Meet Manoel Beato, a sommelier who has been bringing together wines and literature for 30 years at Fasano

Grandma Laura’s house was airy, framed by a neat garden, the kind that formed a natural fence around the corner, right in the heart of Vera Cruz (SP). It was there that her family gathered to celebrate Jesus’ birthday, only Manoel was the one who guaranteed the Christmas party — here, the uncle of Fasano’s sommelier.

An engineer who worked at Transamazônica, he had easy access to the Manaus Free Trade Zone. From there, he would bring electronic toys for children and imported wines for adults, rare examples in the late 1970s.

At the age of 13, Manoel Beato, the nephew who would become a respected sommelier, would taste his first glass of wine. Lightly, dizzily, he saw the world go round, but his excitement over the remote-controlled cart, which he had received as a gift from his uncle, soon brought him back on track.

It seemed an omen of a wine-filled life. Good wines? Not always. A year later, at a blockbuster wedding in the same city in the interior of São Paulo, he found himself confident enough to face a few bottles of Chilean red, others of Portuguese whites and who knows what else.

Overdose, he thought, as he put his mouths out, right there, behind the parish church of Vera Cruz. In the midst of his hangover, the regretful drunkenness made him swear that drink like that would never be in his mouth again.

Throughout his life, Beato gained, as wine connoisseurs say, literage. Since drinking in his homeland, he’s tasted some 400,000 wine labels produced by wineries around the world — that doesn’t mean he’s had all those bottles.

This March, Manoel Beato, now 58 years old, turns almost half of them, 30, at the helm of the most famous Italian restaurant in Brazil. “From the beginning, I had carte blanche at Fasano. My story is mixed with that of the restaurant”, says Beato.

For Gero Fasano, 60, Grupo Fasano’s restaurateur, “sometimes Manoel works for Fasano, sometimes Fasano works for Manoel”. Considered the greatest sommelier in the country, Beato is a serene, soft-spoken figure, walking around the 20 tables in the restaurant and another three in the bar, in an area of ​​850 m² — not to mention the private space, which can host up to 30 guests.

When showing the label to diners, he explains the origin of the drink, the year of the harvest, what harmonizes with what. To the regulars, he usually suggests literary works filled with references to the universe of Bacchus.

Works with at least 400 labels a night. With delicacy in his gestures, he is the type that passes away from arrogance. In his words, modernity has to do with naturalness. “To be chic is to be natural.”

Before Fasano, he was a waiter in his spare time during the letters course at Unesp, in Assis (SP). Moving to the largest city in the country, in the mid-1980s, he also started running around here with the tray.

In a burst of saturation in the great center, he wanted to study more, read more, travel even more and left for Europe. First, Portugal, where he continued to work as a waiter. He then harvested grapes from Jayer-Gilles, a renowned producer in France’s Burgundy wine region, for about a year, while serving as a waiter at a restaurant in Grenoble.

The city was not a choice in vain. Henri-Marie Beyle was born there, known by the pseudonym Stendhal, writer of “The Red and the Black”, a classic that Beato admires so much. “Literature has helped me improve my relationship with people,” he explains. “It is necessary to make our speeches a little lighter.”

Back in São Paulo, he stopped by the Maksoud Plaza restaurant, a hotel that closed its doors. Soon, she migrated to Saint Germain, in Jardins, which also no longer exists. She tended the cellar with labels from Romanée-Conti, one of the most celebrated in the world.

He passed by the extinct Le Bistingo, a space considered daring at the time, both in terms of gastronomy and in the variety of wines. It was there that Beato deepened his studies of perfumes and aromas of the drink.

During an internship in France, he innovated once again, taking to Lille the habit of tasting wine in front of the customer.

In the early 1990s, Ciro Lilla, owner of Mistral, one of the largest wine importers in Brazil, at the time president of ABS-SP (Brazilian Association of Sommeliers), received a call from Rogério Fasano, asking for a good sommelier .

“That night, I had a visit from Beato, who came to ask me to recommend a restaurant that was looking for a sommelier. I told him: ‘Turn around and run over to Fasano,'” recalls Lilla, 73.

Beato ran. And he keeps running. Now the sommelier is in New York, where the Fasano branch opens in the city.