A Singular Palate and a Single Malt

When Master Blender Sean Josephs envisioned the ideal partner for the third release in Pinhook’s Collaboration Series, he kept coming back to the thing that made the juice for this particular blend special. “Given that we were specifically doing whiskey aged in red wine casks,” he explains, “I wanted to go to the sommelier realm for a collaborator.” Pinhook has always taken cues from the wine world, but with this release, the connection would become even more explicit.

Enter Jordan Salcito, the sommelier who made her name curating wildly inventive wine lists in New York restaurants like Momofuku and 11 Madison Park. Sean and Jordan had known each other during their days in New York’s high-end restaurant scene, and had more recently reconnected as both launched their own beverage companies—Pinhook for Sean, and for Jordan, Ramona, an acclaimed line of canned sparkling wines and spritzes—sharing advice, resources, and ideas, and egging each other on. For a project requiring not only a skilled palate but also an enthusiasm for breaking new ground, Jordan was a perfect fit.

As they got started on the blend, she immediately proved a natural with whiskey, thanks to “spending the last two decades of her life dedicated to how things taste and how they smell,” as Sean puts it. And the result is astounding. “I’ve never tasted anything like it,” he says of Collaboration #3. “Her influence, plus aging the whiskey in wine barrels, brought out these incredibly unique, much brighter fruit notes than I’ve never encountered before.” 

We recently sat down with Jordan to talk about her lifelong passion for wine, the twists of fate that led her to make a career out of it, and the parallels she found between wine and whiskey while blending Pinhook’s Collaboration #3. 

The Journey to Wine

Wine got hold of Jordan’s imagination early on, even though as a child she had yet to take her first sip of it. “My grandfather made wine in his basement with my dad when my dad was a boy,” she says. “That was my dad’s one memory of his own father, the only memory that he has held onto.” Her grandfather died when her father was just 13 years old, and this family story of winemaking became what Jordan calls the connective tissue between the generations. “Wine took on this mysterious and romantic quality for me, long before I was remotely interested in drinking it,” she says.

Later, Jordan moved to New York City and worked her first restaurant jobs. At first, she saw them as side jobs, but that began to change when she started working at WD-50, the seminal restaurant in Manhattan’s Lower East Side that gave us the term molecular gastronomy. For the first time, she could see a future for herself in that world. 

She eventually moved on to Daniel, the temple of refined French cuisine on New York’s Upper East Side. In contrast to WD-50, Daniel “was so very classic,” she says, giving her a more complete understanding of what goes into producing an exceptional culinary experience. And that included the wine list, which was increasingly captivating her with the sense of mystery and romance she’d felt about her family’s homemade stuff years before.

That sense peaked one night when, on her night off one week, she headed to Cru, the restaurant where her future husband, Robert, was the sommelier. “I sit down and he puts a glass in front of me and then a few minutes later he comes with a wine bottle. I can’t see what the wine is but he pours it into the glass, and I pick it up, and I remember just smelling this presence of tart cherries and limestone and a hint of leaves and magic. It was so profound. It turns out it was a bottle of 1980 Henri Jayer Richebourg Grand Cru. That was a big aha moment for me.”

It was Daniel Boulud himself who told her that while she would always have a job waiting for her in his kitchen, he could see that her heart was in wine. By the time she left Daniel, her path was clear. “Wine became the through line,” she says, “a new north star.” 

The Place Beyond Excellence

Jordan’s unique path through New York’s restaurant world not only led her to wine, but solidified her philosophy toward it. In her next position at 11 Madison Park, where she’d become a sommelier, she was “right at the nexus of boundary-pushing and tradition….I like to think of it as my graduate school, discovering the Court of Master Sommeliers and discovering real discipline as part of a team.

“There was always that tension between what is new and different, and what is rooted in excellence and tradition,” she says. “That duality was always interesting.” And it jives with Pinhook’s own philosophy, built on a desire to expand the deep-rooted tradition of American whiskey by pushing bourbon and rye in new directions. Discipline, it turns out, makes a great foundation from which to bend the rules, or even write new ones. 

When Jordan arrived at Momofuku a few years later as the restaurant group’s beverage director, she was primed to run in new directions. “At Momofuku, there was a directive of creativity, which was so much fun,” Jordan says. “It was a lot of fun getting to play with the idea of what wine meant.” She created a wine list of all sparkling wines for Momofuku Ko, and at Momofuku Noodle Bar did away with traditionally sized bottles, serving instead half bottles and magnums. She also worked with mixologist John deBary on the cocktail side of the drink menus, expanding her appreciation of spirits.

Still, even in this exciting environment, the duality of tradition and creativity persisted. She began preparing for the Master Sommelier exam, an intense, unforgiving process (that’s not without its share of controversy) and one steeped in tradition and prestige. At the same time, Jordan found herself thinking about the greater possibilities of wine, and especially elements of its past that could use an upgrade.

The Ramona Era

After so much preparation, the dates arrived for Jordan’s Master Sommelier exam, a notoriously difficult test given in three parts. She passed the first two, but in the third, she was unsuccessful. It washard to take, but in the end the disappointment turned out to be an opportunity.

“That for me was a liberating moment,” she says. And it happened to coincide with a couple other pivotal events in her life. Two days after the getting news about the exam, Jordan found out she was pregnant with her son Henry. “That was this change agent from the universe that I had not realized I was looking for,” she says. “That felt like a moment of freedom from the universe to focus on this idea that had been in the back of my head.”

And then she headed to a wedding in Italy, where she already had connections with winemakers through a previous project. As the ideas flowed, “it all sort of clicked. Like wait a minute, I could do this in Italy. Italy has always been aligned with my value system and I have some relationships here already.” And then the name came to her. Ramona was the name of her sister’s childhood alter ego. “She would do these bold, crazy things and then blame it on Ramona,” says Jordan. It was perfect.

She launched Ramona as something great “in these non-fancy wine moments,” a drink that she could enjoy in her casual time off. It was low key but didn’t compromise on taste, quality, or sustainability. Drinkers loved it, and she internalized another important lesson. “I thought I needed a credential, and this was a great reminder that no, in order to do the next thing, you only need to be brave enough to do the next thing.”

Blending a Whiskey through the Lens of Wine

When Sean and Jordan met in New York City to blend the Collaboration #3, Jordan came armed with her vast knowledge of wine, ready to apply it for the first time to a whiskey. She found similarities in the process striking. “Of course one is a much higher proof and the base ingredients are different,” she says, “but the nuances and things like perception of acidity, there are so many elements of analyzing a wine that translate to the whiskey-blending experience.”

They tested a number of blends, with Jordan approaching each one from what she calls a foundation of pleasurability. First and foremost, they wanted this whiskey to be a joy to sip. As it would turn out, they nailed it at the outset.

“The first blend that she created was ultimately the blend that we used. We couldn’t beat it,” says Sean. “I don’t think it was a particularly easy task, and the fact that she did it with complete comfort and ease, and not only that but hit it out of the park on her first one, is incredibly impressive.”

Like most things both Sean Josephs and Jordan Salcito touch, the process was based in a hard-earned expertise, but it also embraced the adventure of it. “There’s the analytical tasting, and then there’s the tasting because you’re in a moment and you get lost in the glass, where there’s just a purity of intention,” says Jordan. “I think there is that through line in a great bottle of anything.”   

Case in point: the Pinhook Collaboration #3.