Man Of Taste

Unbridled passion, a phenomenal memory, and a discerning palate have made Sid Cross one of the world’s most sought-after wine critics and consultants

by Jim Sutherland

Everyone has a Sid Cross story. Fashion writer and editor Sarah Bancroft recalls seeing him wandering among the abandoned tables at a wine event, picking among the empties, looking for bottles with sufficient heels for a taste. Chef Rob Feenie says that single-minded desire is a Cross signature wherever he goes, whether the Bordeaux region that is almost a second home or at his actual home on Point Grey Road. “The way he acts is the same: ‘Okay. Let’s taste.’”

Sometimes the persistence is not even related to fermented grape juice. Wine writer John Schreiner says Cross is a dedicated airplane “seat shopper,” who, should his assigned spot be disagreeable, will attempt to claim several others only to land back in the original.

At a recent afternoon tasting at the Alibi Room in Gastown, Cross makes his way to the table where Morning Bay Vineyards owner Keith Watt is pouring six wines: three whites and a rosé from his first crop of Pender Island grapes, and two Merlots produced from grapes secured in the Okanagan. The winemaker is visibly pleased to see Cross. “He was one of the first people to taste our wines,” he says. “He shows a real concern for fledgling wineries.” Veteran Okanagan winemaker Howard Soon, who is responsible for Sandhill and other labels, describes Cross’s abiding interest in a slightly different way. “When I first met him he scared the shit out of me. He summed the wine up in five minutes, arguing both sides and coming to a conclusion.”

As Watt tells the story of each wine, Cross carefully sniffs the one-ounce pours, inhaling a gulp and then spitting. The notes he jots on stray paper will later be transferred to the current edition of the identical black notebooks he’s been keeping since the late 1960s. Morning Bay’s 2004 Reserve Merlot gets a second and then a third pass from Cross. “It’s got nice, bright, forward fruit,” he says. “It’s got some structure without a lot of tanin or high alcohol. You get a lot of ripe berries, some minerality, which makes it kind of delicious. Some people would criticize it as not that intense or concentrated. But you should be looking for drinkability and complexity.” Cross would have to check his notes, but he thinks this may have been a bottle he recognized at the Canadian Wine Awards (one of several panels he typically sits on), where it won a bronze. It’s a wine that suits his own preference in wine—“more elegant and very complex on the nose”—and that might well have been overlooked by a less experienced panelist looking for something bigger and juicier.

Of the many caricatures associated with wine enthusiasm, almost none fit Cross. A high school basketball star, dedicated sports fan, and fitness nut who does calisthenics every morning and, at 67, still expects to run 10 kilometres in under 50 minutes, he’s not the party-hearty imbiber who swallows too much and spits too little. In fact, he’s generally a light drinker who says he prefers the aroma of wine to its taste. Despite the 100 percent he received in grade 12 mathematics and his career until 2001 as a prominent civil litigator, he’s not the Robert Parker-style consumer advocate who wants to assign every wine a number, in essence equating potency with quality. Rather, his preference for drinkability over concentration, and his ability to find something good to say about almost anything makes him the anti-Parker. Finally, despite a pronounced Francophilia and a preference for doing things the way they should be done, he’s just too enthusiastic, too positive—too nice—to be considered a snob.

Cross’s formidable palate is a byproduct of his even more formidable memory. In blind tastings he’s often able to pick out obscure bottles simply by having sampled from the same producer, label, grape, or vintage months or years before. Feenie recalls a tasting in which Cross identified a specific Bordeaux based on his intuition that the wine was made from new-growth grapes and his recollection that the estate had been replanted in the 1970s. Once, on the way to New Orleans, Mission Hill marketing director Ingo Grady asked for restaurant advice, and Cross suggested five spots to visit, along with the sommelier’s names.

Cross was born in Winnipeg but raised in West Vancouver, where his mother Eleanore was an enthusiastic cook and his father Gordon—“a very smart man who should have gone back to university”—built houses for a living and made wine for fun. Both Cross and his younger brother Ken, an accountant and one of Cross’s few local rivals as a palate and a wine collector, inherited these interests. In Sid’s case they were further honed while working as a waiter on CPR trains during breaks from a university career that ended in 1962, when, at 22, he graduated from UBC with a law degree.

Cross joined Ladner Downs, the big corporate firm (now Borden Ladner Gervais). Made an associate in 1969, at 29, he worked primarily as a civil litigator, running some high-profile cases but gradually taking on more of a rainmaker role, drawing especially on the contacts he’d made while pursuing his wine interest. Cross made his first pilgrimage to Bordeaux in 1970, a trip that would become an annual occurrence, typically with stops in London and Paris, and always with his wife Joan, whom he met in 1965 through a mutual friend, and whose interest in food rivals his in wine. Now a recipe tester and developer recognized for her own formidable palate, Joan is almost as omnipresent on Vancouver’s food and wine scene. Ingo Grady says you can’t really separate the two: “We think of Sid as Sid and Joan.”

John Schreiner, then a business writer for the Financial Post, remembers running into Cross in the city’s first specialty wine store on Pender Street, in the mid 1970s. Cross assumed Schreiner knew something of wine and quickly routed the conversation deep into French wine lore, leaving the neophyte Schreiner in awe. He might have been even more awed had he realized the store existed partly because of Cross’s lobbying of former Ladner Downs colleague David Vickers, who as attorney general in the Barrett government legislated changes to liquor regulations that made such a spot possible. As a collector Cross is continually stymied by B.C.’s liquor laws, which make it difficult to bring in wines and all but impossible to buy and sell them in an orderly, efficient way. For almost four decades he has battled to change the situation, often resorting to guerrilla tactics.

Early on, he recognized that the political process could be bent only so far, and the diplomatic route might be a better way to get the wines he wanted to taste into the province. In 1977 he was instrumental in setting up the Commanderie de Bordeaux, a society devoted to the wines of the region, soon followed by similar groups focussed on France, Burgundy, California, and Australia. Set up in association with the relevant jurisdiction, these bypassed the provincial bureaucracy by employing diplomatic pouches to bring in product. In 1979 Cross also helped launch the Playhouse International Wine Festival, which has become the biggest of its type in the world, and which makes it possible, for one weekend at least, to purchase thousands of otherwise unavailable wines. A few years later he was a force behind the establishment of UBC’s Wine Research Centre, which has designs on acquiring the world’s largest archive of wine, a substantial proportion donated by Cross himself.

For all this, Cross still can’t see why it shouldn’t be possible to buy any wine you want, as in virtually every other jurisdiction on the planet. He envisions a province in which wine collectors can sell and trade without breaking the law. Having consulted with Gordon Campbell’s new government prior to its election in 2001, he expected dramatic changes to bring B.C.’s system in line with Alberta’s relatively free market. But a decision was made to wait for Ontario to make the first move, and when that province backed off, B.C. did likewise. Cross is now lobbying for changes that would allow restaurants to charge less for wine, and worries that high p

rices will be one of the enduring memories many visitors take home from the 2010 Olympics.
Cross’s pursuit of enlightened self-interest has affected the British Columbia hospitality scene in ways not strictly related to wine. At Ladner Downs he watched over a legendary lunchroom, catered by people like Alice Spurrell, who went on to found Les Amis du Fromage, the iconic Kitsilano cheese shop. And though he has gained a media presence only in recent years, with a column in Western Living and regular tasting notes in Wine Access, he and Joan have long influenced the course of both wine and restaurant industries. “He came into my restaurant the first week it was open,” says Rob Feenie, who relies on the couple for wine and food advice (and who likes to entertain them at home as well, due in part to Cross’s habit of bringing along a magnum of vintage first-growth Bordeaux). With Vancouver magazine food editor Jamie Maw, Cross also helped set up the Chef’s Table Society, which published the Vancouver Cooks recipe compilation (each one tested by Joan, with wine pairings from Sid). Cross—with his enthusiastic interest and critical presence—can take some small credit for the success and style of B.C. wine, which occupies the middle ground between the elegance and complexity of the Old World and the fruitiness and upfront flavour of the New.

Cross’s influence is not contained to B.C. and Canada. He’s the wine committee chair for the London-based International Wine and Food Society, which is looked to for, among other things, its authoritative vintage charts. And he’s been made a chevalier, an officeur, a member d’honneur and on and on by various French wine bodies, one of which sends him a magnum of champagne on his birthday. Feenie notes that Cross is invited to all the best gatherings in France, including many the restaurateur cannot get into.

Being invited to dinner at the Cross’s relatively humble place on Point Grey Road is a cause of high anxiety for many people. “It’s snobby, it’s educational, but it’s light-hearted,” adds Jamie Maw.

Never more light-hearted than when the subject turns to Cross’s wine cellar. “At any time,” says Maw, “Sid might descend to the basement and be gone for several days, then pop back with an appropriate bottle with dust on it.” Never has anyone, even brother Ken, been allowed to accompany him on these expeditions. Nor will Cross even discuss his cellar, citing security concerns, even if, in truth, the bulk of his collection is now housed off premises. Joan has occasionally ventured in and reports only that it is “small and crowded.” Not large and crowded, like her husband’s oenophilic, unique, and memory-packed brain

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