Ivan Ruiz loves wine, and he wants you to love it too.
The owner and wine director of The Wine List of Summit, he is a bundle of energy and enthusiasm as he tours his 5,000-squre-foot store. With good reason. It is a beautiful boutique, with a café, take out food business, and racks upon racks of wine.
“Anyone can sell you a bottle of wine, but we search around the globe for the very finest, then introduce our customers to unusual sections and sophisticated subtleties,” he says.
Downstairs is the classroom where he teaches “The A B Cs of Wine” to 1,000 people a year. It is also home to the wine locker room. Customers can rent a locker and keep their wine where it is always 55 degrees with 70 percent humidity.
Mr. Ruiz is a wine expert, but no wine snob: some of his bottles go for as little as $6, but there is also one, a 1961 Cheteau Haut-Brion, that costs $3500. He developed a wine app and he spent two months working at a winery in the Champagne region of France.
“I love everything about wine,” he says. “How it’s made, how it’s bottled, how it tastes. It is fascinating.” But it is not just a love of wine that keeps him innovating; it is also good business.
“We try to come out with new ideas to survive in a competitive marketplace,” he said. He also builds wine cellars and is working on a TV show.
It is that mixing of business with the love of the product that led to the creation of the Summit Wine Festival held each fall.
“In 2008 the economy crashed,” he recalled. “Summit is 60 to 70 percent Wall Street driven. I toured the town with the mayor and some of the councilmembers and we counted 23 empty stores. We said, ‘What can we do to attract businesses?’ I thought a wine and food festival would help revitalize the climate. I spent 20 years in the restaurant business and I knew all the top chefs so I got them and the sommeliers together. Our first festival was in 2009. We had 1700 people and 40 chefs come to that one.”
It includes a gala dinner, cooking demonstrations, wine tastings, book signings, and more. It is a food and wine lovers dream. The Summit Wine Festival now attracts over 2,000 people, along with top chefs, writers, TV personalities and wine sommeliers. The proceeds go to the Community FoodBank of New Jersey.
This is all part of his desire to educate people about fine food and drink.
“People know how to eat,” he says. “But they don’t know how to dine.”
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Mr. Ruiz came to the United States from Colombia when he was 17. He worked at fast-food restaurants while at Elizabeth High School, graduated in 1985 and started as a busboy at the Grand Summit Hotel.
“I really liked it there,” he said. “It felt like home.”
He realized that he needed a diploma to be successful, so he came to MCC part time. He was 15 credits shy of a degree when he was hired as manager at the famed Ryland Inn. Turning that into New Jersey’s first four-star restaurant was more than a full-time job, so Mr. Ruiz left school. Five years later he was back, earning his degree in 1995.
“The foundation I got at Middlesex was amazing,” he said. “The professors were knowledgeable and they taught professionalism and follow-through. If it wasn’t for the foundation I got at Middlesex, I wouldn’t be here today.”
