Every year about this time we feel super nostalgic. We met 53 years ago on June 4 in the newsroom of The Miami Herald, which overlooked Biscayne Bay. Since moving to New York City in 1990, we have returned to the Miami area often. On our visits, we’re amazed at how the skyline and neighborhoods have changed. Where’s Melreese Golf Course? At the same time, we’re comforted and sometimes confounded by the things that have endured. MetroRail, really? 

Badly needing some rest and relaxation, we headed south earlier this month and made a big decision: Forget renting a car. Instead, we slathered on sunscreen and sat under a huge beach umbrella a few feet from the Atlantic Ocean. When not doing that, we stood on our balcony, bubbly in hand, and watched cruise ships depart and pelicans soar and dive. Looking inland when the sky turned pink and orange and lavender, we took in the bright neon lights beckoning from the ever-changing resort town that is Miami Beach.

Most of our must-have experiences during visits are culinary and dining at Joe’s Stone Crab is always at the top of that list. We cannot remember a time in Miami when Joe’s was not a part of our lives. The last time we were there, for lunch pre-Covid in 2017, the wine list was improving but still not as stellar as the wonders coming out of the kitchen. So without even thinking of looking online at the current wine list, we expected we’d take something and pay the restaurant’s reasonable $40 for corkage. 

Since we no longer check luggage, that meant that we couldn’t bring a gem from home and we’d have to buy something from a wine store within walking distance of our hotel. That’s how John ended up at I Heart Liquor — we kid you not! That’s the kind of store that offers things like XXL Sparkling Moscato, “Moscato Without Manners.” Since nothing he saw there was worthy of Joe’s stone crab claws, he picked up a domestic Brut Rosé to have on our balcony and we trusted that we’d find something way more interesting on Joe’s list. Did we ever! 

As usual, we asked our server for a copy of the wine list for each of us and without batting an eye — sometimes we have to explain why — he brought us a second one. We were impressed. There were numerous selections under $70 and plenty of names we don’t often see on wine lists like Domaine Serene from Oregon; Kistler and Kongsgaard from Napa; two vintages of Louis Latour Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet-Grand Cru and quite a few more. When we were growing up together in Miami, Joe’s wine list was a weakness; no longer.

We went to Joe’s twice on this trip. The first night, the only thing we knew was that the wine was going to be white. Not a big stretch there. So we tried some wines by the glass. Dottie had a glass of Albariño and John a glass of the Graville-Lacoste Bordeaux Blanc from Graves. The Bordeaux was so good we decided to have a bottle ($58) with our dinner of claws, creamed spinach and Lyonnaise potatoes. 

We’ve always found that the stone crabs are a surprisingly difficult pairing, especially with the mustard sauce and butter (we order both). They are so rich and dessert-like that California Chardonnay seems redundant, but other whites often get lost. The Bordeaux was just right: crisp, flavorful and refreshing.

Chablis seems like a natural pair, but we haven’t been impressed with Chablis at any price point recently, so the next night we gave it shot anyway. We decided to try a glass of Chablis first and we had our fingers crossed. Our server suggested splitting it in two glasses, which we appreciated. Checking on us a few minutes later, he saw Dottie’s glass virtually untouched and said to John, “She didn’t like that at all.” True. It was disappointing, we both decided, just kind of flat and uninteresting. We longed for the exciting taste of that Bordeaux Blanc, so we ordered it again, breaking our long-standing rule of always trying new things. 

Back home, we contacted Joe’s to talk to the wine director. Turns out the one we’d met years ago, who was intent on improving the list, Paul Kozolis, had left. So we spoke with José Uchuya, the beverage director for the past four years. He’s been at Joe’s in various senior capacities for 43 years. Joe’s operates like a well-oiled machine. Though we’re sure there is a strict hierarchy, the uniformed people on the floor move seamlessly amid each other, so when we called Uchuya, his response to our first question seemed apt.

Grape Collective: Who puts the list together?

Uchuya: Well, in a way we all do. I don’t think that putting a list together in a place like this is a one-person job. I have a management team and we sit down weekly. We have about 70 servers, who are my salespersons. And I get input from them to see what our customers like and customers want. I look for something that I believe belongs on our list. I figure out who has it and then I just bring it in. Our wine list is never done. So I will say it’s a team effort.

GC: The city has changed a lot.

Uchuya: Oh yes, definitely. the town has changed considerably. As well as our clientele. Our clientele is very diverse, especially because the city has grown. There’s a lot of people from different areas. And that’s one of the reasons that now we don’t really close. If you remember back in the ‘80s, we used to close for five months. We used to open up for the crab season and that’s no longer the case.

GC: Thank goodness. 

Uchuya: We used to close for five months and then gradually we started opening more and more during the summers to the point that now we only close for about three weeks between the last week or last two weeks in September to the first or the second week in October.

GC: How often does the wine list change?

Uchuya: We used to change the wine list basically once a year. Now the wine list is never finished because we’re constantly adding things according to our clientele, what our customers want.

GC:. What is it that the customers want? Is there one type of wine that they want?

Uchuya: No. I mean, the customers want quality. So we try to give them that. Also, kind of like a food menu, we don’t want to bore our customers. We have many very repeat customers, so we don’t want to bore our customers with the same thing over and over and over.

GC: We noted that there were quite a few bottles under $70. Are you seeing more sales on the lower end or the middle end or is it across the board?

Uchuya: Believe it or not, even though the under $70 bottles are on that list, they are not the majority of sales. We have them there because we have a very wide variety of customers and we want everybody to be able to come over, sit down, have dinner and enjoy a glass of wine with their meal, or a bottle of wine. And we have to have everything for everybody, basically. 

GC: When we talked to Paul in 2017, he told us that Joe’s sold more red wine than white. Is that still true? 

Uchuya: That’s not the case now. I don’t know if it’s because of the selections that we have or because the clientele has shifted, but probably 60% of our sales are white wines, 40% are red. Then again, Florida is hot, but you still see people having probably a nice fish dish drinking Zinfandel. 

GC: Well, whatever people like.

Uchuya: Exactly. We let people have whatever they want.

GC:  Are you selling more wine today than you did say five years ago?

Uchuya: Definitely we are. Once you look at the numbers, they’re staggering to see the amount of wines that we sell daily, especially during our peak months, which are December, January, February, March. I mean, it’s just mind boggling to see the amount of wines that come out of here.

GC: What kind of numbers? Can you share?

Uchuya: Sure. I mean, up until now [since the restaurant reopened for the season in October], I think we just passed 20,000 bottles of wine sold. I mean, I don’t know in other restaurants, but I think that’s a big number, since October. Lucky for us, with technology nowadays, very easily we can figure out what is the price point that sells the most. What areas do people like the wines more? So looking at all of those numbers in combination with talking to our waiters, our bartenders, and a lot of the times also talking to our customers, we try to learn the complexity of putting a wine list together. 

GC: What are people ordering most of or more of?

Uchuya: Well, the biggest varietal that we have that we sell is Sancerre.

GC: Tell us about staff training. 

Uchuya: We do that, for the most part, twice a week. We sit down with the crew and we taste some of the wines that we have on the menu. I don’t give them an enology class per se, but what I do is I tell them what the wines that we have in the menu are all about so they can in turn suggest it to customers.

GC: Well, we were very well taken care of both days. 

Uchuya: I’m glad to hear that. I love what I do. I love the challenges that each department that I ever worked in gives me. So that’s what I love about the job. I love talking to people. I’m a people person, but that’s what I love about doing all these different jobs. For me, Joe’s, it’s like home. I spent a lot of hours here, a lot of years that I’ve been walking through this building and to me this is home. And I guess for a lot of our customers, we have customers who have been coming over here for over 50 years.

GC: Did you have any particular passion about wine?

Uchuya: I always enjoyed wine. In my personal life, I travel quite a bit and I always had the passion for not only wine but for a bunch of other things. The fact that they entrusted me with that part of the business gave me more reasons to educate myself and learn. I think that the biggest part of that is knowing who your clientele is and understanding what it is that they want. I don’t consider myself a wine expert. I’m just somebody who is passionate doing what I’m supposed to do, I guess. The challenges of putting this list together that never ends, it’s very exciting.

GC: We noticed the plaques around the restaurant. There’s one with our friend Bob Hosmon’s name on it. He used to write about wine for The Miami Herald.

Uchuya: Some of those people in those plaques here, they came very, very regularly. Unfortunately, some of those, they’re gone. We put their names there to remember them. They were very special to us. Some of them were personal friends as well. We learned from Jo Ann Bass [who died in January at 94 and whose grandfather opened Joe’s in 1913] to give value to everybody who comes through the door.

Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher conceived and wrote The Wall Street Journal’s wine column, “Tastings,” from 1998 to 2010. Dorothy and John have been tasting and studying wine since 1973. In 2020, the University of California at Davis added their papers to the Warren Winiarski Wine Writers Collection in its library, which also includes the work of Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson. Dottie has had a distinguished career in journalism as a reporter, editor, columnist and editorial writer at The Miami Herald, The New York Times, and at The Journal. John was Page One Editor of The Journal, City Editor of The Miami Herald and a senior editor at Bloomberg News. They are well-known from their books and many television appearances, especially on Martha Stewart’s show, and as the creators of the annual, international “Open That Bottle Night” celebration of wine and friendship. The first bottle they shared was André Cold Duck. They have two daughters.