wine guy wednesday

CultureMap Wine Guy Chris Shepherd on a must-attend dinner at March toasting French wines

Editor's note: Long before Chris Shepherd became a James Beard Award-winning chef, he developed enough of a passion for wine to work at Brennan's of Houston as a sommelier. He maintains that interest to this day. When Chris expressed interest in writing about wine-related topics for CultureMap, we said yes.

In this week's column, he tells us about a special wine dinner at one of his favorite Houston restaurants. Take it away, Chris.

$March restaurant chefs and Jon Bonn\u00e9$

Photo by Zach Horst

Chris Davies, Jon Bonné, and Felipe Riccio review the dishes at March.

Here we go! Have I got a wine dinner for you!

This Tuesday, October 3, the team at March will host renowned wine writer Jon Bonné for a one-night dinner celebrating the release of his amazing new book The New French Wine. If you don’t have this book, drive illegally fast to the nearest place to buy a book and get your hands on this one. If you work in a restaurant, a wine bar, or just frequent either of those places, you should have this book on the shelf.

Over the past few years, we are seeing a change and an influx of new wines coming from France. Wines are becoming more available and even more approachable. Trust me, I love the houses and vineyards in Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, and Loire, but now we are seeing this deep rooted love of different areas and some new winemakers that are embracing that as well. History wasn’t wrong. It’s just as Jon Bonné writes, “C’est Compliqué,” or “It’s’ complicated.”

I’m going to share a paragraph from his book that says a lot to me. Jon writes:

The state of wine in France matters because France is (and, with luck, forever will be) the soul of the global wine industry. Its grape varieties remain benchmarks around the world. Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir and Chenin Blanc, Gamay, and so on are the base materials for so many other wine regions, whether it be California or the Adelaide Hills, or even Tuscany. And reference examples from France remain just that: precedents by which other places measure their progress.

I personally agree with all of this— history tells us this. When I spoke to Jon today, he told me, “I would argue that nothing this big has happened to the French wine business since Phylloxera over 150 years ago.”

We’re seeing the newest winemakers and lesser known regions everywhere now on wine lists, in shops, and even at the grocery stores. We’re seeing sections for Beaujolais, Languedoc, Roussillon, Provence and even the Jura.

This book took Jon over either years to write, and it’s a masterpiece. It breaks down the whys, the whos, and the wheres from region to region. France has been hard to discover forever, but this book has it all laid out for you. You want to know more about the new and the old producers of Champagne, yep! I feel like the dog that had been chasing the car forever, and I finally caught it. Thank you for that, I was getting tired.

Now, on to the dinner. It’s no secret that the folks at Goodnight Hospitality are good friends of mine. I love what they do at Montrose Cheese and Wine, Rosie Cannonball, March, and I can’t wait for Marigold Club to open. They just get me — delicious food and beverage in a very thoughtful way.

Felipe Riccio, who is the chef/partner at Goodnight, is a young, very smart chef. And he truly understands wine. Believe it or not, there are not many chefs out there that focus on wine as much as food — Erin Smith at Feges BBQ, Terrence Gallivan at Elro, Felipe. I’m sure there are a few more but not many. It takes work and passion to learn wine but once you fall into it, it’s on!

Felipe and his team at MARCH are in the middle of the Sicily menu right now but are planning this one-night, amazing dinner. Master sommelier June Rodil, Mark Sayre, Gillie Dougherty, and Felipe sat down and picked the wines for this dinner by region and then dove into the deep end of the pool to work the menu. You want to talk about special? Yeah! You need to get this ticket, I already did because it is going to be one for the memory books. I would suggest if you want a killer experience then head on over to the MARCH website and book your seat. Everyone involved is just over the moon with excitement.

June told me, “Rather than being in constant search for the same old icons, Jon is discovering new French wine icons and unlocking their history and culture while sharing with us what we should be collecting for the future.”

I know that collecting is just as important as being able to enjoy now. In this book you will find both, and that’s pretty amazing. I hope you join Jon, Felipe, June, me and the rest of the team on Tuesday. Let’s raise a glass of Champagne and have an amazing conversation and dinner! See you there.

-----

Contact our Wine Guy via email at chris@chrisshepherd.is.

Chris Shepherd won a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest in 2014. The Southern Smoke Foundation, a nonprofit he co-founded with his wife Lindsey Brown, has distributed more than $11 million to hospitality workers in crisis through its Emergency Relief Fund. Catch his new TV show, Eat Like a Local, every Saturday at 10 am on KPRC Channel 2.

chefs wine books news-you-can-eat

eat real food

Houston DJ-turned-TikTok star cooks up a cult following one recipe at a time

Courtesy of Uncle Dibbz

Uncle Dibbz, a.k.a. A.H. Bowden, has built a devoted following for his viral recipes.

For the past month, Uncle Dibbz has been, shall we say, going ham on social media with the myriad videos of alternative Thanksgiving dishes. He’s dropped how-to clips for such recipes as Cajun-roasted turkey, honey-baked ham/hens, oven-bag turkey, and six-piece fried turkey (to go). Basically, if you don’t want to cook a bland ol’ Butterball this Turkey Day, Dibbz has you covered.

Who is Dibbz, you say? Well, he’s a North Jersey-born, Georgia-bred, Houston-based chef who’s been building quite the foodie rep online. Several videos across his TikTok, Instagram and YouTube pages, from his Cajun-boiled fried chicken (2 million on IG) to his “Propose to Me Pasta” (12.3 million on TikTok), has amassed millions of views. But Dibbz (government name: A.H. Bowden) wasn’t always a culinary content creator. He used to spin music back in Atlanta as DJ DiBiase, named after retired wrestler Ted “The Million Dollar Man” DiBiase. “DiBiase is a mouthful to say, so people just always call me ‘D’ or ‘Dibbz’ for short,” says Bowden, 37, during a Zoom interview.

@uncledibbz PROPOSE To Me PASTA 💍 🍝 Trust your Uncle! This SEAFOOD Pasta will seal the deal 👌🏽 Get my recipe below ⬇️ or on uncledibbz.com [@uncledibbz Link in Bio] 🌐 **Ingredients:** - 8 ounces spaghetti - 1 lb mixed seafood (shrimp, scallops, crab meat, etc.) - 2 tablespoons olive oil - Fresh chopped basil - 2 cloves garlic, minced - 1/2 cup white wine - 1/4 cup heavy cream - 2 tablespoons unsalted butter - Salt and pepper to taste - Uncle Dibbz Delta Dust [link in bio] - Fresh parsley, chopped (for garnish) - Grated Parmesan cheese (for garnish) **Instructions:** 1. Cook the spaghetti pasta according to the package instructions until al dente. Drain and set aside. 2. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the minced garlic, chopped basil and sauté for about 1 minute until fragrant. 3. Add the mixed seafood to the skillet. Season with Uncle Dibbz Delta Dust to taste and cook for 2-3 minutes until cooked through. Remove the seafood from the skillet and set aside. 4. Pour in the white wine to the skillet and let it simmer for 2 minutes, allowing the alcohol to cook off. 5. Stir in the heavy cream, butter, Uncle Dibbz Delta Dust seasoning, salt, and pepper. Cook for another 2-3 minutes until the sauce thickens slightly. 6. Add the cooked spaghetti and cooked mixed seafood to the skillet. Toss everything together until well coated with the sauce. 7. Remove from heat and garnish with fresh parsley and grated Parmesan cheese. 8. Serve hot and enjoy the flavorful Seafood Spaghetti. That's good Shawty! #UncleDibbz #ThatsGoodShawty #Pasta #marryme #proposal #bride #wife #husband #relationshipgoals #datenight #easyrecipe #seafood #cajun #cooking #fyp #foryou #viral #houston ♬ original sound - Uncle Dibbz 🍴

He was making a nice living as a DJ, even serving as rapper Big K.R.I.T.’s touring DJ for a while. But when the pandemic hit, the gigs obviously dried up.

“I was living in Miami at the time,” he says. “And, you know, when you have a lot of time on your hands to think – but also need to figure out a way to, you know, sustain an income and everything like that – the ideas start coming,”

Like most DJs at that time, he was doing live mixes on Instagram. But his days throwing cookout parties in Atlanta inspired him to start doing his cooking videos, where he used his very own seasoning. Of course, he had a lemon pepper blend, which he used in a lemon pepper hot wings video that currently has over a half-million views on TikTok.

“I'm about to go live to DJ later that night, and my phone was just going off with orders,” he recalls. “So I'm like, where are these orders coming from? And it's not from my friends. I'm seeing the cities and the states. I don't know these people.”

Thanks to his videos, which usually end with him saying his signature line “That’s good shawty!” (that’s also the name of his cookbook he released last year), Dibbz went into the seasoning business full time. He eventually hired another person to help send out the piles of orders he was receiving.

He even got an order from former Dallas Cowboy Emmitt Smith, one of his favorite athletes. “I remember doing a book report on him when I was in fourth grade,” he boasts.

Although Dibbz has a flair for making meals that border on decadent, he’s an ardent practitioner of cooking with natural ingredients, especially in his seasoning. He has several low-sodium seasoning, including Bebe’s Salt Free – named after his mother, who had open-heart surgery a few weeks before the pandemic started.

“I don't think a lot of people understand the amount of toxins and chemicals that go into a lot of these seasonings,” he says. “You're starting to see it in the news now. A lot of the foods with certain dyes are being taken off the shelves and things like that.’

Soon, Dibbz moved himself and his new business to Houston, a favorite place to perform as well as a town whose hip-hop got him into music. He cites local chopped-and-screwed gods DJ Screw, Michael 5000 Watts, and OG Ron C as his holy trinity of influences. To give props to the music of his new home, he created a hot sauce – called HXT Sauce – whose uncharacteristically large bottle resembles Promethazine cough syrup (aka the key ingredient in lean, the preferred purple cocktail for the city’s rap community).

“It's not necessarily about promoting that usage,” he says. “But, at the same time, it’s just a homage to one of the factors and influences of screwed-and-chopped music.”

Dibbz still indulges in spinning records from time to time. The Waxaholics’ DJ Big Reeks has gotten him to break out the vinyl a few times during his Thursday-night sets at Alley Kat Bar & Lounge in Midtown. But creating new recipes, dropping delicious content and proving you can eat and live in a hearty, healthy fashion still remains his full-time mission.

“I’m not just talking about eating cauliflower rice all day and every day, but just eat real food,” he says. “We're eating fake food. That's the bottom line. We're eating fake food and my whole purpose is to inspire people to eat real food and that starts with real ingredients, real herbs, you know – real natural seasonings.”

news-you-can-eat chefs celebrities