Justin Leone, sommelier and owner of Munich’s Sticks and Stones, shares the secrets of an award-winning wine program.
What does Winning a WBWL award mean to you at Sticks and Stones?
First and foremost, when any bar or restaurant achieves this level of success, the owner or the manager is not there standing alone. It’s the team. For me, team is everything. I certainly couldn’t do what I do without my team: it’s such an insane logistical nightmare what we do, with the largest by-the-glass list on the planet with this new technology. And, regardless of how much someone on your team knows that you’re doing a great job and pushing something into the future, to actually get recognized for that is incredibly important.
And then of course there is just the sheer pride that comes from standing next to the other winners. There’s nothing but respect, honor, and also inspiration knowing that you’re in a room with so much talent, dedication, and passion. And you’re all fighting for the same cause in the end. The award is certainly the cherry on top, but just being in the same sentence as some of these other luminaries is certainly a massive honor.
Related
What are you trying to achieve with your list at Sticks and Stones?
With Sticks and Stones, it’s kind of a combination of a young sommelier dream and a frustration, having come up through Michelin gastronomy and some of the most well-known establishments across several countries. Being an incredibly passionate and driven wine freak myself, I noticed that gushing about these crazy wines that I’m able to open or taste or drink because of my position or because of my situation is incredibly rare. And when you tell the guests about these things, you know the best they can do is kind of nod, and say, “Oh yeah, sounds nice.” And it was just a constant monologue and that frustrated me: the barrier to entry to the great wines of the world is getting higher and higher, the allocations are getting tighter and tighter.
In the end my dream ended up resolving my frustration: I turned the monologue into a dialogue by offering over 900 of the world’s greatest wines in every vintage and format by the glass, with, of course, the new Coravin Vinitas, which makes us unique in the world right now, it really opens up every possibility to anybody who loves wine, from beginners who are inspired by their first sip of something insane that they never thought that they would ever drink because the bottle is too expensive to seasoned collectors who say, “Oh, I have this in my cellar, but I haven’t opened it yet, give me a glass.” It just builds so much community and conversation and that’s really for me what wine is all about and what our bar is all about.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of your list at Sticks and Stones?
Content from our partners
At Sticks and Stones Wine Bar, our real strength is in accessibility. I mentioned that with the sheer number of glasses that we offer. But it’s not just about the glasses, it’s also about curation. I think curation is really the point that separates good wine programs from great wine programs from iconic wine programs. Because we have this new technology with the Vinitas we can preserve anything in 0.1-liter bottles which last more or less from between one to two years depending on the bottle. We can offer any vintage from any format, 3 liters, 6 liters, 9 liters. In any vintage that I would love to show my customers and from any given wine, we can offer a very different experience. I mean, it’s not very often that one gets to experience the same wine from, let’s say, three or four different formats. And that’s something that someone can do here. And you can see the impact that the Matusalem has on the depth and the power and the finesse of the wine as opposed to just coming from the 750ml.
Our system has radically evolved our entire method of purchasing and sales, because immediately every bottle becomes seven glasses, every double magnum becomes 30 opportunities to sell that wine and show that wine to somebody. So, we don’t need to have cases of any particular wine on hand. For super rare things, I might only have two bottles, but I can blow 14 people’s minds with those two bottles. It’s unique in that we can be so broad and so deep in our program without having the burden of carrying a €10 million cellar, which to be honest, I could never afford. I’m just a poor restaurant owner, with no investors. So it’s about efficiency, too. But this a game changing way to look at the entire economics of how a wine bar works and what we can offer and how we can take our guests on a journey, an apropos journey.
We also have a very cool flight program which is very funny. It’s set up like you’re walking into an airline with a really funny cartoony safety book with a vomit bag with “in case of turbulence” with all the topics that I don’t like talking about in wine listed on it. We have flight packages, such as “Economy” with three glasses, or private jet flights which take you back decades to the greatest wines in the world, and of course they’re all easy to share with a with a friend or a partner. It’s all about opening doors and taking people on a journey to discover the world and their tastes and things that they never thought they would see.
Name three wines on your list that you feel best represent what you’re trying to do at Sticks and Stones.
The more I’ve travelled and spent time in Spain, the more I’ve absolutely fallen in love with Vega Sicilia and I wrote about this in my book. The first opportunity I ever had to drink the 1968 Único was like literally a life changing experience. I would probably pick that above almost anything else because the depth and the aromas, the complexity and the evolution—but it’s so young still. I mean it’s just pure insanity to me and so I always try to keep several vintages of old Vega Único on the list and Reserva Especial, because that’s the wine where if someone comes in and they’re willing to spend a little bit of money on a glass to really, you know, alter their minds, I will gladly be their shaman, so to speak, on their psychedelic journey through their first glass of Vega. And so, if not the ‘68, we always have fantastic vintages on hand, the ‘70 or the ‘62 or the ’82.
I love blowing people’s minds with things that they don’t expect. And in Europe, there’s a perception that California wines can’t do what Bordeaux does, despite the judgment of Paris and all of these things, it’s still kind of a a misnomer. And so one of my large strengths at Sticks and Stones is a massive and broad California program with great depth. A ‘78 Heitz Bella Oaks from the 6 liter is one of the more memorable California wines that I’ve ever had alongside the ‘68 Louis Martini, which people don’t even think the wines can age that well. And you look at those wines, they look like they came straight off their grocery store shelf because they were made 60 years ago, so they look terrible. Like I think one of them still has one of the little grocery store tags on it saying $12.99 or something. And I mean this was back in the time when California was run by farmers and and it was really such an honest, rustic and down-home kind of place. And they didn’t even know what they were making. They didn’t even know how legendary these wines were going to be. No one thought people were going to be drinking 1968s now in 2025. But these wines are are absolutely magic.
And then on the more accessible level, you know, of course we have a lot of international tourism. People always want to see, you know, what Germany does. And of course what we do best is Riesling. And we have an amazing list of of brilliant Grosses Gewächs, and even more accessible, just, you know, village wines from Germany, which are spectacular. But one that consistently stands out for me and that I very, very much love is Wagner-Stempel. And just because he keeps his pricing so humble as as we do.
What is your favourite wine and food pairing based on a wine and a dish served at Sticks and Stones?
As a starter, we have a really cool Japanese sardine tapa, which is the clash of Japan and Spain coming together with France on brioche with sobrasada from Iberico and with a really beautiful fillet of white Japanese sardine from Maison Dehesa, just in oil and lightly cedar smoked. It has this beautiful brininess, but the elegance and the slight fattiness of the flesh can be a very tricky pairing, actually. What they’re doing these days down in Jerez, not necessarily with straight up old school Sherry, but rather with, dry table wines from grapes like Palomino, for example, this insane saltiness and mineral edge to those wines with a bit of an almost orange wine kind of character giving it structure. Man, that’s so awesome with that kind of tapa, which not only does it sound like “what grows together goes together,” but it really does come through.
In a more on a more decadent sense, we have this beautiful corn-fed poularde, a chicken dish with a vanilla-scented sweetcorn espuma in a dark, reduced jus. So you have this play between light and dark flavors, and it’s always a coin toss if you’re gonna do white or red—you could do both. But my personal favorite for the viscosity, the oiliness, the body, the richness, the spiciness, the the breadth is really, really wacky wine in some ways—a Viognier from Napa, which sounds odd from the Stagecoach Vineyard, which has barely any white wine planted to it from a California producer in cooperation with Yves Gangloff from Condrieu and it’s called 2 Guys, 2 Barrels. They make 2 barrels of it a year and it really is like Condrieu coming from California and it’s a 2013 that I have right now. It’s just an explosion. And it’s not only for the for the flavor, but for the texture and the aromas. It’s pretty awesome. So I’m not saying that we’re playing on a three-star level, but I’m saying the mind-blow factor gets pretty up there.
