Rajat Parr facts for kids
Rajat ("Raj") Parr is a famous Indian-American expert in wine who became a winemaker. He used to manage the wine choices for the Michael Mina group of restaurants. Later, he started his own places that make wine in Oregon and the Central Coast of California.
Raj Parr has several wine brands. Sandhi is a brand where he buys grapes from others. Lompoc, Domaine de la Cote, and Evening Land are brands that use grapes from vineyards he owns with his business partner, Sashi Moorman. He mostly makes Pinot Noir and Chardonnay wines. These wines are made using special farming methods called biodynamic and organic. This means they try to work with nature and avoid harmful chemicals. His idea for making wine is to keep it very natural. He does not change the wine much, like not adding extra things or letting the grapes get too ripe. He also has a new project: a wine-making building in the city of Downtown Los Angeles, which he shares with another winemaker, Abe Schoener.
Rajat Parr's Early Life
Rajat Parr was born and grew up in Calcutta, India. He spent a lot of time with his cousin, who ran two restaurants in New Delhi. Even though he had read about wine, he did not taste it until he was 20 years old in 1993. This happened when he visited an uncle in London. Wine is not very common in India, so it was a new experience for him.
Parr went to college at the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration in Manipal, Karnataka, India. He also studied at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. He first wanted to become a chef. He even worked as an extern (like an intern) at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.
Rajat Parr's Career Journey
Parr moved to San Francisco to work at Rubicon Restaurant. He was encouraged by his wine teacher after reading about the restaurant's famous wine expert, Larry Stone. Parr was very determined to learn more about wine. He visited vineyards on his days off. He impressed Larry Stone with how hard he worked.
Within six months, he became Stone's assistant. Stone became his teacher and helped him learn a lot. After three years, in 1999, Parr became the main wine expert, or sommelier, at the Fifth Floor restaurant in San Francisco. In 2003, he became the director for all the Michael Mina restaurants across the United States. This meant he was in charge of all their wine programs.
In 2007, Raj Parr and Michael Mina were asked to create a food and wine program for the Millennium Tower in San Francisco. People called him "one of the most celebrated sommeliers in the world." The restaurant, called RN74, opened in May 2009. It had a very long wine list, with 84 pages! RN74 closed in October 2017.
In October 2010, Parr worked with Jordan Mackay to write a book called Secrets of the Sommeliers. This book won an award in 2011 for best beverage cookbook. Parr and Mackay also wrote another book together. It was called The Sommelier's Atlas of Taste: A Field Guide to the Great Wines of Europe and came out in October 2018.
See also
- List of wine personalities
