“I’ve always wanted to write about the wine world,” says Sharon Evans. “It’s usually presented as a bunch of snobs, and I know it’s not.” Before she and her husband, John Ragir, founded Live Bait Theater in 1987, Evans worked for two years as a sommelier, a job she fell into while performing monologues around town and waiting tables at the Paradise Cafe in Lakeview. One day the restaurant’s sommelier told her he was leaving and suggested she take his place. “He’d take me to tastings and gave me books to read,” says Evans. “We stayed up late tasting wine and taking notes.” Though she “probably wasn’t totally ready when he left,” she held the job for a year, and then went on to become the assistant wine buyer at the gourmet market Convito Italiano.
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At Convito she met a lot of vintners from Italy and fell in love with their wine. “They were very European and polite and said, ‘If you’re ever in Italy, come and see our vineyards,’” says Evans. She took them at their word: in 1985 she and Ragir spent their four-week honeymoon touring Italian vineyards. “Going to the source is a profound experience,” she says. “When you go to Italy and taste Chianti with Italian food, it makes sense the way it just doesn’t in this country.”
Set designer Mary Griswold suggested that Evans meet with Peter Amster, a director who’s worked everywhere from Northlight Theatre to the Lyric Opera. “It was like a blind date,” says Evans. “You meet and you talk. But I kind of thought he was out of my league.”
Preview performances of Blind Tasting are Saturday, May 24, at 8 and Sunday, May 25, at 7; the show opens June 1 and runs through July 20 at Live Bait, 3914 N. Clark. Ticket prices range from $15 to $20. On Wednesday, June 11, there’ll be a free panel discussion at the theater with Spellman, Amster, Richard, and others on the art of wine; on Wednesday, June 25, Vin Divino president Seth Allen will lecture on Italian wine. For tickets and more information call 773-871-1212 or see www.livebaittheater.org.
