vintages. A rare-wine cellar holds older reds at 55ƒ F. A cold room, kept below 40ƒ F,
keeps finer Champagnes and the more delicate white wines behind a chain-link fence in the hotel's enormous walk-in cooler.
Geddes also had two rolling carts made to hold everything a sommelier might need, including silver bottle-coasters, linen napkins, Shout packets (to take care of spills), candles, decanters
and a variety of tasting glasses. (Before pouring samples for their customers, Geddes and his sommeliers taste every wine to weed out bad bottles.) And every wineglass is steamed clean with distilled
water and wiped dry with a lint-free cloth.
All that attention to detail has paid off with the most visible and exciting wine program in Las Vegas and, just maybe, something for the whole country to look up to. Just keep an eye out for
the tower of wine.
Market Watch (October 1999)
Aureole at The Mandalay Bay
The Mandalay Bay's Aureole is the new Vegas version of chef Charlie Palmer's New York landmark -- bigger and bolder in every way. Wine Spectator rated the restaurant as a 91 in the
September 15, 1999, issue, p;acing third among the 23 Las Vegas restaurants it reviewed. Take wine, for example. to reach the dining room, you descend stairs that wrap around a 42-foot-high wine tower,
built of steel and laminated glass, that holds nearly 10,000 bottles. You might even pass a "wine angel," one of the acrobatic women in black catsuits who rappel their way up and down the tower
in pursuit of someone's dream bottle.
With nearly 2,000 selections backed by an inventory of 35,000 bottles, Aureole's list is the best in Las Vegas for imagination, intelligence and range. There are plenty of high-end
classics, from vertical of Domaine Ramonet Montrachet to great depth in classified Bordeaux (1961 Palmer is a reasonable $1,673). Equally impressive are the extensive listings of more obscure but no less
exciting wines, from Austrian and German whites to California Zinfandel and Australian Shiraz.
The menu, designed by Palmer, is executed by chef Joe Romano and his wife, pastry chef Megan Romano; both previously worked at Aureole in New York. The food is boldly flavored, but
ingredients are often repeated from dish to dish. By the end of the meal, the flavors of the wines may well be more diverse than those on the plates.
The enormous dining room seats nearly 400, but Adam Tihany's design makes every diner feel at home by breaking the space into smaller sections. The bar and a few tables cluster around the
wine tower; a middle section is spacious and lively; and intimate rear dining room called the Swan Court offers a view of a small pool and fountain. Despite its roots, Aureole is not a replica or a
"theme" restaurant. Its casual swagger is at home in Vegas, and by applying the "bigger is better" attitude to wine, Aureole has made itself a star in its new home.
-- T.M.
Wine Spectator (September 1999)
Aureole - Starstruck
The restaurant's powerhouse win list and sky-high tower of bottles put a new spin on the phrase "vertical tasting."
Aureole is the brand-new Vegas version of chef Charlie Palmer's New York landmark -- bigger and bolder in every way.
Take wine, for example. The New York Aureole has an imaginative, compact list, but in Las Vegas, wine takes center stage. To reach the dining room, you descend stairs that wrap around a
42-foot-high wine tower, built of steel and laminated glass, that holds nearly 10,000 bottles. You might even pass a "wine angel," one of the acrobatic women in black cat suits who rappel their
way up and down the tower in pursuit of someone's dream bottle.
"Charlie originally wanted a list of about 400 wines, as he has in New York," explained Steve Geddes, Aureole's director of wine. "But I took one look at that tower and I
knew we had to have a great list or we would look ridiculous."
With nearly 2,000 selections backed by an inventory of 35,000 bottles, Aureole's list is the best in Las Vegas for imagination, intelligence and range. There are plenty of high-end
classics, from a vertical of Domaine Ramonet Montrachet to great depth in classified Bordeaux (1961 Palmer is a reasonable $1,673). Equally impressive are the extensive listings of more obscure but no
less exciting wines, from Austrian and German whites to California Zinfandel and Australian Shiraz.
The menu, designed by Palmer, is executed by chef Joe Romano and his wife, pastry chef Megan Romano; both previously worked at Aureole New York. Many dishes are familiar from new York -- the
crab cakes, Palmer's signature scallop "sandwiches," variations on a theme of duck. The food is boldly flavored, but ingredients are often repeated from dish to dish. By the end of the
meal, the flavors of the wines may well be more diverse that those on plates.
The enormous dining room seats nearly 400, but Adam Tihany's design makes every diner feel at home by breaking the space into smaller sections. The bar and a few tables cluster around the
wine tower; a middle section is spacious and lively; an intimate rear dining room called the Swan Court offers a view of a small pool and fountain.
Despite its roots, Aureole is not a replica or a "theme" restaurant, Its casual swagger is at home in Vegas, and by applying the "bigger is better" attitude to wine,
Aureole has made itself a star in it new home.
Aureole
Mandalay Bay, 3950 Las Vegas Blvd. S.
Telephone (702) 632-7401
Open Dinner, daily
Cost Very expensive
Credit Cards Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club, Discover
Food 89 Wine 93 Service 89 Ambience 94 Weighted Average 91
Food Arts (May 1999)
Tihany's current chef d'oeuvre is the Wine Tower at Charlie Palmer's newly opened Aureole Las Vegas in the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino. When asked about the tower, he
responds in a deep-voiced, charmingly, louche manner, "You mean the newest, biggest erection in Las Vegas? Everything you ever wanted to know about wine? It leaves people speechless because it's
totally unexpected."
The $1.2 million construction is essentially a 15-by-15-by-50-foot building that rises out of the restaurant's bar -- a temperature and humidity controlled glass tower lit from within,
with translucent racks stocked with wine attached to a glowing core. First visible from a bridge as you enter the restaurant, 'it's like the bridge to a rocket," says Tihany. "It brings
you in at the 25-foot level and you meander down and around the tower to the floor."
Inspired by the movie Mission Impossible, Tihany designed the tower so that bottles are retrieved by wine stewardesses attached by cables to four pulley systems, one for each of its sides.
Once strapped in, dressed in black cat suits and shiny black helmets and equipped with harnesses to hold the bottles, they are propelled up and down the tower's seven levels, controlling their flight
patterns with computerized joysticks. "It's pretty sexy," says Tihany. "Yes, it does influence sales and increase the pleasure of dining. I don't know if you could get any more
extravagant with wine."
For Aureole Las Vegas' master sommelier, Steven Geddes, "It's a grandiose way of making wine and focal centerpieces of the restaurant, showing that it is an integral part of the
dining experience. The spectacle immediately breaks down the snobbery and arrogance in wine service, so that it's open, understandable, accessible, and about getting the customers the wines they
want. In Europe, wine is part of everyday life. We're going in that direction, but we're not there yet. The tower helps break down the mystique and makes it fun."
It's also more efficient than he anticipated, taking about three minutes from the moment the waiter punches in the order till the wine arrives at the table. During that short time, the
order is output by a printer in the wine tower, one of the "wine angels," as they're called, reads the bin number on the order, retrieves the wine, sets it in her holster, and descends with
the goods. Between orders, the angels, most of them professional dancers, rock climbers, or acrobats, are still flying about, restocking wines. They are in constant communication with Geddes via cordless
microphones. His is hidden in his tie. "It's all very FBI," he confides.
"The sales have been incredible," continues Geddes, "and it's not a commercial list. For example, we have the largest Austrian list outside Austria. We offer about 100
German wines and about the same number from the Pacific Northwest. About 30 to 40 percent of our wines are exclusive to us in the state of Nevada. The tower is just for young, very stable wines. We keep
the 1900 Petrus and other more fragile and valuable wines in another cellar. The total collection consists of about 50,000 bottles. the tower holds 9,000 bottles, the cellar 6,000 and we have additional
cold storage and off-premises storage for another 25,000 bottles."
The average price of the bottles they're selling is $125 to $150, and Geddes says the customers range from "one snob collector who thought it was blasphemy" to "a guy who
just pointed at the tower and said, 'that's the one I want.' He chose the wine based on the color cap." Above all, Geddes says, the tower shows that "wine is for the world: it's
about good times, good people, and the art, religion, and passion of it all. Sometimes I just stand back, look at the tower, and laugh."
The New York Times (March 17, 1999)
“The Big Cellar in the Desert” by Frank J. Prial
Las Vegas, NV. -- "Would you care for some wine sir?"
"Yes, I'd like a bottle of the 1990 Mondavi Reserve cabernet."
"Excellent choice, sir. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll adjust my harness and go up and get it."
The scene is Aureole, the desert branch of Charlie Palmer's highly regarded restaurant in New York. While the original Aureole is elegant and understated, the version here is the new
Mandalay Bay Hotel is ... well, pure Las Vegas.
Take, for example, the wine tower. Four stories of stainless steel, glass and plexiglass, it it a wine cellar in reverse, soaring 42 feet over the bar. Clearly the star of the show, it holds
-- and strikingly displays -- some 9,000 bottles of wine.
The wine steward going for a bottle of cabernet or Champagne crawls into a harness that is hooked on to hoist on the sides of the tower and is lifted swiftly to the correct level. The harness
is equipped with an intercom and up and down controls.
"Sure, it's theatrical," said Steven Geddes, the hotel's director of wine, "but it's also functional: 10 seconds to the top, 10 seconds back down."
Move over, Paris. Move over, New York. When it comes to wine, Las Vegas is the place to be: a city with an unquenchable thirst.
The competition among hotel wine buyers is fierce and is expected to intensify as half a dozen mew luxury hotels and casinos, including the Paris and the Venetian, are completed. "We go
through a case of first growths every weekend," said Barrie Larvin, the wine director at the Rio Hotel, referring to five of the top Bordeaux chateaus: Haut-Brion, Latour, Margaux, Lafite-Rothschild
and Mouton-Rothschild.
The casino patrons who have created this demand bring a certain high-living swagger, if not connoisseurship, to their enjoyment of wine. But they're not getting any bargains. Wine prices
in Las Vegas are comparable to those in New York and Los Angeles, especially in high-end restaurants.
What is exceptional is the extraordinary range of wines. Few restaurants in the world offer such variety.
At the new Bellagio Hotel, the wine director, Jay James, buys 34 pallets of wine a week, each holding 56 cases. During high tourist season, he sells 900 bottles a day.
At the Las Vegas outpost of Smith & Wollensky, the New York steakhouse, Michael Feighery, the manager, shakes his head at the demand. "We've only been open a couple of months,
and we can't restack wine fast enough," he said. "And everyone wants three-liter bottles."
Alcohol has always fueled the action here; scantily clad waitresses circulating among the players and serving free drinks are as much a tradition as the gaming tables and the slots. But gin
and vodka, not wine, were the beverages of choice.
Most Las Vegans trace the interest in wine to the opening of a branch of Wolfgang Puck's Los Angeles restaurant Spago in the Forum at Caesar's in 1993. Its almost instant success
persuaded casino operators that the rules had changed, that the days of stiff drinks and bland food were over. "Las Vegas has always offered two things: gambling and entertainment," said Mr.
James at the Bellagio. Now, he said, "food and wine here are entertainment." The first hotel to commit to a major wine program was the Rio, a gaudy skyscraper set apart from the rest of the
hotels on Las Vegas Boulevard, the so-called Strip, by Interstate 15. The Rio, which is also home to Jean-Louis Palladin's Napa Restaurant, hired Mr. Larvin in 1996.
Mr. Larvin, 51, got involved with wine at age 18, when he went to work at the Dorchester Hotel in London. In the early 1970's he was named Britain's sommelier of the year three times.
Now he buys wine, lots of it.
"I bought wine secretly for three months," he said, explaining that he did not want to push prices up by letting purveyors know the hotel he worked at had deep pockets. "At one
point I was bringing in 15,000 bottles of wine a day. We went to 600 labels, then we went to 2,000."
In 1996 he paid just over $1 million for 127 bottles of Chateau d'Yquem. the most famous of the sweet wines of Sauternes. The collection consisted of one bottle of every vintage of Yquem
from 1855 to 1990.
Las Vegas hotels are becoming important in the wine auction market. The biggest auction in recent years was the sale of Andrew Lloyd Webber's cellar at Sotheby's in London in 1997.
Mr. Larvin bought about a quarter of the collection.
Mr. Larvin values his cellar, assembled in less than three years, at more than $6 million. "When we opened the new wine cellar in 1997, I thought I had enough wine for 10 years," he
said. "I was reordering in 10 days."
Though less flamboyant, perhaps, than Mr. Larvin, Mr. Geddes at Aureole and Mr. James at Bellagio have remarkable wine lists of their own. Aureole's list offers 19 vintages of
Mouton-Rothschild between 1900 and 1995, including 1945, 1959 and 1961. Also listed are 64 different zinfandels, 114 cabernet sauvignons and, for something completely different, and extensive choice of
Austrian wines, including 30 different gruner veltliners, and Austrian specialty. "We have about 2,000 different wines," Mr. Geddes said.
Not to be outdone, Bellagio's master list has 52 chardonnays. Smith & Wollensky's wine list is shorter, but the selection is sophisticated and there is no lack of good wine. The
restaurant is particularly strong in large bottles -- magnums, double magnums and three liters.
While the wine lists at the big hotels are large, so is the number of people ordering wine. The Bellagio, for example, has 11 restaurants, including Vegas versions of Le Cirque 2000 and
Circo, two New York City restaurants, a steakhouse called Prime directed by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and Picasso, directed by Julian Serrano, formerly of Masa's in San Francisco.
"Each restaurant has its own list," Mr. James said. "Most have about 250 labels. Le Cirque has about 400. There are some overlaps, and each can draw on the master list. There
is a wine warehouse and a temperature-controlled vault that keeps 5,000 or 6,000 bottles on call. We can get any bottle to one of the restaurants in 15 minutes."
In the hotels, the high rollers, big gamblers that every casino woos, can order any wine they want and often get it free. Sometimes they ask for bottles the wine staffs would like to hold for
connoisseurs, or just to dress up the wine list. The high rollers have priority. "Casino marketing calls," Mr. James said. "I get them what they want."
He would, of course, prefer to sell his wine. "Someone comes here, wins $100,000, maybe $1 million, we're happy to sell him $30,000 worth of wine," Mr. James said. "It
keeps some of that money in the house."
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