Orange Wine Is Not a Fad: Digging Up Ancient Flavors in Modern Bottles; Meet Stetson Robbins.

1
00:00:00,192 --> 00:00:03,915
The big element for me that we leave out of when we talk about

2
00:00:04,027 --> 00:00:06,932
terroir is culture. And I think that the

3
00:00:06,996 --> 00:00:10,767
perspective on taste that the, that the people who are making the

4
00:00:10,783 --> 00:00:14,555
wine has, what they eat, what

5
00:00:14,555 --> 00:00:18,374
they like, that coupled with the resources that

6
00:00:18,390 --> 00:00:22,017
they have access to is, you know, that is also

7
00:00:22,017 --> 00:00:25,676
part of terroir. Sure it is. Yeah, that's a great thought. Sit back and

8
00:00:25,852 --> 00:00:29,270
grab a glass. It's Wine Talks with Paul

9
00:00:29,543 --> 00:00:29,800
Kaye.

10
00:00:37,094 --> 00:00:40,829
Your favorite hangout for podcasting. We have a late entry today. We actually very

11
00:00:40,829 --> 00:00:44,276
excited to have Stetson Robbins in, and that we were just laughing

12
00:00:44,372 --> 00:00:47,802
because of some previous history that I totally had blanked on. And so I'm glad

13
00:00:47,834 --> 00:00:51,105
to, to reconnect on this, and we're gonna have some fun. So

14
00:00:51,521 --> 00:00:54,487
welcome, Stetson. I appreciate coming in and having some time with us. Good to see

15
00:00:54,487 --> 00:00:57,645
you again. This is, uh, this is a no-holds-barred

16
00:00:57,917 --> 00:01:01,172
podcast. We're not gonna— we're peeling it all back, man. We're not gonna mess

17
00:01:01,204 --> 00:01:04,830
around. Yeah, that's right. Like an orange wine maybe,

18
00:01:04,830 --> 00:01:08,590
right? No, we're gonna talk about biodynamic wines, orange wines. We're gonna talk about his

19
00:01:08,590 --> 00:01:12,290
career and his new project, which is focused on orange wines.

20
00:01:12,290 --> 00:01:15,570
And everybody asks me, what's an orange wine? In fact, I asked my daughter this,

21
00:01:15,570 --> 00:01:19,130
and I'm glad you brought up your Brooklyn thing. She brought me my first orange

22
00:01:19,130 --> 00:01:22,410
wine from Brooklyn. So we'll talk about that. But tell me a little about what

23
00:01:22,410 --> 00:01:26,210
you're doing right now with the Black Lamb Project, and we'll

24
00:01:26,210 --> 00:01:29,730
go back in your history. So my wife and I

25
00:01:29,730 --> 00:01:32,270
started Black Lamb a little over a year ago.

26
00:01:34,404 --> 00:01:37,342
California-based wine importer that's focused on

27
00:01:38,440 --> 00:01:41,717
two regions: the Slovenian Italian largely,

28
00:01:42,298 --> 00:01:46,020
and a little bit of surrounding; the Slovenian Italian border,

29
00:01:47,447 --> 00:01:49,128
and the Republic of Georgia.

30
00:01:51,378 --> 00:01:53,501
Our the focus of our selection is

31
00:01:55,704 --> 00:01:58,727
very much focused on.

32
00:01:59,836 --> 00:02:03,587
what we could call— you mentioned ancient wine, like Amphitheater. It's like you're going

33
00:02:03,940 --> 00:02:07,210
back in time. Going back in time. And I think that this is, this is

34
00:02:07,210 --> 00:02:10,881
something that we hope to, you know, push even further and encourage.

35
00:02:11,297 --> 00:02:13,814
You know, we went to, uh, I went to New York for

36
00:02:15,225 --> 00:02:18,816
a misnomered wine tasting called the Best Wines of the World, or the Best Wines

37
00:02:18,816 --> 00:02:22,326
of the World. And there were, oddly, interestingly enough, it was 4

38
00:02:23,336 --> 00:02:27,119
vendors or suppliers that have not come to America before. I spent a

39
00:02:27,119 --> 00:02:30,325
lot of time at a Georgian table. I spent a lot of time at a

40
00:02:30,325 --> 00:02:33,750
Macedonian table, and Moldavian table and a Slovenian table

41
00:02:34,394 --> 00:02:38,195
and fascinating parts of the world for wine. But tell me

42
00:02:38,195 --> 00:02:41,824
how you got into this part of the business. So we go back, you had

43
00:02:41,824 --> 00:02:45,497
brought a gentleman to taste wines. We'll talk about that in a second. But prior

44
00:02:45,546 --> 00:02:49,187
to that, you were, what were you doing that got this bug, which we all

45
00:02:49,187 --> 00:02:52,295
have in, in wine? So in

46
00:02:52,570 --> 00:02:56,115
college I majored in theater and

47
00:02:56,616 --> 00:03:00,061
a large— Oh, so it's a whole act. This whole thing's an act. Totally.

48
00:03:00,778 --> 00:03:01,316
I mean, it's sales.

49
00:03:03,411 --> 00:03:07,056
That's right. I

50
00:03:07,136 --> 00:03:10,379
studied the Greek deity

51
00:03:10,475 --> 00:03:14,296
Dionysus. I had a teacher that taught a pagan culture class

52
00:03:14,424 --> 00:03:17,924
that was very focused on this specific Greek deity.

53
00:03:18,582 --> 00:03:21,857
And at the time, it struck me because

54
00:03:23,094 --> 00:03:25,742
I couldn't imagine what a culture was like that was so

55
00:03:25,758 --> 00:03:29,081
focused where wine is something

56
00:03:29,819 --> 00:03:33,667
of such significance. It represented

57
00:03:33,667 --> 00:03:37,083
almost like half of their civilization. You had

58
00:03:37,371 --> 00:03:41,172
the 2 primary deities, Apollo and Dionysus, and they were

59
00:03:41,236 --> 00:03:44,972
the duality that ruled the

60
00:03:46,111 --> 00:03:49,542
Greek gods. And so, in studying Greek

61
00:03:49,542 --> 00:03:53,343
theater, becoming interested in wine just

62
00:03:53,391 --> 00:03:56,937
philosophically, I found myself waiting tables in a

63
00:03:56,937 --> 00:04:00,759
restaurant that had an unusually developed wine

64
00:04:00,791 --> 00:04:03,970
program because the restaurant also owned a winery.

65
00:04:04,709 --> 00:04:07,760
Babcock is the— My good friend Brian Babcock. But wait, so

66
00:04:07,760 --> 00:04:10,956
you're Greek studies,

67
00:04:11,213 --> 00:04:14,681
acting, struggling actor working at a restaurant. Now that's a

68
00:04:15,002 --> 00:04:18,744
prophetic thing, right? But you added this wine component, this Greek deity thing.

69
00:04:19,081 --> 00:04:22,244
Yeah, because it was— that was part of what—

70
00:04:22,871 --> 00:04:26,609
when I started working at Walt's and If I

71
00:04:26,609 --> 00:04:29,961
wanted to wait tables, I had to learn something about wine.

72
00:04:31,670 --> 00:04:35,502
The— I was already kind of primed because, you know, I was curious to

73
00:04:35,550 --> 00:04:39,189
learn a little bit about wine, but also, you know, found it, it wasn't

74
00:04:39,205 --> 00:04:42,750
something that I had a lot of, you know, understanding or experience of. And it

75
00:04:42,750 --> 00:04:46,414
was quite complicated. And there were all these different varieties, all these different

76
00:04:46,446 --> 00:04:50,048
regions. Yeah. You have different glasses. And, and so I was— This is

77
00:04:50,082 --> 00:04:53,824
Walt's Warth in Seal Beach. Seal Beach. Still there. Still

78
00:04:53,824 --> 00:04:57,434
there. Still there. Yeah. Still a Babcock product. Yeah. You can go drink,

79
00:04:58,224 --> 00:05:01,480
you know, Babcock Chardonnay. You know, it's

80
00:05:01,480 --> 00:05:05,147
interesting you said that

81
00:05:05,597 --> 00:05:09,363
because, you know, we eat out quite a bit now. Kids

82
00:05:09,363 --> 00:05:12,618
aren't home, and it amazes me what

83
00:05:13,085 --> 00:05:16,630
waiters and waitresses don't know about wines and what they don't understand what

84
00:05:16,630 --> 00:05:20,434
they're purviewing, as well as the fact

85
00:05:20,434 --> 00:05:23,787
that when you have a really big list, it's even harder to understand.

86
00:05:24,124 --> 00:05:26,787
Yeah. So we went to New York and I, I forgot the name of the

87
00:05:26,787 --> 00:05:30,556
restaurant. You would know it. Fancy place. And I ordered an '86 Bordeaux

88
00:05:30,717 --> 00:05:32,610
because I had featured it in the club. I wanted to see how it was

89
00:05:32,706 --> 00:05:36,476
doing. And the somm that had never tasted it, so I invited her to sit

90
00:05:36,476 --> 00:05:39,347
with us and have a glass 'cause she needed to taste it, right? To understand

91
00:05:39,379 --> 00:05:43,229
it. Mm-hmm. So you just took it on your own to decide you should

92
00:05:43,229 --> 00:05:46,984
learn about this stuff. Well, they sort of— the restaurant

93
00:05:46,984 --> 00:05:50,242
was really— they were really focused on the wine

94
00:05:50,290 --> 00:05:53,965
program and the staff being well-educated early on. And

95
00:05:53,981 --> 00:05:57,817
so that they were— they, they— and I think they actually like, they paid for

96
00:05:57,817 --> 00:06:01,203
my first level. Oh, okay. For Quartermaster Sommelier.

97
00:06:01,781 --> 00:06:05,585
So they were, they were really supportive of— That's great. They wanted people on the

98
00:06:05,601 --> 00:06:09,404
floor that knew the wines and, and, and I was, you know, eager to

99
00:06:09,468 --> 00:06:12,149
learn. And it eventually turned into

100
00:06:14,507 --> 00:06:18,034
After Walt's, I wanted to continue with the Quartermaster Sommelier

101
00:06:18,034 --> 00:06:21,576
training. I worked at a restaurant in Disneyland called

102
00:06:21,576 --> 00:06:25,103
Napa Rose, which was one of the area— one of

103
00:06:25,103 --> 00:06:28,277
the Quartermaster Sommeliers were doing their testing

104
00:06:28,854 --> 00:06:32,157
at Disneyland. And so if you were part of the Napa Rose, you would just

105
00:06:32,157 --> 00:06:35,956
get to do the Quartermaster Sommelier stuff. You got kind of like wrapped up into

106
00:06:36,068 --> 00:06:39,515
it. So I just had, just not to interrupt you, but I just had Matt

107
00:06:39,515 --> 00:06:43,282
Ellingson, who runs Royal 21 at 21

108
00:06:43,282 --> 00:06:46,670
Royale, which is the level above Club 33. Mm-hmm. Right. So there's

109
00:06:46,670 --> 00:06:49,970
this floor now where they had these $15,000 a seating

110
00:06:49,970 --> 00:06:53,490
dinners. Oh, at Disneyland. Yeah. Can you imagine that? Yeah. It's considered the most

111
00:06:53,490 --> 00:06:57,210
expensive restaurant in, in the country. I didn't realize that. And I, we've been

112
00:06:57,210 --> 00:07:00,790
to 3-star Michelin restaurants in Monaco that didn't cost nearly as that

113
00:07:00,790 --> 00:07:04,510
much. Right. So he was telling me about the Napa Rose program,

114
00:07:04,510 --> 00:07:08,170
how important it is to most of cuisine in this Orange

115
00:07:08,170 --> 00:07:11,330
County. It's just a very famous place in regards to training,

116
00:07:11,870 --> 00:07:15,664
list quality, food quality. I mean, I, I think I, I

117
00:07:15,776 --> 00:07:18,887
think they're still doing the course. I haven't been. It was— this was 2000—

118
00:07:19,865 --> 00:07:22,863
uh, when was I there? Like

119
00:07:22,863 --> 00:07:26,679
2005. Oh, I see. Okay. I, I don't know

120
00:07:26,679 --> 00:07:30,191
if they're still doing as much of the training stuff there, but, um,

121
00:07:30,463 --> 00:07:33,269
but no, it was— it— for me, it was a really big opportunity because I

122
00:07:33,269 --> 00:07:36,909
wanted to pursue becoming a Master of Wine. Yes. And— or, uh,

123
00:07:37,181 --> 00:07:40,917
uh, Master Sommel. Uh, in

124
00:07:40,965 --> 00:07:44,413
doing it, I realized it wasn't what I wanted to do. Yeah, I I, uh,

125
00:07:45,200 --> 00:07:48,797
uh, I wasn't interested in table service so much as really

126
00:07:49,295 --> 00:07:52,844
getting as deep into wine as possible. After that, I ran a little

127
00:07:52,844 --> 00:07:56,537
shop after Napa Rose. Uh, I traveled in France a

128
00:07:56,553 --> 00:07:59,797
little bit with a, a friend that I had developed who was an

129
00:07:59,829 --> 00:08:03,635
importer working for Wine Warehouse, Peter Mann. Yeah, our

130
00:08:03,683 --> 00:08:07,136
old friend, man. Heritage of France. Heritage of France. Yeah, yeah.

131
00:08:07,521 --> 00:08:11,006
So he, he was really— he was one of the first people that really, um,

132
00:08:12,178 --> 00:08:14,956
He took me to Bordeaux and Burgundy in

133
00:08:15,325 --> 00:08:18,841
2006. So yeah, I was getting to barrel taste the 2005

134
00:08:18,841 --> 00:08:22,647
vintage, which was quite special in both of those places. And we got to,

135
00:08:23,193 --> 00:08:26,484
I wouldn't have had been able to have this experience without him. Well, how did

136
00:08:26,484 --> 00:08:29,744
you hook up with Peter Mann? I mean, he was the import specialist at Wine

137
00:08:29,776 --> 00:08:33,517
Warehouse, you know, and Cliff, his boss. So I was running, I was running

138
00:08:33,854 --> 00:08:36,696
a little wine, or I was working first. I worked at a wine shop.

139
00:08:37,631 --> 00:08:40,851
that was pretty focused on inexpensive French wines.

140
00:08:41,515 --> 00:08:44,994
It was called Vin de Paix Wines, and

141
00:08:44,994 --> 00:08:48,734
it's no longer there, but all of the wines were

142
00:08:48,798 --> 00:08:52,614
$15 or under. And almost everything

143
00:08:52,807 --> 00:08:55,996
that we, anything that Peter was bringing in that could work

144
00:08:56,125 --> 00:08:59,733
price-wise. Well, he had value-oriented wines generally, right? Yeah. Yeah.

145
00:08:59,990 --> 00:09:03,389
But also some really nice, you know, some things that were, that were not so

146
00:09:03,389 --> 00:09:07,134
value-oriented. Yeah. But a lovely guy, and I learned a lot

147
00:09:07,134 --> 00:09:10,090
from him. And after retail,

148
00:09:12,490 --> 00:09:16,266
I didn't plan to try each area of the

149
00:09:16,298 --> 00:09:19,622
wine business, but after restaurants and retail,

150
00:09:20,316 --> 00:09:23,868
I ended up curious to see what the wholesale side of things

151
00:09:23,966 --> 00:09:27,761
was. And so, to— And many would say, what are you,

152
00:09:27,810 --> 00:09:31,486
crazy? Yeah, the dark side. Yeah, that's the dark side.

153
00:09:31,567 --> 00:09:35,245
Exactly. But the, the, the

154
00:09:35,245 --> 00:09:38,932
experience in France, I, I, I, I, what I figured out is that

155
00:09:39,547 --> 00:09:42,539
what I wanted to work, who the, the people that I wanted to work most

156
00:09:42,539 --> 00:09:46,107
closely with are the winemakers and the people who got to work most

157
00:09:46,107 --> 00:09:49,676
closely with the winemakers are the importers. And so

158
00:09:51,849 --> 00:09:55,433
Peter, you know, I was, I, I, I, I hadn't really thought about it

159
00:09:55,433 --> 00:09:58,261
until now, but I think I kind of, I kind of wanted to be able

160
00:09:58,277 --> 00:10:01,530
to do what Peter was doing. Yeah. Which would be a great job. Yeah. And,

161
00:10:01,595 --> 00:10:03,316
and I, and at one point I was actually considering to work at Wine Warehouse.

162
00:10:06,665 --> 00:10:10,307
Instead, a buddy of mine, Kevin Stewart, convinced me

163
00:10:10,917 --> 00:10:14,334
to help him sell some Australian wines that he was working with.

164
00:10:15,393 --> 00:10:18,923
And then I picked up this book of strange

165
00:10:19,019 --> 00:10:22,838
Eastern European wines that was a company called Blue Danube Wine.

166
00:10:23,432 --> 00:10:26,962
And so I had really good New World wines from Australia,

167
00:10:27,363 --> 00:10:31,197
and then I had really exotic European wines, and I felt

168
00:10:31,197 --> 00:10:34,954
like that would be a good combination to, you know, So that's an

169
00:10:35,067 --> 00:10:38,188
interesting concept for that, because I went through the same kind of decision once where

170
00:10:38,188 --> 00:10:41,052
I decided to get out of corporate America and go do something on my own.

171
00:10:41,990 --> 00:10:45,702
So, but here you are thinking of maybe Wine Warehouse, which would be corporate America

172
00:10:45,702 --> 00:10:49,523
in the world of wine. It's very structured, you know, family-owned,

173
00:10:49,572 --> 00:10:53,206
but very structured. And Wine Warehouse, just for the listeners, is one of the great

174
00:10:53,771 --> 00:10:57,294
wholesale houses in Southern California specializing in wine,

175
00:10:57,326 --> 00:11:01,130
particularly, obviously, and didn't Didn't the Meyerson brothers

176
00:11:01,130 --> 00:11:04,470
own the Sunkist jelly candy too or something like that, right? Yeah, that was, I

177
00:11:04,470 --> 00:11:06,470
think, the start. I think the candy was first. They probably made more money doing

178
00:11:06,470 --> 00:11:10,250
that, right? But you decided to go on your own basically. I mean, selling

179
00:11:10,250 --> 00:11:13,830
for Kevin, who would want to do that? Sorry,

180
00:11:13,830 --> 00:11:17,670
Kevin. And then picking up your own

181
00:11:17,670 --> 00:11:21,030
book, which were these Eastern European

182
00:11:21,030 --> 00:11:24,540
wines. Yeah. I mean, when I went into the wholesale side of things,

183
00:11:26,616 --> 00:11:30,225
I don't think I had necessarily the ambition to have my own

184
00:11:30,419 --> 00:11:33,105
import company at that time. I was just trying to

185
00:11:34,384 --> 00:11:38,106
explore another area of the industry. And it was

186
00:11:38,187 --> 00:11:41,613
fun to drag a bag of wine around. And, you know, this was—

187
00:11:42,386 --> 00:11:45,873
so with the Eastern European wines,

188
00:11:48,252 --> 00:11:52,019
some of the best restaurants and shops in Los Angeles

189
00:11:52,019 --> 00:11:55,750
were interested in these things. Mm-hmm. Because they were so, you know, the

190
00:11:58,217 --> 00:12:01,744
Basically, when Yugoslavian communism

191
00:12:02,178 --> 00:12:04,997
ended and, you know, when the socialist systems of Hungary

192
00:12:05,464 --> 00:12:09,192
and Yugoslavia broke apart in the late

193
00:12:09,419 --> 00:12:13,269
'80s, early '90s, you know, fast forward 20 years later,

194
00:12:13,787 --> 00:12:16,846
they've reprivatized the wine industry and you start to see some real,

195
00:12:17,285 --> 00:12:20,937
like, you start to see indications of the potential. Mm-hmm. And they were

196
00:12:20,937 --> 00:12:24,638
positive. And a lot of the producers were smart

197
00:12:25,495 --> 00:12:29,124
not to rip out their vineyards and plant international

198
00:12:29,124 --> 00:12:32,802
varieties, but instead to make their focus their local

199
00:12:33,141 --> 00:12:36,742
indigenous grapes. And so

200
00:12:36,742 --> 00:12:40,098
sort of is the, over the last 10

201
00:12:40,228 --> 00:12:43,633
years, I think what we've seen is a sort of a

202
00:12:43,633 --> 00:12:47,403
diversification of what

203
00:12:47,435 --> 00:12:51,082
we see on the shelves and on wine lists, both in terms

204
00:12:51,131 --> 00:12:53,939
of regions, styles, grape varieties.

205
00:12:55,237 --> 00:12:58,586
And that's just such, I can't think of a more exciting—

206
00:12:58,955 --> 00:13:02,145
It's an interesting thing 'cause I'm Armenian and we've, I've been to Armenia in

207
00:13:02,145 --> 00:13:05,815
2006, tasted their wines. They were horrible. But I think the

208
00:13:05,815 --> 00:13:09,581
Soviet, in the Soviet bloc, you know, the Georgians were the

209
00:13:09,581 --> 00:13:13,332
wine manufacturing group and the Armenians were the brandy group. And that's basically the way

210
00:13:13,348 --> 00:13:15,447
it was set up. This is what you're gonna do, this is what you're gonna

211
00:13:15,447 --> 00:13:19,022
do. And then when it broke down, Armenia now has

212
00:13:19,518 --> 00:13:22,355
technologies in making wines, but you brought,

213
00:13:23,590 --> 00:13:26,170
The slow, I mean, it's so funny. I mean, you cracked me up when you,

214
00:13:26,170 --> 00:13:29,190
when you reminded me that you brought the, the head— this is the very first

215
00:13:29,190 --> 00:13:32,590
podcast, not podcast, the first video I ever did. And I don't, I don't know

216
00:13:32,590 --> 00:13:36,390
what I'm doing. I still don't really. I've got a camera, I've got this cheap

217
00:13:36,390 --> 00:13:39,590
bar, and I decided to do this thing. And you brought

218
00:13:39,590 --> 00:13:43,010
in Miha and— Ivan and Miha Batic.

219
00:13:43,010 --> 00:13:46,710
Ivan Batic. And we, and, and I remember the

220
00:13:46,710 --> 00:13:50,230
wines because they're Bordeaux-based. I thought that was fascinating. Mm-hmm. Bordeaux

221
00:13:50,230 --> 00:13:53,590
varietals. And they were very good. Mm-hmm. I remember that. And we did this segment

222
00:13:53,590 --> 00:13:57,100
and that lighting was bad. And then who knows what the sound was like.

223
00:13:57,410 --> 00:14:00,590
But then I got an email from, from Mija, the young man who was probably,

224
00:14:00,590 --> 00:14:04,150
what, in his 20s then? Probably something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. He, he emailed

225
00:14:04,150 --> 00:14:07,970
me, he says, please take down the video because I don't like my

226
00:14:07,970 --> 00:14:11,709
English. And I'm like, you're kidding. I'm like, I'm like, no,

227
00:14:11,709 --> 00:14:14,490
I'm not taking it down because this is the first thing I've ever done on

228
00:14:14,490 --> 00:14:17,450
a media thing. I'm keeping it up there. He emailed you? Yeah, he emailed me.

229
00:14:17,450 --> 00:14:19,490
Isn't that funny though? You have, who knows, was it, when do you think that

230
00:14:19,490 --> 00:14:23,250
was? I mean, I think it would've had to have been like 10

231
00:14:23,250 --> 00:14:25,570
years ago, 15 years ago, more, maybe more. Well, 10, a little over 10 years

232
00:14:25,570 --> 00:14:29,377
ago. Yeah. So was that with Blue Danube? I

233
00:14:29,409 --> 00:14:33,192
was with Blue Danube. Yeah. So Blue Danube was bringing in these Eastern

234
00:14:33,192 --> 00:14:36,606
Bloc wines. Yeah. They, they, Blue Danube was

235
00:14:37,118 --> 00:14:40,532
founded by a husband and wife. He is

236
00:14:40,629 --> 00:14:44,267
German, she Hungarian. They came from the tech

237
00:14:44,267 --> 00:14:48,017
industry and they lived in Vienna

238
00:14:48,242 --> 00:14:51,832
and Budapest doing like selling computer systems.

239
00:14:52,409 --> 00:14:56,160
And eventually they came back to the United States. They were both

240
00:14:56,416 --> 00:15:00,165
like expatriates originally. And when they came back to the United

241
00:15:00,181 --> 00:15:04,027
States, the Austrian and Hungarian wines that they were, uh, that

242
00:15:04,027 --> 00:15:07,552
they fell in love with while they were out there were not available in the

243
00:15:07,552 --> 00:15:11,366
United States. So, um, they, without having

244
00:15:11,414 --> 00:15:14,026
any customers, they organized a container full of wine.

245
00:15:15,500 --> 00:15:18,497
They bought most, I think it was all Austrian wine. And that would be death

246
00:15:18,625 --> 00:15:22,038
to most, to most companies. That would be, yeah, absolutely.

247
00:15:22,535 --> 00:15:26,146
Um, Not only did they, they, they bought a container full of

248
00:15:26,708 --> 00:15:30,449
Austrian wine, they bought one pallet

249
00:15:30,802 --> 00:15:34,206
of ice wine, which took 10 years. A pallet? A pallet of ice wine.

250
00:15:34,495 --> 00:15:38,252
Took 10 years to sell that. Uh, no Grüner Veltliner, uh, a

251
00:15:38,268 --> 00:15:41,945
lot of Chardonnay. Well, so it was—

252
00:15:42,202 --> 00:15:45,879
that container, if anybody knows, is, uh, what, 1,200 to 1,500

253
00:15:45,911 --> 00:15:49,748
cases depending on how you stack them? Yeah. And, uh, you know, in

254
00:15:49,764 --> 00:15:53,294
the world of wine, that's a monumentous task. And I think we've

255
00:15:53,695 --> 00:15:57,462
had a podcast with Alex Garracci from Chile who did the

256
00:15:57,462 --> 00:16:00,989
same thing. He didn't know anything. He came here to play soccer and he brings

257
00:16:00,989 --> 00:16:03,986
in a container of Chilean wines into San Francisco, no less, like the worst market

258
00:16:03,986 --> 00:16:07,321
to try and sell it. And he goes, oh no, what did I do? So

259
00:16:07,321 --> 00:16:10,318
what happened to this container? Well, so they

260
00:16:10,751 --> 00:16:14,502
actually did bring in

261
00:16:14,550 --> 00:16:17,612
some wines that started getting attention with some of the

262
00:16:18,944 --> 00:16:22,696
better pro— like wine programs there in San Francisco

263
00:16:22,809 --> 00:16:26,626
as well. And so I was running

264
00:16:26,674 --> 00:16:30,267
a small shop and looking for, you know, wines

265
00:16:30,960 --> 00:16:34,715
to diversify the weekly tastings that we were organizing. And

266
00:16:34,731 --> 00:16:37,052
I became interested in Eastern Europe

267
00:16:39,327 --> 00:16:42,908
by virtue of latitude. If you look at the 45th parallel

268
00:16:43,343 --> 00:16:46,891
and you follow it east through Europe, there's a lot of territory that we don't

269
00:16:46,891 --> 00:16:50,699
talk about. And this is understood as is kind of

270
00:16:50,747 --> 00:16:54,534
that ideal position for grape cultivation. And, uh,

271
00:16:55,015 --> 00:16:58,657
and lo and behold, all of these places have really long histories. Yeah,

272
00:16:58,866 --> 00:17:02,187
their own grapes and their own cultures of productions, their own, uh,

273
00:17:02,476 --> 00:17:05,845
methods of like styles of production. Um, and so

274
00:17:06,648 --> 00:17:10,466
Frank was coming down to LA to sell wine, um,

275
00:17:10,643 --> 00:17:14,381
and he was doing this, you know, that's no— what, you can't sell wine in

276
00:17:14,429 --> 00:17:17,767
LA driving from San Francisco? No, it's hard to do. Yeah, though it was done

277
00:17:17,799 --> 00:17:21,119
for a long time. Yeah. And, and technically that's what I'm doing here right now

278
00:17:21,167 --> 00:17:25,000
with that. But when he came

279
00:17:25,016 --> 00:17:28,769
down, I was so taken with the wines and how different they were that I

280
00:17:28,785 --> 00:17:32,041
asked him if I could, like, can I be the guy who sells these down

281
00:17:32,137 --> 00:17:35,505
here? Yeah. And so that was, that's how it

282
00:17:35,505 --> 00:17:39,210
started. But you're still at retail then? I was at retail. Yeah.

283
00:17:39,450 --> 00:17:42,578
Getting ready to jump to wholesale. Did you bring those wines into the retail

284
00:17:42,578 --> 00:17:45,978
shop or? Yeah. Or had already done that? Yeah. And so how was the reception

285
00:17:46,026 --> 00:17:49,523
in California? You know, Anything in

286
00:17:49,539 --> 00:17:52,701
California that's imported is a little more difficult because we have our own trade.

287
00:17:53,327 --> 00:17:57,018
But now you're looking at Eastern Bloc wines, places that people probably

288
00:17:57,018 --> 00:18:00,533
didn't realize even grew grapes for wine. Was it, was it well

289
00:18:00,533 --> 00:18:04,177
received before the Silver Lakes of the world? Yeah, we had— well,

290
00:18:04,193 --> 00:18:07,322
Silver Lake was one of the first supporters. Yeah, yeah, that's— they were one of

291
00:18:07,322 --> 00:18:10,308
the first ones that were buying. Um, they,

292
00:18:11,303 --> 00:18:13,759
uh, our customers, we, we had— it was like a pretty

293
00:18:14,910 --> 00:18:17,126
community-oriented shop. So a lot of the people,

294
00:18:18,858 --> 00:18:22,118
we would see them on a weekly basis. And so they

295
00:18:22,812 --> 00:18:26,217
were coming and it didn't really matter what we, you know, they were open to

296
00:18:26,217 --> 00:18:29,823
learning. They were there to be exposed to, you know, these,

297
00:18:30,082 --> 00:18:31,848
you know, different wines. Yeah. And so

298
00:18:33,969 --> 00:18:37,578
always eager to, you know, they were always like open what

299
00:18:37,885 --> 00:18:41,489
sold, you know, what would sell well, you know, what did people actually like?

300
00:18:41,813 --> 00:18:43,898
You know, then that becomes, you know, which of the wines from those areas

301
00:18:43,914 --> 00:18:47,386
then became things that

302
00:18:47,921 --> 00:18:51,466
people would buy is, you know, sort of another question. That's a whole different

303
00:18:51,466 --> 00:18:55,286
question. So I just bought some wine from a defunct club, uh, and I

304
00:18:55,286 --> 00:18:58,910
haven't tasted too much Slovak— Slovenian or Slovakian wine lately.

305
00:18:59,414 --> 00:19:02,373
They don't seem as much, but, uh, it was—

306
00:19:04,088 --> 00:19:07,892
I got access to these great quantities of great wines. They've done a very good

307
00:19:07,909 --> 00:19:11,600
job. It was Slovenian. I can't remember the brand now, but, um, they had

308
00:19:12,102 --> 00:19:15,705
sourced some very nice wines and they had prepared the whole club Brought in the

309
00:19:15,705 --> 00:19:19,366
wines, they had pallets of it. They had done the newsletters, they researched it,

310
00:19:19,783 --> 00:19:23,252
and they had curated nice wines. And then the, the celebrity

311
00:19:23,252 --> 00:19:27,026
chef who this was patterned for was Todd English, the

312
00:19:27,026 --> 00:19:30,799
guy with, um, Olives and those restaurants. And then he got busted by the MeToo

313
00:19:30,799 --> 00:19:34,461
movement. And so the club never started. And they were looking, oh my God, they

314
00:19:34,461 --> 00:19:37,046
were looking for a place to move this stuff really quickly. Perfect. And that was

315
00:19:37,046 --> 00:19:40,756
the first time that I had tasted wine from that area again. Uh-huh. Until we

316
00:19:40,756 --> 00:19:43,807
went to Croatia like 2 years ago, a year and a half ago. And I

317
00:19:43,807 --> 00:19:47,476
was fascinated by the region and the variety of

318
00:19:47,508 --> 00:19:51,117
grapes, didn't recognize any of them, of course. And in fact, most of the

319
00:19:51,117 --> 00:19:54,537
restaurants, and you can probably bear this out, that we ate that were Czech

320
00:19:54,990 --> 00:19:58,698
Croatian restaurants did not have French or American wines on them. Is that normal?

321
00:20:00,240 --> 00:20:03,703
Yeah. You mean in Croatia? Yeah. I mean, when you're, when you're in those

322
00:20:03,799 --> 00:20:07,568
areas, you're, anything that you see that would be French or American would

323
00:20:07,923 --> 00:20:11,050
probably be pretty, you know, uninspired, something

324
00:20:11,246 --> 00:20:14,936
industrial and— Something for the tourists that Don't,

325
00:20:14,953 --> 00:20:18,086
yeah. But one of the big successes was

326
00:20:19,092 --> 00:20:22,806
Plavac Mali, and this is the red grape of Croatia,

327
00:20:23,308 --> 00:20:26,785
and it's the genetic offspring of

328
00:20:26,785 --> 00:20:29,567
Zinfandel. And so— Right, that's right. Yes.

329
00:20:30,586 --> 00:20:33,289
That's one of the stories that's, you know, there was

330
00:20:34,928 --> 00:20:38,672
when, what's her name, Carol Meredith,

331
00:20:39,813 --> 00:20:43,662
when like the grape geneticists, when they were just figuring out how

332
00:20:44,049 --> 00:20:47,676
like to, like,

333
00:20:47,837 --> 00:20:51,587
what is it, like write the genome or— Yeah, right.

334
00:20:51,635 --> 00:20:54,380
Yeah, sure. When they just figured out how to do the genetic, you know, to

335
00:20:54,380 --> 00:20:58,141
test grape varieties genetically, they were looking

336
00:20:58,174 --> 00:21:01,612
for something to pursue. And Mike Grgich

337
00:21:02,274 --> 00:21:05,696
was convinced that California Zinfandel was a

338
00:21:05,810 --> 00:21:09,589
Croatian variety. Really? And that's— I know Mike was Croatian, but I didn't know

339
00:21:09,589 --> 00:21:12,566
that was his— Yeah, that's, and so he, He,

340
00:21:13,359 --> 00:21:17,116
he, he convinced them, you know, he convinced Davis basically that this would

341
00:21:17,116 --> 00:21:20,774
be a good, you know, way for them to, you know, utilize these new,

342
00:21:21,530 --> 00:21:24,968
uh, uh, uh, this new ability to test grape varieties

343
00:21:24,984 --> 00:21:28,454
genetically to really understand what is it, where did it come from.

344
00:21:28,840 --> 00:21:32,637
And, um, he was wrong that, uh,

345
00:21:32,975 --> 00:21:36,613
Zinfandel was not identical. It wasn't, um,

346
00:21:36,807 --> 00:21:40,418
identical to Plavac Mali from Croatia, which is what he

347
00:21:40,535 --> 00:21:44,238
had, uh, which is what he had, uh, uh, contended. have

348
00:21:44,286 --> 00:21:47,913
guessed, but they

349
00:21:47,913 --> 00:21:51,171
found the identical genetic match

350
00:21:51,845 --> 00:21:55,376
growing wild on the side of a vineyard. And

351
00:21:55,376 --> 00:21:58,618
Plavac Mali, which is prolific across

352
00:21:58,747 --> 00:22:02,117
Dalmatia, Southern Croatia, is the

353
00:22:02,262 --> 00:22:06,017
offspring. It's like a few hundred-year-old offspring

354
00:22:06,113 --> 00:22:09,949
of Zinfandel. So, the Blue Danube was bringing in

355
00:22:10,382 --> 00:22:14,055
these things, you were repping them. Mm-hmm. And then you went to New

356
00:22:14,055 --> 00:22:17,807
York. Well, so my, when I started with Blue Daniel, I

357
00:22:17,807 --> 00:22:21,415
had no experience in wholesale. I'd never, I

358
00:22:21,527 --> 00:22:25,264
hadn't, I'd never worked for an importer. But, but

359
00:22:25,617 --> 00:22:28,792
Blue Daniel was also, you know, this was a second career for the owners

360
00:22:29,289 --> 00:22:32,929
and they didn't have a lot of, none of us had a lot of

361
00:22:32,929 --> 00:22:36,617
experience. And so we learned together.

362
00:22:36,986 --> 00:22:40,241
My role in the company grew. I was responsible

363
00:22:40,306 --> 00:22:43,899
for doing all sorts of label projects. Mija

364
00:22:43,915 --> 00:22:47,669
came to my wife and my wedding, you know. Really? Yeah. So we

365
00:22:47,669 --> 00:22:51,247
became, you know, this— This is great. This was over 10 years. I was,

366
00:22:51,824 --> 00:22:55,241
I was selling in Los Angeles for 5 years. And over that time

367
00:22:55,594 --> 00:22:59,172
I became, you know, I was responsible for,

368
00:22:59,557 --> 00:23:02,316
I don't know what percentage of the portfolio, but it would have been more than

369
00:23:02,413 --> 00:23:05,990
half of it. And so a lot of the

370
00:23:08,838 --> 00:23:10,753
We, so I was in Los Angeles.

371
00:23:12,587 --> 00:23:16,076
People started, you know, we were, we were selling some wine. It was working. We

372
00:23:16,076 --> 00:23:19,430
were bringing in more wine. The company was growing. Some more

373
00:23:19,478 --> 00:23:23,126
salespeople were kind of like, oh, like, what is this Blue Danube? Kind of taking

374
00:23:23,174 --> 00:23:26,902
interest. And then we, we kind of start to grow and then we start feeling

375
00:23:26,902 --> 00:23:30,187
confident. So we're like, oh, let's go sell wine in New York. That'll be easy.

376
00:23:30,770 --> 00:23:34,590
Yeah, no problem. Right. So we, there was, we hired a woman out

377
00:23:34,590 --> 00:23:36,807
there who did a really good job, or as good of a job as she

378
00:23:36,807 --> 00:23:40,627
could have considering what resources she had and

379
00:23:42,580 --> 00:23:46,311
that she wasn't supported. She was like a one-man band in New

380
00:23:46,375 --> 00:23:50,182
York City. And— Excuse me, the

381
00:23:50,182 --> 00:23:53,501
deliveries were coming into LA or on the East Coast and being driven here?

382
00:23:54,149 --> 00:23:57,773
The wines you were selling here, they're coming to LA port, right? Yeah.

383
00:23:58,257 --> 00:24:01,840
Oakland and Long Beach. Okay. So she's in New York and

384
00:24:01,840 --> 00:24:05,649
she's got access to, I guess, a few cases, but— You asked the right

385
00:24:05,698 --> 00:24:08,636
question because yeah, we were feeding New York with small cases just to kind of

386
00:24:08,636 --> 00:24:11,993
start start. Which is expensive. Which is

387
00:24:11,993 --> 00:24:15,835
expensive. But there were customers that were interested in the wines and they

388
00:24:15,867 --> 00:24:19,628
were, you know, committed to taking them. And so it was, you know, justified.

389
00:24:20,602 --> 00:24:24,426
And, uh, you know, this idea of growing into something national

390
00:24:24,555 --> 00:24:27,137
was, you know, pretty exciting for, you know,

391
00:24:28,735 --> 00:24:32,435
for us, even though we were completely naive. Right. And, uh, so you—

392
00:24:32,501 --> 00:24:36,032
but you asked the right question. Uh, when we shipped the full

393
00:24:36,032 --> 00:24:39,644
container, When we finally decided to ship a container to New York,

394
00:24:40,735 --> 00:24:44,504
uh, the person, the woman that was selling the wines decided that she wanted a

395
00:24:44,504 --> 00:24:48,272
raise. And it was like, no problem, just sell more wine. Yeah,

396
00:24:48,288 --> 00:24:52,073
because we got— it was coming in. And, and it— and she wasn't,

397
00:24:52,121 --> 00:24:55,842
you know, it wasn't— she wasn't able to make, uh, she ended up— it ended

398
00:24:55,842 --> 00:24:59,594
up not working out. But we had a container of wine in New York. So

399
00:24:59,659 --> 00:25:03,411
my wife and I reduced what we own To

400
00:25:03,443 --> 00:25:07,113
a pallet, to a single pallet. That's not

401
00:25:07,113 --> 00:25:10,351
easy. It wasn't. UPS'd it to

402
00:25:10,800 --> 00:25:14,310
Brooklyn and in 3 weeks moved from

403
00:25:14,503 --> 00:25:17,789
New York to Brooklyn. Wow. What a wonderful woman. To

404
00:25:17,789 --> 00:25:21,171
take— yeah, I

405
00:25:21,171 --> 00:25:24,441
don't know what I got her into. I moved 2 blocks and I got in

406
00:25:24,441 --> 00:25:28,271
trouble. No, she actually joined the company at that time when

407
00:25:28,368 --> 00:25:32,192
we moved to handle the admin side of it. That was what allowed

408
00:25:32,192 --> 00:25:36,018
us to make this move. And I thought that people were going to be really

409
00:25:36,034 --> 00:25:38,889
excited to buy wines from me when I moved to Brooklyn.

410
00:25:40,641 --> 00:25:44,449
They had seen everything. Yeah, because it's the East Coast. Yeah, they have way more

411
00:25:44,481 --> 00:25:47,727
than we do. Yeah, they were jaded. And so, what was supposed to be a

412
00:25:47,760 --> 00:25:51,422
6-month project turned into an 18-month project

413
00:25:51,422 --> 00:25:55,133
turned into 5 years. Oops. And we

414
00:25:55,133 --> 00:25:58,705
didn't want to stay there permanently. My wife got pregnant. We have family in Northern

415
00:25:58,705 --> 00:26:02,523
California where we wanted to ultimately settle down. And

416
00:26:02,635 --> 00:26:06,229
so we moved back to California and, and

417
00:26:06,309 --> 00:26:09,935
continued to work on— we were trying to build distribution for

418
00:26:09,999 --> 00:26:13,817
Blue Danube nationally, but the owners were getting to

419
00:26:13,849 --> 00:26:17,620
a point where they were trying to slow down. I was trying to speed

420
00:26:17,620 --> 00:26:21,101
up. And so we ended up separating.

421
00:26:21,213 --> 00:26:24,855
Mm-hmm. And And a

422
00:26:24,855 --> 00:26:27,663
couple of the producers that I had brought to the portfolio,

423
00:26:29,027 --> 00:26:32,606
they didn't want to continue working with Blue Danube if I was going to leave.

424
00:26:33,103 --> 00:26:36,810
And so they basically said, why don't

425
00:26:36,874 --> 00:26:40,003
you sell our wines by yourself? And it—

426
00:26:40,003 --> 00:26:43,822
That's a great story. It gave me an opening. And now

427
00:26:43,870 --> 00:26:47,336
we're organizing container 5 and

428
00:26:47,336 --> 00:26:51,075
6. Hey. Oh, so that's great. Congratulations. So this is what,

429
00:26:51,380 --> 00:26:55,060
what, a year, 2 years now? About a year and a half. Yeah.

430
00:26:55,060 --> 00:26:58,320
Okay. So yeah, 5, 6 containers. That's pretty quick. Yeah. Particularly

431
00:26:58,320 --> 00:27:01,660
in this marketplace where I suppose

432
00:27:01,660 --> 00:27:05,260
though, I mean, we've, we're, we're, we're, we're working

433
00:27:05,260 --> 00:27:09,020
on packing our 5th and 6th. Yeah. Okay. So we're, so we've, but we've sold

434
00:27:09,020 --> 00:27:12,240
about 4 containers. Yeah. I get it. But yeah, this is a, this is a

435
00:27:12,240 --> 00:27:15,600
tough business right now. I mean, there's a ton of different wines. I think you're

436
00:27:15,600 --> 00:27:19,230
doing the right thing because If you wanna jump in the

437
00:27:19,230 --> 00:27:22,670
fray with, you know, €1 per liter wines that are coming from Europe, you know,

438
00:27:22,670 --> 00:27:25,650
you're gonna lose this game. Yeah. Because I can't, I mean, I, I can't play

439
00:27:25,650 --> 00:27:29,430
in it. Yeah. The, the logistical side of the business, which is

440
00:27:29,430 --> 00:27:33,090
the, the consumer side that you get, you, you know, no one would say, hey,

441
00:27:33,090 --> 00:27:36,090
the, the wholesale side's great too, 'cause we know how hard it is. But the

442
00:27:36,090 --> 00:27:39,870
consumer side right now is extraordinarily congested. Mm-hmm. And it's full of

443
00:27:39,870 --> 00:27:43,610
crap. I mean, just basically €1 per liter junk they're bringing in.

444
00:27:43,610 --> 00:27:47,175
But the trek is, to New Jersey, up the coast to New

445
00:27:47,175 --> 00:27:50,700
York, gets bottled, sent out to wherever it's going, to all these different

446
00:27:50,700 --> 00:27:54,401
competitors of mine. So you have a very unique niche. And I think

447
00:27:54,466 --> 00:27:58,055
that the public is looking for something experiential about

448
00:27:59,032 --> 00:28:02,557
experimenting with wines, trying new things. And it's the marketplace that's gonna

449
00:28:02,557 --> 00:28:06,163
prevail in the sense of if you're gonna make money on the wholesale side, if

450
00:28:06,163 --> 00:28:09,191
your company wants to be successful, Mm-hmm. it has to be on that side. It

451
00:28:09,191 --> 00:28:13,037
has to be on the side where the consumer is learning something. You know,

452
00:28:13,118 --> 00:28:16,806
and maybe a tougher hand sell because they're from the

453
00:28:17,206 --> 00:28:20,574
Soviet bloc or from the— Unfamiliar. It's, it's right.

454
00:28:20,991 --> 00:28:24,727
Yeah, it does. The wines that we're working with, so with

455
00:28:24,759 --> 00:28:28,094
Black Lamb, uh, the company that my wife and I have founded,

456
00:28:28,591 --> 00:28:32,343
um, we, it gives us the opportunity to kind of

457
00:28:32,375 --> 00:28:35,614
go, uh, so I worked with Blue Danube, I covered a lot of

458
00:28:35,662 --> 00:28:39,478
geography, you know, if it, it a much larger geography than

459
00:28:39,510 --> 00:28:43,120
if you Combined France, Italy, and Spain in

460
00:28:43,136 --> 00:28:46,761
terms of just square miles. That's a lot. And no, I

461
00:28:46,761 --> 00:28:50,290
mean, East— You're talking about sourcing in Eastern Europe. Yeah. I

462
00:28:50,338 --> 00:28:54,108
mean, if you look at from Croatia to Georgia

463
00:28:54,413 --> 00:28:58,215
to Slovakia, this is a huge part. I mean, it's

464
00:28:58,440 --> 00:29:01,953
a lot of land.

465
00:29:02,193 --> 00:29:05,530
Georgia wouldn't be considered Europe proper, but

466
00:29:05,562 --> 00:29:09,404
Central Americans think of, when they think of Europe,

467
00:29:09,421 --> 00:29:13,193
what they're really thinking about is Western Europe. Yes, that's correct. And, and

468
00:29:13,404 --> 00:29:16,019
Central Europe is huge. And,

469
00:29:17,886 --> 00:29:20,929
you know, I was largely ignorant to it in both, both

470
00:29:21,187 --> 00:29:24,872
geographically, culturally, in terms of cuisine.

471
00:29:25,547 --> 00:29:29,291
I was just, you know, completely— my introduction to these cultures

472
00:29:29,388 --> 00:29:32,505
was through the wine. You know, I got hooked to the wines because the flavors

473
00:29:32,842 --> 00:29:36,402
are so unique and different. And if you have these, you know, notions of if

474
00:29:36,402 --> 00:29:39,535
terroir is something that you're interested in,

475
00:29:41,097 --> 00:29:43,271
this is something that you can, you know, it's quite

476
00:29:45,042 --> 00:29:48,699
the, the notions of terroir are quite unique and different

477
00:29:48,747 --> 00:29:52,537
from what you're accustomed to from France and Italy. Yeah. So that

478
00:29:52,537 --> 00:29:56,268
way, let's pause on that for a second. That is, that is what it's

479
00:29:56,268 --> 00:29:59,803
about, right? We, we want to have our

480
00:29:59,803 --> 00:30:03,547
customers experience the terroir of something,

481
00:30:03,644 --> 00:30:06,588
and that's it's the grape variety is obviously very important, but,

482
00:30:07,326 --> 00:30:11,003
uh, I make this comment a lot, and you're gonna explain this

483
00:30:11,116 --> 00:30:14,343
with, with your wines, but what other product can you pick up,

484
00:30:14,953 --> 00:30:18,486
make in a European country or wherever, and bring it across the

485
00:30:18,486 --> 00:30:21,216
world, across the 40th parallel, all the way around the other side of the world,

486
00:30:21,232 --> 00:30:24,909
and plop it on the table and say, this is what we represent. And

487
00:30:24,925 --> 00:30:28,698
so when it comes to the movement towards terroir, maybe it's,

488
00:30:28,794 --> 00:30:32,520
it's not new, but I think to the consumer, it's relatively new. Mm-hmm. To the

489
00:30:32,766 --> 00:30:35,975
To the oenophile, no big deal. We all get it. We, this is what we

490
00:30:35,975 --> 00:30:39,573
study. But to the regular consumer who's trying to break out of these €1

491
00:30:39,784 --> 00:30:43,469
a liter wines, this is what we try to sell them, the

492
00:30:43,485 --> 00:30:47,286
idea of the terroir. So tell me about the terroir of these countries. Are

493
00:30:47,286 --> 00:30:50,944
they vastly different? And is it compared to like a Burgundy

494
00:30:51,042 --> 00:30:54,661
where it's like across the street, you know, the terroir's different? Mm-hmm. Or more like

495
00:30:54,661 --> 00:30:58,315
a Bordeaux where it's a little more gradual or Napa? Well, so the

496
00:30:58,400 --> 00:31:02,071
big, uh, The big element for me that

497
00:31:02,167 --> 00:31:05,229
we leave out of when we talk about terroir is culture.

498
00:31:05,758 --> 00:31:09,590
And I think that the perspective on taste that the, that the people who

499
00:31:09,606 --> 00:31:13,325
are making the wine has, what they, you know,

500
00:31:14,095 --> 00:31:17,013
what they eat, what they like,

501
00:31:18,119 --> 00:31:21,358
that coupled with the resources that they have access to

502
00:31:22,432 --> 00:31:25,574
is, you know, that is also part of terroir. Sure it is. Yeah, that's a

503
00:31:25,574 --> 00:31:29,229
great thought. And, and I think also the market is part of terroir.

504
00:31:30,643 --> 00:31:34,208
If you don't have a table to compare things on,

505
00:31:34,722 --> 00:31:38,529
you don't know that they're different. If you don't take the products out of their

506
00:31:39,075 --> 00:31:42,576
native environment and put them in a non-native

507
00:31:42,576 --> 00:31:46,094
environment where they can be compared with other examples,

508
00:31:46,431 --> 00:31:49,338
then you don't know what the— you can't quantify these steps. You can't quantify it.

509
00:31:49,435 --> 00:31:53,065
You're right. That's a really good point. So, the name Black Lamb

510
00:31:53,578 --> 00:31:57,415
is— it comes from a book called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,

511
00:31:57,948 --> 00:32:01,021
which is— it was written between the First and Second World

512
00:32:01,934 --> 00:32:05,685
War. The full title is A Journey Through Former Yugoslavia,

513
00:32:06,089 --> 00:32:09,614
and it's this big travelogue that deals

514
00:32:09,711 --> 00:32:13,512
largely with the interpretation of culture. It was written by a

515
00:32:13,512 --> 00:32:17,144
British woman who was trying to interpret the Slavic

516
00:32:17,208 --> 00:32:20,794
cultures of Yugoslavia in this very critical period

517
00:32:22,358 --> 00:32:25,309
in human history. And if you boil down the book to its

518
00:32:27,167 --> 00:32:30,500
like it's one of its core tenets, it would be that

519
00:32:31,209 --> 00:32:34,783
what we see in another culture says more about

520
00:32:34,976 --> 00:32:38,410
us than it does about the other culture. That's

521
00:32:38,603 --> 00:32:42,056
interesting. Sure. That's really

522
00:32:42,088 --> 00:32:44,796
interesting. Working with these producers is—

523
00:32:47,324 --> 00:32:51,060
I had an experience in Slovenia where a winemaker was asking me

524
00:32:51,108 --> 00:32:54,576
to— he's like, how should we make it? How should we change the wine?

525
00:32:54,981 --> 00:32:56,712
What do you want? And I'm like, no, no, no, don't. You make what you

526
00:32:56,712 --> 00:33:00,030
make, And I'll

527
00:33:00,030 --> 00:33:03,170
buy it if I like it. I

528
00:33:03,170 --> 00:33:06,470
don't want you to change. Yeah, I didn't. I felt, I was like, oh my

529
00:33:06,470 --> 00:33:10,090
gosh, I don't want to influence. I

530
00:33:10,090 --> 00:33:13,110
had this idea that I'm in a vacuum and I'm an

531
00:33:13,110 --> 00:33:16,410
anthropologist and I'm trying to find this

532
00:33:16,410 --> 00:33:20,090
authentic thing and I might risk damaging it because now

533
00:33:20,090 --> 00:33:23,830
he's asking me, what should I do? I'm like, put coconut in

534
00:33:23,830 --> 00:33:26,050
it. Let's put some coconut. Well, wait a minute. You're right though, because that just

535
00:33:26,050 --> 00:33:29,390
goes to your point about the terroir should include the,

536
00:33:29,390 --> 00:33:33,130
the, the palates and the community and where it's grown besides just

537
00:33:33,130 --> 00:33:36,130
the soil, because that influences what things taste like as well as the food,

538
00:33:36,130 --> 00:33:39,690
right? And it's funny, it's an interesting point you brought up. We went to

539
00:33:39,690 --> 00:33:43,150
Italian restaurant that night and I wanted to, I had friends that just got back

540
00:33:43,150 --> 00:33:46,910
from Chianti and they're, they're complete Napa Cab fanatics. That's

541
00:33:46,910 --> 00:33:49,710
what they have in their cellar. And I said, okay, she wants to go to

542
00:33:49,710 --> 00:33:53,110
Italian dinner for their anniversary. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start from the north and bring

543
00:33:53,110 --> 00:33:55,810
some Piemonte wines. I'm gonna bring some from Tuscany. I'm gonna go down the south

544
00:33:55,810 --> 00:33:59,205
of the heel and get some, you know, Aglianico or something. open. So I want

545
00:33:59,205 --> 00:34:02,062
everybody to experience this. And

546
00:34:02,737 --> 00:34:05,161
one of their friends who's sort of an oenophile, he goes, I'm going to bring

547
00:34:05,161 --> 00:34:08,452
some cabs. I'm saying, okay, bring them. So he brings some stuff

548
00:34:08,982 --> 00:34:12,819
and I said, well, let's just first do this experiment with the food just to

549
00:34:12,835 --> 00:34:16,543
have fun. And so we tasted this Barbaresco and then we had

550
00:34:16,543 --> 00:34:20,380
a Chianti and then we had this Aglianico. Then he opens the

551
00:34:20,380 --> 00:34:22,644
cab and I was so

552
00:34:23,607 --> 00:34:27,054
proud because He goes, oh,

553
00:34:28,016 --> 00:34:31,589
now I understand California wines are different. I'm like,

554
00:34:31,781 --> 00:34:35,450
yes. Mm-hmm. Because this is what we want. And that, and it goes right to

555
00:34:35,450 --> 00:34:39,087
your point that we want those wines to be different. We want them to taste

556
00:34:39,391 --> 00:34:42,852
indigenous. We want them to represent where they're from. Yeah. So that we can

557
00:34:42,852 --> 00:34:46,569
experience that. That's a very important thing. Totally. So the cuisine in

558
00:34:46,601 --> 00:34:50,174
these areas, did they evolve then with the, the

559
00:34:50,222 --> 00:34:53,619
indigenous cuisines? Oh yeah. I mean, these are, if you look at, um,

560
00:34:54,890 --> 00:34:58,282
So if we start in Georgia,

561
00:34:59,632 --> 00:35:03,297
so the 2 areas that Black Lamb's focusing on, Slovenian-Italian border and

562
00:35:03,313 --> 00:35:07,138
Georgia, both of these are, in both areas

563
00:35:07,251 --> 00:35:10,996
you have close proximity to Alpic mountains.

564
00:35:11,429 --> 00:35:15,011
So you have the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, and then you have the Alps

565
00:35:15,237 --> 00:35:18,836
north of Slovenia. Mm-hmm.

566
00:35:19,175 --> 00:35:22,706
The natural conditions are such where it's forced human

567
00:35:22,738 --> 00:35:26,144
migration across these areas. So the

568
00:35:26,193 --> 00:35:29,888
Georgians for all of, you know, human history have

569
00:35:29,888 --> 00:35:33,440
had to, you know, fight people coming up from the south and trying to

570
00:35:33,440 --> 00:35:37,239
take their wine away from them. So what

571
00:35:37,239 --> 00:35:41,006
is present-day Georgia is actually probably where humans domesticated the grapevine.

572
00:35:41,620 --> 00:35:45,208
So we think of wine as coming, being a Western institution,

573
00:35:45,628 --> 00:35:49,165
but in reality it came from Eurasia. I think that, I

574
00:35:49,303 --> 00:35:53,124
think that's Becoming pretty common knowledge. Yeah, yeah.

575
00:35:53,269 --> 00:35:56,738
I mean, the more, the more archaeological evidence that's

576
00:35:56,738 --> 00:36:00,448
found, the— and it's also molecular, it's, you know,

577
00:36:00,978 --> 00:36:04,768
like genetically testing the grape seeds to identify that

578
00:36:04,768 --> 00:36:08,301
they're Vitis vinifera, and then even to identify what variety they are.

579
00:36:08,398 --> 00:36:12,076
So there are grape varieties that are still grown in Georgia that

580
00:36:12,076 --> 00:36:15,593
predate Christ by, you know, thousands of years. And we have

581
00:36:15,593 --> 00:36:19,257
genetic We have genetic proof establishing this.

582
00:36:19,611 --> 00:36:23,275
So, a big part of my attraction

583
00:36:23,468 --> 00:36:26,982
working through Eastern Europe and working my way

584
00:36:28,387 --> 00:36:32,167
for— as you start looking east, if you want to kind of get

585
00:36:32,442 --> 00:36:35,789
to the point of origin, you end up in Georgia. Right. And so,

586
00:36:37,011 --> 00:36:40,644
in parallel, while we were kind of creating this business, we're creating this

587
00:36:40,644 --> 00:36:43,767
business that's focused on these you know, very

588
00:36:44,268 --> 00:36:47,802
unique, very different, sometimes unusual wines.

589
00:36:47,915 --> 00:36:51,595
We're also trying to kind of understand the history of wine and

590
00:36:51,628 --> 00:36:54,694
track it back. And that becomes part of like our identity.

591
00:36:56,437 --> 00:36:59,978
Georgia, not only was the grapevine domesticated in

592
00:36:59,994 --> 00:37:03,777
Georgia, but this was, this was like an Eden for humans.

593
00:37:04,052 --> 00:37:07,665
And so all sorts of other plants were also domesticated in this

594
00:37:07,779 --> 00:37:10,733
area. So like plums originate in Georgia,

595
00:37:11,334 --> 00:37:12,730
hazelnuts, walnuts. Wow.

596
00:37:15,080 --> 00:37:18,221
Pistachios. Okay. Not pistachios. I don't think pistachios. I think that I may be— Very

597
00:37:18,253 --> 00:37:21,540
Middle Eastern thing, that's why. Turkey. I don't— yeah.

598
00:37:22,103 --> 00:37:25,827
But obviously when, you know, we

599
00:37:25,827 --> 00:37:29,001
have grape seeds that are 8,000 years old that are Vitis vinifera,

600
00:37:29,546 --> 00:37:32,947
Georgia didn't exist at this time, nor did Armenia or any of the

601
00:37:32,947 --> 00:37:36,783
countries that we recognize today. These were, you know, definitely,

602
00:37:37,443 --> 00:37:40,561
this was like pre-written language. But

603
00:37:41,027 --> 00:37:44,613
because Georgia is very resource-rich in

604
00:37:44,725 --> 00:37:48,166
terms agriculturally, it's like

605
00:37:48,166 --> 00:37:51,619
discovering— if you went to Georgia, which

606
00:37:52,620 --> 00:37:56,170
perhaps you will. I was actually invited and I sent Peter Koff, the

607
00:37:56,170 --> 00:37:59,545
Master of Wine, because I figured he would get way, at that time, way more

608
00:37:59,545 --> 00:38:03,280
out of it than I would've. Yeah. I mean, being that if

609
00:38:03,280 --> 00:38:06,440
you're Armenian, this area Is, uh,

610
00:38:07,308 --> 00:38:09,218
let me, let me just bounce off of that for a second, 'cause I wanna

611
00:38:09,218 --> 00:38:13,024
explain Vitis vinifera because, uh, it's a, you know, it's a Latin classification of

612
00:38:13,024 --> 00:38:16,749
the highest level of grapes for wine manufacturing. And number

613
00:38:16,765 --> 00:38:20,104
2 being Vitis lambrusca. And I could have

614
00:38:20,104 --> 00:38:23,878
sworn having my trip to Armenia that the wines

615
00:38:23,910 --> 00:38:27,105
I tasted were not from Vitis vinifera grapes because they were so bad.

616
00:38:27,619 --> 00:38:31,007
There is a lot of Isabella, like there are a lot of like

617
00:38:31,167 --> 00:38:33,945
non-vinifera, right? Vines growing. I mean,

618
00:38:34,770 --> 00:38:38,490
Georgia's covered in grapevines. Like, you go into forests, there are winemakers who

619
00:38:38,490 --> 00:38:42,330
literally trek into forests to harvest fruit from one

620
00:38:42,330 --> 00:38:46,110
wild plant that never gets pruned, that's just growing. Talk

621
00:38:46,110 --> 00:38:49,850
about biodynamic. Yeah, that's— I mean, it's just— yeah, it's just— I mean,

622
00:38:49,850 --> 00:38:53,690
it's really, you know, it's like there are, there are some of these abandoned fruit

623
00:38:53,690 --> 00:38:57,410
projects where, you know, the wines aren't always the best if you have to

624
00:38:57,410 --> 00:39:01,190
carry buckets of grapes. Well, I was accused by a customer of mine that,

625
00:39:01,190 --> 00:39:04,090
you know, we have wine grapes in America, which we really don't. But he goes,

626
00:39:04,090 --> 00:39:06,768
what about Concord? And I go, yeah, but that's not a wine grape because it's

627
00:39:06,768 --> 00:39:10,352
not Vitis vinifera. But we also know that Armenia was the

628
00:39:10,466 --> 00:39:13,628
location of the only intact winery that they found,

629
00:39:13,645 --> 00:39:17,463
6,000-year-old, with the sandals and the amphora and all this stuff

630
00:39:17,772 --> 00:39:21,588
in there. So it seems to me that the industry, it's

631
00:39:21,668 --> 00:39:25,143
new here. It's even new in Western Europe compared to that. I mean,

632
00:39:25,709 --> 00:39:29,265
I think I had Chablis Carboneau in here. He's talking about 12th century château,

633
00:39:29,346 --> 00:39:31,586
but this predates that. But let me ask you that question.

634
00:39:33,666 --> 00:39:36,914
Because you said something about the other crops that are coming from Georgia and the

635
00:39:36,979 --> 00:39:39,886
cradle of domestication of plants and

636
00:39:40,081 --> 00:39:41,801
nuts and things.

637
00:39:43,967 --> 00:39:47,522
I've had apricot wines, I've had pomegranate wines, we've had them all. Concord

638
00:39:47,522 --> 00:39:51,146
grape, Kentucky, from Kentucky. And it seems to

639
00:39:51,146 --> 00:39:54,853
me that the grape

640
00:39:54,853 --> 00:39:58,093
itself, and we've domesticated it for wine purposes, that's great.

641
00:39:58,557 --> 00:40:02,282
But there seems to be no other fruit, and I don't know the

642
00:40:02,346 --> 00:40:05,766
answer to this question, that produces an ethereal

643
00:40:06,280 --> 00:40:10,085
beverage as representative of where it's from that creates

644
00:40:10,134 --> 00:40:13,232
so much emotion. Like, if you drink apricot wine,

645
00:40:13,907 --> 00:40:17,503
it's apricot wine. It doesn't represent the soil and the

646
00:40:17,503 --> 00:40:21,277
terroir, right? It's just an apricot wine. Yeah. And I wish I

647
00:40:21,277 --> 00:40:24,761
could dig into, and maybe you know, What is it about the

648
00:40:24,825 --> 00:40:28,326
grape that has produced a beverage that is

649
00:40:28,936 --> 00:40:32,757
so established in our culture and represents where it's

650
00:40:32,757 --> 00:40:36,467
from in such great granularity, really? Well, I mean, that,

651
00:40:36,483 --> 00:40:40,240
yeah, that's a big question. Well, I'm not— it's just sort of a philosophical

652
00:40:40,240 --> 00:40:43,853
thing that's driven me. I mean, I think that, um, something that is

653
00:40:43,917 --> 00:40:47,546
very important to, to me is if we, uh,

654
00:40:48,413 --> 00:40:51,126
I, so I didn't answer a little bit about food, which is just to go

655
00:40:51,126 --> 00:40:54,635
back. Yeah, that's all right, go ahead. But so Georgia's also along the spice trade.

656
00:40:55,247 --> 00:40:58,904
Georgian cuisine is like, it's like encountering Italian food for the first time.

657
00:40:58,953 --> 00:41:02,734
You're like, it's like, it's so many classic dishes

658
00:41:03,155 --> 00:41:06,414
that are so specific that you've never tasted anywhere else. It's like,

659
00:41:08,038 --> 00:41:11,074
I can't remember the chef from Noma, but he, the René,

660
00:41:11,510 --> 00:41:14,967
it's René. René. Yeah. So the chef at Noma

661
00:41:14,967 --> 00:41:18,057
described the

662
00:41:18,057 --> 00:41:21,634
Caucasian cuisine as being one of the last explored, you know, one of the great

663
00:41:21,634 --> 00:41:25,198
cuisines of of the world that hasn't really

664
00:41:25,295 --> 00:41:29,112
been explored at a high level.

665
00:41:29,563 --> 00:41:33,059
And I think it's due. That's so interesting. No, the Georgians, if you're

666
00:41:33,059 --> 00:41:36,566
vegan, if you're a carnivore, you could be happy in

667
00:41:36,663 --> 00:41:39,508
Georgia. If you're a vegan, you could be happy in Georgia.

668
00:41:41,042 --> 00:41:44,002
I describe the food as something a little bit between Middle Eastern,

669
00:41:45,608 --> 00:41:49,088
Indian, and Mexican. Wow. Sounds

670
00:41:49,088 --> 00:41:52,600
complicated already. Yeah. Oh, it's like lots of green herbs.

671
00:41:52,923 --> 00:41:56,599
They bake a They cook with corn,

672
00:41:57,369 --> 00:42:00,884
beans, the best, a lot of the best. And this is traditional. This is not

673
00:42:00,980 --> 00:42:04,543
nouvelle cuisine, so to speak. No, this is traditional. No, this is very traditional. But

674
00:42:04,928 --> 00:42:08,506
something that I came to understand in comparing Georgian food to

675
00:42:08,506 --> 00:42:12,326
Mexican food is that Mexican food is also influenced by the spice

676
00:42:12,438 --> 00:42:16,049
trade. And so the Moors in Spain,

677
00:42:16,209 --> 00:42:19,916
a lot of what, like cumin is not an ingredient. You know, there are

678
00:42:19,916 --> 00:42:23,014
things that don't grow in Mexico that are part of Mexican cuisine.

679
00:42:23,367 --> 00:42:27,123
Tomatoes come from Mexico. You eat better tomatoes in Georgia than you do in

680
00:42:27,155 --> 00:42:30,699
the United States. Probably they have older genetics and they're

681
00:42:30,877 --> 00:42:34,307
not the, you know, they're not tomatoes that have been grown

682
00:42:34,517 --> 00:42:38,159
for their industrial culture. Tomatoes here are terrible. Yeah, no, in Georgia they're like

683
00:42:38,386 --> 00:42:41,212
a fruit. Fruit of Armenia. In Georgia, it's like a fruit. Like you eat a

684
00:42:41,212 --> 00:42:44,599
tomato, it feels like you're eating a piece of fruit. A cucumber feels like a

685
00:42:44,599 --> 00:42:48,436
little melon. But wine

686
00:42:49,764 --> 00:42:53,447
was born is a product of preservation. You have this

687
00:42:53,624 --> 00:42:57,392
plant that produces a huge abundance very rapidly,

688
00:42:57,971 --> 00:43:01,661
and as quickly as it's, as quickly as it's ripe, it goes bad.

689
00:43:01,774 --> 00:43:05,615
Right. And so, like cheese,

690
00:43:06,923 --> 00:43:10,720
like pickles, wine is a product

691
00:43:10,720 --> 00:43:14,430
that's born out of preservation. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Good

692
00:43:14,446 --> 00:43:18,167
point. Yeah. And, and I don't like wine that

693
00:43:18,167 --> 00:43:21,884
doesn't bear those marks. So, the wines that I'm

694
00:43:21,900 --> 00:43:25,428
bringing in, it's like you feel that this is

695
00:43:25,784 --> 00:43:29,055
yeast. Yeast and bacteria are—

696
00:43:30,884 --> 00:43:34,179
a brewer from Pasadena, Mark

697
00:43:34,195 --> 00:43:37,908
Craftsman. Do you know the Craftsman beer? Sure. Yeah, right. He told me,

698
00:43:38,376 --> 00:43:42,146
I was drinking in a beer bar having conversations with—

699
00:43:42,146 --> 00:43:45,475
Craft 1803, I think it is. Yeah, yeah. And he's like, oh, you wine people

700
00:43:45,475 --> 00:43:49,324
talk about terroir all the time. it's not about

701
00:43:49,324 --> 00:43:52,272
terroir, it's about fermentation. And

702
00:43:53,314 --> 00:43:56,246
he's right in some sense. To a certain extent, yeah. Yeah, to a certain extent,

703
00:43:56,262 --> 00:43:59,723
he's right. And I think that with the

704
00:44:00,781 --> 00:44:03,954
categories of natural wine, biodynamic wine,

705
00:44:04,691 --> 00:44:07,847
orange wine isn't automatically natural or biodynamic.

706
00:44:08,232 --> 00:44:11,405
It's a style of winemaking. The farming

707
00:44:12,238 --> 00:44:15,831
and the vinification will qualify if it's

708
00:44:15,831 --> 00:44:19,607
organic or something else. But, um, I had

709
00:44:19,607 --> 00:44:23,383
Brandon Sparks Gillis from Dragonette here. He

710
00:44:23,383 --> 00:44:26,902
was a baker. My daughter's a baker. He's like, you know,

711
00:44:27,078 --> 00:44:30,870
the, the fermentation science for wine pales compared to the fermentation

712
00:44:30,870 --> 00:44:34,325
science required to understand bread. Totally. Because it's just so much more

713
00:44:34,325 --> 00:44:37,362
complicated. Yeah. But it's a great background to understand.

714
00:44:38,358 --> 00:44:41,794
And so there's a lot of movement towards Not movement

715
00:44:41,794 --> 00:44:45,288
toward, but there's a lot more wineries experimenting and using

716
00:44:45,320 --> 00:44:49,007
natural yeasts and getting away from inoculated yeast. Yeah. That

717
00:44:49,007 --> 00:44:52,502
influence the character of the direction the wine goes

718
00:44:52,839 --> 00:44:56,221
when it's already built into the grape. Yeah. It's already

719
00:44:56,686 --> 00:44:59,828
should be part of that process. Yeah. I mean, in, in Georgia

720
00:45:01,030 --> 00:45:04,172
you have the combination of dirt, fire,

721
00:45:04,877 --> 00:45:08,708
and grapes, and the most magical wines that I've

722
00:45:08,805 --> 00:45:12,540
ever encountered, things that are the most like flavors. It's like, how do

723
00:45:12,732 --> 00:45:16,466
why don't we have wines that taste like this anymore? And it's so that

724
00:45:16,482 --> 00:45:20,215
they're, they're, they're, they make these clay,

725
00:45:20,728 --> 00:45:24,494
they're called qvevres. They're, they're not the same as amphoras because

726
00:45:24,494 --> 00:45:27,747
amphoras have handles. They're intended for transport and

727
00:45:27,779 --> 00:45:31,369
storage. Qvevres were a technology for winemaking

728
00:45:31,801 --> 00:45:35,279
that was specific to, you know, the processing of grapes.

729
00:45:35,952 --> 00:45:39,644
And so— How big are they typically? Big enough to get

730
00:45:39,644 --> 00:45:43,031
inside of and clean yourself. 1,500,

731
00:45:43,047 --> 00:45:46,628
2,000 liters, 3,000 liters.

732
00:45:46,903 --> 00:45:50,397
There's some that— there's old ones that they've found that are so large, they don't

733
00:45:50,397 --> 00:45:54,232
know how— that no one alive knows how to make quebreries that

734
00:45:54,296 --> 00:45:57,727
large any longer. And are those—

735
00:45:58,083 --> 00:46:01,903
they're fired? They're wood-fired in a kiln

736
00:46:01,903 --> 00:46:04,803
that's built, like a very primitive kiln. So

737
00:46:05,136 --> 00:46:08,907
low-temperature firing. Is there a versions of this now.

738
00:46:09,263 --> 00:46:13,048
No, the, the, the, what you want is the old version.

739
00:46:13,145 --> 00:46:16,850
Yeah. If you want to have like, uh, quevries should not

740
00:46:16,850 --> 00:46:20,144
be conflated with, uh, tinajas or

741
00:46:20,338 --> 00:46:24,133
amphoras. Tinajas are the Spanish, Spanish version of clay, or

742
00:46:24,149 --> 00:46:27,760
the, and then you have like Italian amphora, um, because they're

743
00:46:27,840 --> 00:46:31,657
using much finer clay and firing at much higher temperatures. So

744
00:46:31,657 --> 00:46:34,991
the vessels are much more, they're totally inert. It's like, it's like working in

745
00:46:35,089 --> 00:46:38,935
concrete or— Yeah. That's why, that's what I've seen. Yeah. Modern ones that

746
00:46:38,967 --> 00:46:42,098
look like they're just— the shape of it is kind of interesting, but they, they're

747
00:46:42,098 --> 00:46:45,759
gonna react with the wine like a concrete. No, the Georgian, the Georgian

748
00:46:45,856 --> 00:46:49,404
qvevris are, uh, they have to line them with beeswax,

749
00:46:49,870 --> 00:46:53,145
uh, because they're, because they're quite porous. Yeah. Um,

750
00:46:53,402 --> 00:46:57,031
and, uh, uh, it also serves as like a sand— it's a

751
00:46:57,192 --> 00:46:59,985
propolis. It's like a, it has antibacterial

752
00:47:00,628 --> 00:47:04,358
qualities as well. Um, But these are much more,

753
00:47:05,147 --> 00:47:08,950
the, the microoxygenization that you find in cuverie

754
00:47:09,014 --> 00:47:12,733
wines is typically much greater than you will in amphora

755
00:47:12,941 --> 00:47:16,620
wines. Sure. Because the, the cuveries are buried and there's oxygen

756
00:47:16,813 --> 00:47:20,540
in the earth. And so they're, you know, it's, it's, it's a different

757
00:47:20,573 --> 00:47:23,254
scenario than a barrel or a stainless steel tank.

758
00:47:25,762 --> 00:47:29,123
But one where you, you're gently, you know, exposing the wine to

759
00:47:29,139 --> 00:47:31,708
oxygen. So does it take, to go back, like you were talking about, we're going

760
00:47:31,822 --> 00:47:35,549
back in, in history and making wines now that they were made of before

761
00:47:35,662 --> 00:47:39,338
all the, let's say, modernization of stainless steel

762
00:47:39,467 --> 00:47:42,015
and concrete vats and things. To do that,

763
00:47:44,500 --> 00:47:48,038
you're basically eliminating any influence

764
00:47:48,958 --> 00:47:52,351
that a winemaker might have with direction of its

765
00:47:52,351 --> 00:47:56,129
fermentation or possibly where it's being—

766
00:47:56,258 --> 00:47:59,793
there's no oak. Do you have oak in your wines? No. Yeah,

767
00:48:00,439 --> 00:48:03,742
some of them, like the Cabai wines are all all aged in barrel for the

768
00:48:03,742 --> 00:48:07,452
ones I have now are 2 years in wood. But the

769
00:48:07,516 --> 00:48:10,278
cuverie is the, is, uh, uh,

770
00:48:11,450 --> 00:48:14,903
it's, it limits what the wine, it limits the choices of the

771
00:48:14,903 --> 00:48:18,741
winemaker, but it's almost to make really special wines in

772
00:48:18,773 --> 00:48:22,290
cuverie. I think you really have to understand it's the cuverie is a tricky

773
00:48:22,290 --> 00:48:25,517
vessel to make wine in. It can be, it can, you can, uh,

774
00:48:26,079 --> 00:48:29,291
you can't check in on the wine as easily. Mm-hmm. Once you seal them, they,

775
00:48:29,420 --> 00:48:33,219
They stay sealed for, you know, typically it depends on the style of

776
00:48:33,251 --> 00:48:36,888
production, but they'll be sealed for some amount of time. So you don't know,

777
00:48:37,357 --> 00:48:39,651
you know, you, so before you open it, you give a little prayer

778
00:48:40,117 --> 00:48:43,787
and hope that it's good. But it's,

779
00:48:44,205 --> 00:48:47,328
but there's, but it's not, but they do have,

780
00:48:48,192 --> 00:48:51,528
they still are able to make critical choices that will

781
00:48:51,818 --> 00:48:55,557
arrive at a wine that they intention, that they intended

782
00:48:55,557 --> 00:48:58,903
to produce. Yeah. So let's simplify it a little bit.

783
00:49:00,203 --> 00:49:03,766
We had this great conversation, it's already been 50 minutes, we haven't discussed orange

784
00:49:04,055 --> 00:49:07,394
wine at all. And so my daughter took me to a

785
00:49:07,731 --> 00:49:11,069
Brooklyn wine shop and she said, Dad, I want you to taste these wines. I

786
00:49:11,197 --> 00:49:14,760
paid $75 for a Nero d'Avola from Sicily, supposedly natural,

787
00:49:15,451 --> 00:49:18,741
took it back to the hotel and it was really literally unpalatable for me.

788
00:49:19,287 --> 00:49:21,197
And she agreed that it just wasn't that good.

789
00:49:23,154 --> 00:49:26,588
And that was my first exposure to what somebody might call natural wines. And I've

790
00:49:26,588 --> 00:49:30,406
written an article about natural wines being— there's

791
00:49:30,406 --> 00:49:34,225
no definition really except that it's basically untouched. But

792
00:49:34,305 --> 00:49:37,995
given that, which is a very basic definition, there's so many things that I can

793
00:49:37,995 --> 00:49:41,605
just see the wines here and tasted so many different biodynamic and

794
00:49:41,605 --> 00:49:45,391
organic wines. And there are a huge array of character.

795
00:49:45,519 --> 00:49:49,353
Yeah. I tasted a Sardinian in San Giovese

796
00:49:49,449 --> 00:49:52,799
not too long ago, 100% biodynamic, music in the vineyards,

797
00:49:53,296 --> 00:49:56,951
and very, very conventional tasting. Mm-hmm. You know, not

798
00:49:57,063 --> 00:50:00,766
the rustic style that maybe sometimes these things come

799
00:50:00,766 --> 00:50:04,180
with. And then, then you can be very rustic. Mm-hmm.

800
00:50:04,918 --> 00:50:08,589
Your product line, does it represent both of those or is it mostly rustic wines?

801
00:50:08,941 --> 00:50:12,757
That, that Amphora, I mean, this Claverie, Quevrey,

802
00:50:12,933 --> 00:50:16,588
Quevrey version. Mm-hmm. Must be a rustic version of the wine. 'Cause you got— They,

803
00:50:16,604 --> 00:50:20,227
they can be very like delicate and pro— I, I

804
00:50:20,227 --> 00:50:23,801
like the range. You have what you'll refer to, what I refer to in

805
00:50:23,849 --> 00:50:27,504
Georgia as old man style, which is going to be skins and stems

806
00:50:27,857 --> 00:50:31,640
like 6 months or longer. And these are like the most tannic

807
00:50:31,688 --> 00:50:35,407
wines on earth. They're far more tannic. And they're made that way, the

808
00:50:35,407 --> 00:50:38,886
same way. And that's the, yeah, I mean, well, that's the intention

809
00:50:38,998 --> 00:50:42,428
that is the characteristic of that style.

810
00:50:43,631 --> 00:50:46,500
But then in other parts of, this is more typical in the part of Georgia

811
00:50:46,516 --> 00:50:50,219
that's warmer. In the cooler areas, you tend to have shorter

812
00:50:50,219 --> 00:50:53,860
macerations, less extractive wines, lower alcohol,

813
00:50:55,335 --> 00:50:58,014
you know, more delicate. And

814
00:50:59,105 --> 00:51:02,923
they can both be made in cuverie. So the cuverie is just,

815
00:51:02,987 --> 00:51:06,789
it's an important vessel. It has a long history. It's romantic. It's very

816
00:51:06,821 --> 00:51:10,559
difficult to make wine in. The wines that can, that are made in

817
00:51:10,591 --> 00:51:14,281
cuverie can be quite unique and

818
00:51:14,281 --> 00:51:18,131
sometimes special, but ultimately it's just a container. It's

819
00:51:18,131 --> 00:51:21,836
really the first, you know, the first element

820
00:51:21,965 --> 00:51:25,468
of of any Georgian wine is gonna be, you know, what is the grape? Where

821
00:51:25,516 --> 00:51:29,261
is it planted? When are you harvesting it? Right. Yeah. It's, that's, that's really,

822
00:51:29,551 --> 00:51:33,039
it's not the qvevri that makes the wine. Right. It's the, and this isn't, I,

823
00:51:33,231 --> 00:51:37,073
this is for me important to point out just because there are, there, there are

824
00:51:37,089 --> 00:51:40,256
people in that are working with Georgian wine who have this

825
00:51:41,096 --> 00:51:44,907
perspective that if it's not made in qvevri, it's not real. And I

826
00:51:44,907 --> 00:51:48,636
think that that's absur— it's the same as saying every wine should be

827
00:51:48,750 --> 00:51:51,707
oaky. Yeah. Right. We would never want every wine to be oaky. That's right.

828
00:51:52,583 --> 00:51:56,143
Right. And so it's, uh, it's interesting. Well, I guess it's—

829
00:51:57,357 --> 00:52:00,691
I guess it depends how, how much you want to peel back and be, uh,

830
00:52:00,755 --> 00:52:03,276
you know, like a caveman stomping on grapes and making your own wine. And that's—

831
00:52:03,340 --> 00:52:06,887
and that should be the authentic way to make wine because that's the way humans

832
00:52:06,887 --> 00:52:09,949
started making wine. And that, that's not right either, right? No. We want to— it

833
00:52:09,949 --> 00:52:13,735
wants to be a palatable, drinkable, something we can enjoy and become part of

834
00:52:13,735 --> 00:52:17,230
our lifestyle. So what

835
00:52:17,519 --> 00:52:20,918
with Black Lamb now, what is it you are are trying to do with the

836
00:52:20,918 --> 00:52:24,162
public? And where's the marketplace? What are people

837
00:52:24,676 --> 00:52:28,515
responding to? Is it restaurants? Is it retail? Are people responding to these

838
00:52:28,531 --> 00:52:32,209
wines? Pretty, yeah, I would say both restaurant and retail pretty evenly.

839
00:52:32,868 --> 00:52:36,530
Um, we were just like looking, we were doing some analysis

840
00:52:36,658 --> 00:52:40,048
of which wines are selling well and kind of trying to,

841
00:52:40,642 --> 00:52:44,400
you know, 'cause it's the, uh, if you sell French wine,

842
00:52:44,995 --> 00:52:48,240
you what people buy. Yes. And you know what sells. And that's right. And, and

843
00:52:48,240 --> 00:52:51,400
you can, you can, you know, you have some rough idea of the numbers with

844
00:52:51,400 --> 00:52:54,860
this stuff. It's like, you know, you buy 100 cases of this wine

845
00:52:54,860 --> 00:52:58,240
and 5 cases of this weird wine, and the 5 cases

846
00:52:58,240 --> 00:53:01,480
disappear like nothing. And then the 100 cases sit there. Sit there. Yeah. And so

847
00:53:01,480 --> 00:53:04,400
it's just, it's, you know, it's, hey, welcome to the wholesale wine business.

848
00:53:04,400 --> 00:53:07,860
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. What a fun, you know, you,

849
00:53:07,860 --> 00:53:11,700
you, you, uh, you, you either have too much or not enough. Right.

850
00:53:11,700 --> 00:53:15,080
You never, you, you never have just the right amount. It's, of course, you either

851
00:53:15,080 --> 00:53:18,746
have too much wine or not enough wine. Yeah. wine. But

852
00:53:20,586 --> 00:53:24,413
so this case, the 2 styles that we see really

853
00:53:25,075 --> 00:53:28,878
like our customers liking are the skin-fermented

854
00:53:28,878 --> 00:53:31,760
white wines, high-extract white wines, and

855
00:53:31,921 --> 00:53:35,608
low-extract red wines. So let me ask you this, the orange wine thing.

856
00:53:38,110 --> 00:53:40,819
No oranges. You know, what's his name? Bob

857
00:53:42,053 --> 00:53:45,489
Trinchero, Oh, you know, this is whatever the story is. The

858
00:53:45,602 --> 00:53:48,215
fermentation guy was arrested when he's making this dry

859
00:53:49,065 --> 00:53:52,672
rosé and he ended up with white Zinfandel. And it's this, you know, hot market

860
00:53:52,672 --> 00:53:55,847
thing, you know, makes him famous and Sutter Home goes off the charts. And now

861
00:53:55,847 --> 00:53:59,631
he has this fancy wine in Napa because it's paid for by, you know, $2.49

862
00:53:59,631 --> 00:54:02,822
white Zinfandel. So, but that was, that was basically

863
00:54:03,255 --> 00:54:06,830
taking a red grape and fermenting it like a white wine and you end up

864
00:54:06,830 --> 00:54:10,277
with pink. When, when did orange wine, which is

865
00:54:10,694 --> 00:54:14,398
white grapes you know, macerated like a red wine.

866
00:54:15,424 --> 00:54:18,710
When did this happen? And is it always been around? We just, it just wasn't

867
00:54:18,710 --> 00:54:22,541
part of our regular cuisine or part of our regular routine. Mm-hmm. Or is it

868
00:54:22,573 --> 00:54:26,277
something that's just starting that people are, my daughter loves it.

869
00:54:26,421 --> 00:54:29,948
What's the story behind it? Both. I think both, like the, what we're, what we're

870
00:54:29,948 --> 00:54:33,715
experiencing today is a renaissance for these styles, but

871
00:54:33,715 --> 00:54:37,018
this style of wine production predates

872
00:54:37,726 --> 00:54:41,124
white wine production. White

873
00:54:41,751 --> 00:54:45,455
grapes were macerated. Most probably vineyards were

874
00:54:45,455 --> 00:54:48,936
mixed with white and red grapes and

875
00:54:49,361 --> 00:54:53,113
everything was going in together. But

876
00:54:53,533 --> 00:54:57,280
in Georgia, they hold the white grapes

877
00:54:57,410 --> 00:55:00,947
in higher regard than the reds in some certain

878
00:55:01,383 --> 00:55:05,099
ways. Mm-hmm. with

879
00:55:05,147 --> 00:55:07,680
red wine, you can't leave it on the skins. If you leave it on the

880
00:55:07,712 --> 00:55:11,271
skins for the length of, it's like a, it's a bit of a paradox. You

881
00:55:11,271 --> 00:55:15,118
can leave the white grape with the skins for longer and it becomes

882
00:55:15,263 --> 00:55:18,933
deeper in color and more expressive and richer. You leave the

883
00:55:18,949 --> 00:55:22,717
red wines on the skins for that for longer, you actually start

884
00:55:22,717 --> 00:55:26,339
pulling color out of the wine and the wines become, you know,

885
00:55:26,403 --> 00:55:30,219
they, they, they, they lose something. And so the red wines are typically

886
00:55:30,635 --> 00:55:34,467
when you're making, when Georgians are making wine in qvevris, the red grapes are in

887
00:55:34,643 --> 00:55:38,194
qvevri with the skins for 2 2 to 6 weeks. The white

888
00:55:38,194 --> 00:55:41,242
grapes are with the skins for, you know, up to a year.

889
00:55:42,530 --> 00:55:46,302
Really? Yeah. And so, they actually— so, the white wines will be

890
00:55:46,302 --> 00:55:49,896
more tannic than the red wines. Because the acid content in the

891
00:55:49,912 --> 00:55:53,012
skin, the white wine is probably just as

892
00:55:53,419 --> 00:55:56,880
volatile or just as strong as the red. There's no—

893
00:55:57,140 --> 00:56:00,810
there's nothing physiologically

894
00:56:00,956 --> 00:56:04,688
different between red and white grapes other than pigment. Other than the color. Yeah.

895
00:56:04,866 --> 00:56:08,542
The— what's his— Clark, He

896
00:56:08,590 --> 00:56:11,651
wrote Postmodern Winemaking. House Clark? No,

897
00:56:12,277 --> 00:56:15,979
Clark Smith. He's like a, he's made,

898
00:56:16,124 --> 00:56:19,794
you know, he's like super scientist for making big heavy

899
00:56:19,890 --> 00:56:23,641
duty red wines. And it's all about like tannins,

900
00:56:23,882 --> 00:56:27,007
you know, suspending, you know, polymerizing

901
00:56:27,600 --> 00:56:31,367
the, the, your tannins so that they like

902
00:56:31,367 --> 00:56:35,071
stay in solution and you, and you can have like rich, you know,

903
00:56:35,119 --> 00:56:38,762
he, he does science. A lot of his work has been, you know,

904
00:56:38,890 --> 00:56:42,517
the, the kind of science that would support making like really great, you know,

905
00:56:42,821 --> 00:56:46,063
trying to take something like Screaming Eagle and making it better.

906
00:56:46,191 --> 00:56:49,737
Yeah. So what's, what's the marketplace? But he's really, so he, he,

907
00:56:49,962 --> 00:56:52,994
he, he, what he claims is that German technology,

908
00:56:53,829 --> 00:56:56,813
stainless steel refrigerant and

909
00:56:57,535 --> 00:57:01,194
sterile filtration, that, that is really, that, that really

910
00:57:01,210 --> 00:57:04,807
changed That in the cellar, that marks

911
00:57:04,983 --> 00:57:08,629
a change. And that's what gave us white wine and rosé. White

912
00:57:08,661 --> 00:57:12,274
wine and rosé are the same thing. Red wine and orange

913
00:57:12,354 --> 00:57:16,032
wine are the same thing. Yeah, right. That makes sense.

914
00:57:16,080 --> 00:57:19,404
So he's saying the Germans have

915
00:57:20,063 --> 00:57:23,805
created this idea of filtering and— Mosel

916
00:57:24,415 --> 00:57:27,932
during the pre-Industrial Revolution, Mosel, the

917
00:57:27,932 --> 00:57:31,529
semi-sweet German wines were like, that was the rage in Europe.

918
00:57:31,610 --> 00:57:35,305
Europe, and the Germans figured out technology where you didn't have to be in

919
00:57:35,482 --> 00:57:39,065
Germany. You could make Mosel-style wines all

920
00:57:39,178 --> 00:57:42,696
over the planet because you can, you know, because you can

921
00:57:42,729 --> 00:57:46,183
control it. Now we have, now we have the, the, the mechanics to

922
00:57:46,183 --> 00:57:49,831
control it. And, and, and then what has basically happened is that the

923
00:57:49,879 --> 00:57:53,639
wines just got dry. So the sugar, it's still that, it's

924
00:57:53,639 --> 00:57:56,595
still that same, you know, that same reductive,

925
00:57:57,174 --> 00:58:00,894
fresh, primary style. And, uh, but

926
00:58:00,894 --> 00:58:04,693
we've— the sugar's just no longer present. And, and

927
00:58:04,966 --> 00:58:08,621
like a lot of people prefer to drink— like there's a lot of people who

928
00:58:08,717 --> 00:58:12,420
just drink red wine. If you just drink red wine, your other

929
00:58:12,420 --> 00:58:15,706
wine is orange wine. Yes. Because it's the same thing. Same thing. I mean, at

930
00:58:15,706 --> 00:58:19,313
least tactically and phonetically. Yeah.

931
00:58:19,473 --> 00:58:22,599
Like, not like ripeness is the same and everything's just— you get— I mean, you

932
00:58:22,599 --> 00:58:26,398
don't peel a plum, right, or a peach before you eat it, right? I, I

933
00:58:26,447 --> 00:58:30,295
consider part of my mission is to reduce the on. Like, every now

934
00:58:30,295 --> 00:58:33,086
and then I like a glass of rosé. Yeah. And every now and then I

935
00:58:33,086 --> 00:58:36,712
like a glass of white wine. But part of the mission of Black Lamb is

936
00:58:36,712 --> 00:58:39,712
to see the proportion of, uh,

937
00:58:40,706 --> 00:58:44,236
uh, white grapes processed as, uh,

938
00:58:44,316 --> 00:58:48,054
white wine versus orange wine to, you know, I, I think there should be more.

939
00:58:48,279 --> 00:58:51,551
This is, this is, yeah, it should be, there should be more of this. A

940
00:58:51,551 --> 00:58:55,370
lot of orange wines, you know, Orange wine is a style of production

941
00:58:55,370 --> 00:58:59,130
that hasn't had a lot of modern practice.

942
00:58:59,130 --> 00:59:02,690
Yeah. So naturally there aren't gonna, you know, people are learning. It's

943
00:59:02,690 --> 00:59:05,710
not, it's not gonna be as— That's kind of the question, cuz I've had such

944
00:59:05,710 --> 00:59:09,470
a dynamic range of these wines. So let's say, uh,

945
00:59:09,470 --> 00:59:12,750
well, I'm gonna have a Napa Chardonnay, so I'm pretty convinced it's gonna be, if

946
00:59:12,750 --> 00:59:15,910
it's well made, it's gonna be pretty oaky. It's gonna have some fruit flavors and

947
00:59:15,910 --> 00:59:19,250
they'll be heavy on my tongue. It'll be not a lactic fermentation. Oh, that's what

948
00:59:19,250 --> 00:59:22,750
we expect. Right. Mm-hmm. But is there, is there a

949
00:59:23,514 --> 00:59:27,334
terroir-generated or style-specific generated

950
00:59:27,527 --> 00:59:30,818
amongst— forget Georgia in the mid— in that part of the world, but even in

951
00:59:30,818 --> 00:59:33,723
America, where I'm gonna get an orange

952
00:59:34,510 --> 00:59:38,282
version of Sauvignon Blanc and have some profile that I expect

953
00:59:38,363 --> 00:59:41,653
to get because I did that? Or is it too early in the career of

954
00:59:41,653 --> 00:59:44,784
this fermentation style to have that?

955
00:59:45,811 --> 00:59:49,519
Uh, this is still an experiment every time I buy a new

956
00:59:49,519 --> 00:59:53,159
bottle. The, uh, yeah, it's,

957
00:59:53,752 --> 00:59:56,830
it, you need to, you need to, you have to have, uh, uh,

958
00:59:57,391 --> 01:00:00,854
somebody to buy from that you trust who can, you know, who can interpret your

959
01:00:01,046 --> 01:00:04,589
taste and guide you to it. Um, the,

960
01:00:04,829 --> 01:00:08,516
the orange, obviously oranges are not used. The, the term orange wine is a

961
01:00:08,580 --> 01:00:12,123
reference to the color, of course, that the wine becomes.

962
01:00:12,844 --> 01:00:15,938
But good. I'm glad you brought that up because, but it's, but all, but there's,

963
01:00:16,114 --> 01:00:19,769
there's a, within the industry, we disagree. Do we call

964
01:00:19,833 --> 01:00:23,330
it macerated white wine? Do we call it orange wine? Do we call it

965
01:00:23,410 --> 01:00:27,087
amber wine? And, uh, I have— I like— you

966
01:00:27,183 --> 01:00:30,732
cannot make— a lot of orange wine is the

967
01:00:30,796 --> 01:00:34,168
color that it is not because of skin contact, but because of oxidation.

968
01:00:34,810 --> 01:00:38,407
You can't make an orange wine darker than the grape that you

969
01:00:38,423 --> 01:00:42,020
harvest. Right. So if you're harvesting a grape like Sauvignon Blanc or,

970
01:00:42,277 --> 01:00:45,793
you know, Tokaj Friulano, something that in harvest looks green,

971
01:00:46,323 --> 01:00:49,343
it's not going to give you an orange wine wine, even if you macerate it,

972
01:00:49,520 --> 01:00:53,360
unless you oxidize it. And so, if, like, we

973
01:00:53,360 --> 01:00:56,638
have Sauvignon Blanc and Friulano that's 2 weeks on the skins,

974
01:00:57,440 --> 01:01:00,817
you leave Pinot Grigio on the skins for 2 weeks, it looks like it's onion

975
01:01:01,010 --> 01:01:04,597
color. Right. Sure. Sauvignon Blanc or Friulano, they don't really

976
01:01:04,710 --> 01:01:06,448
change color. And so,

977
01:01:09,604 --> 01:01:12,969
the diversity that you'll see in red wine, anywhere from something

978
01:01:13,339 --> 01:01:17,103
so light that you'd call it a rosé, all the way to

979
01:01:17,793 --> 01:01:21,436
the like heaviest, uh, you know, most tannic,

980
01:01:22,046 --> 01:01:25,673
uh, uh, like Sagrantino. One of the Pinot Noir that I got from

981
01:01:25,738 --> 01:01:28,643
Chalk Hill that was really kind of dark enough to call it red wine, and

982
01:01:28,643 --> 01:01:31,307
that's what I did. And I got in trouble because I said it's rosé, and

983
01:01:31,307 --> 01:01:34,838
I got decided— but customers were confused.

984
01:01:35,223 --> 01:01:38,032
I called it red wine, it said rosé on the bottle, but it was really

985
01:01:38,032 --> 01:01:41,708
dark. It was really dark. I love that. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, so So

986
01:01:41,965 --> 01:01:45,693
do we have to then, if we're gonna make an orange wine, so

987
01:01:45,693 --> 01:01:49,148
to speak, if we're gonna macerate the skins with the juice,

988
01:01:49,598 --> 01:01:52,822
do we have to filter it? Do we not filter it? Do we have to

989
01:01:52,886 --> 01:01:56,662
leave it this way as just as a social stigma to

990
01:01:56,678 --> 01:02:00,098
this type of wine? Does it have to be cloudy? No. So we can do

991
01:02:00,098 --> 01:02:03,882
that. And what happens if we filter or fine something like that?

992
01:02:04,351 --> 01:02:06,971
Does it change the character? Same as with red. As the same with red wine?

993
01:02:07,182 --> 01:02:10,555
Yeah. You don't see, we don't see the hazy red wines. Yeah, we don't. 'Cause

994
01:02:10,555 --> 01:02:14,168
they're pigment. Yeah. So, if you hold it up to the

995
01:02:14,168 --> 01:02:17,600
light, usually you can see it. Yeah. You can, you can see if a red

996
01:02:17,616 --> 01:02:21,289
wine is opaque or shiny. With orange wine,

997
01:02:21,385 --> 01:02:25,089
it's more, the wine is more transparent. So, you can see, you can

998
01:02:25,154 --> 01:02:27,639
actually see that there's this material. You know,

999
01:02:28,521 --> 01:02:32,226
it's, we're not dogmatic about whether or not a

1000
01:02:32,290 --> 01:02:35,995
wine is filtered or not filtered. The wine should be good. Yeah. And, if the

1001
01:02:35,995 --> 01:02:39,815
situation demands that the producer filter it and

1002
01:02:39,847 --> 01:02:43,196
that's what they choose to do, then— How many

1003
01:02:43,228 --> 01:02:46,980
suppliers? Nobody that we're working with sterile filters. These

1004
01:02:47,012 --> 01:02:50,746
are, you know, this is just to remove like gross particulate. How

1005
01:02:50,762 --> 01:02:53,274
many different wineries now are you working with?

1006
01:02:54,610 --> 01:02:58,420
About

1007
01:02:58,420 --> 01:03:02,038
15, like 15 to 20. Oh, that's a pretty good book already.

1008
01:03:02,231 --> 01:03:05,626
Yeah. Yeah. In all Georgian or Slovenia, Georgian, Slovakia?

1009
01:03:06,257 --> 01:03:08,779
No Slovakia, but that will hopefully be coming. Right now, just Slovenia.

1010
01:03:10,910 --> 01:03:14,532
Armenia, one Hungarian producer, uh, and Georgia.

1011
01:03:15,895 --> 01:03:19,726
And then Croatia? Uh, yeah, I, I am actually— I'm working

1012
01:03:19,758 --> 01:03:23,237
a little bit with some. My taste gravitates, uh,

1013
01:03:24,487 --> 01:03:28,046
I, I like parts— I like some Croatian wines. That's— I thought they're fascinating.

1014
01:03:28,158 --> 01:03:31,973
Yeah, definitely fascinating. Um, the, uh,

1015
01:03:32,502 --> 01:03:35,868
a lot of the wines in Croatia are these like big, you know, they're kind

1016
01:03:35,868 --> 01:03:39,636
of— they're, they're a little bit more along the lines of like

1017
01:03:39,700 --> 01:03:43,430
classical red wine. They are, yes. And, and we're kind of They're very,

1018
01:03:43,430 --> 01:03:47,270
uh, they're very Western European-like. Yeah. Some characters. And we're, and I think we're

1019
01:03:47,270 --> 01:03:51,010
trying to, we wanna work in the fringes. Yeah. We're a small company

1020
01:03:51,010 --> 01:03:54,290
and there's room in the market to do that. And so you still working with

1021
01:03:54,290 --> 01:03:57,370
your wife then? Yeah. Oh wow. That's pretty neat. Yeah. She, she does all the

1022
01:03:57,370 --> 01:04:00,750
real work. 25 years. She's downstairs right now. My wife. Oh

1023
01:04:00,750 --> 01:04:04,550
yeah. Yeah. Sorry. My wife. My wife and I've been

1024
01:04:04,550 --> 01:04:07,990
together 20 years. Oh, there you go. So that's great though. We've, we,

1025
01:04:07,990 --> 01:04:11,830
we figured it out except that, um, you know, my daughter, the way

1026
01:04:11,830 --> 01:04:12,970
I have the $1 home sale and she just hates it when she, we go

1027
01:04:12,970 --> 01:04:16,730
to dinner because because we start discussing work, you

1028
01:04:16,730 --> 01:04:20,354
know. Yeah, we've— we, we have problems to solve or whatever. So

1029
01:04:20,819 --> 01:04:23,690
she's like, oh my God, I can't believe you're talking about work. Yeah. But I

1030
01:04:23,722 --> 01:04:26,320
have, I have created, uh, quite a, um,

1031
01:04:27,571 --> 01:04:30,826
wine critic out of my wife. So when we got married, it was

1032
01:04:31,564 --> 01:04:35,172
like Gallo-Chablis, and now, you know, I bring stuff

1033
01:04:35,172 --> 01:04:38,812
home and she's— I can see by her face, you know, oh, this

1034
01:04:38,876 --> 01:04:42,550
is something I should feature on the club. Yeah, that, that I

1035
01:04:42,550 --> 01:04:46,350
have that exact same— the wines land, Kristin, we

1036
01:04:46,350 --> 01:04:50,170
bring 'em, you know, we, we, we start opening 'em up and tasting 'em. And,

1037
01:04:50,170 --> 01:04:53,930
uh, you know, typically she'll like a couple of 'em and, and,

1038
01:04:53,930 --> 01:04:57,310
and the rest of them she's like, no, I'm gonna drink those ones. And I'm

1039
01:04:57,310 --> 01:04:59,630
like, you find yourself— we have to sell all these. Yeah. But did you find

1040
01:04:59,630 --> 01:05:03,430
yourself saying, wait, you don't, you're not experiencing

1041
01:05:03,430 --> 01:05:07,130
the wine I need you to experience. I want you to understand like the

1042
01:05:07,130 --> 01:05:10,790
source of this and the terroir, including what you're talking about, the cultural, the cultural

1043
01:05:10,790 --> 01:05:14,549
history behind the wine, because I obviously taste much more than

1044
01:05:14,549 --> 01:05:17,954
she does, and I appreciate— I think I'm gonna say appreciate more than she does,

1045
01:05:18,050 --> 01:05:21,455
but I get the esoteric value of them,

1046
01:05:22,644 --> 01:05:25,952
even though they may not be something she tastes— likes the taste of.

1047
01:05:26,000 --> 01:05:29,759
Yeah, right. And I think that's part of the thing we have to teach. And

1048
01:05:29,855 --> 01:05:33,388
I would guess in your industry, your side of the business, uh,

1049
01:05:33,405 --> 01:05:36,472
particularly with these kinds of wines, we want to

1050
01:05:37,099 --> 01:05:40,596
have the consumer or reflect on that and, and

1051
01:05:41,029 --> 01:05:44,091
maybe broaden their horizons a little bit by, by thinking, gee,

1052
01:05:45,038 --> 01:05:48,197
if I can really detect this character and I can feel like I'm in Georgia,

1053
01:05:48,245 --> 01:05:51,660
I can feel like I'm in this region of Georgia or wherever I'm at, that

1054
01:05:52,158 --> 01:05:55,862
we get them to understand more value behind wine. Like, for

1055
01:05:55,862 --> 01:05:59,711
instance, when I go home from work today, I tasted probably 60 wines already.

1056
01:06:00,015 --> 01:06:03,752
She's gonna ask for a glass of wine. I try to contend with her.

1057
01:06:03,944 --> 01:06:07,314
Your mood, what we're gonna have for dinner, you know,

1058
01:06:07,811 --> 01:06:10,748
where the kids were pulling our shirttail at the time when they were younger. And

1059
01:06:10,764 --> 01:06:14,006
I try to bring something to the— in a glass that she's gonna

1060
01:06:14,472 --> 01:06:18,147
feel more like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And I

1061
01:06:18,548 --> 01:06:22,223
wonder with these kinds of wines, with the consumer, are we getting

1062
01:06:22,320 --> 01:06:25,786
positive feedback? Are we getting customers saying, wow, I

1063
01:06:25,786 --> 01:06:29,365
understand this part, I'm seeing what you're talking about? Is that what's happening?

1064
01:06:30,344 --> 01:06:33,393
Yeah, I for, um, yeah,

1065
01:06:33,955 --> 01:06:37,630
orange wine. Consumers are interested in orange wine.

1066
01:06:37,823 --> 01:06:41,369
This is, you know, the, the category started popping up in

1067
01:06:41,738 --> 01:06:45,477
the United States maybe 10 years ago. And, uh, the first people

1068
01:06:45,525 --> 01:06:49,200
that were drinking it were like the, you know, Psalms and, you know, they

1069
01:06:49,200 --> 01:06:52,490
kind of talked about it and then it was on to the next thing. And,

1070
01:06:52,570 --> 01:06:56,165
um, you can find plenty of articles talking about the

1071
01:06:56,197 --> 01:07:00,000
fad. I mean, just recently there was an article in The New Yorker, uh,

1072
01:07:00,129 --> 01:07:03,801
that like created and upset because the guy completely dismisses

1073
01:07:04,220 --> 01:07:08,025
orange wine as a category, which I think is— I mean, he doesn't know.

1074
01:07:08,073 --> 01:07:09,105
Ridiculous. Yeah.

1075
01:07:11,472 --> 01:07:15,255
He's not a wine— he comes from a fashion background. And so, the

1076
01:07:15,255 --> 01:07:18,863
article was well-researched, it was well-written, and I'm glad

1077
01:07:18,895 --> 01:07:21,641
because I think it gets— if I read it and I knew nothing about orange

1078
01:07:21,641 --> 01:07:25,259
wine, I'd be really curious. I've got to taste this stuff that this

1079
01:07:25,259 --> 01:07:28,607
guy's saying. Yeah, right. That's interesting. Yeah. But no, it's

1080
01:07:28,607 --> 01:07:31,892
just the— as a

1081
01:07:31,892 --> 01:07:35,290
category, I think it's— wines used to be

1082
01:07:35,290 --> 01:07:39,138
different. And this is, you know, this is the category right now that really

1083
01:07:40,047 --> 01:07:43,716
almost any time you encounter it, it can offer you something that, you know,

1084
01:07:43,797 --> 01:07:47,622
that is an experience. Yes. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't like it. Maybe

1085
01:07:47,622 --> 01:07:49,975
you don't like it when you start drinking it, but by the time you get

1086
01:07:49,975 --> 01:07:52,778
to the bottom of the bottle, you do like it. Yeah. Or maybe you don't

1087
01:07:52,794 --> 01:07:55,865
like it and then you start eating And then you like it. Right. And I

1088
01:07:55,865 --> 01:07:59,168
think with, um, that's with a lot of wines, right? Georgia, in Georgia, you don't,

1089
01:07:59,216 --> 01:08:02,630
uh, wines. I mean, for me too, wine's not a cocktail. It's, it's, uh,

1090
01:08:03,239 --> 01:08:06,734
it's a seasoning and it's, uh, it's part of

1091
01:08:06,766 --> 01:08:10,469
cuisine. Like, and, and I think everything that you like, you know,

1092
01:08:11,399 --> 01:08:15,198
how are we feeling? Who are we with? What does the moment, you

1093
01:08:15,198 --> 01:08:18,821
know, demand? Uh, that will, uh, you know, there, there

1094
01:08:18,869 --> 01:08:21,802
are orange wines that I'll pull out that are perfectly

1095
01:08:22,315 --> 01:08:25,649
appropriate to drink like a cocktail. Yeah. You don't need to eat anything.

1096
01:08:25,919 --> 01:08:29,569
They're, you know, gentle. And then there's things that you couldn't drink

1097
01:08:29,569 --> 01:08:33,309
if you don't have, you know, some fatty piece

1098
01:08:33,309 --> 01:08:37,129
of meat in your mouth. Yeah. Well, it's

1099
01:08:37,129 --> 01:08:39,429
already been an hour and 10 minutes, which is fascinating. We got to taste some

1100
01:08:39,429 --> 01:08:42,589
wines. We can probably do this again and again, and I would love to have

1101
01:08:42,589 --> 01:08:46,389
you back. We'll pick a new subject of what's going on out in that part

1102
01:08:46,389 --> 01:08:49,169
of the world, and we'll kind of peel that back too. But it's been fascinating

1103
01:08:49,169 --> 01:08:52,049
to have you here. Great to see you again. Thank you. After all these years.

1104
01:08:52,049 --> 01:08:55,750
And tell Uh, Miha that, uh, his video's still up. I

1105
01:08:55,750 --> 01:08:59,390
will. I definitely

1106
01:08:59,390 --> 01:09:02,970
will let him know. We can check how many plays it's got because back then,

1107
01:09:02,970 --> 01:09:06,210
who knew? We'll try to pump it up a little bit later. I should, I

1108
01:09:06,210 --> 01:09:09,170
should, you know, what I've been doing with some of those old videos back in

1109
01:09:09,170 --> 01:09:12,710
the day, I just, I'm peeling off the audio, but the cameras are so

1110
01:09:12,710 --> 01:09:16,390
restricted on how much they could record and the audio is so much less quality

1111
01:09:16,390 --> 01:09:20,190
than it is today that I was using my equipment. But I've been taking some

1112
01:09:20,190 --> 01:09:23,712
of those audios and peeling them out of videos, pairing them up for about a

1113
01:09:23,712 --> 01:09:26,664
half hour to 45 minutes worth of— so wait till he gets ahold of that.

1114
01:09:26,713 --> 01:09:30,458
He's really going to be upset. Well, we won't tell

1115
01:09:30,458 --> 01:09:33,835
him. Cheers. Cheers, Tessa. Great to have you here. Thank you, Paul. Thank you.