Laura Santander believes two things strongly: wine appreciation and storytelling go hand in hand, and more women should be working in her industry.
Every bottle of wine has a story, according to Laura Santander, one of Mexico City’s most up-and-coming sommeliers. And the best story is usually your own.
“I was on this trip with my sister in Bordeaux and this really nice woman was giving us a tasting in French. When she gave me directions to bathroom I got lost literally in one minute. I walked through this enchanting garden, entered into this other building and found the bathroom. When I came out this nice man started talking to me and led me back to the tasting room, we were laughing and talking, and when I got back I noticed that everyone sort of deferred to him. I came to realize that he was the owner of Château Haut-Brion … the Prince of Luxembourg! I had walked in to the bathroom at his house! Because of that, Haut-Brion will always have a special meaning for me.”
While she doesn’t always have a story so personal to tell, Santander does try to narrate the essence of every bottle that passes through her hands.
“My mission is to get across that behind each bottle is a family or a cooperative or a region. Every wine is an homage to the land where its grapes grew. Anyone can read a label, but the interesting part is that the wine talks about itself, about who it is and why it acts the way it does. I don’t think there’s anything more personal than that.”
And who, she asks, is better at telling stories than women? Santander believes women have the necessary sensitivity for storytelling, for evoking emotion. That, she says, is why they make great sommeliers and great waitresses.
Mexico doesn’t have readily solid statistics when it comes to the level of female participation in fine dining. A 2014 census by CANIRAC reports that women make up 57 percent of the restaurant industry, but that includes every type of restaurant and every kind of job. While most kitchens are full of female cooks (a reversal from the male-dominated kitchen culture in the United States), the likelihood of being waited on by a woman in high-end restaurant in Mexico City is almost zero.
“When we have a woman who applies to be part of our service team, I am the first to get excited and be her biggest cheerleader,” says Santander. “As long as I am here and there are women willing to work hard, I will make sure we have women on our staff. You can’t ignore the obvious machismo that still exists, but nevertheless, at least in our restaurants, the opportunity is there.”
Santander’s big break was an unexpected encounter with Chef Abel Hernandez – amazingly, her first interview out of college – that helped her land as of one the partners of Chic Culinaria, a collection of three award-winning restaurants in Mexico City.
She has a soft, low voice, her manner demure, but warm. Ask her about wine and she lights up like a Christmas tree.
“Sometimes, I am describing a bottle of wine at a table and my mouth starts to water,” she says. “People immediately say, ‘Yes, that one,’ because they are so convinced by my description.”
The carefully crafted wine lists for Eloise and Loretta, the group’s two outstanding restaurants, have won Excellence Awards from Wine Spectator for five years running (in addition to each winning Food and Wine and Gourmet Awards), all due to Santander’s passion-bordering-on-obsession for creating the perfect list. Eloise has a little bit of everything, but Loretta is 100 percent Old World wines, and has thus allowed Santander the leeway to search for the excellent and unusual–she’s tried wine from Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Armenia, and Greece in her pursuit.
“I want to be able to offer cool things to our clients, wine that they won’t try anywhere else,” she says. “I am 100 percent sure that most people have never tried a wine from the Maldives. The wine, but even more so the places, are so completely foreign to us here.”
Santander herself won the Nariz de Mexico in 2012, and she credits much of her success to the help of other women in her field. Women like Sandra Fernandez, Lourdes Martinez, Laura Zamora, Georgina Estrada, Fernanda Gutierrez, and Carlota Montoya.
“Some are my friends, and some I just wish were my friends,” she says with a laugh, “but they are the kind of people who won’t let you fail. Being a woman in this industry has been the best thing that could have happened to me because of the other women that I have met. Besides my business partners, they have been my biggest help and my greatest teachers. The fact that some of the women that I have admired most are now part of my life, personal and professional, has been my most valuable gift.”
As interest in wine and wine drinking grow in Mexico (wine is still under 10 percent of overall alcohol consumption nationally), part of Santander’s mission is helping locals discover what’s out there.
“If someone comes and tries a Croatian wine and they love it, great, if they don’t like it, that’s ok too, there is always something else to try. There’s an increase in wine and wine drinking, but also in peoples’ desire to try new things. Mexicans are the number one consumers of Mexican wine, but even fanatics of Mexican wine are ready to try new things. That wasn’t happening five years ago.”
As part of that discovery, Laura will keep telling her stories, those of the wine and her own, which is now irrevocably linked to the future of wine in Mexico.
