Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 38 MARCH 2020 PHOTOGRAPH BY KILLIAN PHOTOGRAPHY through the end of March. "In March, I hit full force. I'm doing three to four dinners a week," says Bruce, which means a lot of recipe development. Over the course of three decades and literally thousands of dinners, the chef has never repeated a dish. Bruce says the wine dinners are an exciting challenge because he can use ingredients that might be difficult to source for a regular menu. So diners might see periwinkles, whelk, or razor clams—all local. Winery-wise, March offers some heavy hitters, like the famed Mouton Rothschild- Mondavi collaboration Opus One Winery dinner on the 25th, and Ramey Wine Cellars, known as a pioneer in lush California style, which closes the festival on March 27. But Bruce is equally excited for less-known names Chef Daniel Bruce of the Boston Harbor Hotel created the longest running food and wine pairing series in the country. Chef Daniel Bruce tastes about 2,000 wines a year. Sounds like a bit much, right? Even he was surprised when adding it all up. "That's a lot!" the chef admits, quickly pointing out that he usually swirls it in his mouth and then spits it out, as is typical for wine professionals. "Imagine if I drank that much? I wouldn't be sitting here," he says with a laugh. Bruce has a good reason for all that tasting. The internationally known chef oversees the wine program at Boston Harbor Hotel, which includes the long-running Boston Wine Festival, an event that enlivens the waterfront each winter with dinners, seminars, and receptions. For the wine festival alone, there are an average of 35 dinners each year, and each dinner features about seven different wines. "So that's 250 wines right there—and that doesn't count the night of the dinner, where I need to taste each bottle to see if they are corked or off in some way," Bruce explains. Of course, choosing the wineries that the chef features each year requires more tasting. Because of the reputation the Boston Harbor Hotel has developed over the 30 years of the festival, winemakers are drawn to stay there whenever they are in town—and they often have a bottle of something special in tow. "I always make the time to taste," the chef says. "They traveled 3,000 miles to get here; how can I not take the time to taste with them? And I'm able to get all these new ideas." In fact, the 2020 wine festival features 13 new wineries on the slate—so many that it's become a theme of the event. "More than 35 percent of the wineries coming have never been here before," Bruce says, "which is pretty cool, considering I've been doing it for 30 years, right?" Bruce says. March is the busiest month for the series, which launches in mid-January and runs Chef Daniel Bruce put Boston on the tasting circuit. BY JEANNE O'BRIEN COFFEY WINE ON like Silenus Winery on March 19. "Silenus is so small and they only make a few different varietals," Bruce says. Another under-the-radar pick is Finca Allende on March 13, a producer in Rioja. "The winemaker's philosophy is to make wines in a nontraditional way," Bruce says. Bruce is also excited about Lux, an unusual offering because it is the collaboration of four different family-run wineries in Italy, representing wines from Tuscany, Veneto, Piedmont and Sicily, rather than a single winemaker. With all of these events, Bruce looks forward to socializing with old friends and making new ones. At the end of each wine dinner, he invites attendees to join him and the winemaker in the hotel's bar to get to know Bruce and the winemakers a little better. Over one more glass of wine. PURCHASE bostonwinefestival.net F A C E S + P L A C E S