Glass Act

Prior to joining Tinker Street’s team as beverage manager and sommelier one week before the popular Herron-Morton restaurant opened in January, Lindsay Slone spent nine years as a bartender and worked as a sales rep for Vanguard Wines and Crossroad Vintners distributors. That combination of skills—both pouring and pitching fine wines—gave the IUPUI grad, who turns 31 this month, the perfect background for arguably the coolest job in town. “It’s in my blood,” Slone says.

But apparently that’s not enough. In April, Slone passed the first (of four) Guild of Sommeliers tests toward becoming a Master Sommelier. Next month, she hopes to crack the second level, bringing her that much closer to the most distinguished of oenophiles. She gets plenty on-the-job training, estimating that she tastes roughly 30 wines a week to select the bottles that work best with the season, the trends, and Tinker Street’s menu.

Just don’t mistake her for a wine snob. “What it all comes down to is that if a wine tastes good to you, it’s good wine,” says the self-taught Slone, who gravitates toward smaller, family-run wineries and loves red Rhone blends, white wines from northeast Italy and the Loire Valley, and Spanish reds. But, she admits, “There’s a good chance my favorite will change next week.”

Lindsay Slone’s Favorite Things

1. Black Market: “The entire menu is an awesome mix of comfortable boundary-pushing. And their annual holiday beer brunch is one of my favorite events.”

2. Dig IN: “The best showcase of what we have to offer from the food-and-beverage industry in Indiana.”

3. City Market: “Especially on Wednesdays during the summer.”

4. Long Thanh Vietnamese restaurant: “I am slowly but surely eating my way through the menu, yet I still like to get the shrimp-and-pork pancake and rare-beef pho every time I visit.”

This article appeared in the September 2015 issue.