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A peek into XIV’s wine list

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Michael Mina‘s latest restaurant –- called XIV (‘Fourteen’), in case you’d lost count –- amounts to a slight departure from other Mina efforts. Then again, every Mina venture is a slight departure from the last. But how does Mina tweak his wine program for each new locale?

The wine list at XIV is orchestrated by Mina’s wine director, Rajat Parr. Parr got his start as a busboy at the recently closed Rubicon Restaurant in San Francisco, where master sommelier Larry Stone once held court, assembling one of the greatest wine lists in the country, as well as training and inspiring close to a dozen of California’s most prominent sommeliers and wine professionals –- Parr is a Rubicon alumnus.

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Tasked with populating 14 wine lists, Parr operates with a fair amount of leverage, the kind that allows him to travel to Champagne annually to blend a proprietary ‘Cuvee Michael Mina’ in the cellars of the exquisite grower producer Chartogne-Taillet. In many other Mina ventures, Parr has assembled the wine list equivalents of novels –- tomes with a breadth that reminds one of Dickens or Bulgakov. At XIV, however, Parr has composed, for him, a short story.

The list here is surprisingly (relatively) brief –- fewer than 250 wines –- accounting perhaps for the peripatetic attention span of your average Sunset Strip patron. But Parr has covered his bases. He describes it as ‘200 of my closest friends,’ which includes artisanal California producers like Steve Beckmen and the Peay family, as well as a selection of wines made by his fellow and former sommeliers (for example, Stone’s Sirita Cabernet or Spago somm Kevin O’Connor’s Lioco ‘Michaud’ Chardonnay). And Parr isn’t afraid to include a few from his own burgeoning label, Parr Selections.

XIV, 8117 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 656-1414.

-– Patrick J. Comiskey

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