Perfect Pair #4

wine and a burger playing hard-to-get

Welcome back to Perfect Pair, a series on where I get to chat with some of my pals in food, beverage and nightlife on their hard hitting burger opinions and what they love to pair with their patties.

For this edition, I sat down with Spencer Fox, sommelier, rockstar and all-around food fan to chat about which wine to drink with the elusive Lord’s burger and so much more!

Burger Diva: Spencer, tell me a little about you!

Spencer Fox: I am a sommelier at Lord’s in the West Village. I also play guitar in a band called Charly Bliss. Those are probably the two most pertinent things in my life.

BD: Tell me how you got on this pathway to wine.

SF: In the winter of 2023, I was working at another restaurant in New York and it was a pretty slow winter so they were cutting shifts like crazy and I had a few weeks where I was working one day a week which is not enough to pay rent in Bed-Stuy.

I went on Craigslist and saw a listing for a wine store. I’ve always been tertiarily interested in wine but at that point from a distance, I was like, “Why not?” The manager at that job was like, “You seem great. You’re enthusiastic. I will give you this job. If you do not figure out how to sell wine within a month, we unfortunately will have to fire you because you have to know how to sell wine at a wine store.”

So I started reading about it and learning about it first as a means to keep this job that I needed dearly but then it became very clear that this was something that held my attention and excited me. It gradually ramped up to the point where I was very very very much engrossed in it and from there it started really spreading and catching and becoming a dominating force in my life.

BD: What’s your favorite thing about wine and something that you love to continue to learn about?

SF: I think it’s the people and the practices and the way they translate their passion and their care for the craft into the wine itself. I hear about these people who are legendary tectonic forces in wine who run their operation with nothing more than a few horses and very modest equipment and the help of their sons, daughters, and friends and that’s it!

These bottles are being sold for hundreds of dollars and are some of the most revered consumable things in the world and it really is a farmer who works really hard. Hearing stories like that reminds you that this is something that is ultimately quite free of frills but the end product is so miraculous that it makes that feel like such an unbelievable feat.

glug glug

BD: So you started on the retail side of things and you moved into being a sommelier, working in restaurants. What has that transition been like?

SF: I think the retail background equipped me with an understanding on how to talk to people about wine but also how to communicate things to people who may not have a wine vocabulary. You are ultimately just trying to be a conduit between a person and the wine that they really want. That can be difficult if you’re coming from a place of understanding and knowledge because you want to talk about tannins and textures and all of these things that might not resonate with someone that doesn’t know a lot about the vocation.

Working in retail taught me how to understand wine from the perspective of someone who is approaching it in a very beginner mindset and I love the fact that at a restaurant you can center those sorts of conversations around the food that you’re going to be pairing with the wine. I love food, I love cooking, I love all that stuff so it does feel like a union of the two things that I care a lot about which is really great.

Where a lot of people want to match a high intensity food with a high intensity wine, I kind of take the opposite route where I want a wine that yes can stand up to these bigger richer flavors but also work in conjunction to provide levity from how intense the food is.

BD: For the Lord’s burger specifically [Author’s note: next week ;)] what would you pair with it and why?

SF: My tastes skews higher acid and lighter in body and I try to direct customers in that direction when I can. Especially with the food here, your palate more than anything wants to be refreshed and renewed and the thirst wants to be quenched because the food is incredibly intense here which makes it great!

Where a lot of people want to match a high intensity food with a high intensity wine, I kind of take the opposite route where I want a wine that can stand up to these bigger richer flavors but also work in conjunction to provide levity from how intense the food is.

I would probably do something like a Tavel rosé. I would do a Cru Beaujolais from a warmer area in Beaujolais like Morgon. A lot of stuff from the Jura could work. Something red and Catalonian would work. But ultimately something with medium body and vibrant acid to really clean up the palate.

BD: Outside of Lord’s, talk to me about your favorite burgers in the city?

SF: Well OG has to go to the dearly departed Trophy Bar. A pandemic casualty. Just the platonic ideal of a dive bar. And the burger - I believe the deal was you could get a cheeseburger, fries and a Miller for $15 any day during happy hour. The thing I liked about it was that it was a thin patty but not a smash. It retained so much juice but was a very compact unit which I think is so integral to a burger. I think it needs to be wieldly.

BD: It’s so important to be able to hold a burger with one hand and talk with the other, especially at a dive bar.

SF: Exactly! A burger is a social food! It’s not a steak or something. Another one is Icehouse in Red Hook, amazing. Oh dude. You know…Rolo’s. I don’t know why it pains me to admit how much I like the burger. It feels cheap. But it’s perfect.

BD: Well you know how I feel about it.

SF: Exactly. I honestly think that the pepper that they pair it with is so spot-on. It’s perfect. It’s like banchan. You take a bite of this little thing and it resets your palate. The fact that it’s cold AND grilled? A stroke of genius.

BD: With a burger like the one at Trophy Bar, obviously you’d have a High Life with it, that’s the deal. But if you were to do a wine with that compared to the burger here, what would you do?

SF: I think a burger that is a bit more delicate gives you a lot more mobility. I could see a southern French skin contact wine or even a more textural white from coastal Spain could be amazing but I think ultimately when you’re pairing a wine with red meat, you need to have enough body and texture to stand up to the amount of fat that’s going to be on your palate. I do not think it’s confined to red wines.

BD: I agree! When a burger is more rich, I kinda like a zippy white.

SF: Hundred thousand percent! The thing you don’t want is if you’re eating a burger and you have a Muscadet or a Txakoli that is very light, you’re just not going to taste anything. You need something to deliver a bit of concentration and intensity but after that you can kind of go in any direction. And honestly - Trophy Bar burger? Probably it’s gonna go ahead and say champagne. Like the champagne of beers!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.