Most chefs who contribute their time and efforts to the Hope School’s annual Celebrity Chef Dinner prepare wonderful feasts, have a great time interacting with their hospitable hosts and appreciative diners, and leave Springfield feeling good about helping a worthy institution. But when Springfield native and Chicago restaurateur Kevin Boehm brought his acclaimed chef, Guiseppe Tentori, to Springfield for last year’s benefit (see the IT 9/4/08 issue about Boehm and Tentori at www.illinoistimes.com), he went much further; he joined Hope School’s board.

One of Boehm’s jobs was to help find the culinary talent for this year’s benefit, a task at which he was as successful as his three Chicago restaurants: he recruited not one, but two stars of Chicago’s culinary firmament.

Brian Duncan is a leading wine expert, not just in Chicago, but also nationally. He’s a regular at the Food and Wine’s Aspen Classic each summer. He’s been chosen as wine director of the year by Gourmet magazine and is a threetime nominee for the James Beard nomination for Outstanding Wine Service, among many other honors and awards. In 2006, Wine & Spirits magazine chose Bin 36, flagship of the three Chicago restaurants in which he’s partner, as having the “Best Wine-Pairing System” in America, citing Duncan as the creator of its “smart, friendly approach.”

Pretty heady stuff for anyone, let alone a guy from Chicago’s South Side who spent his adolescent years in central Illinois after his father was transferred to Springfield for his state job. Duncan graduated from Pleasant Plains High School. Proving that it really is a small world, he even worked at Hope School during summer breaks from ISU on what he calls “the graveyard [late-night] shift.”

Regardless his honors, Duncan remains true to his mission to “share his love of wine by making it accessible to everyone.” One of his innovations was to serve a wide variety of wines by the glass and offer wine flights — a serving of a series of small pours of a single variety or style. It’s one of the best ways to learn about wine, but “When we opened in 1999, no one thought wine by the glass was sexy,” Duncan says. “We were taking a risk basing our foundation on wine by the glass and in flights of wine.” Today both practices are commonplace.

Duncan is passionate about wine and wants to share that passion with his customers; more, he wants to make drinking wine fun — something that’s too often lost in snobbery and seriousness.

He refuses to call himself a sommelier, preferring the term wine director, and feels that pompous wine aficionados keep wine’s popularity “creeping along” when it should be exploding. Duncan doesn’t think someone has to have a wide knowledge of wine in order to appreciate it. “I have a problem when people talk over people’s heads,” he says. “I always say, ‘I don’t need to be a tailor to get my suits made…. The best way to learn about wine is to drink it. Throw away the vintage chart and invest in a corkscrew.”

Duncan believes that good wine isn’t neces