Much has been made of chef Matthew Lightner’s Okta—see our food critic's review here—where you can enjoy gleefully risqué dishes inflected with fermentation and funk (think cherry belle radishes over sea bream, or desiccated rhubarb, or parsnip custard). But there is another star in this story: Ron Acierto, the beverage director at Okta, who successfully answers daily questions like, What wine pairs best with black truffle tarts and bloomy cheese?

As he replies, a sly, knowing smile emerges. On a given night he might be faced with, say, madai with a purée of wild watercress and pickled shiitakes, or black cod marinated in the sweetly fermented Japanese rice drink amazake, with carrot. Over the course of a dinner at Okta, eight to 10 wines will be served by the glass. 

Pairing with cuisine in this style is no easy thing. The dishes are all reliant on the microseasonal output from Okta’s own farm. Unfamiliar ingredients abound. “It’s a challenge, and it’s fun,” Acierto says. “It means I have to dig deep.”

Acierto, 50, did not grow up dreaming of Oregon sommeliering. He arrived in America from a village in the northern Philippines at age 15. “In my culture, there’s no wine,” he says. “There are spirits in the Philippines—mostly gin and rum—as well as beer, but wine was unknown to me until I came to the United States.” He first worked at a series of fast-food joints, restaurants and golf clubs while living with an aunt and uncle in Fort Wayne, Indiana. A chance encounter with a bottle of Opus One, one of the cult-favorite, $300-and-up Napa cabernets, piqued Acierto’s interest in West Coast wines. He moved to Oregon in 2005 to manage hospitality and sales at Cherry Hill Winery in the Eola-Amity Hills, and from there his résumé reads like a ledger of modern Portland cuisine, including stints running the beverage programs at Bluehour, Lucier, Departure, and the Jory at Newberg’s Allison Inn, as well as owning Muselet. 

Acierto earned a name for himself as a walking wine encyclopedia and preternaturally gifted sommelier with a bedrock of knowledge of Old and New World wines, particularly in Oregon. When Lightner—known for his two-Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant, Atera—teamed with Katie Jackson and Shaun Kajiwara  of Jackson Family Wines to open Okta at the new Tributary Hotel in McMinnville, Acierto was tapped to serve as beverage director for the entire project.

At its highest levels, the work of restaurant wine service—building bottles lists and by-the-glass pairings—becomes a kind of canvas for individuals to tell the world who they are. “There is never a perfect pairing. Wine is subjective, food is subjective, everyone has a different palate,” Acierto says. “You have to be playful.”

His approach to wine at Okta is rooted in classicism, counterbalanced with riskier and peculiar choices, hopping from hallowed vineyards in Burgundy and Champagne to the oddest grapes from the tiniest producers and importers in the state, like an Oregon Mencía from Limited Addition or Slovenian Malvasia from importer Lone Wolf Wines. It helps that Acierto tends to know about
every last undersung row of rare Auxerrois or cluster of Huxelrebe in the state, via a robust schedule of tastings, winemaker visits, and never-ending research.

His north star is balance. Sometimes that means pairing a truly weird dish, like Lightner’s Braeburn sherbet topped with yuzu ice and a Japanese-whiskey pastry cream, with a comparatively classic Sauternes dessert wine; other times it means leaning into the weirdness, like pouring a tremendously rare and fresh Oregon Grüner Veltliner alongside sea bream and seaweed. There’s a push-pull thing happening throughout, a series of double-dares and compounding risks, weaving in and out of each other across the courses.

And then there is the bottle list, which has ballooned to some 2,000 bottles from over 300 producers comprising a world geography of wine with endless rabbit holes down which to wander. There are classics (Grand Cru Champagne) and deeply weird bottles like the Vinarija Škegro Krš Orange Žilavka in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and offerings from Cameron Winery, one of the few Oregon winemakers experimenting with nebbiolo grapes. 

Some of the most unusual flavors on the list are vintage Oregon wines. The ageability of Oregon bottlings is something Acierto is passionate about, and here you can drink wines of yesteryear, some stretching all the way back into the late 20th century. Yes, these are often made from pinot noir and chardonnay—the grapes your parents probably like. But when made well and allowed to age across the decades, these wines warp and wend upon themselves in profound and unexpected ways. “We’re very humbled and honored by the opportunity to serve these wines,” he says.

The sweet spot in Acierto’s approach melds his wine alongside Lightner’s food, so that the wine and the food are able to be at once both pointedly sophisticated and gleefully, uninhibitedly weird on the very same palate.

On a recent visit, Acierto poured me one of the most unusual sparkling wines I’ve ever tasted, a Champagne Henri Giraud Dame Jane Rosé, from a winery that has been owned by the same family since 1625. It was vinified in a traditional terra-cotta vessel known as an amphora, one of the very oldest ways of winemaking, dating back across Mesopotamia, and allowing chardonnay and pinot noir to age together for three long years. The resulting wine has fruit and weight and crystalline clarity, like a slice of cherry cream pie cut by a diamond laser. Acierto served this to me just before the duck egg custard with summer corn and edible succulents and the truffle cream two-bite tarts, which arrive like God’s own Oreo cookies.

The overall effect was decadent, sure, but also, yes, strange in the best of ways—and all the better for it, a high-wire balancing act in which wine is elevated, and risks are taken, and everything is just so in Ron Acierto’s world.