Breaking Bread with Tom Papa - Episode 84 - Anthony Giglio

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Anthony Giglio is one of the funniest wine experts in the world, so naturally we are good friends and we reunite at the table this week, just in time for the holidays. https://www.anthonygiglio.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Insurance isn't one-size-fits-all, and shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed progressives' name-your-price tool for years. With the name-your-price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy. Or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options. No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit progressive.com and give the name your price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life on your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. It's how we go.

Hey, it's time for breaking bread with Papa. Hey, don't you know? Hey, it's also a show. Hey, everybody, welcome to another edition of Breaking Bread with Tom Papa. I am Tom Papa. Thank you so much for being here at the table. Once again, we're roaring into the holidays. And I've got a good one for you today.

A good friend of mine, Anthony Gileo, he is such a great guy. and he's going to talk so eloquently about wine and Italian food and is going to make you realize that food and wine is something to be celebrated and enjoyed and not feared and and what's the word feared and tortured or tormented about when you don't know a part of it. This is all about just joy and love and. and enjoying every aspect of it. And he is such a great guy. The backstory is I met Anthony probably 20 years ago when I was through my cousin Jimmy.

And my cousin Jimmy is this great guy and he just loves. He's one of my 21 cousins and big Italian family. And he connected with Anthony who was doing this wine event and is just they became fast friends. I became friends with him and I haven't seen him, but we kept tabs on each other as our careers were going, going through the, through the rise. And he would appear, he became a wine sommelier, and he became, he's very funny and he became this great writer also. And he would be like the food critic in these different magazines and he wrote a lot for food and wine. He, let me just read off some of the great stuff that he's done. He's. He's.

written for food and wine. He's hosted all these create events, the Food and Wine Classic in Aspen, the Pebble Beach, Food and Wine in South Beach, New York Wine and Food Festivals. He is a director for the American Express Centurion Global

Lounge Network. He was the writing with a wine editor at Food and Wine Magazine, Food and Wine Guide, the Boston official bartender's guide. He's written all of these books. He's 11 books. He's 11 books.

bucks. It's crazy. Cocktails in New York passport to Italian wine. He does these trips to Sicily. He's just so great. But what's so cool is like, you know, we've run into wine people before and they actually make the whole experience seem even more intimidating. Anthony, he's just a guy from Jersey who is very funny and he's, he's more about communication than he is even the knowledge of the wine in a way. So he gives it to you and, such a way that's just so fun and relatable and it makes you realize, oh, this is something that I should just, this isn't complex. This is actually fun. And it's always about whether you're going to enjoy it. He, we have this great conversation. He's done all of these Zoom events. You have to go to

Anthony, let me expel that for you real quick. It's G-I-G-L-I-O. Seems like it should be Giglio, but I knew it wasn't. Gileo. And you go to see, look him up online. And he actually does these wine tastings. that are amazing and he's been doing them all through the pandemic. Such a great guy. I can't wait for you to listen to this conversation. We went off quickly for an hour talking quickly about wine, Eggplant Parmesan, Christmas Eve. It's just a great conversation.

And he will be on many times. A lot of the people that we've spoken to, Lydia Bastionich, Jonathan Waxman, they all kind of intersect with Anthony. Anthony. He's always circulating. He always is involved with all these great food people. And he's just so much fun. And I'm just so happy at this time of year to sit down with him. It was perfect, perfect. So enjoy this conversation. And today's episode is sponsored by the good people at DoorDash. DoorDash. Oh, what a relief the people of DoorDash have been in my life to just bring you not only food from a restaurant, but food from, from the grocery store. You know how many times I have been lining up, about to bake something, and then realize, oh, I don't have cardamom. Oh, where's my ginger?

I'm not going back out. I'm not going back out. I'm calling the good people at DoorDash, groceries, products, dinner, I mean, whatever you want. And for a limited time, you can get 25% off. and zero delivery fees on your first order of $15 or more. Let me say that again. For a limited time, you can get 25% off and zero delivery fees off your first order of $15 or more

when you download the Door Dash app and enter code Papa P-A-P-A. That's 25% off, up to $10 value and zero delivery fees on your first order when you download the DoorDash app and enter code Papa, P-A-P-A, subject to change, terms apply. My tour is on sale right now. We have so many shows. We've got New Jersey. We have Tucson, Arizona. We have Chicago.

All these shows going into the new year. So if you need presents and you want to give somebody the gift of laughter, go to Tompapa.com and you can get the books there as well. It's all there. Enjoy yourself. I hope you're making a lot of stuff. I am already starting to plan. I'm going to be traveling right up until like two days before Christmas Eve.

So I literally woke up today thinking I have to get everything for the lasagna before I leave on my trip. But that planning is fun. And you start to plot out, okay, what are the big meals? Where am I going to go? What steakhouse am I going to be with my friends? Where am I going to visit my family? When I go back to New Jersey, where are we going to go to Mario's Pizza? I'm plotting it all out.

everything that is going to happen in this month is based on food. And I can also tell in the kitchen, if this is happening to you, things are starting to pop up. There's been like a gift of wine. There's some peppermint bark. There's some Italian cookies. It's all starting to gather. So I will probably be twice the size by the time we record next week. All right.

So let's get right to it because we have a big healthy conversation with Anthony Gile. You're really going to enjoy it. Keep your pen and your pause button ready because you're going to want to write down a lot of great tips, a lot of great wine labels. This is a perfect one for the holiday season. So enjoy. Anthony Gileo. Anthony, good to see you. This is such a treat. Tom, it is always a pleasure, man. It's been too long, actually. It's been so long. This is so exciting because, you know, people, people tend to. to to poo-poo magic. And I am a believer in magic and that things happen for a reason. And you and I had a, to make this podcast happen today came from a series of events that should not have happened. And they did happen. And that you and I know each other for years and we'll get

into all that. And we've known each other for years. And I literally was like walking around my house trying to find your number. I'm like, he's got to be on the podcast. We're coming up to Christmas. We've got to we have stuff to talk about. I've run into so many food people recently that know you and write about you and you're in that world. And I'm like, where is Andy? I can't find his number anywhere. And literally that moment, like at the end of like hours, you text me out of the blue. I was hiding in your phone all along. It was there. You forgot. I totally did. And then I saw our old conversations. But this is so perfect. And as you said, Kismet. This is a, this was supposed to happen. Yeah, exactly. So good to see your face. Likewise. I was telling your cousin, we were actually

talking about you. I said, I'm taking tons. Tom's Instagram, like the 70s vibe that like it looked like every every one of my like uncles in the 70s except like it's current and it's a look that looks really good on you. It's a great. What do you mean by that? What part? No, the look you like there's a vibe on some of your Instagram videos that captures for me like a very familiar feeling of the 70s that like, you know, that it's a it's kind of a hipster look, the long sideburns. I supported them until my wife made me get rid of them, but like, I like the look. And I was talking to your cousin about it, who is our, he's the glue that binds us.

Yeah. My cousin Jimmy is a great guy. And we, that's how we became pals years ago in New York because Jim is a, he's very successful in his own right and loves to eat. Of course, Italian, you know, part of my one of my 21 cousins. And he loves to eat. And he was the only cousin that not only loved to. but could afford the best places in all of Manhattan.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. How did you meet, Jim, originally? I was sent to San Francisco by wines from Spain, the commercial wine bureau of Spain. And they sent me to teach wait staffs about the Rioja wine campaign back in this, like, 1995, maybe. And I got invited to a party. and Jim was a guest.

And the two of us just looked, someone invited me to a party at a friend's house. It was like a friend of her friend's cousin. And they said, oh, you're going to love each other. You should go to her house for a party. And I got there. And it was an outrageously fun party. And your cousin was there.

And it was just that look. And we're like, Jersey, Jersey boys out of our element connected. We just knew, you know, that there was something there. And we literally spent the rest of the weekend together. like we went out. We watched the games. We went to brunch. Like we were all over the place with this pack of people I hung out with.

Right. He would say, I'm coming to New York soon. And every time he came into town, you know, we would get together. Right. Great friends. Oh, that's amazing. And I got you as a bonus. You were a bonus gift.

Yeah. And I was a bonus gift. And then, yeah, we hung out once we got into the New York end of things. And it's been such a cool thing because, I mean, literally, Anthony, we probably, I mean, we spoke a little bit, but we haven't. really hung out in probably 20 years. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's real bad.

So we're going to fix that today. We're going to get started because the other part of it is that you, you've taken this path, which I guess you started, if that's when you first met, when you met Jim. And I remember like you, but you was the beginning of your career, really. Yeah, I was about five years. I was about five years in at that point. I, I graduated in 89 from Fordham and with journalism. So a journalist first.

Right. who got great advice to become a sommelier to learn about wine just to write about it. I never really wanted to work as a summary. I just wanted to be able to speak and and taste professionally so I could translate it into writing about it. Right. And that's what I had started to do. I got my diploma in 91.

Worked the windows in the world for two years until 93. I worked until the night before they bombed it. No, really? Yeah, we closed that day. Yeah, back in 93. great. So I yike, Dale de Groff, the famous mixologist, who I much, you know, years later, I wrote his book, The Craft of the Cocktail with him. But he and I closed that night. He was, he was working the bar and I was working the private wine room, the cellar in the sky. Whoa.

Craziness. Yeah, it is crazy. So I was a couple of years in. And then I took on this, this fun gig for wines from Spain when Spain was really, really struggling to, you know, to make a beachhead here in the U.S. Nobody knew anything. about them. And I still think today, I would argue today 30 years later, or 25 years later, most Americans still don't understand Spanish wine. They know they're delicious and they're everywhere, but we still don't know what we're doing with them because we don't know what the varietals are. Like, we could barely sort out the fact that we all speak French but don't know it. I mean, every grape we know is French, right? Right. Right. But yet, if I say,

okay, let's connect the dots. It's like all the tastings that are right now, Tom. I've hosted, by the way, during the pandemic, I have hosted 380 virtual tastings for over 10,000. 10,000 people in nine countries. Whoa. Oh my God. But one of the famous, one of the favorite seminars is old world, new world smackdown where we, we pit like old world new world. And I'm like, you all, you all know what Pinot Noir is, but what if I say to you, Pomard,

what if I say Cote de Nui, whatever, you know, whatever, you know, start naming French addresses. And that's, that's a big, big, big, for me, a big stepping stone for everyone who doesn't know anything who says like, oh, you know, I don't want to talk about. I'm not confused about wine. I'm like, let's just start here. Everything you know about wine, almost 99% of it comes from France. And the reason that we are disconnected from is because in the U.S., in the new world, we speak by the grape. And in almost the entire old world, where every grape is from, they speak address. So, you know, Barolo, you know, Brunello, you know, Keanti, Rioja, Champagne, Bordeaux, all the big addresses. Right.

all day addresses. Within those big addresses, they're smaller, more exact addresses. So that's what I like, so like, you tell me you, what I love to do, Tom, and I'm going on a complete tangent. This is great. Keep going. This is perfect. I love, love, love pouring people. So like what I do is I send everybody four bottles for these virtual tastings. Uh-huh. I'm using verve wines in New York City, San Francisco and Chicago. They ship all over the country for me. So we send every house four bottles, and then we taste four together in an hour. But I love throwing in a shabli. And everyone seems to know the word Shabli. Like,

yeah. It's one of those like, you know, Downton Abbey, you know, wine names that comes up. And people, so I'll pour them a white wine.

And I say, let's not talk about this till after we taste it. And then I have this whole thing that's about tasting every single wine three times. Because the first sip doesn't count because we're neutralizing the palo

or rinsing, basically. Right. Yeah. Second, second sip is when we really could taste balance and we do this, this fun exercise. And then I say,

okay, now whether the host sent you get, you know, treats or if I sent the instructions the night before, raid your pantry and fridge. Now tasted with something savory, add fat plus salt. It could be a potato chip. It could be prosciutto.

It could be patte. It could be anything simple. Let's taste it again. And after that third sip, then I said, okay, now let's vote on this wine. Are we here? Are we here? Are we here? And then I get them hooked.

I'm like, all right, how do people like this wine? And hopefully a majority of them raise their hands. I'm like, how do people here, by the way, hate chardonnay? And a majority of people raise their hand. And I'm like, you are drinking chardonnay, but not just any chardonnay. You're drinking one of the oldest addresses for chardonnay. It's over, I think, the year 1140,

we found like the first sightings of chardinet in this address in France. I'm like, it is oak-free chardonnay from the source, and it is clean, crisp, steely, mineral, delicious. And that's why you like it. That's why you like it. So stop saying you hate chardonnay. You hate cheap chardonnay.

You hate the shardin that you're handed at every wedding, every corporate party, every wine by the glass is a cheap garbage chardonnay. We have to stop pounding on Chardonnay. There's a lot of great shardy out there. We're all victims of the 90s when Shardney became the oak bomb. Yeah. Shoulder pads and hairspray, dynasty wine. It's so true.

It's so true how trendy all that stuff gets. Yeah. It really is. I mean, like sideways with when he shit on, when he shit on Merlot, I was loving Merlot. My entire, it was the beginning of my adult life. And I was like, this is so soft. And it's surprising. And it was nice.

And I was like, oh, I can't possibly order this in front of anybody ever again. Tom, the biggest, I was so conflicted with that movie. Yeah. I mean, I was geeking out from the wine side of it. But I also thought, Jamadi was such a douche in that role. And the worst thing that I would hear people say, oh, my God, sideways, you remind me of Paul Jamani. I'm like, is it physical or is it that I'm a douche or is it both?

Either way, I don't want any association with that side of the wine world. I mean, I've basically made a career. Like, you and I are both, I'm going to be immodest here and say, we're funny guys. Like, we can't help ourselves. We can just come to worry out of us. You could pay it a lot more to be funny than I do. But the point is, like, I use that as a way to disarm people to have fun with wine. Because I cracked this code 30 years ago that it is a terrifying, overwhelming topic.

People want to be comfortable, but they're really not comfortable. very few people are comfortable talking about wine. And I'm going to say, like, let's just throw it all out the window. By the way, when I became a summary, I threw away 80% of the technical data and said, but how do I speak plain English to my fellow Americans and give them what they need to know, which is, why do I like it? Why don't I? And let's figure it out.

Because we could always take it to the next place and see where your taste leads you. And just to relax about it. Yeah. Yeah, it's, look, I've taken somewhat of a journey, like, you know, just because once I started learning that, you know, anything at all and started to follow my tastes and follow different regions, and then I'd meet a friend that, like, loves Barolo and that I went, went into there, and then I had a friend that was really into Chateanu to Pops, and I was like, I started going there and just letting it lead, like, just kind of let it naturally take its course. And then, and then I find,

I'll take the course and I'll go, I'll go down this path and then get stuck in the, in the side of the road. And it's like, I can't get out of Chattanovae Pop. Like I just keep spinning my wheels and spinning my wheels. And then you're like, oh, I don't I go to be stuck though, by the way. That's, it could be worse places. Yeah. Absolutely.

But, but there's so much. I think that is the thing that becomes the daunting part, even when you start to get turned on and start to, your palate becomes a little more sophisticated. and you know more than like you knew before, it's just so vast. That's the thing that always gets me. Yeah. Well, yeah, and that's the good news.

There's boundless, boundless supply to be, to be discovered. And that's actually, it's really good to not stay in your comfort zone, like to keep moving out. Like, I take no greater pleasure than tricking people with spectacular bargains. Yeah. Most people expect that I'm drinking really fancy stuff or, you know, You know, my nickname is Fancy Pants. My family can't believe that this is what I do for a living.

It's like, people say, oh, fancy pants would never drink a $10 wine. I'm like, what if it's from Spain? You have no idea what's hiding in plain sight from Spain and now Portugal, which is coming up really fast. Oh, really? That's one of the few places you can get, amazing wines for $10, $12 that are only that price because we're not demanding them enough and the prices stay low. But I would, I always say this.

if you find an $8 bottle of Spanish white at your local store like we have here in the Northeast, Hudson County has tons of a Jersey City, New York, where I, you know, my offices, I could find great $10 Spanish bottles. Yes. I would expect that if we knew the address, if they came from a better address like Barolo or Brunella or whatever,

we would pay $10 more or double the price. Absolutely. Easily. Easily. Easily. Just because you're like, yeah, those, you're shopping for it. It ticks off the boxes. And you drop your credit card.

And then you go home and then you convince yourself, it's great even if you don't like it. Right. And I also say, like, there's a really funny part of that. Some people won't buy it because it's too cheap. And they either can't be seen buying it because it's too cheap or they'll go home and order it. But the truth is, yeah, I mean, I think that there's definitely people think you have to spend more to get more. And by the way, I'm happy to take anybody's credit card and spend as much as you want. Right.

with you for you. But I also know that like there's definitely, there's definitely a fun game to play, which is, well, if you like this, let's look. It's like, it's like real estate. So you can't afford, you know, give you,

name your LA metaphor. You can't afford Rodeo drive. Right. What's around the corner? Maybe we can, I'm going to take you right around the corner and say, if you like shut enough to pop, well,

why do you just try, like, why do we start to coat their own and build our way up to that or. Right, right, right. Oh, man. It's so great. And it really is such a fun thing to get into. And there,

And there are, but there are some, some killers that are at a price point that's a little higher that are reliable. You know, I mean, like the domain tempere. Tempierre. Yeah. So good. And, you know, that's probably $40, $50 a bottle, you know. 60ish here. Yeah.

I just, I literally someone asked me about it last week. I hosted a tasting and we had a rosé. And I said, now if you were really, wanted to bling out, like, you know, like, you'd, go for Tompier. Like, Tompier is like for Sam's like one of the geeky, geeky great oldies. I'm like, for a lot of people, I don't know if you're comfortable spending $60 on rosé. Like it doesn't seem serious enough. Right, right.

You know, they have a beautiful white as well and red, but like the rosé is what made them really famous. Right. You know, people expect to spend $20 in rosé, not 60. Right, exactly. You know, Tom, do you remember Domain Ott? It was that like genie bottle back in the 90s. It was like one of the early super rosés. And I remember because it had this gorgeous.

Look at a lava lamp bottle. It's been copied a million times since, but you can still find it. It's a gorgeous salmon colored and a gorgeous label. And it had everything right. It used to be 18 and now it's $60, $70, $80 because like the super rosés. For me personally, I'm never going to spend that on a rosé. I'll never going to spend on white wine either. No, me neither.

My one goes on red if I'm going big. 100%. 100%. But again, I'm usually pretty too cheap. And I'm spoiled. I get samples. Well, you must. Yeah.

I know. That's a great thing. I know. I did something for, for hall wineries. Sure. Catherine. Yeah.

And they were so generous. Just like, just from doing a podcast, just case after case kept showing up in my house. I was so happy. Yeah. So,

you picked a good career for sure. I will say. I count my blessings. And then, you know, and I didn't know what was going to happen during COVID. And Tom,

like I, I felt tremendous guilt about how busy I was when a lot of people in the restaurant industry were suffering. Sure. I thought like, you know, I got to look at that I'm providing a service that clearly is needed, which is people still need to connect. People need to socialize and they need alcohol. Yeah, no, exactly.

I figured out a way to get wine into everybody's houses in a model that really worked well. It's so great. I'm so thankful. Oh, to reach that many people. I mean, you never would have done that even live and in person. I can't. No way. The fact that I could do three in one night.

Yeah. Standing here in my dining room, like, I literally have the jacket, the shirt, short and flip-clops, right? I'm standing at a bar right next to me here. It's so great. And I have a 15-minute break. It's like, you know. It's great. Rush my team.

Get back up. Do it all over again. Oh, it's so amazing. I got to break in on one of those. The other thing that I really was excited to see that you were doing is, uh, you had like trips to Sicily. Yeah. Because Sicily, my people are from Sicily and I've never been to Sicily.

Oh, shame on you. I know. I know. Get the private jet right now. Let's go. Can you work that out? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'll do my best.

I want to go so badly that I've started poking around just with to have wine lead the trip. And I found through, uh, through, I've been. ordering wines through Kermit Lynch. Sure. Because it's just such a good job of telling the story of the place. I'm a writer and stuff. So I love anything that comes with a story. I'm just,

I'm hooked and I'm in. And there's so many, what I first thought was a very sparse amount of wines from a region is actually the opposite. There's a lot. And it seems like a lot of new wineries starting up in Cicely. Oh gosh. Cicely.

Well, I mean, so Cicely is actually two. stories there's the flat mainland and then there's mount etna which is on fire i mean like and tom i tell this story over and over that uh so you know my wife tony is sicilian right her parents came over like basically pregnant with her she spent all of her her childhood summers there for three months and so like we go back to her parents house um almost every summer we've missed three years now but um but when i was dating her in mid 90s early you know maybe 97 um mount edna probably probably probably had 13, maybe 19 wineries on Mount Etna.

And this was before, and it was talking about it. And when I was there, nobody was talking about it. I didn't even, it wasn't on my exams. I didn't even know about it. And we were, her houses at the, like, the north coast of Sicily at the foot of Mount Etna's north face, you know. And it's behind us. We could see it, belching, whenever, you know, it's all there.

It's like omnipresent. But as of 2020, there are over 370 wineries on Mount, it's like, it got. discovered. Like it's just, like the metaphor of it exploding is real that everybody from the north came down to plant a flag and then all the critics started writing about it. I mean, you know, then once Eric Asimov writes about it in the Times, it's over. Yeah. And he did that probably in 2012 and it just was a stampede of people going on there.

So, whoa. Now there's luxury hotels and spas and, you know, when we go up there, we're like, what the, it was tumbleweed. That's amazing. Yeah. Is it good or is it good or is it too much? No, it's amazing. And the wines are so different. So Mount Edna's wines differ from anything else on the island. So like if we were talking in, you know, if you come to class with me, Tom, I would tell you that. The main grapes on the mainland are Norella. I'm sorry, Nero Davala, which is the main red of all of the Reds in Sicily. And, you know, they have some Sera and other grapes. But Nerodavel is number one. And on the white side, it might be, it might be Grillo and Insolia, Mosado. A lot of white ones. grown there, but not Etna, separate. Two red grapes. The primary is Norello Mascalese,

and a tiny bit of Norella Capuccio, and then there's a white called Caricante. And what, you know, some people wince at this, but critics went crazy about Etna because you're at this high, you know, you think it's this blazing hot island, but yeah, up at 2,000 feet where the grapes are growing, it's, it's blazing sun all day and then a huge shift in temperature at night. So the wines have spectacular acidity because they have this diurnal, you know, roller coaster every day. And they have fog and sea coming out. Like, it's all right there. So the wines are, they talk about them as very high in salinity, which is a strange word

to use with wine reviews, but it's, it's becoming more common. And there is this, when you smell the whites, like the Caricontag is probably one of the most beautiful, one of the most beautiful whites I've tasted in years. Like when I, and I go crazy for these, there's a great, there's a wine called, there's a one called Pietro Marina by Benanti, which is one of the old families from the region. And it's like $160 in New York at good wine, a good restaurants. Really? It's one of the few white wines I would buy.

Wow. You know, if I was with a host who said, hey, let's go crazy. I would say this white wine is insanely overpriced, but it's really worth it. Really? But to go back and say, Tom, what people say about Aetna, for better or for worse, is that it is the burgundy of Italy, meaning peanut noir and chardonnay, from. the source, these grapes remind you of really beautiful burgundy because they're a lot of acid, right, you know, modest fruit. They're more like burgundy where Americans are so used to

fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit. This is the European paradigm where you get more earthiness and acidity that are better for pairing with food rather than, and this is part of my one of my many jokes. I was like, the American paradigm is wine is food. We just expect deliciousness without thinking about will it be better with food? Will it go with food? We'd certainly pair things, but the baseline is this better be good right now. Yeah, no, exactly. No food involved. And I'll show you the stinkers. I'm like, well, let's taste this wine from Aetna. And I pour this one all the time. It's one through to the side called Calabretta Calacala. And it's a little thin, a little chalky, a little bit really. And two sips in, people are like, and I'm getting them

excited. And then they taste them like, hmm, it's interesting. And I'm like, Now I want you to grab a piece of that Parmigana right there and take a bite and then let's take a sip. And it just explodes. That's the European paradigm. Yeah. Wine and food are locked together. And that's a weird concept for Americans. And I say because we expect we're spoiled.

We have beautiful West Coast wines that are just over delicious ripeness and fruit and power. Europe. Acid, acid, acid, acid, too. I go think of acid. Squeezing lemons over food. It makes it better. Right. It gets better with food.

And they taste better. Right. There was, I had a, over Thanksgiving, I had a, a bottle of, Bandol.

Yep. And, uh, Jim Harrison, who was, you know, you know, wrote like crazy about food and stuff.

And, and, and his, his thing is like, you know, this is like, try this with food. Like,

have this, I had my nephew. And I did the same thing. I'm like, all right, try this. He's like, yeah,

yeah, it's good. I'm like, all right. Now take a bite. Take a bite to that. that turkey and then take a sip. He was like, holy shit.

Yeah, exactly. But that's that that's as a red as a red wine drinker. That always kind of trips me up because if I'm having fish like, you know, which really calls for white and it's like, but I'm going to plow this red right over it. I don't care that it really doesn't technically pair. But Tom, I said that all the time that if we were having like, I'll say like, and usually like these tastings, there's like a group of two dozen people and clients of clients some long alone. I'm like, when Tom takes us all to dinner next time, Tom, I do have your credit

card number, so I will be making a reservation at Little Alowel townhouse next time you're here in New York. But I will always say the chef, four courses. Second course is red wine plus fish. And savvy chefs know what to do. But I say, but there are chefs who like when I do this in Kansas or somewhere, you're like, I don't get it. I'm like, anything that you would think of that you could anchor to red wine used for the sauce. So is it capers? Mushrooms, tomatoes, burnoise. I mean, like, you know, brown butter like they would use on. A classic skate wing in French cuisine is that white, white, white, white fish with brown, you know, burned butter poured over the top. You've now anchored it to red wine. And the red wine just has to be higher in acid, lower and tan. So your California cab

will not handle it. It will still crush the fish. Right. High acid. So peanut noir, gamay, A lot of the European things I'll show you like that, like the, at neuroses would be amazing with that. And that's how you bloop to play because people sit down. I'm like, now I know you're thinking, this is a weird pairing. Let's talk about it after. Let's take a sip first. Right. Enjoy the course and we'll talk about it after.

People just can't get over it. It blows. Yeah. Oh, this is the greatest thing I've learned since I've been doing the podcast. Amazing. Yeah. That's so great. There was, I went to, uh, there's a big wine shop, which is actually, I think, closing,

20-20 wines in L.A. And it looks like Raiders of the Lost Dark. You go in and it's like this big cavernous place and it's just bottles everywhere. And I had, I always like to go in and have the owner who's the shopkeeper. Like, what are you drinking? What can you turn me on to? And, you know, there's crazy bottles for hundreds of dollars. And he would always take me to like what you're saying, like those fines, what he's drinking.

And Spain. Spain always came up. There was this, I forget the name. It was like the petal, like La Petulis. Yeah, Petalos. From, from Alvaro Palacios. Oh, my God. So good and so affordable.

And I just gobbled it all up. It was so tremendous. I have, hold on, I have your new, I have your new favorite right here. Oh, yeah. This is the great thing about doing this podcast is whenever somebody like turns me on to stuff, I have to listen to my own podcast to get what I was taught. So I have poured. Altria gallons.

So the winemaker's name is in this. By the way, let's pretend this is one of my zooms. I'd say, okay, look at this label. This is why you don't buy Spanish wine. This is the dumbest label in the history of labels because it tells you nothing. It tells you nothing. It sort of sounds Latin, right? Ultrea sounds Latin.

Yeah. But then St. Jacques sounds very French. What the hell? And then if you squint right there, it says Raoul Perez. It is so small. It's insulting to anyone who has to wear glasses. So what do you get here?

Nothing. The gift from Spain is the bow tie. We call it right here. This little tag is mandated by the Spanish government. This is the American government. This is where you get the very good advice, like not to drive a tractor while pregnant. But this is what matters right here.

Yeah. It's two things. Bierso is the region. And the grape is mensia. By the way, all to say, Now Americans, what is Mencia? Who knows? How would I describe it?

I call it the love child of Grenache and Surrah. It's the love baby of those two. So for me, it's the juicy middle. It's, by the way, you mentioned Shetnaf to Pop earlier. Shetnautte Pop is one of the villages in my favorite place on the planet, the Rhone Valley. People don't know the Rhone. People, and by the way, Tom, I don't know about you, but do people expect you to be your favorite place in the world? It has to be Italian wine.

Like, I'm expected. Yes. Italian wine. The people like, in the Northeast, yeah, they're all very, just that the pitchforks come up when I don't say, I love a good kianti. That's my favorite place. Or tell me your favorite Bernello or your favorite porolo.

Yeah. Absolutely. I like all wine. I will taste anybody's wine. I will your credit card. I will buy any wine. But my happy place, honestly, is the Roan. And this to me is the Roan in Spain.

In Spain. So because the Roan to me is the happy place between super light, high acid reds like pinnoir and gamet and Bojolet and the Sicilian we just mentioned. Yeah. And then at the other end of the spectrum is massive tannin, which is Cabernet, Borlo, Neviolo, et cetera, prearrats. In the middle, I call it the juicy middle. And that's Grinash, Surat, Mavendra, the GSMs. And Tom, in California, the Central Coast, there was a movement in the 90s called the Rhone Rangers.

And it was a bunch of why makers like Randall Graham and I'm forgetting Bob Lindquist. Kupe, they all, they were, they were looking at everybody drinking Chardonnay and Cabernet and Chardonnay and Chardonnay and Cabernet and Chardin and Cabernet. Right. Long before Merlot and Pino-Wire entered in Sovignon Blanc. And they were like, there are other grapes to be heralded and they include the GSMs. And that's actually a category that you could find on labels. It'll just say GSM because there's no majority. It's Brinacera and in Australia, that's a humongous category.

In Australia, they drink a ton more rhone varietals than we'd ever do here in the U.S. Oh, interesting. That's why you know Penfold's Grange is Shara, which is Saras, Saras is the Roan. And so it goes back to the Roan is my favorite place. So this is like, this is the Roan and it's at a fracture of the cost because this is, I take full responsibility. I've helped drive this up from $18 to now 24 because I keep talking about it to everybody and everybody. Oh, you got me. I'm going to do it.

But this would be, but I said if this were from Borolo or Brunello or Bordeaux, this would be $50. $50, no problem. Really? $50, no problem. And it's just gulpable. and delicious. Oh, that's great. Oh, this is awesome. All right. Now, let me, let me ask you this. But we had, we had a couple of food people that were on the podcast who, who, uh, you knew. There was one I couldn't remember early where I was going. Early on, early on you were going to see, um, um, uh, Barbutto,

uh, why my Jonathan Waxman. Jonathan Waxman, that's what it was. He mentioned me in his book because of my, yeah, I was given jars of tomato sauce every year. That's right. That's what it was. And I, I was going not only to interview Jonathan, but also to, for the first time with my family, we were taking, my sister has a farm in, in Clifton, New Jersey, called City Green. And we were taking all the tomatoes and we were boiling them down. And we were sitting underneath the house at the Jersey Shore all day making tomato sauce. I need to know about that. That's not.

Oh, it's so great. But yeah, it's Clifton, New Jersey. It's called City Green. And she creates all of these. She's got a couple farms. And she has not only provides vegetables to all of the cities, but she also learning gardens and has summer camps and all these kids from Patterson and Passaic and Newark and places. And these kids come in and they get to learn how to garden and how to do all the stuff.

And it's great. It's an amazing, amazing operation that she's created. It's been like over 10 years now. I love it. And the good part is my nephew's. the head farmer gets all the tomatoes and then he brought them down. And for the first time, we really, we really Italianed out. We had the big pot.

We were just stirring it all day. We canned it at the end. It was heavenly. And yeah, and that's why, yeah, when I was, I saw that you knew what the hell I was talking about from the Jonathan Waxman book. Oh, yeah. So I grew up in my house where I grew up on the west side of Jersey City. We did the tomatoes in our basement.

The whole neighborhood knew about it. Like, you know, we'd have the, you know, the Leverna and Shirley windows held up with the eye hook and or a stick keeping the window. And like our house would be wafting for days with boiling cauldrons of tomatoes. And then my grandfather died in 1990 and the family went cold turkey and just stopped. Sort of like a, like a, I don't know, like a protest movement. And then nobody, and I was still too young to get involved. But I meet my wife and her family, they're literally off the boat. I mean, both of their parents came from Sicily in the 60s.

and they they they would say oh we you know we can the tomatoes in uh in in in in August and I said I will be there I will be that's so great I wrote about Tom I wrote about this in food I wrote about it in food and wine two years ago I wrote a really lovely I like to think a lovely tribute to my mother-in-law who is an amazing gardener and an amazing cook and I said like I will not lie that when when I heard that there was sauce to be made that weighed that weighed very favorably in the decision to give my wife a ring like this this family I would was entering into had checked a lot of boxes out. Oh, yeah.

Including a beach house in Sicily and a mother-in-law who loves doing laundry. Like, she'll come over here with a shopping cart and take our laundry. I'm like, no, it's okay. You really don't need. And she's like, I have nothing else to do anywhere. Oh, that's so great. Oh, that's heaven. That's heaven.

Dude, she, like, she does laundry according to the weather because the whites have to go out in the sunny day. So they bleach in front of, like, as the sun will whiten them. Well, come on. She's timing. My friends, I have friends who send clothes over when they can't get stains out and say, do you think Lucia can help with this? I'm like, Lucia can make it look better than it looked when you bought it.

Like, oh, that's amazing. She makes everything beautiful. Oh, my God. That is heaven on earth. That is so great. Yeah. And I spoke with Lydia Bastionich recently. Yeah.

And I love Lydia. I love Lydia. Yeah, yeah. There's no, there's so many. You pop up. Oh, and the pizza guy. And so Dan Richer, by the way, so Lydia was at Dan's media party when he kicked off the book two weeks ago. So all worlds keep colliding.

Yeah. Lydia. So Dan Richer, Ratsa pizza, a lot of fun with, you know, us as Jersey boys. Yeah. Always fighting for respect to the New York. When Pete Wells wrote in The New York Times, I think it was five or six years ago now. Yeah. Is the best pizza in New York City dot, dot, dot, dot, in New Jersey.

It was like the earthquake of all, like the daggers. People came from Brooklyn with their knives. Like what is happening? And the pizza is so ridiculously good. Last night I hosted three friends were in town from Sicily. Right. From my wine tour team. And then Gary, my partner here in New York, who I work with on the tours.

And his husband, Sal, who owns Digostas cooking school. So we're all, we're all connected. But I had never been a Rata. And I said, take the path train. It's two stops and we'll have an amazing dinner. And I sense of the kitchen. I said, here's the Italians. They're xenophobes.

There's never any food as good as theirs. Yeah. And they complain about everything outside of their mother's houses. Let's see what they say. They had no reason to lie to me. They were like, this pizza is extraordinary. Like extraordinary, extraordinary, extraordinary. You got to come, Tom.

We're going to do it for sure. No, absolutely. I think that's when we're going to reunite in person is going to be at Rata for sure. Has to be. So as you're running around in your life and things have opened up and we're running around a lot more for sure. And you're making lists and you're trying to do things and you're trying to keep track of what you're going to make for dinner or if you're even going to have time for dinner. Or if you just forgot something at the hardware store, whatever you need, DoorDash is there to help you. What do you want to eat tonight?

Maybe you want a home cooked favorite. Maybe you feel like don't want to go to the store. Maybe you look and you've got this. This is my life. It always. I always think I'm going to make something and I'm missing one or two last ingredients. Well, it's time to get back out there. But if you're not quite ready for a full-blown adventure,

there's still ways to explore the world from the comfort of your home with DoorDash. You don't need to travel far to experience something new. Get what you want to eat right now and right to your door with DoorDash. Along with restaurants you love, you can now get groceries and other essential. items delivered with DoorDash, get drinks, snacks, other household items in under an hour. Why would you ever go to a store again? Craving late night ice cream, DoorDash. Forget your ginger. DoorDash. Maybe you need some tape when you're wrapping presents. DoorDash. And for a limited time, our listeners get 25% off in zero delivery fees on their first order of $15 or $1,000 or

more when you download the Door Dash app and enter code P-A-P-A-P-A. That's 25% off, up to $10 value and zero delivery fees on your first order when you download the DoorDash app in the app store and enter the code Papa. You should have this app on your phone. I don't know why you don't have this app on your phone already. You should definitely have this app on your phone. Make your life easy. It doesn't add like a lot of money to get stuff coming right to your house.

figured it out. Don't forget, the code is Papa, P-A-P-A for 25% off your first order with DoorDash. Subject to change, terms apply. You're the best. And the great thing about Razzo is that he's trying to convince me that I can make the pizza with the bread dough that I use, with that, that I make. Okay. When I was like, so double zero, right? We got to do the double zero. I was a, uh, uh, uh, no, no, no. No, no.

That's why would you use something? So it's like, uh, you know, proprietary to Italy where we're here in the States and we have all this beautiful grain and all this beautiful flour. Yeah. Uh, no, what you have when you're making your sourdough bread is, is fine. You're going to be able to make this great pizza because pizza has been a, uh, a bitch for me. I have to have been able to master it at all. I don't know why. it's been hard.

Yeah, I went through the bread phase too with, uh, during COVID, like making all the beautiful sourdough and I got really into it. And then I, I was talking him about it. And he said, come spend a Saturday with me and we'll, we'll make, we'll make dough. We'll make a lot of dough. And I worked with them all day. And I, I definitely picked up a lot of tricks and advice and tips. But he's, he's beyond.

He's just, yeah, he's so brilliant. And, um, he has that, yeah, a lot of the press he's been getting about the book is this rubric. that he has, he puts everything through these crazy rubrics. Like, you know, tomato, double blind tomato sauce taste things. And I think he's got like a rubric of I should know this and I don't. It's like 60 points of, of checklist that has to be done for pizza. Oh my God. Before they allow the pot to come out.

And like it's always mind-blowing to people when they pick up a slice. Yeah. East coasters, we fold it right away. And the West Coast apparently you eat it flatter apparently. Yeah, it will never, it will never bend. It never, it doesn't matter what, because he is the master of knowing, the exact size and weight of every ingredient that is going on that plate, and it's a strict rule and how they'll all cook at the same time because there's only one shot.

You know what I mean? So it's like he's he's constantly using like, you know, he's got a, he's got the, a caliper that he uses to measure slices of eggplant. Yeah. He made an eggplant pie for me this summer called Eggplant Super Salt. And it was a love letter to my mother-in-law who taught him how to make real Sicilian eggplant parm and really super salt that i you know that he was very instrumental in helping me get that right in the beginning when i was testing it and trying to you know take a commercial

oh wow all right hold on it before we get to super salt tell me about this eggplant parmesan um i can't send your recipes online actually oh yeah yeah uh my mother-in-law's eggplant farm is unlike that that's that was the food of wine piece was about is that i grew up eating a lot of i'm not eating, avoiding a lot of crappy pizza parlor style, gloppy green egg plant. Bloppy slimy. Yeah, like goo. Like just, it was awful. And I, I, so when I went my wife, she says, oh, we're going to my mom's for lunch and she's making eggplant. And I've said, and I will polite, I will nodly, I will politely nod and say, thank you, but I'm not really into this. And she's like, oh, no, you have no idea my mother's egg plant. It's famous. I'm like,

says who. And she's like, it says everyone who eats it. And, and it says everyone who eats it. And I was blown away because it's it's the opposite of what you think it is right like it's not the bread flour you know egg flower dredge but lucia is this master she she she buys the she could do with any shape eggplant but of course the the raison deptre would be the i'm sorry the b'l end all would be the big fat softball sicilian bright purple ones in the summer like august right here it's august we have to wait until august but she could be with the normal black ones but um she would peel them. By the way, her secret is you picked them up and they should be as light as a feather.

And I've said that to friends, think the opposite of citrus. Like when you buy citrus, you want the heaviest, juiciest oranges and lemons. That's how you know that they're not, they're not, they haven't evaporated because they haven't been sitting on shelves for weeks. Right. But eggplant is the opposite. The heavy they are, the more seeds are inside, the more bitter they are. Okay.

And so she will always say, so she literally, she goes through the baskets. I have our local farmer's market. they know her. They put baskets under the table for Lucia. And then she comes through and just throws overboard, all these heavy ones. Like, what's wrong with those? And she's like, they're all seeds. And they're like, how do you know that?

She's like, you just, she'll like do the scale for you. But you peel it. You would slice it. And she sliced it. Like, you know, like, as thick as my iPhone. Like it literally like that. I thought for sure you were going to say thin. I thought that was going to be the first move.

No. And then she would put a plate in the kitchen sink. And she'll start doing circles of eggplant, heaping. Yeah, with the salt. All the way up and up and up. And then she fills a pot, a pasta pot with water and puts it on top of that pile of egg plant. And as the salt is bleaching all the juice out, it's crushing it and compacting it under the weight. And then she moved, you know, after an hour or whatever, she'll, yeah, she goes and watches the Vatican for a while.

She'll come back. She's got the satellite dishes on. She's watching the Vatican 24-7 and Italian cooking shows. She pulls the pot over to the side. And then she literally takes egg plant. and rinses it in the clean water. Uh-huh. And then puts it on paper towels.

And it's just like, oh, my God. That's it. There's no bread, no egg, no flour. What? He dries them. And she puts a thin coat of olive oil in a pan, and it's big, bang out. And, like, they crisp. What?

And they crisp. And then she builds it, she starts to build a pile of them. And then after she's done, she tips the oil out. And in that pan, it's on the stove top. There's a whole, there's a whole, uh, cat, catty of Sicilian cooking that I learned. I'm Neapolitan, by the way. This is all new to me.

But like after the war, they were so devastated Sicily. You couldn't, there was no gas lines. People didn't have gas running into their houses. Everyone was using single burners or electric burners. But you made, most things had to be done on the stove top. Or you had to carry it down to the bread baker and pay them a few, you know, a few pennies or whatever to bake things at the end of the day or whatever, you know, after the bake. To roast something if you had the money.

So she makes everything on the stove top. And you build the eggplant with tomato sauce. And I'll give you that recipe too. I have the toll online. And then the eggplant and you just keep building with parmigiano and up and up and up. And then the lowest flame cover on and it just collapses into this spectacular lava of concentrated tomato and eggplant purity. It's like unlike anything I've ever had. And she sends it, she sends it constantly.

And like, there is a point where we're like, oh, my God, your mother summer egg plant. But like, we'll do that is we make it, we'll use it. Like I'll put that in a pan and toss pasta with it. Like I just, anything, just to use it all different reasons, all different ways to use it. But like at the height of summer, that's like a first course when we have friends over with a big hunk of crusty bread. And some people are like, what is this? And like, that's the other eggplant parma you've never had before. Wow.

That is amazing. It doesn't even make sense. No. It really doesn't. It's handled so much more heavily here. Yeah. By the way, I wrote this piece in, well, in Fudan, I repeat the story, but I wrote this in Boston Magazine years ago. And I said, it seems like, you know, I was the one critic of Boston Magazine. And they said, we want you to write a future about the North End, you know, they're a little Italy.

Yeah. The highways were coming down. Remember, they did the big dig and they took down all those. And they said, when 93 comes down, it will actually expose the North End, which has been separated from the rest of the city by this man-made, you know, barrier. And when it comes down, we worry that we might lose Little Italy. Will the North end get absorbed into the rest of the city and disappear? I was like this thought they had.

So they sent me in and they said, go review everything in Little Italy. And I was like, of course, yes, please. And I went up there. And I wrote this piece and I said, you know, like there are real Italians living here from Northern Italy, Tuscany, whatever. I go, but the overriding recipe ends. Every single recipe in America ends. add mozzarella sauce and bake.

It's like everything gets parmed. Shrimp gets parmed, cauliflower parm. Everything is buried in sauce. Yeah, comes out in a boat filled with sauce. So, yeah, so it really, really super interesting. Wow. That it goes against anything you expect. Yeah.

Oh, that's amazing. All right. So back to your salt. Back to your salt. I didn't know that you had this little, this side hustle. What? Yep, I had no idea. We got to catch up.

I think you know that I'm a decent home cook, not a trained chef, but I have tons of chef friends who teach me a lot and let me cook with them. So I've been making this compound salt that my, you know, I was a riff on a recipe that a friend gave me, Sally Schneider, who won a beard award for her book, A New Way to Cook probably 20 years ago. And so Sally's a great friend. And there was this one little tiny paragraph like as an extension to a roast recipe for pork or something. And it was Tuscan herb salt. And it was chopping one clove of garlic, one, you know, one branch of rosemary, and then cutting it in with salt. And until the salt absorbs all of it and starts to turn, you know, the color of the rosemary. And then you use that to slather all over this pork roast.

It's an amazing recipe. But I took that. And for years, I would just start riffing more and more crazy things into it where everything on my window stills are a whole herb garden. I would be like, okay, I prefer more sage. Rosemary is very heavy, very, very powerful. Let's use some time. Let's use this. And I kept adding more garlic. And I kept scaling this thing up to where I would start to make sheet pans of it and let it dry on the kitchen table. My family would want to kill me because it was re- What exactly was on the sheet pan? What do you mean? So I would build on a cutting, first on a cutting board, I would take, let's say, five heads of garlic. Okay. and make a mash, like just a complete paste of five heads of garlic.

Five whole heads, not cloves, heads, right? I'm scaling this up. I'm using, and I would probably use five to 10 pounds of Sicilian sea salt. In the beginning, I was using kosher salt. Like my early days was diamond crystal kosher salt. Right. And then chopping a bunch of herbs and just, and it would, and I would start to measure. And eventually I became, I was scaling it up bigger and bigger, bigger.

where I would then make two to four sheet pans at a time. And then literally, like, I do it in Lucia's basement and then put them out in the yard with a sheet over them and let the sun dry them all day because then it would get really hard. So all the moisture and the salt, the salt pulls out all the moisture and they got hard. And then you have to bang it with your fist and make it into a powder again. And I would bag it and sell it to friends. And friends would be like, I would leave it at friend's house. I'd go to your house like, hey, let's grill some burgers.

And the next thing you know, I'm putting it on it. And you're like, what the hell is that? And I'm like, and I leave it to you. Like, hey, you know, something I make on the side. Friends, of course, in our business, we're all, you know, connected. Like, you need to sell this. I'm like, who cares that I make salt? I'm a wine writer.

Like, what does that matter? It's so great. It's a long story, but it's like the kism that we talked about earlier. Yeah. I have, I do have a knack for stumbling into these conversations and situations where it's unbelievable how these things unfold. but my wife's cousin invites me to a dinner party and the woman sitting next to me has an import company

and she says, you're the wine guy and I said, and you're the salt guy. I'm like, ah, you know, I'm trying to get this thing off the round. She said, why don't you let me help you? I have a huge stand at the fancy food show every year and everybody comes and kisses the ring and she didn't say that, but I know that's what's happening.

She, everybody came like Martha Stewart. Wow. Everybody came to see Cecilia and she made a special corner for me and said to her whole team, start over here with this, coffees, teas, candies, panatones, blah, blah, blah, and everyone ends with Anthony and then hand it off to him. And I met over 350 of the biggest names in the, in the, oh, my God. Food World. And they all gave me advice on what to do with this thing and what, you know, what it should

look like. And right. One of the things they said was the problem with what you're making is you're using all fresh, which sounds great. And it's what people want to hear, but they're troublemakers. Rosemary and garlic are troublemakers that never dry. And if you put them in a jar, even though you think they're dry, they might cause mold. So have this stuff tested and you're better off substituting for dry.

And I said, I will never use dry. Like does it make any sense? Like a garlic powder? Yeah, or garlic flakes. I'm like, no, I could never do that. I will not, I will figure this out. And of course, I couldn't figure it out. And then Cecilia, this woman who helped me again, she has this company called Italian products

and beyond. she said, hey, I have a truffle producer in Bologna who's interested in helping you. Like, helping me. She was like, well, she goes, I've helped build his career. He helps me. I help him. He wants to help you because I'm helping you. And he has a process called flash sterilization.

So he passes truffles through these very expensive machines where it is able to kill the microbes that might cause mold. But the integrity of the of the produce stays intact. The fresh produce. All my herbs go through. and they're they're cleaned, but they're not killed. So they stay green. And when you mash it into the salt, so here's the salt.

Super salt. And it stays, so the salt stays moist and takes on the color of all the herbs. So when you open it, it's sort of like a cell gris from France like that, salt that's wet when you open the bag. Right. It actually stays a little moist. Like if you leave a lit open, it will dry out. But it's very moist when you open it, which wasn't the way I used to make.

I used to dry it solid. But I was told, it doesn't matter. how dry you think it is. We said to lab. They were like, nope, there's still moisture in here. You'll fail an FDA inspection

if you try and. So I had to, I offloaded it to Italy. It's being made in Bologna. But I'm in. So great. 95 whole foods up the East Coast. I'm in all the central markets in Texas.

Fox Trot markets in Chicago, Dallas, D.C. Oh, wow. Food 52 picked me up last Tuesday. And I've already sold over 200 orders. It's been crazy. Oh, my God. God, that's amazing.

Yeah, they come in two packs because it's, it's really. Yeah, I saw it online. You can order it online. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I have a, yeah, the whole store set up in Shopify. It's, by the way, the funny, you know, so the play on my last name, of course, it's a side gig is my company name. Because this is my side gig.

Side gig. I was like, yeah, it should be your little side hustle. It has, it has absorbed the better part of my life for the last two months because it's holidays. And I'm packing boxes every day when I'm not talking to you and other people on the, like, Zoom. Right. Like, I'm packing, pack, and pack. So I'm selling a ton of it right now. That's amazing.

It's amazing. I'm so excited that. That's so great. And what do you, what is it? What's the best use of it? Tom, it goes on everything. You put salt on everything. Yeah.

Well, so like, think about it. You can start your day with eggs. It's amazing with eggs, whether they're scrambled or just finished over the top. Right. I actually whip it into butter. So my kids are so used to garlic and butter now because we have like compound butter with super salt. But any, anything you would roast, any vegetables, fish, meats, anything you grill, honestly.

And everything you saw. You have to, yeah, you have to just be judicious. And like, what's, what's funny is my wife who doesn't cook, I'm the cook in the house, right? Yeah. So I would say, like, okay, you can do this. You can do this. And she's like, Anthony, simplify it. It makes your life easier because you're not chopping herbs.

You're not chopping. It's all in. Right. Oh, my God. Stuff. Like, it's for the weeknight cook who's like, I just want to throw. Like, I constantly make a quick, uh, of chicken thighs. Like there's got to be something in the house from my

least, you know, 16 year old son who needs to eat it all hours. I'm just constantly like, I'm like, it takes exactly five minutes to do this, guys. Screaming hot pan, a little olive oil, put some chicken in there, sprinkle some salt, turn it in four minutes, another four minutes, and we're done. We are made chicken. This is how you survive. My son gets up to the money, he scrambles eggs. He makes his sandwiches. That's great. Super salt, super salt. But it's kind of pretty crazy. That's so great, Anthony. That's amazing. I will send you some. I'm going to send you some. I'm to send you some address. That's so good. All right, before we wrap up, I have to, I have to,

I was going to start with this, but we just had too much to talk about. Christmas Eve, we're coming into the holiday season. We're coming into, uh, in my big celebrations are at Christmas Eve. I do the, the feast of the seven fishes. Yep. Uh, the, the, the Italian, wonderful, wonderful, uh, celebration. Um, this is kind of interesting, but especially off white wine conversation with the fish now that I can have if I could just base some of my fish and in rooted in the in the in the in the red wine category I'll be very happy um first of all how do you celebrate during the holidays and is and what is a give it give me a little gift of of wine knowledge to go into the holiday season so do you want Christmas Eve like that's

probably the big fish day um Christmas Eve is the fish day so like we will have um um You do it too? Yeah, yeah. So it's my wife's family and my family. We all, we actually all get along really well. So it'll be either my house, my sister's house, my parents, my mother-in-law is like we'll all come over. So in total, we're around 16 or 18 all in. And Christmas Eve is a spaghetti with clams, of course, shrimp cocktail, shrimp scampy, fried calamari, stuffed calamari.

my mother always has to have her stuffed lobster tails. I like to kill whole lobsters, but the family's not really into the needy of it all. But I'll make just a few of those for me and some of us. But my mother-in-law, she'll make the baccala in a tomato sauce with olives. And that is red wine central. I mean, that is tomato sauce, right? Yeah.

That's an easy one. My clam sauce has tomato in it, but it's more of a white sauce. but there is tomato, like, but just it's not red like, like, you know, Vincent's a little Italy on Mott Street or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but I will always have a very light, chilled red on the table no matter what we're having because there's always a place for it. So, Tom, this is, you ask me a little wine advice.

Here's what I'm going to start and say this. All of our wine, no matter what weight, what color, what price needs to be chilled. And this is a colossal problem that I go over with over and over and over. Americans have been completely misinformed about wine temperature. If you Google my name and temperature, you will see it comes up with temperature tantrums that I have all the time because I can't impress upon you how much of a difference it makes to chill a wine in an ice bucket for five quick minutes with ice and water. You cannot believe how much better it tastes after five quick minutes in a shocking cold bath. All wine. All wine.

All red wine. But there is a tipping point. So the bigger tanic reds like Cabernet can get too cold. Right. And they shut down. But like when I talk to you about like those, you know, burgundies and beaujolets and gamays and, uh, uh, the Norello's from, uh, from Cicely, the super high acid red.

And if you just said that to any wine, any wine store, hey, I'm looking for super high acid red. That is a thing. And they'll know exactly what you mean like, well, we have and they'll start showing you a million of them. And they're, and the price will be all over the place from $10 to $100. But right. Those are the ones that you literally can leave in the ice bucket, Tom, all summer. They're in ice buckets with the champagne and the white wine.

Really? They can't get too cold. So the 10 degree window for wine service is 55 to 65. There's no room temperature. I like to remind people, when you see those wine fridges now that are available everywhere. Yeah. Did you notice there's no room temperature setting in there? It's a refrigerator because red wine needs to be cooled down to minimum.

What should I keep my little wine fridge set at? So is it for one, for one temp or two? It's one temp. And you keep mostly red in there? Yeah. 55 is fine. 55? 55, yeah.

It doesn't matter. If the wine's a little cold, it's very easy. It'll warm up in five minutes in a glass. Like, it's not. Like, I always say the greatest problem to have is the wine's too cold. Right, right. Okay. Hold it like they do on nighttime TV like a chalice, you know, the wrong way.

Right. You'll heat it up in two minutes in your hands. Welcome to my. But that's what I would say, Tom. So, like, all right, it's winter, especially here. Your winter isn't our winter, you spoil rat. But so everyone's here is thinking like big, massive reds, tan and power. They still need to be chilled, not massively, but they should never be drunk of room temperature.

But I still think that when it comes to food pairing and red wine, unless it's steaks or burgers, like really big red protein, there's a huge, huge missing space for high acid light reds. And there's a million of them out there. boys who's asks. I want to have, I'm looking for some high acid chillable reds. And every retailer, worth their salt,

knows worth their salt, knows. Worth their super salt. So, I mean, that's a great place to start. I mean, I think that I would say that.

If that's helpful, I could go on and on as you know, but, yeah, this is great. Well, listen, this is the first of many appearances

that you're going to have on this podcast. And, and we are going to get together when I, when I get back, I'm actually, I think I'm performing in in January, in Jersey. Yeah, we know.

Yeah, so I'll pad it. I'll pad it so we can get together and go do some damage somewhere. Rata pizza. Yeah, oh, that'd be great. I'll bring the wine. I got a lot of good wine here. Maybe we'll get Jimmy to come back up. Yeah, that'll be great. I'm going to see him next week.

I'm actually speaking at the Palm Beach Food Wine Festival next week. Oh, nice. He's 10 minutes away, so I'm going to see him next week. Oh, that's so great. Anthony, you're the best. This was so much fun. Tom, you're the best. It's true.

Have a great holiday. Thank you, brother. All right, man. Take care. You too. Bye. All right, everybody. That's the big show.

I hope you enjoyed it. I told you it was going to be a lot of fun. A lot of stuff to write down. Go out and get yourself some affordable wine from Spain. Get some high acid wine that should be refrigerated and enjoy. Enjoy. Enjoy. Thank you to Anthony.

Go to Tompapa.com. up all of my tour dates. I'm coming to Newark. I've got two shows there. I've got Tucson, Arizona coming up soon. A lot of, a lot of tour. I mean, I'm really, there's almost, I can almost just name cities at random and I will be there between now and this time next year. All right, everybody. I hope you're enjoying your holiday season. See you next week.