Feb 15, 2019
How to make cider from 300-year-old pear trees, what it's like
to work alongside Dan Barber at one of the world's best restaurants
and how it feels scoring Gourmet Traveller's Sommelier of
the Year award – Caitlyn Rees can give you a first-hand account of
all of these standout experiences.
When she was at Fred's in Sydney (where she served fascinating
wines from the Adelaide Hills to Armenia), she was singled out by
Gourmet Traveller as Australia's best sommelier in the
magazine's 2018 restaurant guide.
And because she won Melbourne Food and Wine Festival’s Hostplus
Hospitality Scholarship, she ended up doing time at three places on
her worldwide wish list: Relae in Copenhagen (a Michelin-starred
restaurant that upended her expectations about how chefs and wait
staff should work together), Dan Barber's Blue Hill at Stone Barns
in New York (her behind-the-scenes stories about this acclaimed
restaurant are truly amazing) and helping Eric Bordelet in
Normandy, the ex-Arpège sommelier who collects fruit from
centuries-old trees to make his famously great cider.
She also talks about the "rough red" that her grandfather made (and how it was her first encounter with booze), her time at Momofuku Seiobo (another wish-list job of hers), why she left Fred's (even though she loved working there) and what she's currently doing at Cirrus. Plus, a tragic story about suitcase wines and we hear her list of favourite places to eat and drink in Sydney (including the restaurant where she's spent practically all of her birthdays).