Paul Bertolli of Oliveto shares his culinary prowess
 Anyone who has spent time dining around Italy knows how hard it is to transport the true Italian character of the food to anywhere else. So much of the texture and flavor is tied to the freshness and vibrancy of the ingredients that you almost have to be there to get it. A few chefs in America manage to capture that essence when they cook Italian food, and Paul Bertolli is one of the best from that group.
 As chef and partner at Oliveto restaurant in Oakland, Calif., Bertolli is a fanatic about freshness and the quality of the distinctive ingredients that make up his dishes. Even his tomatoes come from farmers who are experimenting with the best places to grow each variety, similar to vintners finding the best terroir for their wine grapes.
"The best cooking is from scratch, so we make our food from scratch--all the pasta, all the cured meats," he explains. "We butcher whole carcasses (of beef, veal, lamb and pork). We use all the organ meats and cuts that are normally thrown into the saucepot in most restaurants."
Bertolli believes true Italian cuisine is difficult to make in the United States--not because it's tricky or requires extraordinary talent--but in that it demands so much attention to detail. Because the food is so simple, ingredients must be the very finest, and technique must be authentic. "For pasta sauces, braises, dishes in umido [steamed], the most important thing we do is what I call bottom-up cooking. Rather than working with reductions, we work with residues in the bottom of the pan, and you build up the sauce or the dish from this fundament of flavor. They're not cleaned-up sauces. Italians tend to let the flavors bleed through."
Bertolli likes to start with a traditional idea and add the sort of touches that could be imagined only by someone who lives  in the anything-goes milieu of Northern California's gastronomy. That's what he's been doing since he was chef at Chez Panisse in nearby Berkeley in the 1980s, and that's what he's done with this menu.
The first dish, Bitter Salad with Old Balsamico, consists of arugula, radicchio, red dandelion selvatica (a wild green), duck giblets and pancetta. All this amounts to a riot of flavor. "They make something like this in Modena," he says. "It's called insalata campagnola [country salad], where the bitter greens are a foil for the balsamico, which tends to be a little sweet. Generally you get pancetta and Parmigiano and sometimes walnuts. I added the giblets to make it a little easier on the wine. Those greens need something to mitigate the bitter flavor, otherwise it kills wine."
Sauvignon Blanc turns out to be the answer. Bertolli and I try two with the salad and like them better than a dry Vouvray or oloroso Sherry. Bertolli likes the Sancerre, which doesn't lose a bit of its generous fruit flavor with the greens. "The salad  reminds me of bistro salads in France," he says, "where they toss giblets with the greens and drink Sancerre." I prefer the zing of Morton Estate Sauvignon Blanc Hawkes Bay Colefield 1999 (89 points on Wine Spectator's 100-point scale, $18) from New Zealand, which becomes more dazzling with the dish. The Kiwi wine is also more widely available, and we agree to use that one for the menu.
The next dish, Tramezzino (literally, "sandwich") of Sand Dabs, uses sautéed fillets to encase a layer of leeks and parsley with a pan sauce of butter, capers and lemon. "In Italy they'd probably use olive oil, and grill the whole fish," Bertolli muses. "This is not particularly Italian, although, come to think of it, I've had green sauce with capers on eel in Treviso, and this is reminiscent of that dish."
The best wine match here is Petrucco Ribolla Gialla Colli Orientali del Friuli 1999 (however, it is not widely available enough to make it a practical choice for this menu). By itself the wine is lean and zippy but finishes round, with caramel notes. With the fish it gets very spicy and bright, while the dry Vouvray becomes too steely. An Australian Chardonnay emerges as delicious, but all we can taste is the rich, spicy wine, not the food. A good alternative to the hard-to-find Ribolla is an Alsace Pinot Gris such as Trimbach Reserve Personnelle 1997 (87, $30), which has similar characteristics and is easier to come by.
Farrotto with Wild Mushrooms uses an ancient form of wheat called farro to make a dish similar to rice-based risotto. Bertolli offers a Barbera d'Asti and a Barbera d'Alba, but they're so crisp and citrusy that the food flavors disappear. The surprise winner is an Oregon Pinot Noir, Ponzi Willamette Valley 1998 (90, $25), which Bertolli agrees shows the right intensity for this dish. "They're equal," he says.
The Rotolo Pepato of Pork is rubbed with a peppery seasoning, butterflied, rolled with finely chopped herbs and garlic and roasted in a wood-fired oven. (Butterflying adds a little extra depth of flavor, but this  step can be omitted, Bertolli notes.) "To me there is nothing better than really fresh organic pork with a little rosemary and garlic, roasted in an oven fired with almond and oak wood, half of which is wet so there's smoke," he says. He pauses for a moment and brightens. "What more do you need?"
The dish looks simple, served only with long-simmered fresh cannellini and cranberry beans. It makes the Domaine Les Palličres Gigondas 1998 (92, $25) very smooth in texture, as the wine picks up the pepper flavors. According to Bertolli, the secret is the beans. "Beans work even better than Gorgonzola for mitigating tannin," he says. And the meat and the wine are a natural combination. The Gigondas fits its spicy, fruity flavors harmoniously around the dish. A Corsican red, a Gattinara and an Australian Shiraz, among others, also improve with the food, but the Gigondas wins the day.
For dessert, Bertolli creates a tart filled with raisins cooked in vincotto, a syrup made from grape must cooked down to half its original volume. Available in bottles imported from Italy, it is quite sweet, but has the natural grape acidity that provides some balance.
The sweet dessert needs a very sweet wine. Neither a late-harvest Chenin Blanc with 10 percent residual sugar nor a luscious young Loupiac is sweet enough, but Gabor Tokaji Azsú 6 Puttonyos 1993 (NR) certainly fits the bill. Its strong honey character adds an extra layer of flavors to the dish, and its raisiny flavor makes it an excellent match.
It's clear that Bertolli thinks about wine and wine-and-food matching more than most chefs do. At Oliveto, his special chef's menu suggests specific wines for each dish. He always includes food in his monthly staff wine tastings to get the servers and chefs thinking about the topic. His wine list is short, but filled with offerings that have been carefully chosen to work well with the food, including selections from small producers in France, Italy and California.
A recent review in San Francisco magazine criticized Oliveto's list because it was short on star Cabernets, Merlots and Chardonnays.  The review probably didn't recognize many of the wines--even experienced wine drinkers might recognize only a small percentage of them--but Bertolli likes it that way. "Unusual wines are hard sells," he notes, "and I like the idea of making the waiters work--not to torment them, but to give them a structure, in which to engage with customers."
Ideally, says Bertolli, "the wine tastes better by virtue of the food, and the food tastes better by virtue of the wine." Wine and food needn't come from the same place. Oliveto's list comprises less than 40 percent Italian wines, and the emphasis on wines from elsewhere not only reflects Bertolli's personal taste, but his conviction that the best match is found in the glass, not in traditional precedent.
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