McCall Magazine
– Winter/Spring 2008
Wine Dinners Article – First Draft
Doug Copsey 9/14/07
Contacts
Morels
– Annie Burd, Mgr.; Gary Kucy, Exec. Chef, 385-1068 or 271-6112; gkucy@tamarackidaho.com
Jug Mtn. Ranch – B.J. Sullivan, Mgr., 720-6614; Mary Clemmer, Chef, 634-
5072; restaurant@jugmountainranch.com
Working Title: Practice Makes Perfect
Word Count: 1.979
It is often said that anyone who can read a recipe can create a good meal, but concocting a dining experience that will tickle the taste buds long after the meal is over requires something more than any recipe can offer. Likewise, selecting a wine is easy when you simply go with what you like, but when you want to risk trying something new, knowledge and an experienced palate almost always serves the turn better than any wine menu description. That’s what makes pairing the two a skill that can only be developed with considerable time and practice. But what a way to practice!
This is nothing like those piano lessons you used to agonize over, or the foot cramps your first toe shoes gave you. And it’s certainly not like those endless wind sprints on the football field, or the blisters you got from that one more set of tennis the coach insisted would win you the next tournament. Oh no, this is much worse. Imagine being forced to sit down with your colleagues around a table covered with open wine bottles and plates of freshly prepared food, and being asked to determine which wine goes best with which dish. Now that’s my kind of practice.

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It has become a common occurrence of late for restaurants to offer their customers special evenings where select wines are paired with a unique menu prepared by the chef. Two cases in point: McCall’s Jug Mountain Ranch
Restaurant and Tamarack Resort’s Morels. In restaurants like these, nestled among the remote mountains of central Idaho, the ambiance of the dining room is enhanced with a view that makes the experience even more enjoyable, for the preparers as well as the diners.
Mary Clemmer has been delighting McCall residents with her cooking for
25 years, and she’s been around the restaurant business even longer than that.
She started in Boise at the original Bouquet Bar, a rowdy night spot that used to occupy a small space on Main Street between eighth and ninth, and helped with the move to the new Bouquet, just a couple of blocks away. She was in the kitchen the summer the Idaho Shakespeare Festival started at One Capital
Center’s short-lived Main Street Bistro, and she stayed through its next incarnation as Ray’s Seafood Restaurant. When that was taken over by Angell’s she worked there a while longer before leaving for Café Mariposa, in the midmountain lodge at Utah’s exclusive Deer Valley Ski Resort. In 1982 she moved to McCall and started the Huckleberry, which she ran with her sister and another partner for a few years. And if that’s not enough variety for you, she spent six summers with the Alaska Fire Service feeding firefighters out in the bush. Now she’s into her second year as the chef at the Jug Mountain Ranch restaurant
“I’ve played in the kitchen with a lot of great chefs and have always just enjoyed it,” says Clemmer. “With the Huckleberry we had a lot of theme dinners.

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When we ran out of themes, we did decades. So I’ve always loved to play around with food in that way.”
Before she came along, the Jug Mountain restaurant did special dinners only a couple of times a year. That’s something Mary increased right away, and once B.J. Sullivan came on as restaurant manager a few months after Mary, the idea of pairing wine with a 4 to 5 course dinner really began to take hold. B.J. was general manager of the Sawtooth Club in Ketchum for seven years before signing on as th at area’s wine representative for Boise’s Hayden Beverage
Company.
“We were doing a lot of wine tastings while I was at the Sawtooth Club,”
Sullivan says, “and I started working with the wine list along with the other managers. From the get-go it was something I was interested in, and then when
I worked at Hayden I went through an introductory sommelier’s course from
Beringer and a couple of other seminars on wine.”
Working as a team, Mary comes up with a menu and B.J. searches for wines that will make a good match. That means frequent tasting sessions, something the whole staff enjoys. Sometimes they pick an ethnic cuisine to work with such as Mary’s favorite, Thai, which always includes her signature Thai soup. Othe r times it’s a regional theme, like her morel dinner where attendees spent half-a-day picking the tasty mushrooms and then sat down to a dinner featuring the tasty delicacies in each course, including her acclaimed pan seared duck.

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“They’re really a lot of fun,” says Sullivan. “We just put three large tables together and do it family style. Everyone sits and parties together and has a really good time.”
2007 was the first full summer with the second nine holes on the golf course being open, and Jug Mountain Ranch was a popular venue for tournaments. As a result, there w asn’t much room for wine dinners. Likewise,
December is usually booked solid with Christmas parties, mostly for smaller businesses since seating is limited to around 50. But all that is expected to change in the spring of 2008, with the opening of the new clubhouse. Perched on a hillside among the pine trees overlooking the golf course, it offers a breathtaking view of the valley and the Council Mountains beyond. The main dining room will seat around 60, with room for another 60 on the patio, 20 in the bar, and 20 more in the solarium.
In the meantime, the success they’ve had with past wine dinners has them already planning for more beginning in January,
2008.
“They’re also going to put in a hotel,” Clemmer says, “and once that’s done it will be a whole different scene. Every season offers its own kind of beauty out here. It’s very exciting.”
Gary Kucy knows that feeling. When he first came to Tamarack Resort as
Executive Chef five years ago he was making lunches in a trailer and dinners in a yurt out in the forest. Two years before the Lodge at Osprey Meadows was completed, Morels opened in one of the tent-like sprung structures that made up

5 the resort village. Now in its second winter at the lodge, the restaurant offers an intimate, indoor dining area with a large patio that looks out over the golf course to the lake below.
“When we were down in the village and we didn’t have the Seven Devil’s
Pub opened yet ,” says Kucy, “there was only one restaurant option. We had to do chicken wings and steaks in the same place. Now we can define the restaurant a little more.”
The change in atmosphere also brought about some changes in the food.
“I try not to fall into the easy road of meat, starch and vegetables and you just change the protein on every plate ,” Kucy says. “My philosophy is to try and develop a little something so that each dish is its own experience.”
One glance at his mouth-watering menu bears that out, along with the fact that Gary likes to use local ingredients whenever possible.
“We’ve built enough clientele here that it makes it easy for me to bring in more unique products from this area. Before, it was tough for me to bring in some Copper River Salmon or King Salmon be cause if I couldn’t sell it I’d be sitting on it. Now I sell more Kobe beef from Snake River Farms than you can imagine.
It’s the highest priced item on the menu and we’re always running out of it.”
As you might expect, morel mushrooms are a popular item at Morels.
Gary found a local aficionado who manages to keep him supplied with the 30 pounds a week he goes through during the brief summer mushroom season. He also gets his huckleberries locally whenever possible, and says the lamb chops

6 and legs from Lava Lake Lamb just fly out the door every week. Likewise, when he began working with Black Canyon Elk in Emmett he was selling a couple of pounds a week. These days he goes through 40 pounds each week.
“We make our own elk sausage now with the trim from the Loins,” says
Kucy. “That’s the kind of thing I really enjoy, exposing people to what Idaho is and what this area is.
We’ve got clientele coming here from all over the world and they all want to know, hey, what are you guys eating out here?
“
Thanks to Annie Burd, who took over as the restaura nt’s General Manager a year ago the food wasn’t the only thing that got an upgrade once Morels moved to the Lodge,
“Annie has brought up the service level here 200 per cent,” Kucy says,
“that’s been a huge help.”
The Ohio native moved to Bozeman, Montana some twelve years ago and never looked back. She joined Tamarack two years ago and proudly calls herself a westerner now.
“My nametag doesn’t even say Ohio,” she boasts. “I don’t even know anything about Ohio any more.”
In an area where the labor force can sometimes be a bit rough, refining and educating the staff has made the biggest difference.
“They’re great people,” says Burd, “they just haven’t had the advantage of certain kinds of education. I initiated a series of wine tastings for the staff, and every wine comes with an information sheet on each wine we’re tasting. We

don’t just put them in the cellar, we taste everything that comes in here. It’s a huge help when the person serving the wine knows what th ey’re talking about.”
Annie is working on expanding the staff wine tastings into regular tasting events for the customers. And wine dinners are just a natural outgrowth of that.
They began last August with a lobster dinner. Gary created a four course menu that featured lobster in every dish except dessert, and Annie paired each course with a different wine. They followed that up with a Farmer’s Market dinner the next month and expect to feature a similar event each month throughout the winter.
“I want to do some dinners with regional influence,” Burd says, “but not just country themes like French or Italian, specific regions like Rhone Valley or
Cinque Terra.
”
Her plan takes the wine dinner concept a step further with the idea that, especially in old world countries, the wines are very specific to the food eaten by the locals there. Gary also believes that pairing wines from a given region with the food they eat where the grapes are grown will produce a more well-rounded experience.
“It just helps people understand that marriage of climate and culture, and why they drink the kind of wine they drink,” he says.
Despite a background that includes an apprenticeship at the five-star
Arizona Biltmore and ten years at Mark Miller’s Coyote Café in Santa Fe that included traveling the world with Miller doing cooking demonstrations and opening restaurants, Gary is not above growing his own food for the restaurant.
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“I think it’s very important for people to understand about growing things.
I’ve got a huge garden and it’s great to be able to see where the food comes from and how it grows, and taste the difference. I grow all my own garlic, among other things.
You go to a farmer’s market and get a tomato that tastes fantastic.
I have a hard time ordering tomatoes that great.”
These are just two of the many restaurants offering dinners that match wonderful food with fine wine. The popularity of these events seems to be growing, and the beauty of it is that the combinations are unimaginably endless, since no two chefs prepare any given dish the same, and no wine tastes the same to any two people. Sign me up for the practice squad. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.