In the middle of my senior year in High school, 1963, my pal Tim McGee helped me score a job working for Pearson’s Brentwood, the premier wine cellar of the Westside. Located on the corner of 26th and San Vicente, just across from the Brentwood Mart, Pearson’s was not the usual liquor store. First of all, it closed at 7:30 and did not do much of a brown bag trade. Pearson’s specialized in fine wines and in stocking the bars and wine cellars of the rich and famous. Thus, my job was to deliver cases of wine to very exclusive addresses and occasional 6 packs to friends in the Palisades.
The owner was Casey Pearson, who was rarely around, but the store was run by his son Roger Pearson, a decorated war hero and a genuinely great employer. Roger lived with his family in Mandeville Canyon and his house backed up to a hillside. Wheeling a hand truck past the pool, one came to a huge vault door which led into a massive wine cave nearly the size of a house, temperature controlled and stacked with pallet after pallet of the best vintages. The store itself had a red carpeted two story wine cellar, featuring the best foreign and domestic wine that could be found probably anywhere on the west coast. Another room featured fine crystal bar glasses.
Roger was a hard working man and he expected the same from his employees, but he was always fair, thoughtful, and generous…one of those adults who looked you in the eye and spoke to a 16 year old with the same respect he would extend to a customer. That I repaid his respect by occasionally pilfering beer from him is a fact of which I am not proud. In fact, he fired me once for totaling the delivery van ( I swear it was not my fault), but later hired me during every Xmas rush throughout my college years. This was a remarkable gig. Customers like Gregory Peck (another who would speak respectfully, asking a delivery boy about his education) would hand over a ten page typed Xmas list, ordering gifts from single bottles to cases of the best for every single person he worked with that year. So once the gift wrap department did their jobs, I would pack my VW van with gifts and drive anywhere in LA dropping off Gregory Peck’s largess. It was not just Peck, it was James Garner, John Ford, and a host of others who were not as well known but every bit as wealthy. I could make over $1,500 (not including the tips!) in three weeks, putting in 16 hour days and appreciating every minute/dollar. It was a goldmine for a student and Roger always sent me home at Xmas with a bottle of something good for my family’s dinner.
But the best benefit of the job was the incomparable wine education that I received. Roger was a judge at many tasting events and was well respected in the wine world. When the store closed in the evening, often some vendor would open a bottle of his best and line it up with other labels from the region, same year, or five consecutive years of a same variety, same vintner. We would sit on cardboard boxes in the back room and I would sip fine and not-so-fine wine out of huge crystal glasses and listen to a circle of people discussing the ins and outs of each vintage/appellation, and grape. While I was stupid in many ways in those years, I was wise enough to keep my mouth shut and just listen. I learned what I liked and did not like. I learned how to taste a wine and how important my nose was to the experience, what “legs” were, how to tell a “corked” wine, a wine before its time and one past its prime. The California wine industry was just getting its own legs, so there were few enough major labels that it was possible, unlike today, to know California wine makers. Then, of course, the industry exploded and the Big 12 growers became the Big 400 or 800.
It was not long before my friends and I discovered the original Trader Joe’s, a store whose aisles consisted entirely of stacks of wine cases from some remarkable old European vineyards. We would by a case of pick hits at about $1.99 each, open them all in the parking lot, and then go back to purchase cases of the best. My friend, Peter Sinclair, did this regularly and one of my most prized Xmas gifts each year was a case from Peter that consisted of his pick hits from Trader Joe’s year. (I learned from Roger Pearson that buying foreign wine was like going to the racetrack: if you don’t know the horse, bet on the jockey, or in this case, the importer. This works. If you find a wine that you like at TJ’s, note who imported it and look for others that they picked.)
Eventually, places like the Wine Warehouse, Trader Joe’s, the Wine Barn, etc. proliferated and it was not too many years until Pearson’s could no longer compete. I was sad to see the store closed by the time I came back from living in Australia in 1976. I never knew what became of Rod Pearson or his remarkable wine cellar, but I am still grateful to him for both the lessons he taught me about wine and those he taught me about hard work. I believe that I got a better education in the back room of Pearson’s Brentwood than in any single course I took in college. I still like a good bargain wine and cannot begin to afford to be much of a wine snob. I have developed some inner equation that the enjoyment of a wine is often amplified by the fact that I found it for 12.99. So I raise my glass to Roger Pearson and a lifetime of magical uncorkings. Oh, and sorry about the beer, Rod. Just know that I never raided your good stuff.
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