In this episode of the Vint Podcast, Billy Galanko and Brady Weller talk with British wine educator and enthusiast, as well as host of the acclaimed "The Wine Show", Joe Fattorini. From Joe's story about bathing in red wine, to his journey through wine and spirits sales as a merchant, and the many exploits he's had around the wine world through his show, we hope you enjoy this inside chat with one of the world's most dynamic wine educators. Now, Joe is a consultant and advisor for wine businesses, helping to communicate the story of wine and wine culture to broader audiences. Enjoy!
The Vint Podcast is a production of the Vint Marketplace, your source for the highest quality stock of fine wines and rare whiskies. Visit www.vintmarketplace.com.
Cheers!
Past Guests Include: William Kelley, Peter Liem, Eric Asimov, Bobby Stuckey, Rajat "Raj" Parr, Erik Segelbaum, André Hueston Mack, Emily Saladino, Konstantin Baum, Landon Patterson, Heather Wibbels, Carlton "CJ" Fowler, Boris Guillome, Christopher Walkey, Danny Jassy, Kristy Wenz, Dan Petroski, Buster Scher, Andrew Nelson, Jane Anson, Tim Irwin, Matt Murphy, Allen Meadows, Altan Insights, Tim Gaiser, Vince Anter, Joel Peterson, Megan O'Connor, Adam Lapierre, Jason Haas, Ken Freeman, Lisa Perrotti-Brown, Skyler Weekes, Mary Gorman McAdams, Nick King, Bartholomew Broadbent, Nick Jackson, Dillon Sykes, Mark Bell, David Keck, John Szabo, Channing Frye, Jay Hack, Julia Harding, Austin Hope, Michael Minnillo, Jermaine Stone, Jim Madsen, Santiago Archaval, Tom Smith, Sebastian Lowa, Matthew Crafton, Tony Parker, Andrew Caillard, Mike Veseth, Madeline Puckette, John Olney, Matthew Kaner, Amelia Singer, Chess Martin, and more!
In this episode of the Vint Podcast, Billy Galanko and Brady Weller talk with British wine educator and enthusiast, as well as host of the acclaimed "The Wine Show", Joe Fattorini. From Joe's story about bathing in red wine, to his journey through wine and spirits sales as a merchant, and the many exploits he's had around the wine world through his show, we hope you enjoy this inside chat with one of the world's most dynamic wine educators. Now, Joe is a consultant and advisor for wine businesses, helping to communicate the story of wine and wine culture to broader audiences. Enjoy!
The Vint Podcast is a production of the Vint Marketplace, your source for the highest quality stock of fine wines and rare whiskies. Visit www.vintmarketplace.com.
Cheers!
Past Guests Include: William Kelley, Peter Liem, Eric Asimov, Bobby Stuckey, Rajat "Raj" Parr, Erik Segelbaum, André Hueston Mack, Emily Saladino, Konstantin Baum, Landon Patterson, Heather Wibbels, Carlton "CJ" Fowler, Boris Guillome, Christopher Walkey, Danny Jassy, Kristy Wenz, Dan Petroski, Buster Scher, Andrew Nelson, Jane Anson, Tim Irwin, Matt Murphy, Allen Meadows, Altan Insights, Tim Gaiser, Vince Anter, Joel Peterson, Megan O'Connor, Adam Lapierre, Jason Haas, Ken Freeman, Lisa Perrotti-Brown, Skyler Weekes, Mary Gorman McAdams, Nick King, Bartholomew Broadbent, Nick Jackson, Dillon Sykes, Mark Bell, David Keck, John Szabo, Channing Frye, Jay Hack, Julia Harding, Austin Hope, Michael Minnillo, Jermaine Stone, Jim Madsen, Santiago Archaval, Tom Smith, Sebastian Lowa, Matthew Crafton, Tony Parker, Andrew Caillard, Mike Veseth, Madeline Puckette, John Olney, Matthew Kaner, Amelia Singer, Chess Martin, and more!
You're listening to the Vint Podcast, where we bring you interviews and stories from around the world of wine and spirits, from winemakers and critics to sommeliers and master distillers. We'll explore the people and businesses who are instrumental in shaping the future of today's food and drinks culture. Enjoy the show. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Vint Podcast. I'm here with Billy Galanco, who's wearing all navy today, ready to get into this exclusive interview.
Speaker 2:Yep, I'm here with Brady, who's colorblind, because I'm wearing a black shirt, but that's fine. Yeah, no, I'm back in with a great interview following our great Thanksgiving. I hope your weekend with your minimal plans was great as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's see what we do. Yeah, I had dinner with the family, got to go deer hunting that was good with my father and best buddy, Got some meat for the fridge and had some. I always say it wrong, but carmenier, Carmenier, how do you say it?
Speaker 2:Carmenier yeah, carmenier yeah.
Speaker 1:And that was good too. It was like 2011,. Carmenier and Merlot, I think, in California, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was nice. We had our Thanksgiving and then I actually did a higher end Roan tasting over the weekend after we got back from Thanksgiving. So over Thanksgiving we actually had I think the most interesting wine was actually at my cousin's house Marcus, my uncle's house with my cousin. They had a cake bread cellars wine I can't remember the exact name, it was like one of their fanciful names, but it was Sera and Pinot Noir from the North Coast of Sonoma. Oh, wow, interesting. Yeah, it was really cool.
Speaker 2:I think that the earthiness from the Sera really came through and complimented the Pinot. It was their Rubayat bottling from 2019. And that was like it was surprisingly, yeah, earthy, complex, nice concentration. I was surprised, but it was really nice. Yeah, that was basically the highlight. We also had a single vineyard bottling from Domaine Drouhan, from Eola Amity, actually one of their vineyards. So that was probably my second favorite when I slightly really high acid. It was so lean I forget how lean Eola Amity wines can be, so that was cool, yeah. Then, when I got back from Pennsylvania, I went to a tasting a Rhone tasting and I got to try a couple of things I've always wanted to, or at least wines from places I've always wanted to, so I had my first two Hermitage wines. I had a in my first chave Hermitage, so it was a young, a baby wine. Domaine Jean-Louis Chave obviously Hermitage Blanc from 2020, which was pretty cool. I went and listened to the Summleys Atlas of Wine. There's whatever Raj Par's book is on Atlas of Taste.
Speaker 2:Atlas of Taste. I listened to that on the way to the tasting and back, and they basically, like Chave himself, doesn't drink the Blancs until they're at least 15 years old. When they're young, they're like a fat baby, just rolling around with different notes.
Speaker 2:I was like I get it, I get it now. I just had this fat baby. That was cool. I was really excited. Now I have to try an aged one, and luckily I still don't understand why.
Speaker 2:But Chave's wines, even like after it I'm after age and from Hermitage, are still really affordable when you compare to the top wines from other regions, both Blanc and the Rouge. A couple other ones I had they had a Cornasse there. I had my first Charpeau-Tier Hermitage as well. That was also young, it was 2020, la Pavillon bottling, but that was really cool. Nice, lot of depth and complexity. That one was a fairly expressive even for a young guy at 2020. And then there was a 2019 Domain View Telegraph the La Croix bottling, and then a 2006 Chateau Beau Castel Chattanoeuf from the 2001 Clos de Pops Chattanoeuf de Pops, which both of those are really, really cool to see an aged Chattanoeuf de Pops. I hadn't really experienced many of those before and we sell a lot of both of those producers on the marketplace. So it was nice for me to be able to start tasting more of these things that everybody's buying on a regular basis. So that was cool. That was the highlights of my tasting weekend.
Speaker 1:Nice, yeah, yeah, trying to set up a whiskey tasting night with my buddy for the new year to try and drink through some of these open bottles that we both have. So more on that, maybe we'll have you over.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. If you want to wait till next June, I'll be in DC for a wedding, why Then I can join? Awesome, well, I guess for the the what we're drinking this weekend, I'm just going to leave it with Chattanoeuf de Pops, even though I probably will do this in a couple of weeks. Again, it's what my mom's father apparently traditionally drank with Christmas dinner, so it's a great holiday wine. So anybody just stocking up, I think the red fruits when it's young and it's nice and vibrant and juicy, and then it can evolve well when it gets old. I think it's a perfect combo for whatever you're drinking this holiday season. So I think everybody should should go find some.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. I went on a kind of kick of buying a bunch of gigal wines over the, I guess, over the summer, and might break in something, something there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you could cover the north and the southern room there with this, with his bottle Actually probably cover everywhere, yeah.
Speaker 1:They basically have the whole area covered. Do you want to intro, joe?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So our guest today is is somebody I've been looking forward to chatting with for a long time. It's Joe Fattorini. I first saw him on the wine show, which was a British based wine TV show. That's one of the the bigger wine shows available. I'm pretty sure now I watch it on Amazon before it used to be available on some other platforms. But in the show basically I started watching it because my passions are somewhere wine history, but also wine travel.
Speaker 2:In the show they have a couple of characters not characters actors come on. In the first season is Matthew, recent Matthew good James, pure foils in the second season, and then I forgot the actor in the third season. But basically there are these guys who come on and Joe Fattorini is the hub of which the episodes go around, so he helps direct them in a little bit of their tasting. He sends them on some assignments to taste in whatever country that season based in. So it's Italy in the first season, france in the second season, portugal on this third season.
Speaker 2:And then Joe goes around along with his partner Amelia, who's the other wine expert, to taste in different countries and regions around the world. So he at some point he goes to China, south Africa, he goes to Germany, he goes to certain places in France, but while he's there he tries to do something local to the culture. So in China he's pairing wines and Mosul he attempts to help harvest grapes by walking up and down like the really steep vineyards, which is hilarious because he's a smaller guy carrying a bunch of grapes. At one point he gets hammered into a barrel and he sits in a barrel to see what it would be like to be smuggled in a barrel for a while. So anyway, he does some cool stuff and I always love his little bits on the episode.
Speaker 2:So after the wine show he's gone on to become a wine consultant, a marketing guru, and really advise companies around the world, and I thought it would be a really entertaining guest to have and he did not disappoint. It was a great interview. We went on for almost an hour, so I hope everybody gets extraps in because the conversation it doesn't seem like an hour. You'll be listening and it'll just be over pretty quickly, hopefully. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and make sure you click down in the description and see a video of Joe bathing in red wine, which we'll include down there.
Speaker 2:That he claims helped him get the role in the show, and he explains that later in the episode as well. But yeah, without any further ado, here is Joe Fathrini. All right, we are here with a very special guest, joe Fathrini. Thank you so much for joining us today, joe.
Speaker 4:I'm not that special. I'm just quite sitting and talking about wine with fun people and I'm delighted to be here. I feel quite special. Thank you for having me along.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no worries, I was a big wine show fan. They would have. The audience will have heard us talk about the wine show in the past and also in the intro here, so I'm fanboying out having you on the podcast in the first place. But can you talk a little bit about your life, how you got into wine? Give us a little background before we dive into what you're doing and how you actually got on and started the wine show.
Speaker 4:Completely, because I am one of those traditional wine merchant people in the UK who, well, you end up joining the wine trade because you don't join the army. I wasn't good enough to go and become an army officer and go to Santerst. So what do you do? You weren't holy enough for a priest or clever enough to be a lawyer, so you end up going and becoming a wine merchant because it's socially acceptable and you get to wear red trousers and your parents generally approve. But you don't need to be that bright to go and do it.
Speaker 4:As long as you remember the vintages, I was always quite into wine as a child. I was seven when my grandfather poured some. It was a Latour 45. So the armistice vintage of Latour, which now is worth tens of thousands of pounds and dollars. It's insanely expensive. So, yeah, I joined the wine trade not long after university as a failed soldier, and I was really.
Speaker 4:I am a wine merchant, I'm not a wine broadcaster. You get people who go and they say I want to be a wine communicator, wine writer. Not that that's a bad thing, I'm not one of them. I was just this dude who went around and I sold wine in Scotland for a long time I actually sold, not wine, in Scotland.
Speaker 4:I used to sell hard liquor that's what you call it in America hard spirits to really, really rough pubs, including one where I wasn't able to come in one day and I asked why not? And she said we found a dead terrorist in the lavatories and this guy had been murdered overnight and they were quite famous as a kind of fundraising venue for the Ulster Defence Association. So the Protestant terrorists in Northern Ireland. So he was quite hairy at times. Actually Some of it was rough, but I had lots of fun and then got into wine, wine merchanting. Years later, years later, I then was off the wine show and by fluke I had done some TV when I was young, not really wine TV kind of food and things so I had done stock, but only ever in Scotland. So it was a bit of a surprise. Did you ever? Have you ever heard about how I actually got the gig in the first place?
Speaker 2:No, no, I would love to Soon.
Speaker 4:This is a long time ago now, but I was on a press trip. I was writing a newspaper column for the Herald, scotland's biggest paper. I got this. Somebody said would you come to Argentina and try wine? So I think it was a big Argentine wine awards. It was the first ever Argentine wine awards. So anyway, we tried it and at the end they said oh, thank you all very much for tasting all these young Malbecs.
Speaker 4:All our teas were black, we were all slightly having a Malbec and at the end they took us to a spa and I had a bath of wine and I quite enjoyed this. So I remember I put this little camera at the end of the bath. I'm completely naked in this red bath of Bernada. Anybody's ever drunk Bernada, but you're nice to bathe in. So I'm in this bath and of course I'm quite squiffy because it's been a few days and we're just all drinking happily and I just started talking to the camera at the end of the bath. This has been marvellous. I'm on the most wonderful side. I've been drinking wine and, look, I'm now actually having a bath in it and I put it on YouTube for quite early days of YouTube and totally forgot that this video was there for 10 years. Nobody watched it for 10 years.
Speaker 4:Ten years later, like the hundredth view, was the producer of the wine show brilliant person, melanie Jaffe, absolutely genius and she had been looking for somebody, not explicitly, but somebody who would be stupid enough to have a bath of wine and still talk sensibly about wine, even though they probably had a bit too much to drink. And so, yeah, she got in touch on Twitter and she sent me a DM and said would you like to make this show? And I went yes. I was a bit like what's that joke about Chevy Chase's voicemail? And it says hi, I'm Chevy Chase, yes, I'll do it. And it was a little bit the same Hi, joe, we're making a TV show. Yes, I'll do it. And I let to the chance.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll link your wine bath video below I see it has four below the episode. I see it has 4,000 views already which I had a YouTube video with 4,000 views, but I think it was just me playing a video game when I was six. You said that you had your first experience. Well, maybe it wasn't your first experience, but the experience with the 1945. It seems every guest we've talked to who's had an experience with a World War era wine from France is now massive in the wine trade. One. Why was it that you were drinking such an incredible stored wine at that time? I guess it maybe wasn't the thought of the way it is today. But how does that happen? How does one start? What was the culture of your family such that you were able to have access to something like that when you were younger?
Speaker 4:The amazing thing was how different the wine trades, the wine world, is today to. But then I'm quite old now I'm not 50, so I'm not that sort of age, but it was worth that time Certainly. When I was very little, an A normal, a very big airquest, a normal person could go and drink first-growth clatter as a bit of a treat once a year or twice a year. My parents were wine drinkers but they weren't great wine collectors. They would have wine in the house. I remember as a child there would be Paul Masson's California carafe, one of the all-time great mass brands. So they enjoyed wine in these new bits but they never really went gangbusters for it.
Speaker 4:My grandfather was more of a collector and my uncle, my dad's brother, was a white merchant for much of his career actually. So he really was quite into wine and he's my godfather and so we used to talk about wine. In fact, my aunt's husband, who was an admiral, he also was a wine collector and still is, and has a lovely range. There were people in the family who were wine folk. I think my grandfather had just bought some interesting vintages at a point in time when he didn't actually have to spend that money to go and buy really amazing vintages. You look at 45 vintage wines now and they're really the only ones of those kind of wartime vintages that are still drinking. I had 43 the feet a couple of times but to be honest it's fallen off now. It's interesting to drink as a curio, but it's not great wine and also every year there are fewer and fewer of those things. So yeah, I think when my grandfather died I remember we drank back so we had some claret a British phrase, or red bordeaux. We had some claret from the 20s, I think.
Speaker 4:When he died and in fact we found an old bottle at his funeral this is going to sound mortal and you're all going to think it's just terrible. At his funeral we went to his cellar and we said, well, let's find the oldest bottle of wine we can, because it's what he would have wanted. So we all smoked some of his scars his great cigar smoker and then we found a bottle of port with no label and I think it was from 1886. I think it was the year of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, which was a thing, so it was a jubilee. It wasn't a particularly good vintage, but people had it. So we all just sat around and drank this small port.
Speaker 4:It is a real thing British country houses. I don't know if I've got the points when it's in a country house, but finding some really old bottle of wine and I suppose because of the culture of wine you often find somebody and their grandfather will have had something and it seems amazing If anybody wants to. There's that lovely scene in the book now TV series and film Bright's Head Revisited and there's the lovely scene when Sebastian and Charles drink the old pre-war as in First War vintages in the house and there was a sort of British tradition. The oldest wine we had was actually on the show series one episode, one I get to drink 1798 Vandekonstance. That was the oldest wine we'd ever had on the shows I was like, well, just one I've ever had. So that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow, oh, that's a perfect transition. In fact, do you want to explain a little bit about what the wine show was from? I guess I will have given an overview, but that and then your role in it. It was interesting your parts. Also your part educator, doing like in the wine showcase. I also want to know who came up with the term showcase and showcase at the same time. I love that and your travels. I want to talk about theirs as well.
Speaker 4:I take no real credit for making the wine show because actually it was entirely down to this amazing producer, melanie Jaffe. Melanie has had a phenomenal career making food TV and she was approached by the two executive producers who said we have this idea for a wine TV show and actually quite rightly she said that's a terrible idea because, having been a food TV producer and work with people like Heston Blumenthal and Raymond Blanc and really great chefs, good food looks pretty good and so you can make it look great. Good wine looks pretty much the same as really epically terrible wine. There isn't a massive difference between the two. So I think her original view was no, I'm not really interested in doing this. Gradually I think she came around, she sat on it and she thought this idea through. What she could then see was the idea of actually, could you go make something that really appeal to the millions of people around the world who just quite like a glass of wine? Actually, if you think about what they're fascinated in, they love the idea of where it comes from. They do quite like the idea that it is in lovely places. Interestingly, last week somebody told me the number one reason for going on a wine tourism experience is that the town nearby looks nice. It's not actually the one. The number two reason is it's in lovely countryside. Actually, drinking the wine is only the third most important reason why somebody does this.
Speaker 4:I think Mel had this instinctive sense if you went to really lovely places and you took people who had a genuine friendship, and that's the actors who are in the show. So really the whole thing is built around, I say the three of us. There are actually a whole group of us, because we have Amelia Singer, who's a great wine expert in Britain, up and coming educator not up and coming very established educator now, but she was climbing at the time. Janis Robinson joined us in series two. We'd have interesting guests all the time, but the idea was you'd have at the heart of these two actors who are genuinely friends. So Matthew Reese from the Americans and brothers and sisters, and then Matthew Good, who's in Downton Abbey and the Crown and so on, and they are genuinely just good mates and they go on lovely trips around Italy or France, I think. We then subsequently had James Purefoy from Rome, hps, rome, altered carbon he was very good in that. And then series three, dominic West from the wire and the affair and now Prince stroke King Charles in the crown. So they're all kind of mates and they go around it and my job was to be the bizarre ringmaster who said I need you to go here and send them on. But also then I would go away to somewhere weird, not weird. I'd go to the United States or go to Chile or China or Thailand and go. They make wine in Thailand. Yes, actually I'll go and visit. So I think I probably became the world best traveled wine tourists by the end of it.
Speaker 4:I think we've been to 20 countries and I say the end of it, we could come back. We've made three seasons, we made a little extra bit and there's certainly no reason why we couldn't. But COVID, we lost our stride a little bit and COVID those things out. One of those things I often say to people is we have this slightly weird rule that when we made it, I remember we said to each other we hope that wine people don't like this. So we said that's really weird and it's a wine TV program. And the theory was that actually if you made a program that really, really appealed to wine people, maybe a million people would watch it, but then if it didn't appeal to them, but it appealed to everybody else who drinks wine. 100 million people would watch it. Well, we now know I don't know exactly, but around 100 million people have audience for the wine show, so it's 110 countries.
Speaker 4:And there were people that when the first reviews came out, I remember Jansis Robinson in the UK. She really liked this, and there's Oz Clark, or great critics. He was a fan. And all these people are going no, we really like this. And I was oh no, this is terrible. And then there was one critic I won't name him because he's quite a good friend. He was like no, this is terrible. He was very nice about me. He said I like Joe and Amelia, they're great, but I think this is a terrible program. And I was so delighted because actually, if he really loved it, the 100 million wouldn't have done and that was who he wanted to go after.
Speaker 2:I think that makes a lot of sense. There's so many wine shows, or not wine shows like wine, like the movie Psalm, for example. I really like it. I try to tell other people nobody wants to watch it because it's literally about some ways just like tasting wine and saying tasting notes. So I tried to show my fiance. She got partway through that movie and turned it off. We've watched every season of the wine show multiple times, so that goes to your point that we can both enjoy it.
Speaker 4:Two quite early people who I remember thinking we do have a hit on our hands, we'd made something where the film was. I think we'd been to Chile, so it's very early on. Chile was one of the first places we went to and the direct that one was a lovely guy called Carl Preckerser. Carl, if anybody's ever seen it, made a very famous. You're going to think this sounds mad. He made a British surf movie, a cult British surf movie called Blue Juice with Jörn McGregor and Catherine Zeta-Jones in it. It's a great film and he not only directed it, he wrote it as a student. It was his breakthrough movie. When he came back he had all the footage and he just said I was quite interested just to see if I could cut together like the film, just to see how it would work. So just on his own thing, just cut together a really early kind of rough cut of what he thought the film would look like. And his wife came in and watched it and she said I love that, I really like it. And he said what struck him is that his wife, as T-Total, doesn't drink at all. And if the very first person she was essentially the first person ever to see an episode of the one show. If a T-Total acquires likes it. We're onto something. I probably shouldn't say exactly where, but there is an Arab prince who I've become quite friendly with and he adores this and he genuinely doesn't drink a drop. He says he goes to night places. We have a rule and this is great for wine. I'm going to give away one of our secrets about the useful One of the rules.
Speaker 4:When we used to write or chart out episodes, you couldn't go oh, this is a nice producer, I'd really like to visit them. You couldn't even say I really like these wines or these white people need to know more about them. You had to pitch it in this really specific way. So you're only allowed three sentences and if you're ever thinking of doing wine content, anyone listening here is doing wine content. This is a really good model. Sentence one has to have a question in it. Sentence two has to have two numbers. Sentence three has to have a powerful visual image.
Speaker 4:So actually, I was with some people last week and we drove past one of those bulls on the side of the motorway in Spain and I said to somebody how have you ever wondered why there are so many big bulls, bull billboards on the side of the motorway in Spain and they said, yes, actually now I have an arc. I've got a question I have to answer. Good stories have an arc. Actually, there are 92 of them and they are between 7 and 14 meters tall and they're adds for this brand of wine called Dos Buon Vetrano and they're now a Spanish national monument. You can't knock them down.
Speaker 4:I said, in the final scene of Big Ass Lunas' film Hamon, hamon, the protagonist and the villain fight to the death, naked I have to say, and they're jolly handsome men battering each other with hand bones and just when you think that the villain is going to win, lightning strikes the ball and the testicles fall off, land on the villain's head and kill him. And I remember pitching this to the wide show, the reduces. This is one of those three things. It's a question. I've got two numbers. Those are very powerful, very powerful visual image at the end. That would be how we would pitch every story Now. I could probably now go back and look at each of the little films it made and say, yeah, I could tell you what the question is. And there's the two numbers, so people have got a sense of scale of this thing and then, actually, that was the amazing image that comes out at the end of it.
Speaker 2:I really like that. I didn't really when you put that. It sounds difficult to do when you first laid it out, but then the way you described it, I think it makes a lot of sense. Before I let Brady have an asked question, though, I do want to ask about the specific wine showcase. Did somebody call it a wine showcase or was it the wine showcase? Because that's something I've always wondered about.
Speaker 4:I remember these discussions. We were all in that villa in the first season when we were in Italy and there were lengthy discussions about it and actually Melanie and I are both terrible kind of English pedants, and so we would get across. I remember there was a lengthy dispute about whether they were attorney generals or attorneys general. We insisted it was attorneys general and we had various of those sort. We had a great thing, because you do a bit where you're talking to the camera, it's known as a piece to camera and we'd say, well, you always say pieces to camera, nobody ever goes piece to cameras.
Speaker 4:And so we would have these long debates and one of the things that came out of it was we knew we wanted to have the wine show case and that was that thing, that because we would have 12 weps, we would go and have 12 wines. That felt quite nice and rounded and people understand the idea of a nine liter, 12 bottle case. But of course, at the end of it this thing emerged where we knew we were showcasing Italy through this array of different wines that we went and put in and it was that idea that this is a showcase of the country. So we left it hanging a little bit just to which one it was, but I think it did originally start with the wine show case and it emerged later into. This is Italy in a box.
Speaker 2:Nice, I'm glad to finally get to the bottom of that.
Speaker 1:Joe. What are some of the? You mentioned Thailand and some of these kind of obscure places in your travels and the time you spent doing the show. What sort of were the? Were there any commonalities that stood out between sort of these obscure regions in terms of what you discover when you went to those places?
Speaker 4:Yeah, there were. When you got to this. There were some regions where you go to California and you know what to expect. You go to Burgundy and know what to expect.
Speaker 4:One of the commonalities that came out of visiting, in some cases, the grandest and best known regions is actually how incredibly rural they are. We forget that wine is this very agricultural product. This is made essentially by farmers who their life and the rhythms of their lives is farming, and although they're terribly storied and often very grand, luxurious names that we think of as being like Chanel and I've just finished a really interesting book actually about luxury and one of those things that you can see in the sort of way that the evolution of luxury is that we've automated it and we can churn out ends of thousands of Chanel handbags and endless amounts of Louis Vuitton and blockage, and there are very few people Hermes is probably one of them. There aren't that many, though, who really maintain this original kind of craftsman, craftsman's ethos In wine. You can't get away from that. People don't know that there are very big producers, but certainly when it comes to the sort of wine producers we know and love, they are, by and large, farmers and they live in pretty small towns and then when you go to somewhere like Bosnia you're in towns where it's more rural villages and they face the same problems and the same things that come around.
Speaker 4:There were some really odd kind of quirky parts. One of the things that was really quirky was remember in Thailand we were discussing the great varieties that they had and we never really got into that. We always had to think don't really go into the minutiae of wine making, essentially unless you can taste it in the glass or it really exposes some curiosity and one of the things they came out with one was it's so wet in the atmosphere that the branches start growing roots and you get these air roots. They're called because the plant doesn't know it's not underground because the air is so moist. The other was that they grow lots of a great variety called rondo, and rondo is really common in Sweden, where I am right now, and England and parts of Germany, and I was like that could not be more different from Thailand. The guy went they're all rainy places and it's not the heat or the sun, it's much that these are all places where it's very rainy. And then you realise there's this weird commonality with vineyards in southern Sweden, near Malmö and Helsingborg, and some guy going wine in the tropics in Thailand. That was a sort of bizarre one.
Speaker 4:So often people say what was your favourite place? They all have their own charms. The one that reduced me to tears probably was Georgia, and I just felt like I'd gone home and it was a magical, wonderful place. I was to go and make film in somewhere else, but we never went to New Zealand, but actually I'd go to Armenia first. There's something about going to those really original sites of where wine comes from. That is very, very special, very moving. When you get there and it's in there, it's in people's soul. Wine is so deep within them, it's extraordinary, they say. It runs through them like a stick of rock.
Speaker 2:I like that when you were in China and you were having to pair wines with some Chinese food. Have you had more practice with that since then, or did you find that? I know you've stated on the show it was challenging, but my fiance is Taiwanese and she's gotten very much into wine since we've been dating, but it's always interesting trying to pair those foods, and her parents still won't really drink wine in general, much less with food. So I thought that was a fascinating episode as well, or that piece.
Speaker 4:That was so interesting and it was one of those rooms where, for me, my wife is Swedish, not from Taiwan, not from China I didn't know enough about the culture and one of those things I was really interested to do was to not turn up and do the very quick kind of shorthand and all the glib remarks and so on, because I just had this sense there was something really interesting the contrast again to Georgia, where it's absolutely embedded in people's souls and they've been doing it for a very long time. I know in China people have made wine and they certainly made rice wine for a very long time. It's actually, up to a degree, great wine as well. But what was so fascinating was the way that this culture had emerged of people who, I tell you now, I have never met people who are such ardent and determined wine aficionados, people who did sound like a glacier, but people who put to wine appreciation like their parents had made them play piano. It was that sense that there was just this sense. I want to know everything about this and there were people who were just amazingly well informed. What was striking?
Speaker 4:The two things I really came away with, one was that we cannot assume that all cultures all around the world all approach something with same sensibility. The sense of tannin texture was so much more explicit and important for people. And now it's not so much as I was amazed more that I'm ashamed of how little I spend talking about and thinking about texture and the lack of nuance that I had in the way that texture works. And, of course, obviously, tea culture allows this and I drink a lot of tea, but I just drink one sort of tea and it comes out of a bag and I have it with milk, so you don't really notice it. The nuance there was extraordinary and, of course, the other thing was it was a different view, yang Lu, and it was amazing to me and he was really good at guiding me through.
Speaker 4:It was that sense that you're quite individualistic in the West. You think about my experience, what combination of food and why will work closest for me? And of course, he's in a communitarian culture where the most important thing is how do I make the people at this table, particularly the most important person, again hierarchical and communitarian? How do I make them feel most comfortable about the food and wine pairing that we have, which, of course, is at the heart of being a great sommelier and actually, if the combination high tan in red and incredibly fiery chili actually makes the taste for some people slightly raw and aggressive and to a degree unpleasant, kind of don't care, because she over there is the most important guest and I want her to go and have the best, most important, most brilliant experience. And that was one of those great revelations. It was about a worldview as much as a gastronomic view, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we talk a lot on the pod folks about how obviously the culture of wine, the people in place and all of that have much more to do with the experience that someone has with that wine than just what's on the palate. I think that there's maybe ebbs and flows in wine culture, especially among critics and sommeliers and such that either get that right or get that wrong. So it's really cool when you're in your media and the approach that you take, that you make sure to maintain that thread.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and actually obviously this is not my day job. I go away and do lots of other bits of pieces. One of the big pieces of work I did I lived in California for a while after Series 3 and worked for a wine tech startup and one of the things that we were able to do and it slightly came out of my experience because obviously you listen to people all the time and I was social listening, listening to what viewers were saying I just had this sort of sense that actually the flavor of wine often wasn't that important for you. I know it is.
Speaker 4:I have this beef about palate matching. I don't buy the idea of palate matching, largely because I believe my wife is Taiwanese. We've got very different kind of patterns of palate. We've got these very different palettes. Actually, what matters to us is that it's something we can both enjoy, so the fact that it matches one person's palate is redundant. I won't go and share these things and obviously my palate. When I am sitting watching the TV on a Wednesday night with my wife, in a sense, what my palate wants then is very different to my palate at a wedding, if I'm wanting to toast a champagne or if I'm out for dinner and I really want to impress someone and one of the things we went and did we would test.
Speaker 4:The great thing about being in digital is you can test all kinds of stuff. I've amazed more people don't test stuff, particularly in wine. People just seem to have a thesis about the way people enjoy wine and they go. Well, my thesis is almost certainly right, so I'll just run with that for a piece. I worked on the basis that I was almost certainly wrong, because I probably belong to a slightly weird subgroup of about four to five percent of the population who are really into wine to some degree.
Speaker 4:So what we did is we tested tasting notes that were built. Number one, around textural words so rich, full-bodied, refined, elegant Actually a lot of the words you're not really meant to use, I don't know. Elegant is by and large banned in the wine and spirits education trials. The second sample we used tested food with flavor words strawberries and vanilla and oak and all those kinds. And then the third was based around use cases and we had quite a lot of fun with those, because you'd say it's great with barbecue or it's nice with a rack of lamb, but actually you complain more with it. We would say it's a great insider's choice, or, I could, trade secret, or made by a female wine maker, which in a sense speaks to a use case of I'm the kind of person who likes to support a female wine maker. Great, I tell you one term that works really well veteran owned in the US. It's a really interesting term and people love the idea. Oh, I'm buying from a veteran, that's great. And the results were really clear. By some margin was like three or four times.
Speaker 4:The most powerful terms are texture words because largely they describe people Rich, full bodies, elegant, lie, fresh. They're all words you could apply to a person. Number two is the use case. It's kind of family supper. I got told off because I use the word midweek supper and some of the other states of what the hell's a midweek supper? Should we try taco Tuesdays? They said, yeah, let's try that, that will probably work. It's essentially the English for taco Tuesdays. And way down at the bottom was flavor words and what that came slightly out of doing the wine show and some other bits of research, which was that I think the way people engage with wine is much more human and it's much more emotive than wine people sometimes give it credit for, and we did try to bring that out on the show.
Speaker 2:I think that's probably a good transition over towards what you do now. But before we completely pivot, I want to know. I want you to explain to the audience your coffee test for people's palates and then maybe discuss that a little bit, because I'm not 100% sure I agree with it. But I'd like you to explain it and then we can discuss.
Speaker 4:I can tell you, the joy of the coffee test is that not absolutely everybody agrees with it, which is great, and actually we did it in the show even though I had that. So anyway, what was the coffee test? So the idea is that you get a group of people together and you would say how does somebody take that coffee? And I got my fingers up here. You would largely have your fingers, my one finger, if you are espresso, no sugar. You are about 25% of the population who has relatively few taste buds, although interestingly, this group often includes people who are really really into wine. But the idea is that you have a quite robust palate that can take lots of tan in and high acidity and kind of big flavours. About half the population fit in the middle because they drink things like flat whites and cappuccinos, coffee with milk or black coffee with sugar, and that accounts for the popularity of those I was going to say basic bitch middle of the road Varieties like Merlot and Tony Guine, pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc and lightly oaked Chardonnay, and that's why they're popular, because half the population quite likes. The third group are people who drink things like lattes or don't drink coffee at all, find it's too better Insist on drinking a cup of slaggy milky tea.
Speaker 4:And this is this group that are known as kind of hypersensitive taste. They have lots of taste buds, and it's not that the taste buds do anything different, it's just with having so many of them it's like somebody's pranked up the volume so that Barolo just tastes too loud. It's like listening to Ozzy Osbourne in his prime stretching it about black Sabbath, when actually it's deafening for you. There is this sort of weird anomaly, and in the show we had an amazing comedian, jeannie Asheré, and she just really hated coffee and she just wanted to drink Sprite and chocolate all the time. And she fit it into this idea of the hypersensitive sweets, which is this idea that they're very, very sensitive but actually just really adore sweet things. Now the idea is you go and do the coffee test and then I can say well, depending how you taste your coffee, well, I think you're going to like such and such. At which point I suspect you're going to say well, billy, what's your take on it? And then I'll tell you a really interesting piece of research that came out of it.
Speaker 2:Well, I think part of it is that I like espresso and black coffee. But that originated from me just trying to avoid calories in my daily coffee, so it was just like a flavor thing. So now I have to go back and try all of those other styles just to see. So that was my thing is, I can taste nuance, I'm a good taster. But then, now that you've explained it, I'm like maybe you're right, because I do high acid in the espressos and in black coffee in general. So I don't know, maybe I'm coming around.
Speaker 4:There's an interesting kind of nuance to the whole thing. One of the ones, actually the one of the really killer tests if somebody's not quite sure where they are, you simply ask them if they can taste the difference between diet coke and coke. Now I am a tolerant taster. I've got relatively few taste buds. I could not ever tell you the difference between diet coke and coke. They just taste exactly the same to me. More sensitive tasters saying, oh my goodness, yes, diet coke is all metallic and it's got this kind of weird jarring character to it. That kind of tells you that you have a sensitive palate. There are two interesting takeaways. One is that people just learn. You get people who have very sensitive palate and they just kind of learn to go and enjoy high tanning and high acid wines. The other was an amazing piece of research. I mean, it's a guy called Tim Haney, actually the American master of wine, who came up with this idea. He wanted to take credit for it. It's Tim Haney's idea.
Speaker 4:We did a very early iPhone app and the very first iteration of the iPhone in London. We used this methodology and it was to guide people to choices that they might quite like. One of the quirks of it was. In those days you could do really good cheer location, as nobody knew that we were all scanning you on your phones. We found that there was a group of regular users of the app who were mostly middle-aged business men who worked in the city of London and they lived in San Quest, london. It's a very common thing it's quite a wealthy affluent place to live in San Quest and then they would all go into the city to work. Their palates changed the station. They would go and get to Victoria Station or somewhere where they were off, to Waterloo, where they would go to go home. Their palates appeared to change literally there.
Speaker 4:What we found was that when they were at home, they were drinking Australian Shiras and Merlot and things. When they were at work, of course, they were drinking Clarrots, the old stringy Bordeaux, barolos and so on. Of course. What do you think about? Australian Shiras is the kind of thing you drink at home. It's not particularly status-laden wine. If I'm working in the city and I've just done a deal and we've got some guy to invest £10 million in whatever they've got going and a property deal, I'm not going to say, well, let's go and have a bottle of Australian Shiras, you're going to say let's go and drink some decent Clarrots, let's drink some smart Burgundy, and so you then lean into those bits. There is this massive cultural overlay that sits above the whole thing, which I think is actually becoming more and more prevalent now.
Speaker 4:Nobody really drinks natural wine for the taste. There are certainly some natural wines Nobody drinks for the taste. People drink it because I belong to the natural wine tribe. I'm a natural wine kind of person. That's why I drink natural wine, telling somebody well, you've got a palette that really goes from natural wine. Billy's loving this, aren't you? You know what I mean, brady.
Speaker 1:I do know what you mean, but you might make Billy leave the group chat here.
Speaker 4:Have I called you a defense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Billy sold a wine cellar because the only drinks wines that he can consume in the first five days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would beg to differ some of those. There are some natural wines that are good. There are five bars within walking distance that only serve that here, so I think somebody's enjoying it. But yeah, no, I'll let Brady have his moment of year of gloating.
Speaker 4:Talk to somebody before and I think it's right that Chateau Latour is a natural wine. He's realized that's great statistic that according to the UN, london is technically a forest. Yeah yeah. I think Latour is technically a natural wine and yet it's not a natural natural wine. It just isn't. It's not one of those things that falls into that kind of class. And then there's a lot of discussion in the UK at the moment about a new group.
Speaker 4:They're called Bopis and it's short for Bohemian peasants. And the thing about Bopis is they all keep bees in their garden and they have really the West Smott and it's all about rewilding their property and all this kind of. They all happen to be the daughters of Earls and stons of Dukes. Like Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, her brother is kind of a Bopi. Well, he's also a fabulously wealthy guy and being into natural wine is actually a better way now of showing your status and your class than just going and buying crystal.
Speaker 4:Anyone can drink crystal. It's seen as a bit cheesy now. It's basic bitch fashion. Actually it's a more nuanced take on wine is to go and drink natural. You're absolutely right. I think there's natural wines that taste fabulous. I've got some friends who make just gloriously brilliant natural wines and there are many that I go and drink. I'm aware that some people are drinking them not because they taste great. It's because that's the vibe that they want to go and give off. And equally, they sometimes drink some stuff. Where you go you do realize this just tastes of horse urine. They. It's possible to get past that because of the moniker that it has on it, because it's natural.
Speaker 4:I think that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I was going to say technically, drc, I guess, is a natural wine too. No, we have these bars that you do see the crowds there, just so they can say they're at a natural wine bar. I think that's for sure. And you see more of these places trying to integrate more of these traditional wines that are just made in a low intervention manner and introduce people that way. But if you were to tell them they were just going to a conventional wine bar, I guarantee you half the people around here wouldn't go. So I think that makes a lot of sense, and if you I have to tell you there's a brilliant story.
Speaker 4:If anybody gets the chance, you have to go and look this guy up, and actually there's a couple of these books you can find on the Google library stuff so you can flip through them for free. It's a guy called P Morton Shand. Now nobody remembers P Morton Shand anymore. However, his granddaughter is the Queen of England, Camilla Charles's wife, the Queen of England, Queen of England, Queen of the Irish Kingdom and all its realms and Commonwealth. Her grandfather, her father, was a wine merchant. Her grandfather was a wine writer.
Speaker 4:This guy, P Morton Shand, who was appalling, he was quite the ladies man and in fact in one of his divorce hearings the judge said he rather hoped that the negative press would calm his ardour, which is such a great lie. But he wrote these various books the amazing thing about that worldview when he wrote in the 30s. His first was a book called A Book of French Wines and his second book was called A Book of Wines Other Than French, which captures the entire world of wine in the 1930s. And then he wrote a third book called Bacchus, such and such. If you look up P Morton Shand, it's the Bacchus book and he hangs on in there about natural wine.
Speaker 4:He keeps going on and on about how wines have to be natural and he talks about other wines prostituting themselves. Such great term of phrase. What he was referring to was sparkling wine and fortified, and so actually in the 30s, natural wine just meant something you haven't done much to. I think he would have probably considered 19 crimes to be not natural wine. I think anybody using mega purple or bourbon barrels would be considered to be prostituting it. I think many people today would. But his view that the wine was only ever still straightforward, fermented, broadly untouched kind of products. And we are returning to that a little bit. Petnat, in a way, is a return to the idea that it's too confected, it's too contrived to make a champagne methods sparkling wine. That's go back to being bohemian peasants and thinking that Rousseau was right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to mention that there's definitely a sort of a trend where you know, if you decide, before you try something, that you're supposed to like it or you really want to like it, and then you go and try it. If you don't like it, you just assume you don't understand it. Versus this is bad.
Speaker 4:I think it's maybe something that undergirds like a lot of what we're talking about yeah, can we get rid of that sort of sense of well? You just don't understand this.
Speaker 4:If you don't like it, you don't like it. I do love that sort of split and when I did the MW, the master wine, I never finished it. I got divorced. Actually it's very common, but I think it's something like a third of everybody who starts the MW gets divorced. I certainly did. It was actually cited in the paperwork.
Speaker 4:But one of the things we did then was this sort of idea of the blicks that you can tell whether or not a wine is good, bad or indifferent, irrespective of whether you like it, because it's balanced, have great length, the characteristics in it, the flavors are very intense and it's complex, b-l-i-c. If you give one to three stars ticks, whatever if you like, to each one of those, you can pretty much take everything from full prehouse wine at four ticks to first-grow Bordeaux Grand Cru, burgundy of the finest vintages, which will have 12. Now you might think can you score the entire world of wine within a range of eight? I'm going to tell you. Actually, in the master wine you pretty much can. If you get something that scored four across three ticks, three stars across all those three, it will be amazing. It will be one of the greatest wines you've ever had, certainly once you get ideas, calibration. So a lot of wines you try are eight, nine, maybe even 10, sort of the blicks scale. I've used the example once, twice in the past.
Speaker 4:I quite like Banana Rama. Banana Rama was this terrible 80s. Well, not terrible, I think it was amazing actually because I loved them. There's a little girl band in the 1980s and they go and listen to Robert De Niro's Waiting by Banana Rama, one of the all-time great pop songs. I just love it and.
Speaker 4:But I do recognize it's not very good music and it's shocking. It's teenage pop. I never listen to Wagner because it takes a week to listen to the whole thing and you have to go to Germany to go and listen to it properly and sit in some mad hall. But I do recognize it's one of the greatest composers of all time. On the blick I can recognize, or an equivalent, that Wagner would score very high and Banana Rama would sit very low. I think we have to. Once you recognize that I don't actually have to get it. I'm sure it's very good. It's just not my kind of thing. Actually, over here I quite like Barefoot Merlot. If you like Barefoot Merlot, that's fine, but you can also accept that it's a fold-brie, easy sugar bubblegum pop really in the world of Whites. I hope that people are furious at me saying that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's definitely a difficult tension, but it's kind of like any given moment. We all probably like the taste of ice cream, but you don't want to have it every meal all the time. Ice cream definitely tastes better than a carrot. Probably any given moment you make decisions about what you're looking for.
Speaker 2:Pivoting now into what you are currently doing for wineries and consulting on. Can you talk about what you've just started? You've launched after the wine show? I know it's brand building, it's consulting, it's the whole network of things.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think the thing that it really homes in on is that and I'm not saying this is everybody, but one of those consistent problems is that the wine business is hugely fragmented, and I'm very wary of suggesting that people don't know what they're doing, because actually I think people do know what they're doing. The big problem is that nobody has a water cooler or a coffee machine where they can go and pick up those kind of deep smarts about the wine world and about what they're going and doing or whether it's an exchanging idea. Then you have to go to a wine conference and you don't really get stuff there. You know, we look at what's the difference between treasury wine estates and the sort of work they do and really great family estates. It's that treasury wine estates has a whole team of people who, by working together, come up with really amazing marketing ideas and they execute them very well. And small teams it's often one person it's like the son or the daughter of the winemaker and they've gone away. They might have even gone away to college and you're like, done a course. What they don't have is that sense of being able to share and evolve and kind of evolve things. So I came up with this idea. Well, look, why not go and have somebody who is like your CMO, but for a day a month, two days a month or a week, once, just to come in and do a piece of work? And so there's a whole range of clients, the small actually. I have had one of the biggest wine producers in the world as a client. So sometimes somebody comes up but that was interesting because it came up with a problem. I would have to be very careful when I say but it was a problem in an area in their portfolio where they weren't experts. And they said we actually don't know that much here. We have all these marketing people, but we've been working on a totally different end of the market. We need some want to come in.
Speaker 4:The often the biggest challenge is saying to people you need to position yourself somewhere, you need to mean something for people. Tasting good is massively important and never underestimate and downplay the importance of tasting good. But it's not enough. And actually by the time somebody knows that you've tasted good, they already have to think that you're for them. The moment I'm working, this amazing Bordeaux producer I keep banging on about Bordeaux. It's just because I really like it. I think it's basically all sorts of problems. But it's a really lovely guy and he I won't give a boost because I'll see it elsewhere, but one of his challenges that he is within sight of Chateau Petrus. He has a wine maker from Cheval Blanc and his wine is like $30. And yet it has this extraordinary thing Now, this is luxury for everyone.
Speaker 4:Essentially, somebody's going to buy it, not because of what it tastes like. Now I could tell you what it tastes like and it tastes fantastic. It tastes like really great Merlot. It's got this really lovely character. The 15-vintage is bloody brilliant. The 11 is absolutely superb. So it's this really nice kind of character to the wine.
Speaker 4:That's not going to win anyone over. When you say to somebody this is a bit luxury for everyone and it's the perfect thing if you're wanting to go on a skimming, or you want to go and serve a Christmas, or you want to lay down some really great wine that will just mature brilliantly over the next few years, you'll get into collecting some smartbordow Actually that's what it is. So how do you then go and articulate that? And then it's the case of let's go and find ways of building that up. Sometimes I look in awe at the work other people do and part of my job is to look at what really cool stuff people are doing.
Speaker 4:If anyone's listening to this, go and see the single coolest wine brand that's been launched in the last N years. I think it's absolutely phenomenal. It's called the Rochambeau Club. Rochambeau has, in the sort of French where you spell it, r-o-c-h-a-m-v-e-a-u and I don't want to give too much away. Just go into it, say you're mind-free and go in and you will be confused and you'll be wondering why. One thing you'll be wondering is is there seriously an international pedalo operator association? And you enter this kind of world.
Speaker 4:Now, the amazing thing about the Rochambeau Club is that it takes you into a world before you even know that they sell any wine. It draws you into a complete imaginary universe and the whole thing is totally imaginary. But it's really clever and it's not. It's actually very tiny. It's a tiny little business. It's a small bunch of guys. A wine maker is a flight wine maker, but go and do that. I'm going to leave that for people to enjoy. The Rochambeau Club and it's slightly. And also one of the nice things is it's become the thing to know about. So one of the best bits is not many people know about it and they like that Because then they tell other friends oh like I have done that, told you about it. So this is broadly what I do and I work with a whole array of different people. A lot of it is a combination of.
Speaker 4:I was a wine merchant for three of the biggest, most prestigious. So I worked for a company called Matthew Clark, a massive wine distributor in the UK, then for Bbendum, which was a very innovative wine distributor and ran their London sales team where I met my wife and we were much more funky and we were doing really interesting quirky things. And then I worked for Berry Brothers and Rods, which is probably the world's oldest wine merchants. It's up in 1698.
Speaker 4:Upstairs at Berry Brothers is famously was the embassy of the state of Texas when it was an independent state and when this is a great little quirky fact when Texas was subsumed into the union, there was no longer a legal entity for Berry Brothers to invoice for their last year of being in the building and because they sublet the office and so it was this outstanding debt of about 200 pounds that lasted for several hundred years, and I think years later the governor of Texas came and they had had dinner in the director's dining room and I think cash was handed out to settle this long-term debt. So I worked for really great wine businesses and worked in a quite an innovative series of tech companies. I worked and consult for various tech businesses and then, having been this communicator and the sort of three of them come together and that sort of marketing, strategic marketing, nexus. So getting in touch, I'm delighted to help.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I'm sure a lot of people will. We are bumping up against time here. I don't want to take it too long, but I have. I recently subscribed to the free version of your sub-stack and I wanted to ask you about this one. That's probably the least substantive piece in this latest episode or edition, but is hashtag stem watch just watching people holding wine glasses wrong? Because I also have beef with what's his name? Jeremy Hunt for the taxes on Scotch, as well as wine for investment purposes. So yeah, this one hit home today was nice.
Speaker 4:What can I really want to do is to get a baseball cap by Brady's and I want to brand it with hashtag stem watch across the front sphere. This is going to be my line of merch. Actually, you both got baseball caps on. I should wear my. I should wear a baseball cap. It really came out of this idea as we were making the show.
Speaker 4:I just made a joke out of the fact that wine merchants always hold their glass by the stem and not by the bowl, and I have to tell you it's an element of it. It's a bit meta. I genuinely don't care how people hold their glass. Hold your glass anywhere you want. But it came this quite funny thing where I was like, well, I'm going to be this terribly superior wine merchant who always holds their glass very low by the stem. The number of people who don't get that it's a meta joke is astonishing, because every time I do it, people come back and they say, oh, how disgraceful it was.
Speaker 4:So, yes, in today's sub stack I had I managed to find four photographs of the chancellor of the exchequer, who has put through the biggest duty increase on wine, the biggest rate increase in 50 years. And yet there he is in white tie as well. White tie entails twice holding a wine glass by the bowl. What kind of an oath does that? I do really love English class and so I'm fascinated by English class and the whole thing being snobby I think, is terribly funny. It is a completely confected snobbish joke and you feel free. However, be warned, I will come to your dinner party and I'll be there and I'll be like oh my God, brady, stem watch, hashtag, stem watch. I'll do the hashtag with your fingers properly. But, yes, always hold the glass by the stem, not the bowl. You animals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the evolution, even past holding it by the stem, is holding it by the foot or the base of it. Oh, it is.
Speaker 4:And I tell you who does that? A lot champagne ships, champagne reps, often very, very low down, but only the tomorrow night. I'm going for a stopper with your Maximilian reedle the glass maker and I'm really fascinated. I will be just quietly polishing the lens of my camera to go and photograph anybody for stem watch violations with Maximilian reedle yeah, as little as just barely hanging on as possible.
Speaker 1:Just barely hanging on, it's just the right way, kind of on the nail, because you're holding the base so slightly.
Speaker 4:To your glass Part of this and I think it's one of those areas where he's less prevalent in the United States. I've always loved coming in drinking wine in the United States. I worked for the USPGA tour. There's a slightly weird thing thrown at the end. I did work as the wine expert at the USPGA tour for a while and I used to go around the tournament players' clubs and often it was always the same way. I would go into these golf clubs and I would always be met with a frosty silence because everybody would think this British guy is going to be a snob and the way to come over that is.
Speaker 4:I would slightly make fun of UK Wine's Library, about the whole sort of thing, and we'd end up having the most amazing time Because actually wine's just a lot of fun. It's a great drink, but you can have fun with the snobbery and I'm not entirely opposed to it. Actually I quite like that you'd count things. I quite like that we have a bit of celebration and so on and actually very often we filmed. Once in Israel and I remember there was a rabbi and he said there's a point to this ritual it's to stop you drinking too much If you have no guardrails if you've got nothing around. Essentially a quite dangerous product, a risky product like wine. People can go mad, and we do see that sometimes, and so I play into it a little bit. But you know what, drink what you like with who you like, hold your glasses how you like, but do let yourself enjoy some of the snobbery. It's nice to dress up sometimes and it's lovely to account something into a really lovely encounter.
Speaker 2:I thought the PGA thing was just a joke for part of that episode. I thought I was like a random joke.
Speaker 4:No, he's absolutely true. It was like, literally was the world's coolest job. It didn't survive 2008. It has to be said, the financial crash didn't. It was one of those things. It was a really interesting thing because the way words was out, about half the work was going to tournaments, and so I would go to PGA tournaments and essentially go and drink wine with quite wealthy people as part of the sort of overall experience. Then the other half was these tournament players, clubs where they would host the tournaments. Often you would have these members who are just really, really into wine and so we would put on these events all around the place. So I got to travel the whole of the United States. I'll go to Boston and then I'll be up to Memphis and then it'd be Atlanta and then you scoot left the center. The only thing they didn't have at the time was a club in California which was mad. You know, it's like Minneapolis and Paul or somewhere travel or, and like it was extraordinary. I got to meet Tiger. When I got to see Tiger get beaten, actually, in the president's cup when it was in Canada, I met President Bush senior and Mrs Bush, as well as Torrance. So you got to meet incredible people.
Speaker 4:I say that I'm the guy who once gate crashed the White House correspondence dinner and ended up falling asleep in the corner with Larry King Because Colin Powell's secret service team removed me from the room. It was bizarre, so I do get myself into slightly. It's amazing what you can do with a slightly boarding school English accent and it may be not so much now, but certainly under the second President Bush's presidency. It was still possible to get crashed the White House correspondence Looking up because Pamela Anderson was wearing a yellow dress, this sort of yellow mint meringue dress. And I remember I came in through a service entrance and appeared on the red carpet standing behind Pamela Anderson in this bizarre dress. And I just remember all the photographers shouting. They used some choice, quite violent sexual imagery to tell me to get out of the way, drag door from standing behind Pamela Anderson because it's just a ball British goon standing in the background Having his photo taken.
Speaker 2:So it was so dull. I have to have you back on to have to talk about more, more of your adventures. But thank you so much for joining us. It's been great.
Speaker 4:It's a pleasure. I loved it.
Speaker 2:All right, and that was our interview with Joe Fattorini. I hope everybody enjoyed both the wine show stories as well as his anecdotes from his many years in the wine industry. I think it was a great episode. That is it for us this week and we will be back with another episode and another interview next week. Cheers.
Speaker 3:To check out our current offerings and to sign up for the Vint platform. Find us at wwwvintco that's wwwvinco. For questions, comments or feedback on the Vint podcast. Please email us at support at wwwvintco. Vint and VV markets are offering securities pursuant to regulation A. Our offering circulars amended can be found on the SEC website. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investments such as those on the Vint platform are speculative and involve substantial risks to consider before investing. We may provide communication that may contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Information provided in any communications, including this podcast, is not legal, business or tax advice. All prospective investors should consult a legal, tax or business advisor concerning the subject matter of any communications and any offering.