Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 43 | Matthew Luczy on the Pleasures of Wine

Episode Date: April 22, 2019

Some people never drink wine; for others, it's an indispensable part of an enjoyable meal. Whatever your personal feelings might be, wine seems to exhibit a degree of complexity and nuance that can be intimidating to the non-expert. Where does that complexity come from, and how can we best approach wine? To answer these questions, we talk to Matthew Luczy, sommelier and wine director at Mélisse, one of the top fine-dining restaurants in the Los Angeles area. Matthew insisted that we actually drink wine rather than just talking about it, so drink we do. Therefore, in a Mindscape first, I recruited a third party to join us and add her own impressions of the tasting: science writer Jennifer Ouellette, who I knew would be available because we're married to each other. We talk about what makes different wines distinct, the effects of aging, and what's the right bottle to have with pizza. You are free to drink along at home, with exactly these wines or some other choices, but I think the podcast will be enjoyable whether you do or not. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Mattew Luczy is a Certified Sommelier as judged by the Court of Master Sommeliers. He currently works as the Wine Director at Mélisse in Santa Monica, California. He is also active in photography and music. Mélisse home page Personal/photography page Instagram Ask a Somm: When Should I Decant Wine?

This June, the world comes to Los Angeles. Kick off FIFA World Cup 2026 at the FIFA Fan Festival at the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Watch matches live on Giant Scream. Feel every goal with thousands of fans. And celebrate with music, culture, and flavors from around the world. Join us June 11th through 14th opening weekend as the tournament kicks off in Los Angeles. Tickets are just $10 and kids under 12 were free. Get yours now at Los Angeles FWC26.com.

Wellness looks different at every stage. The right support makes all the difference. Power performance with vital proteins advanced collagen peptides plus creatine. Designed to help build and maintain muscle mass in combination with resistance exercise. It also supports healthy hair, skin, and nails. Strength and beauty in one scoop. So you turn every day into a little time for women's wellness. Vital Proteins. Stay vital.

Visit VitalProtene.com to get started. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and this is another special episode of Mindscape. We're having enough special episodes that you might begin to think that every episode of Mindscape is special, and you might be right about that. But this one is a departure. I've always wanted to get into not only sort of academic kind of things, but also the realm of ideas out there in the real world, involving things like music, which we've already talked about, movies, and also food and drink.

So I always thought it would be fun to have an episode of Minescape devoted to the idea of wine. Now, wine obviously is a huge topic. There are many, many things you could talk about. But ideally, we'd be able to sort of start at the beginning, give useful information to people who knew nothing about wine or even had had some and hated it, but also give some useful insight to people who are experts and connoisseurs. I think that we have achieved that. This is a very fun episode.

Happily, I happen to know Matthew Lutzi, who is today's guest. He is the Somelier at Melisse Restaurant. here in Los Angeles. For those of you who are not locals, Males is two Michelin-starred restaurant probably the most sophisticated, traditional fine dining white tablecloths, French-American cuisine restaurant that you can find here in Los Angeles. There's really not that much competition, in fact. So Matthew's job is both to curate the wine list at Males and then to serve the wine in the restaurant. So, you know, he's an very influential person in the Southern California wine world, as you'll see, at quite a young age. He's also very approachable,

very knowledgeable, and very much of the opinion that everyone should enjoy wine in their own way. So when I asked him to be on the podcast, he was very enthusiastic, and he said, of course, I have to bring wine. So yes, we will actually be tasting wine in real time here on this episode of Minescape. And because we did that, I thought it would be fun to do another experiment and bring in a third person for the podcast, my lovely white. Jennifer Willett, who is a science writer, and who I know from drinking wine with her, is much better at tasting wine than I am. She is one of these supertasters who is especially sensitive to cruciferousness and bitterness and so forth. So we have some overlap in our tastes, but it's a little bit different, so that's a new perspective. And of course, she's also written articles about the science of taste and smell and climate change and how it's affecting wine and so forth. So we have a lot of fun. We start at the beginning. We taste both California wines and French wines and we compare them and we go from everything like what you should serve with truffles to what you should serve with cheeseburgers. And I think that it's an eye-opening

experience. Matthew has some, he has opinions, which is good. That's what you want in a podcast guest. His opinions are not the same as everybody else's, which is also very good. So you're going to learn something, you're going to have fun. I recommend, if possible, that you have this podcast on, you know, at home with some wine in front of you, if you could. If you're in the car listening, then that's also fine, but be sure to remember some of the things we say, bring them back home because this is definitely one of the more educational and useful episodes that we have here on Mindscape. So let's go. Wellness, longevity, health is a lifestyle.

Every week a new trend explodes across the media landscape. And depending on who's talking, it's either a miracle breakthrough or just expensive hype dressed up as science. Enter Kara Swisher. She's here to cut through the news. with their signature edge. Sharp, skeptical, and allergic to nonsense. Don't miss the CNN original series,

Kara Swisher wants to live forever. An essential, smart, and genuinely entertaining guide to the booming longevity industry. Because let's be real. The non-stop stream of wellness promises, AI-driven health claims, and expensive tech with sometimes dubious benefits, isn't slowing down. Kara digs into what actually works

and what it really costs. From access gaps to tradeoffs most people would rather ignore. We're all getting older, that part's inevitable. The choices that come with it? Not so simple. You might as well understand what you're buying into. Don't miss the new CNN original series Kara Swisher wants to live forever. Streaming April 12th with a CNN subscription.

Go to CNN.com slash subscribe to get started. Organic Valley Protein Plus, altar-filtred milk is pasture-raised from cows that might take more steps the most people. That's a plus. And it has 50% more protein and 50% less sugar than regular milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that it didn't make a pun about moving, also a plus.

Organic Valley Protein Plus Ultra Filtered Milk. Protein plus pasture raised. Learn more at Organicvalley.com. Matthew Lutzi, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thank you so much, Sean. Honor. This is going to be an unusual episode. episode of Minescape for a variety of reasons.

One, because just the topic is a little bit different. You know, I say there's no such thing as what we talk about, but we often do a lot of science and philosophy and things. There will be science and philosophy, but mostly we're talking about wine and food and a kind of aesthetic experience that we don't often get to here. So that's great. Second reason why it's different is we're going to be tasting wine. Sadly, the audience is not going to be tasting wine along with us.

I think probably half the audience listens in the car, so they definitely shouldn't be. Not recommended. Not recommended, but look, if they're doing it at home, I will list the wines on the website, and they can buy and taste along with us. And it's highly recommended. Highly recommended. Third reason is because we have a special guest, Jennifer Willett, famous science writers. Say hi, hi, Jennifer.

Hello, everybody. Jennifer is also, as many listeners will know, my spouse. And we brought her here to give us a little bit of an extra opinion about the wines that we're tasting. famously her palate is much more refined and sensitive than mine. So don't listen to what I say, but listen to what she says. Of course, I hope that part of our lesson will be that everyone's palate is different. So that'll be good. Anyway, Matthew, thanks so much for coming.

Tell us a little bit about who you are, how you got here. Like, what does it mean to be a sommelier? Well, okay, so a simileet is one that looks after and serves wine in a restaurant. That's how I would define it. There's a lot of definitions to it, but I think the restaurant aspect of it is crucial. I got into it young. I definitely had three-year head start as far as... On the legal aid for...

On the legal side of it, yeah. Just to make sure... Local? California? I'm from Central California, yeah. Mariposa, California, right outside, Yosemite National Park. Yeah, I got a head start just to make sure I could do all the testing as soon as possible, you know. Very good. Cheating ahead of time.

Yes. And so, I mean, wine is a specific thing. Like, why were you drinking wine rather than the cheap beer that most kids that age would be drinking? Well, I've just always been interested in and fascinated by things with a lot of variables in understanding why things work and always been into music also. So kind of an artistic side. And it sort of instantly clicked with me that wine seemed to be the most artistic way to go about drinking, essentially. And, you know, like I said, from California, most of my friends are older than I am.

And my early mentors were into California wine, and that's where I started. And that was kind of in the formative years while working in a restaurant and not disliking it. A lot of people are working in restaurants while doing something else, especially in Los Angeles. And I was like, this isn't bad. It's a fairly easy way to make a solid amount of money. And how do I just deal with wine? Like, how do I just isolate that? And I went to Melisse on a total whim with my best friend.

And we just had our minds absolutely blown. He got super into the culinary world, you know, bought the Alenia cookbook and the French Laundry cookbook. and, you know, spend eight hours making one course. But he used the food side. Just to do it. Yeah. And then I forked off and was like, okay, how do I be a sommelier?

And specifically, it would be really cool to be the summelier here. And that literally happened. That never works. Yeah. That actually happened. And so, yeah, I did the testing, the first two levels of the quarter of master summoliers, as it's called, when I was 22 and went to Males. So over the course of a couple years trying to get hired, and I was obviously young,

and at that point didn't have any fine dining experience. And it's one of those things where, you know, how do you get experience without having experience? Yeah, right. How do I break in? Well, go somewhere a bunch of times and bug them until they say, yes, you can work one day a week. And then that becomes two. And then that becomes you're an assistant. And then someone leaves and you're the wine director.

I mean, for the people, I think that we have an audience where some people are going to be wine experts and some will never have tasted, let's say, good wine, but wine at all. What is it that makes wine wine? What is it that makes it so special? What differentiates it from, on the one hand, you know, gin or scotch, but also for that matter, apple juice or Diet Coke? Well, you know, certainly gin and scotch reflect a place. I don't think they do it to the level that wine does. I really think that there's an intrinsic locality. specificity of locality to wine as in like this vineyard, not going across the street to the next vineyard,

like hyper, hyper zoomed in, combined with that it's from a vintage, it's from one year, and it changes over time. You know, some liquors do, but not in the same way that wine does,

that there's a lifespan and a trajectory to it that is fascinating. And again, with so many variables that go into it, there's a lot of BS that goes into it, unfortunately, and it is also unfortunately, it can be an easily pretentious topic. I've never noticed that. And I really don't like that. And wine is fascinating and wine is cool, and some people make it not that way.

Is there any way to, I mean, put that in the terms of the actual product? I mean, there's something complicated about wine. I mean that in the good way, not in the bad way. There's something about wine that lends itself to endless variety in a way that bourbon does not. Yeah, well, so without being a biologist, but from, you know, what I do understand about the way wine works, so the grapes that make up wine are called vitus venephra. That is everything that you produce wine from forks off of that. So, Pinoir, Chardonnay, Merlot, serra, nebiolo, tini, fruleano, whatever it is, it's all vitis vinifera.

it's a type of grape yes uh and their berries are about a third of the size i want to say as of like table grapes like concord grapes um they're much harsher you just eat one like in a vineyard i mean especially a red i mean there's if you don't understand tannin you ever get a chance to go walk around a vineyard coastal harvest you will understand it better um so it mutates easily and splits off into, you know, different, not forms, but like Pinot Noir, Pino-Gri, those are linked. You know, the Sovillon Blanc and Cabernet-Fronk are the mother and father, respectively, of Cabernet-Somillon. They were crossed. That's why it has its name. So there's a level of complexity from the biology standpoint, as I understand it, that is, I don't know, unique to wine.

it seems to be like spread out wider with wine. So sorry, just the basic facts that grapes come in more varieties than wheat or barley do is an important part of it. There can't just be one form of wheat. I don't want to say that. Okay. I'm sure, but... Any good brewer is going to like kill your bread.

Yeah, someone in the comments is going to destroy me. But, you know, I think that part of it when you're dealing... Okay, so in either hemisphere, basically the band of 30 degrees, and 50 degrees is the Goldilocks zone, as it were, of where you can successfully ripen vizephyra to have sugar levels

compatible with fermentation. Below 30, they're just getting baked above 50, although this is changing. Above 50, they're struggling to have the physiological ripeness for the yeast to ferment. And there's nowhere that makes wine that isn't pretty.

That's also, It really is like any wine region, like you want to go. Even if you're not into it, like just go and eat there and hang out there. We'll be a good time. I think that one of the things it gets in the way of people who are not wine experts is that it is complicated, right? I mean, this is the benefit. This is the wonderful thing. But it's also intimidating.

So, I mean, besides red and white, what are the basic ways in which we should classify different wines in our heads? Like, you know, high alcohol, low alcohol is an obvious one. full-bodied, less full-body. Yeah. What else is going on? Well, so I do think about this in a binary way, and I think it's helpful for understanding, especially if you're beginning. So let's take red just for now.

You mentioned alcohol content. That definitely is a factor. That's really more of a factor of climate and winemaker decision, which we'll get into. But with red wine, the way I look at it, the first fork in the road is, is it thin-skinned or is it thick-skinned? Okay. So, thin-skinned varietals are Pinot Noir, Game, Grenache, Sanjaveze, Temprenio, and Nebiole. There's the main ones.

There's other, like, funky ones, but those are the six main ones. And then everything else is thick-skinned. So Cabernino-Sovian, Merlot, Petit Brito, Saras, et cetera. And this is strictly a matter of what great bridal it is. Yes. If you know the varietal, then you know where it's thick or thin. Yes. Gerdosh is the funky one that people don't really like think is thin-skinned but

it depending on where it's from it can like kind of seemingly wear both hats but anyway so thin skin thick skin and how does that transfer form into a feature of the wine that you're drinking thin skin makes a lighter wine essentially thick skin will make a heavier wine there's a another one of the weird thin-skinned great is Nebiolo. That's the only one where you, it's basically like, I call it,

it's like puno noir wrapped in fine grit sandpaper. It's, it's tanic, but light. Usually the thick-skinned grapes are going to have more tan in structure. But Nebolo is this funky one. Amazing one,

but that's kind of an outlier. So thin skin, thick skin, and then the other really major thing to look at is earth versus fruit. And that is a function of where it's from. And the wine world is roughly divided into not quite halves, but two parts, the old world and the new world.

Basically, the old world is Europe. The new world is everywhere that's not Europe. Very Eurocentric choice of language, but that's okay. Yeah, yeah. And blanket statement, wines from the old world are grown in a cooler climate. Wines from the new world are grown in a warmer climate. So they tend to be riper, and the riper grapes are getting, the more fruit-driven they tend to be. If the grapes aren't getting as ripe, they tend to reflect more of the surroundings of the vineyard, the soil type, and you're tasting more of the earth flavors.

That's a generalization. There's exceptions to anything we could talk about here somewhere, but basically old world, new world, that's how it shakes out. So the matrices of, is it light or heavy function of the thickness of the skin? is it more fruit-driven or more earth-driven? Within that, you have the variables of what the alcohol content will be. And the other thing that plays into that, or that's a function of all of that, is acidity versus tannin. So, again, the binary way I describe this is acid makes your mouth water, tanon dries your mouth out. That is the easiest way to think about it.

That's very nice. I like that. You know, oversteepe a tea bag and taste it. That's tannin. Yes. Or just over steep your tea, yeah. Whereas lemon juice is that is acid. Makes your mouth water. Yeah.

Organic Valley Protein Plus, salt or filtered milk is pasture raised from cows that might take more steps than most people. That's a plus. And it has 50% more protein and 50% less sugar than regular milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that it didn't make a pun about moving, also a plus. Organic Valley Protein Plus Ultra Filtered Milk Protein plus pasture raised. Learn more at Organic Valley.com.

Wellness, longevity, health is a lifestyle. Every week a new trend explodes across the media landscape. And depending on who's talking, it's either a miracle breakthrough or just expensive hype dressed up as science. Enter Kara Swisher. She's here to cut through the noise with their signature edge, sharp, skeptical, and allergic to nonsense. Don't miss the CNN original series Kara Swisher wants to live forever,

an essential, smart, and genuinely entertaining guide to the booming longevity industry. Because let's be real. The non-stop stream of wellness promises, AI-driven health claims, and expensive tech with sometimes dubious benefits, isn't slowing down. Kara digs into what actually works and what it really costs, From access gaps to tradeoffs most people would rather ignore. We're all getting older, that part's inevitable. The choices that come with it?

Not so simple. You might as well understand what you're buying into. Don't miss the new CNN original series Kara Swisher wants to live forever. Streaming April 12th with a CNN subscription. Go to CNN.com slash subscribe to get started. Now, in the context of wine, acid, I hesitate to call wines acidic because it just doesn't sound great, but like acid-driven, bright, racy, high-toned, those kind of descriptors are tend to be describing wines that have a higher level of acidity, which makes them brighter, makes them more refreshing, if you will. Would a chemist go along with this? Would they say that what you are calling an acidic wine actually is more acidic versus basic in the pH-level you measure? So it's objectively.

Yeah, yeah, pH. I mean, like a low pH wine is, if it's three even, like that's, that's acid-driven. And then you're going up to like four, that's a high pH. Yeah. High more tanic then? No, not necessarily because they're different. So, and they come together. So they work together.

So the tannin level, I don't know if there's a way to really measure it from a chemistry standpoint like there is with pH. But like we'll, as we get into these wines, we can sort of like talk about how they intermingle. But basically acid and tannin, you kind of taste them one on top of each other. And if you could magically take away the acid from a wine, you would notice how much less spine it has. It's called structure, what acid and tannin imparts into wine. But there are two separate sort of properties that kind of do. opposite things, right? So the tanic removes the moisture from your, from your mouth, and the acid adds it. But in principle, you could have a wine that was both very tanic and very acidic. Yes. Again,

Nebiolo, that's it. Nebiolo is raising a tan somewhere going. That's me. So we've had four things to keep in mind, right? Light versus heavy, earthy versus fruity, level of acidity, level of tannicness? Tannin. Just level of tannin. Yeah. And that's red grapes. White, you get to just take out tannin because so the juice of all grapes is clear the only thing that makes red wine red is contact with the skins now there is what's called orange wine which is white wine made like a red wine that's gaining in popularity a lot of like funky bars and stuff of poor wine they're fun for food pairing you see a lot of them in like Croatia and the jura part of Europe but white you still have the acid you don't have the tannin you still have body although it sort of manifests

differently. You know, light white grapes, sovion blanc. All this is depending on how it's made, too. I mean, you can make a sovion blanc into a really rich, like, oaky style of wine, or you can not. So just, it's a great varietal makeup, things like Muscaday, Verminitino, Sauvian Blanc. Those are light, zippy, bright, zesty white wines. Marsan, Ruson, those are big, oily, fatty, fat. batter, punchier styles of white wine. Viennay, really oily, also really floral. So white is kind of has a whole other, you need a different way of thinking about and describing white wine.

Chardonnay is one of my favorite topics, because it's one of the most misunderstood things ever. And this applies to all wine. Like I had this conversation at the restaurant, you know, nightly, you know. Oh, are there things you like, things you don't like? I do not want chardonnay. Is it because you don't like, quote, okey buttery wines?

Yes. Okay. And I always equate this to Goodwill hunting. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. People have been exposed to a lot of bad chardonnay, right? It's not, it's not, it's fault.

People also get exposed to a lot of bad chablis. I mean, I had a lot of bad white shibli in college, and it's turned me off white wine for a very long time. Yeah, well, a lot of that, the California Shibli, as it was called. That is not Shibli. That is not the, from the Appalachian origin, controlee in the north-east. northeastern part of France.

I see. Not far from champagne. Shabli is a place, just like champagne is a place. And, like, there, you see old bottles of California wine that say, like, California Sautearn, California, Burgundy, California, Shabli. The old days. Before the AOCs were formed in 1936 and it became, you can't do that. I want to, you know, we have this beautiful, lovely wine in front of us.

And now we have a little bit of a vocabulary for understanding. Yeah. But I know because we do have a heterogeneous audience, let's, I want some take-home messages. right away. You know, what should someone do if they're not a wine expert and they kind of want to be more, like they want to investigate, you know, what are the steps they should take in a wine store or restaurant or whatever to sort of get the basics and find something they like? I would say find a local wine shop, get a couple friends, and be honest and go in on a few bottles that have their opposite styles and start down in what it is you do or do not like.

So by wine shop, you mean not supermarket. I mean, not supermarket. Yeah. Not to, you know. A place where they know and like wine. Yes. You know, the money will almost always go farther. You will have a staff that's specifically trained to talk about and sell wine and also usually love wine.

Minorly helpful. And. So get something light body, get something full body, get something earthy. Exactly. Yeah. And split them up. Get what you might think. Maybe it might be too many glasses at the house, but you never have enough.

Never. You never do. Yeah. And just start learning and pay attention to it, which, you know, I don't mean that to sound like sharp, but, you know, think about what it is that you're tasting and think about how you would try to articulate it and try to articulate it. Don't just if you don't know what to say, that's fine. But make notes. Go back to that wine shop. Hey, this is what I thought. What do you think? Where do we go now? I didn't like that wine that really dried all the, like took all the saliva out of my. my mouth what does that mean um that that charterne a that i thought was going to be oaky and buttery it was like razor blades like what happened there like what you know just um be honest be uh inquisitive and i really can't stress enough like do it in a group do it with at least you know one other one other person but just to bounce off each other and you know people are going to pick out things that you

wouldn't notice and vice versa and, you know, they're rising tides, right? And it's possible to do okay at the $20 bottle level? Yes, absolutely. I'd say, I'm glad you brought that up because I think there is somewhat of a break there just as far as what it costs. It's hard to do well at the $10 of a bottle level. Yeah. You know, the exception, if you're in Europe and you ask for the table wine, it'll be, you know, sometimes like six euros for a carafe and it'll be awesome. Sometimes. Sometimes. But your chances of it being awesome are way higher there than they are here. You're dealing with tariffs and all that stuff. But you got to be able to spend 20 bucks on a bottle of wine.

And it's five drinks. Like would you complain at a bar if you were paying that for cocktail? Like, you know, it's 20 bucks is where you reasonably should start. And you, yeah, there is no quality price ratio in the wine world. There are a lot of ways to waste money. I'm really fortunate to work where I do. I've got to taste a lot of crazy wines, and a lot of them that are really expensive are absolutely worth it

if you could afford them and not feel it. And a lot of them are just a waste of money. So, I mean, just for the people who might never actually experience this themselves, is there a difference between a $1,000 bottle of wine and a $10,000 bottle of wine? It depends what they are. But there can be. Oh, yes.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it just seems, I think, to a lot of people for whom a $50 bottle wine is expensive. Totally. Yeah. And it is. And it is. Exactly. So, but the idea might very well be that at some point there's a point of diminishing

returns. Oh, no. You're paying for micro percentage increase at that point. And you're just paying for what it is. I mean, it is what it is. Like, literally. I mean, if, you know, the most famous winery in the world that tends to basically most of the most expensive bottles of wine sold, the domain.

in della Romani Conti in Burgundy and Burgundy, they're insanely good. Sorry. They are. I think of it, you know, as in my physics analogy sort of land, it's kind of like the large Hadron Collider. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's very expensive.

Is it worth literally a million times what some, what you can do for $1,000? No, but if you don't spend the billions of dollars, you get nothing. Do you find the Higgs-Boson without it? Right. You don't find a thousandth of the Higgs-Bos on. find nothing. Yeah. Yeah. So if you want to play that at that level, then that's what you call. Yeah. And no, DRC is not whatever percentage it is better than whatever you want to compare it to, but there's only one DRC. Right. And there's a lot of things in the middle of that price range and things that are

equal to the kinds of money you can spend on those kind of wines that are one-dimensional and you're tasting the investors and the winemaker's ego. You're not tasting this like historically consistent place that is just like renowned for a reason. And everywhere across that spectrum, that exists. I mean, more and more and more, my favorite wines are like, I call them the beautiful babies from the great producers, you know, in places like Burgundy where there's a classification system of the vineyards where you have vineyards that are classified as regional like it's from Burgundy somewhere, or then it's from a specific little village in Burgundy, or it's from a specific vineyard in Burgundy, and then it's from a really, really good vineyard in Burgundy,

the four different levels. What's called Borgonne, the most simple of them, from the great winemakers, is a fraction of the price of the expensive stuff, but you're still getting that expertise in a simple wine. And that's the golden place to be. Now, some of those can be 50, 60 bucks to start, but you're drinking $50, $60 wine from people who are making $6, $7, $9, $100 bottle of wine, you know. Speaking of drinking wine. Now, you brought four different bottles of wine here, and you have a theory. I mean, there's a system for why there's four.

There's a reason. Explain the reason. A lot of reasons. So they're all red. Red, good. That's because I said only red. Yes. My fault.

Sean requested red. That's fine. No, no. Episode two, we'll do all white. So, yeah, I wanted to talk about the thin-skinned, thick-skinned thing that I talked about, and then also the old world versus the new world. So the only way to do that successfully is to have four wines. Excellent math skills.

From a physicist, everyone heard about it. So, yeah, I have a Sonoma Coast, Pino-No Noir versus a red burgundy. So I've talked about Burgundy a couple times, but without explaining what that is. So that is a region in the kind of central eastern part of France, not far from the Swiss border that makes Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. A couple other grapes they grow, aligote and gamay, but for the most part, Pinotaur and Chardonnay, and that's it. And pretty much the greatest examples of them.

That is changing. There is competition that is mounting all the time, but the competition is still bounced off Burgundy. It's the reference point. It's the standard. Yeah, it is. Okay. So we have a California Pinot Noir and then a Burgundy, also Pinot Noir.

Yes, yeah. If it's red and it's from Burgundy, it's Pinot Noir. Noir. Everything here is just one varietal. There's no blend. The California Pinot Noir is made by a winery named Cobb, and he's in the Sonoma Coast. So the Sonoma Coast is this big place. It's like saying, oh, where do you live?

L.A. County. Okay. It's kind of helpful, but it could mean a lot of things. So Sonoma Coast, but specifically the vineyards. that Roskob is working with are in this little undefined sub-region of the Sonoma Coast, that they're working on getting passed through as an official sub-region called Freestone Occidental, that's just a few miles inland from the ocean, meaning that the grapes are socked in a marine layer a lot of the time. And also in these coastal regions, you have really wide, what are called diurnal shifts.

So that's the difference between the hottest time of the day and the coolest time of the night. And pretty much categorically across the wine world, grapes want that. They want to be stressed. They want to be bouncing around temperature-wise. But Pino-No-No-R specifically is kind of a nightmare. It's a really finicky, hard-to-grow grape. It requires just perfect, perfect conditions to not be either shrill if it's underripe or flabby and sort of no longer a silky, pretty sexy textured wine if it's getting too ripe.

So this specific little pocket of the Sonoma Coast is great for it. Ross has a really kind of deft touch, very hands-off winemaker, as I call him, and any great winemaker. I don't want to taste what you can do with a wine. I want to taste the wine. The wine, right? So I want to actually taste this wine, but let me just so look forward a little bit so that our audience knows where we're going. These two, the first ones are Pino's, old and new world. And the next two are...

Second two are Saraw. So, again, California and France. that'll be the thicker skin yeah thick skin yeah fuller bodied especially the the California iteration the French sarah really is not much heavier than the red burgundy is going to be but I would to do that on purpose there's a couple kind of almost backwards things in this flight that I always like to illustrate that you know these wide brush strokes are not always accurate so um or there are exceptions to them, I should say. So two Pinot Noir is both from the 2015 vintage and then two

sarahs both from the 2010 vintage. 15 in California, you know, coming out of drought, a string of drought vintages. Warm but not really warm, not to the level of 13, 14. And then in France, 15 is really, really widely acclaimed. It's a little bit of a riper, rounder vintage. 2015. 2015, yeah, yeah. But the yields are down as they've been in Burgundy for the past basically 10 vintages in a row, which we'll get into later why that's happening. But basically the California Pinot Noir, which typically, again, broad stroke, California

versus France, you're going to get a more fruit-driven, heavier style of wine from a warmer climate. And then the European wines typically are more earth-driven and more rust- And here they're kind of backwards. Neither of them is necessarily rustic, but the Burgundy is a little bit more sveled and kind of slick due to the warmer vintage and different winemaking styles between them. But both master, master winemakers. The Burgundy is from a producer named Bruno Claire from a specific little village in Burgundy called Sauvany Labone. And then one vineyard called La Dominoid.

And Domino was planted in 1908. So the oldest vines in this vineyard date back to then. And basically as vines get older, they produce less juice. So the juice they do produce is more concentrated, tends to give you a more complex wine, tends to give you a more age-worthy wine. It's literally the same vines. It's like, do you take a snip from a vine and plant? You can do that.

I mean, there's a point where some of them stop producing altogether. So there's always less and less and less and less of the old vines, and they're replanting other parts of the vineyard. So not every vine in this is from 1908. That's the arrow time at work. There it is. We think of individual animals as having a lifespan, but we don't really think of plants as having a lifespan,

but they give up at some point. Anyway. Yeah, let's taste. The new world. Okay, good. So this is the California Pino Noir. Cod, Rice Spivak Vineyard. Sonoma Coas, Pinotua.

Organic Valley Protein Plus, saltor filtered milk is pasture raised from cows that might take more steps than most people. That's a plus. And it has 50% more protein and 50% percent. less sugar than regular milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that it didn't make a pun about moving, also a plus. Organic Valley Protein Plus ultra-filtered milk.

Protein plus pasture raised. Learn more at Organicvalley.com. Wellness, longevity, health as a lifestyle. Every week a new trend explodes across the media landscape. And depending on who's talking, it's either a miracle breakthrough. or just expensive hype dressed up as science. Enter Kara Swisher. She's here to cut through the noise with her signature edge,

sharp, skeptical, and allergic to nonsense. Don't miss the CNN original series Kara Swisher wants to live forever. An essential, smart, and genuinely entertaining guide to the booming longevity industry. Because let's be real. The non-stop stream of wellness promises, AI-driven health claims, and expensive tech with sometimes dubious, benefits isn't slowing down. Kara digs into what actually

works and what it really costs. From access gaps to tradeoffs most people would rather ignore. We're all getting older. That part's inevitable. The choices that come with it? Not so simple. You might as well understand what you're buying into. Don't miss the new

CNN original series Kara Swisher wants to live forever. Streaming April 12th with a CNN subscription. Go to CNN.com slash subscribe to get started. And what should we be looking for when we're tasting this? So what I do is I always smell first. And first, it sounds obvious, but a lot of people don't.

A lot of people just go into the glass and just go right in. But, you know, obviously our sense of taste and sense of smell are linked. And part of, especially when you're dealing with Pino noir, I mean, it's just, it is like lacy, pretty feminine, understated, floral, exactly. I want to smell all that. and this wine smells gorgeous. And more and more. I'm smelling it right now.

Yeah. Yeah, that, you know, and this I always get like kind of like pomegranate, like lavender. Again, that racy, high tone, bright acidity that you'll see on the end. You feel it in your tongue. You feel it everywhere, really. But the way that the finish like sings and keeps going, that is why you need wine that has a fair amount of acidity in it.

If you don't have that, you just don't get the same level of kind of width and breadth and depth. Yeah, I'm actually very surprised. This is 2015. Sean knows that I don't like younger wines because I don't like super, super fruity wines. And I feel it's the acidity here that makes this so pleasurable and so drinkable. It actually allows those lighter floral notes to come out. And it kind of softens the fruit component a little bit. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you just have a really, really integrated wine, and for it to be integrated this well, this young. This wine isn't even technically released yet. This producer is really adamant about holding the wines back to three, four years longer than most wineries do just because he wants him to hit when they're killing it. Not that this isn't, but... But it's going to age.

In a couple years, it's going to be perfect? It'll be better. I mean, this is a 30-year wine easily. easily. And the other thing here that I love is the salinity. And that's another thing that a common thread through the wines that I love is here it's coming from, like I said, that marine layer. You know, imagine it like you're eating a perfect dish at a great restaurant. Just because nothing tastes salty. It doesn't mean that there's not salt in it. If you could take it out, you notice it's gone. So I think of wine musically and base middle treble on an

equalizer. So acidity is kind of likens to the to the treble with listening to a record and you turn all the trouble off, you can't hear it. There's no definition. That precision is gone. All about that base, no treble is not good. Yeah. Yeah. Um, there's a great example of a perfect high end in a great record. When you say something like pomegranate, so I would not have said that, but when you say it, I can sort of recognize it after the fact. See what happens. Do you think that, right, so there's a psychology experiment going on also. But do you think that there are literally molecules that would be in a pomegranate that are also in here? Yes, there are.

When we get to the surah, we'll talk about rotundund done. So that's the thing that makes black pepper, black pepper. Oh. Surrah, if it doesn't smell like black pepper, got messed up somewhere. And presumably there's advanced scientific research going on trying to deconstruct a wine like this and try to make it, try to make us understand why it tastes. Slash recreated an impedri dish, yes. Yes.

But we can't. I mean, we're not successful. We can make an impossible burger, but we cannot make fake wine yet. It's common. it's coming? I mean, as you know, I mean,

it's atoms. Yeah. There's nothing else. It is reducible. There's a finite number of arrangements. As much as I, oh man, yeah,

me and friends, like, talk about this a lot over a lot of bottles of wine and the moral conundrums of a summelier. Yeah. I mean,

imagine you could tune whatever wine you wanted. That would be kind of an awesome. Oh, I've imagined it. Yeah. Yeah. The chemistry is very,

very complicated, but there is, in fact, a lot of ongoing research, correct? Yeah. Davis, for example, but other places around the world are very much looking at the chemical composition of these for just that reason. The better you understand the chemical components

and what's going on in the chemistry, not just in space but into overtime, the more you can tailor the flavor profiles to your liking. Yeah, and the more you'll learn about if we're not making wine in a petri dish, the more you can better farm. I mean, wine is farming slash gardening, however you want to look at it, but somewhere in the middle of those things. You know, and everything you're doing has an impact. It's all, you know, prior causes, everything. It's all happening in a vineyard. And at the end of the day, you can only make great wine from great grapes.

You can go the other way. You know, you can mess it up, but you can't just like take subpar, lazily farmed, kind of lifeless grapes and turn them into a complex head spinning beverage. It just doesn't work that way. So there's a lot of reasons why that happens. There are variables that we do know about. You know, like Vine Age is a big one. I mentioned that with the Burgundy,

with the old vines. They make less juice, but they tend to just have a wine that's a little bit more concentrated. And I look at the structure of a wine. Again, like I mentioned, which is acid and tannin. And vine age plays into that as like the charging of the batteries of the wine. Like how long will the charge?

charge last essentially. And you mean over years, not over since you opened the bottle and started drinking? Well, both. We can talk about that, too. I'm more talking about in the bottle, but good wine can take way more oxygen than people realize. I mean, like, I have a couple of litmus tests for how much I really like a wine, and one of them is how is it on day three.

Some wines, some styles of wine are absolutely better on day three in pairings at the restaurant. I'll open wines on my way out the door for the next night kind of thing. And summer vinegar after day three. Yeah, exactly. That has to do with structure. And then also the aging of the wine in the bottle. You know, the wine that last 40, 50, 60, 70, 100 years, you know, there has to be,

if we're talking reds, like there's some level of tannin in there. There's some level of acidity. The grapes have to have structure, which I equate to our skeleton. I mean, there's a reason we can sit in these chairs and walk around. And, you know, that is the equivalent of that in wine is the intermingling of acid and tannin. What's the oldest wine you've ever had? Well, I have two answers to that. One of them is Madeira.

So it's fortified wine from the little subtropical. It's cheating because it can't go bad from late 1700s. I forget the vintage on it. Holy smokes. Late what? 1700. 18th century. Yeah.

So drove a lot of the economy. Older in America. That's like the billionaire's vinegar, yeah, with Thomas Jefferson's wine, correct? Yeah, the fake wine. The fake wine. Had a couple of those, too. That's the whole thing.

Okay, but non-fortified? Non-fortified, late 1800 vintages, Bordeaux, like Opryon from 1898, Lafitte. Are they holding up? Yeah. You've got like 20 minutes at most. I'm tasting like two ounces if I'm lucky an ounce here and there and that dries out really quick in the glass.

Sorry, but that's an important lesson, right? A lot of people think the older the wine is, the more you have to decant it and let it air out. And there's a point of diminishing returns there. Definitely. So, yeah, oxygen helps till it hurts, right, all the way across the spectrum. So, um, and again, like if you have a what are called good or great vintages, and I dislike the way of describing them, which we can talk about later because you have to say what that's for good or bad for what there's quote poor vintages when they come out that are better to drink young and then quote great vintages

usually don't drink well young because they're very primary and they're meant to go the distance energizer bunny style down the road that's when they're meant to be drank but um in those ripe quote unquote great vintages um those wines take longer to unpack so if you're going to open them young decanning them is helpful. I decant more white wine than I do red at this point. That's another thing I think a lot of people misunderstand. White can handle way more oxygen than most people give it. And I am a bigger fan at this point of just letting red wine slow ox, as they call it,

like slowly come up in the glass rather than trying to like fast forward it. So enjoy how it changes over the course of the meal. Yeah, exactly. And part of that is I'm like pretty. CD about not crossing pours, as I call it. So especially if you're dealing with an older wine, you know, you pour two to three ounces. Never more than that. Take note.

You never want six ounces of wine in a glass unless you're just ordering wine by the glass. But it's just not helpful. You get less out of it in the long run. That's interesting because, of course, you know, America, there's kind of like we want to get our money's worth. Oh, sure. And this is a very different kind of aesthetic where, you know, to get your money's worth means you want the wine to be as good as possible.

Yeah. And that's not a quantity question. Yeah, basically, I want, you know, roughly 25 ounces of wine in a 750-millimeter bottle to turn into as many wines as I can possibly let it turn into. So if I'm dealing with, that happens more usually with older wines, but if I'm pouring two people, two ounces, they get 10 wines if you're playing along. And also how the empty glass smells is a beautiful thing. And that actually is helpful with young wine.

If something's had maybe too much oak put on it or there's a little bit too much treatment, that's oftentimes what you smell in the glass. I call it the finish of the nose. So people talk about the palate and the finish of the palate and just the nose. But it's not technically the finish of the nose. But I think of it that way. Like what are the remnants all about? Okay.

So we've enjoyed this. Yeah. 2015 California Pino. I mean, this is a high level one, relatively speaking. This is more fruity than earthy because it is new world. More fruit-driven than earth. It's very acidic, bright light on the palate. And now we're moving to the old world.

Yes. To the Brune-Claire. And I won't lead the witness. I'll have you taste. Okay, we're going to taste it. And who knows what can happen? Anything, really. At Minescape, the wine edition.

Ooh. It's very different. Six and a half thousand miles. Well, but that's more in the way they handled the acidity, I think, because here the acidity is very front and center and very, very pronounced. And here it's more blended and smooth and a little more gentle. Bam. Yep. Yep. That's a relatively warm vintage in a place that doesn't have a ton of them. And definitely to do with the fact you're dealing with an old vineyard.

So this is the one where the actual vines are from 1908. part of them, yeah, a block or, I forget exactly like what the split is, but they're being, you know, there's 1908 planning. There's planning in the 50s. I mean, there's no, like, usually if vines are in this part of the world, if they're under 20 years old, they're not even, they'll like sell it off. Is this a wine that will age more than the first one? Hard did not say yes. Although I truly. We don't want to say anything. against the first one. No, I don't. It's not even... The first one is a lovely wine.

I'm surprised that they're both 2015. I would have, and if I was... It did not know, would think that the second was older. Right. The first one tastes like an excellent 2015. The second one tastes older, right out of it. Absolutely, I would drink this, you know, with a meal. It's wonderful.

But there's just something a little extra. The edge is off. I guess it's the best way I can think of it. Yeah, and you know, they're both... So you can sort of... of put wine into three timelines of like primary, secondary, tertiary as far as their lifespans go. And let's like roughly say, let's take the Bruno Claire. Like I say primary is probably the first, you know, they say in the first 10 years of Burgundy, you taste the

winemaker and then after that you start to taste the terroa, the T word, the infamous. So let's say 10 to 15 years is primary, maybe 15 to 25 is secondary. And then, once you're past 25 or 30, you're into tertiary. And you're shedding fruit flavors as you go and exchanging them for, you know, earthy, soil, tea, spicy, leathery, smelly, yeah, and like leather in like, like, old, like I was, I was thinking of an old library. Like, I think it's like the musty. Easiest way to, to describe.

Oh, you were speaking my language. Yeah. As Sean can tell you, I love these older leathery, smoky wines. Oh, it's amazing. And it's, okay, so to circle back on, you know, what makes wine, what's different about it, the time capsule of it. I mean, you know, when you're drinking whatever vintage it is, like, think about what's going on in the world at that time. It's mind-blowing. And just cool that you can do these parallels to draw and it's a whole other conversation piece.

And it doesn't need to be old. Like, I'm not just, I'm not alienating young wines. Like, just those notes can be there in the young wines. Yeah. Like, oh, this is from when we fill in the blank. or when this happened, or do you remember that time when, you know, that's definitely a factor in wine. So the first seems noticeably more acidic to me. Neither one of them seems especially tanic or when this is?

Yeah, so these, thank you for saying that. So these aren't tanic. Pino-No Noir doesn't, isn't a tannic grape. If you had a Pinot Noir that was tanic, it would be from oak tannins. So new oak barrels can impart their own tannins, which are different than grape tannins. and these wines are both made from winemakers that don't do that, which I think is, but Pinot Noir doesn't really want to be made that way, typically. So wine is generally aged in oak, but some of its new, some of its old.

Yes, there's, I mean, you can use cement, you can use stainless. And then in oak, there's French, American, Slovenian, Hungarian. But, yeah, everything on the table is French. When we get to the co-rotee, they use barrels that are about three times a size of the barrels that every other wine here is using, which are 225 liter. If you just think of a wine barrel, the first thing that comes to your mind, that's 225 liters. And the bigger you go, the less surface contact with the wine, so the less oak is imparted. And on, I think both of these are actually pretty similar.

They're about a third new oak each. The Bruno-Clair might be 20%. And then the rest of the oak that's being used has already been used one other time. So it's not like old, old oak. Okay. Wellness, longevity, health is a lifestyle. Every week a new trend explodes across the media landscape. And depending on who's talking, it's either a miracle breakthrough or just expensive hype dressed up as science.

Enter Kara Swisher. She's here to cut through the noise with her signature edge, sharp, skeptical, and allergic to nonsense. Don't miss the CNN original series Kara Swisher. Wisher wants to live forever. An essential, smart, and genuinely entertaining guide to the booming longevity industry. Because let's be real, the non-stop stream of wellness promises, AI-driven health claims, and expensive tech with sometimes dubious benefits, isn't slowing down. Kara digs into what actually works and what it really costs, from access gaps to tradeoffs most people would rather ignore. We're all getting older, that part's inevitable. The choices that come

with it? Not so simple. You might as well understand what you're buying into. Don't miss the new CNN original series Kara Swisher wants to live forever. Streaming April 12th with a CNN subscription. Go to CNN.com subscribe to get started. Organic Valley Protein Plus, saltor filtered milk is pasture raised from cows that might take more steps than most people. That's a plus. And it has 50% more protein and 50% less sugar than regular milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that it didn't make a pun about moving, also a plus. Organic Valley protein plus ultra-filtered milk.

Protein plus pasture raised. Learn more at Organicvalley.com. Some of these sellers, man, in France, like, they, like, yeah, it's, you know, 20, 30-year-old barrel. Like, they have Cooper's a employee just to, because they do not want new barrels. And, like, you walk into these places. and you're like, oh, that's why Bruno Claire smells the way it does. I'm in Bruno Claire smelling it.

You're like, oh, yeah, the mold on the walls is from every fermentation that's happened in here. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to our sarahs. Okay. So the next wine is from Favia wine. So this is a husband and wife team to really, really acclaimed winemakers in California.

Annie Favia is the viticulturalist, so she's doing all the work in the vineyard. She's married to Andy Erickson, who's the winemaker. And if you combine their resumes, it's basically every top culty, hard to get Cabernice of me on, predominantly out of the Napa Valley. I mean, they have friends that own this vineyard in Amador County, not far from where I grew up. And they make it in Napa.

And this is a really good example of a fairly full throttle, fuller-bodied style of California's sarah that doesn't go over the top. It's, you know, we've jumped up in alcohol content here. The first two wines were about 13, 13.5. Now we're at 14.8. And we're in thick skin varietal with sarah. It's like a completely different beverage, really.

No, it really is. Yeah. This is very, even I would be able to say, oh, yes, this is a California wine right away. But see, still there's lift. Still there's persistence. There's energy. It doesn't just go away. And that is really the structure that's what I want.

in wine, it keeps you coming back to the glass. It makes it infinitely easier to pair with food. Wine doesn't have acidity. Food pairings become difficult or just not possible at a high level. Right. I'm getting a very strong, like, olivey note, it almost a prunish note here. Okay, yeah. So, I mean, think of what a prude is. Think of a ripeness level of, you know, we're dealing with riper fruit here. And olive, you see that in Saraw often. I don't know the name of that compound, Sean. I'm sorry. Do I am a theoretical physicist. It's not overpowering, but it's very noticeable.

It's in there. It's prominent. It's overpowering. It's the most prominent note for me. I was like saying, I'll remember you said that when we get to the Jame, the Cogotee, which I find all I've been two in a different way, and I would say a more integrated way. Well, even though this is a high alcohol wine, relatively speaking, you don't get that burdening that you get into sort of the cheap high alcohol line. It's still balanced.

And it's still young. I mean, you know, this is 2010. I don't know if I said that. Both the Saras are 2010. This ties into how wine ages, but I explained that, you know, the alcohol is never going to change. Everything else in the wine can shed and change and evolve

and congeal and whatever, but you always have this pillar in the middle. So, sorry, that's like, unless your bottle is not corked correctly or whatever, the literal amount of alcohol in the bottle never changes. That's not a chemical reaction that happens. There's many other reactions going on. 14.8% ethanol that's there for the long haul.

And that becomes, if the wine's out of balance, that becomes more obvious the older they get. You see this a lot that is really acclaimed vintage in the Napa Valley, 1997. The wineries dealt with huge yields from the vineyards, larger than they could physically handle. so they had to pick like half the fruit, start dealing with it while the other half is in the vineyard

getting too ripe and then bring in the other half and it got just rock star scores left and right, Parker's just dealing out 100 point scores, and now most of them do not show well. And you put your nose in the glass and it's like porty. Child prodigies. Yeah. So that never changes.

And then when you have lower alcohol wines, they're just more seamless. and if you're more seamless when the wines, you want to be seamless all the way through, right? So you don't notice it. And if there's a young wine that's high alcohol, it's better young. I just like categorically disagree.

When I look at these like drinking windows of some of these big, massive wines, like, oh, it'll age 35 years. I don't. Like it will, like it will physically be drinkable, but I don't want what it will taste like then. If you dig that, just dig it, drink it, but I think better young.

So for our non-expert, listeners like the best wines in the world like the classic bordeaux burgundy's and whatever what alcohol level have they traditionally been at uh i say 13 is is like a good goldilocks basically if you're below 11 and a half percent the grapes aren't there's just not enough energy there's not enough uh food for the yeast to ferment oh so there's a sweet spot that you have to meet there's a sweet spot definitely now see, I should say that this is for dry wines. And most wines produced in the world are dry.

If you have... Dry meaning low sugar. Yes, yes. And there's no what's called residual sugar. So left over sugar from the fermentation. Like, you know, there's reeslings from Germany in the Mosul that are 7% that are delicious, but they're sweetness. There's also acidity to balance it out.

They're like deceptively not sweet when you drink a lot of them. So those are. like outside of what I'm talking about. If you're fermenting a wine to dryness, it's basically got to be like 11, 11 and a half or else it's going to just be razor blades. And then once you get over 14 and a half, let's say, that's where you're even in the 15, depending on what the style of the wine is, that's where it starts to be noticeable. And I start to kind of get off the train.

There's a place in, there's a sub-region in Provance called Bandol, whose wines I love. and they just overlooked right on the Mediterranean. And back to the diurnal shifts, huge diurnal shifts. So it's a warm part of France, but then you're on the sea. So they come way down in temperature. And those wines can be 14.5 all day, and you'd never notice it. There's just the integration that they have. But yeah, I'd say, like I said, the two Burgundys we're drinking are 13.

The lowest alcohol is going to be the fourth wine, the Domain GMA Corot tea, which is 12.5. But you look at old Bordeaux and even the old Napa cabs, like from the golden era of right where Napa was starting to blow up late 60s to the mid-70s, even late 70s, those are 12% alcohol cabernoes. And they age incredibly wise. Yeah. Some of my favorite wines. And then now some of those same producers, a lot of them are in different hands, but, you know, they're making 15, 155. But there was a thing. That's high.

It's high. Yeah, I mean. Claiming that. They have wiggle room, too. They can lie about it. Oh, okay. To a degree. They can be like 16.

And there was a thing not too long ago for like big alcohol bomb wines, like Zinfandel and cabs from California would be very high alcohol. And probably that's partly because the American palate was not that sophisticated and they like their booze. Yeah, you know, so there's a lot of like geopolitical things going on in a white. Or maybe that's not the right descriptor, but there's a lot of outside factors with that. And I think, so critics are a big part of this. It is just impossible to not talk about it. And, you know, basically, when you see the alcohol levels go up and the ripe, like,

let's take Napa is like a really good example of it. Like I just said, you know, late 60s, 70s or 12, 12, 5. In the 80s, they started irrigating. So everything was dry farm before then. And like in most of Europe, it's illegal to irrigate. Oh. So the irrigation. If you're making wine.

Yeah. Yeah. It's considered cheating or why? Basically. Okay. Yeah. No cheating. And it raises the yield.

So basically the lower the yield, typically the more concentrated the wine, typically the more complex the wine. And therefore, in quotes, better the wine. The higher the yields, the more dilute typically the flavors are going to be. So in the 80s, they start irrigating. And then right after that, something called phyloxera hit Napa, which hit the whole. wine world basically in Europe in the mid-1800s wiped out the vineyards in Europe. So it's a disease? Yeah, it's a little microscopic like pest that dehydrates the roots and is, yeah, this is

interesting. So American root stock is impervious to it, but it was introduced into France from American, or it was brought over. But American, like, traveled with the roots and then, but it's impervious to it. So, 99. 9% of the vineyards in Europe are planted onto American rootstock. Okay. And that happened in the mid-1800s flocks were hit. It took them 50, 60 years to figure out how to fix it. In that time, a lot of the vineyards got poisoned.

That's actually part of why you see a lot of organic and biodynamic viticulture happening now is undoing what happened then. Oh, interesting. Yeah, like really macro, like farming stuff. But so that happened in Napa. There's a specific kind of root stock that was susceptible to it that, funny enough, UC Davis, like, recommended everyone use. And then before they knew that phyloxera loved it. Sorry.

Science is messy sometimes. Yeah, yeah. We're learning. We're learning. So you have irrigation, then phyloxera. So basically a reset button happens. And then vineyards get replanted. So now you have young vines.

and going into the early 90s, into the mid-90s, this is when like the cult Cabernet thing happens. This is when scores are becoming more and more of a thing, spectator, Robert Parker, all that. And not that that didn't exist before, but it really more into the mainstream, getting into the dot-com boom. So there's, like, there's money coming into this part of the world

that wasn't there before to that level and people like wanting to own a winery. And you have, you know, the way a lot of these tastings happen where they're doing the scores, they're tasting 100 wines in a row. So the only things that pop and get high scores are big, high alcohol wines, just because physiologically, that's what you will go wow to. And it created this thing that I refer to, I correlate it to the loudness wars, which is something that happened in the music industry, really in the same time,

which is interesting, where basically like just as humans were sort of wired to think that louder is better. It is, obviously. Obviously it is. Yeah. Well, you want your song to be the loudest, right? Exactly. Like, oh, this song is banging. And then, oh, nope, here you go. Oh, nope, here you go. And you're also crushing the dynamics out and you're crushing the nuance out. So you're paying, you don't get something from nothing. Like, you are paying for it in one way or another. And the same thing is totally app corollary to wine. You know, the bigger, the bigger, the bigger, the bigger, the bigger. is not better. And you see the pendulum is definitely evening out.

I was just up in Napa like a month ago and tasted a lot of the 15s up there and they're really pretty and tasted some 16s, tasted some 17s out of barrel and I think that things are, it's being reeled in, definitely. There's probably a whole other podcast episode

about the relationship of aesthetics and things happening on different levels, different scales, right? Like, you know, the human mind and eye and palate apparently are, attracted to complications in all these ways. And, you know, the simplicity gets us first, but then we want to get something a little bit more interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So this one, let's see, this is our California, Surrah. It's clearly frutier than the pinos, both of them. Well, it's, it is, it's also heavier. I mean, you're taking a big step in body. Yeah, you're like, there's a concentration here.

I would call it frutier per se. I mean, the pinos have a little floral quality too. Yeah. Which I think offsets the fruit. So maybe that's it. It doesn't seem especially either acidic or tannic to me. Yeah, it's- Again, I mean, these are all like balanced wines at the end of the day.

So nothing's like poking out is that's totally what I'm going for. But it's less acidity. So I would say that it is actually pretty similar level of acidity. But, okay, it's the same amount of treble, but there's more base. Right. Right, there you go. So if I, again, you take out the trouble, like, you would notice it. This is the same thing I touched on with German Riesling.

How some of them can be, like, have sugar levels that would shock you, but you still go and you still pucker at the end of tasting it. Because there's acid to balance it out. Right. So, I mean, it almost certainly is like the pH is probably higher than the cobs, but, you know, or the Cobb and the Cobb and the Brun-Oclair. There's just more oomph to it. All right. And the, uh, and we should, yeah. Our final contestant.

So it's going to this JMA. So this is truly one of my favorite wines that exists. Domain Jemé Co-Rotis, the 2010. 100% Surrah from the northern Rhone. So in southern part of France, the Rhone is split into two parts. I can't call them halves. The northern Rhone is really only like the top 20% of the valley. But these vineyards are planted on these really steep precipitous terraced slopes that the Romans did a lot of the terracing.

and we've been keeping it up since then. And you have this fairly windy place. So you're a fair amount south from where Burgundy is, which you think it'd be warmer. And it's a little bit warmer. Only a couple degrees Celsius. So you have winds blowing through here, which cool down the grapes.

And anytime you have water in the direct vicinity of vineyards, especially when the vineyards around the water are on steep slopes, it acts like a solar panel. So it's bouncing sunlight back into the vineyards. you get a level of ripeness without the heat that you think would be necessary. The best way I've heard it explained, this is Burgundian winemaker. He said that the sun ripens the grapes, not the heat. I'm not sure of that scientifically accurate, but I get it.

Yeah, getting the point across of like, you know, the things that are making up this wine and the ripening process, it does not need to be hot nor like really should it be. And this wine, especially on the nose, nothing else smells like Jamet. It has this like peppered beef jerky. Pepper is the thing I get immediately. So the Rotundan. This is what I was talking about with Rotundan. The smell is amazing.

Rotundon is a chemical? Compound, flavor compound in a black pepper. Yeah. Jamet is just lights out. And it's floral. And it's pepper. Literally is in pepper as well as in this wine. Yeah.

There's another like the other big compound that gets thrown around is pyresine that's in bell peppers. and jalapenos and also in sobion blanc and so like you see it often in new zealand sobiom blanc like is notorious for you just i mean other than smelling sometimes like cat piss which it is famous for i'm not just talking down on it that's a well that's a phrasing common usage you can use that in wine scrabble yeah um but there's a bell pepper jalapeno thing oftentimes in that um and especially uh you see it there you know sobion blanc also makes up sauncera and fernsaintére and France, but something about the way that Saint-Saire, when it grows in the soil types, in the

Loire doesn't, like, produce it in this high levels. So you, it's in, like, the Somelier exams when you're blind tasting, Soviet-Bronk, you're just, like, praying for Marlboro, New Zealand Sao Blanc. It's, like, nailed it, bam. But, yeah. So it's interesting because, I mean, I mentioned the, the strong olive note, and there's a slight olive note here, but I feel like, you know, it's not overpowering in the same way. I mean, I'm getting, you know, like, I'm kind of a leathery at a smoky kind of finish here in addition to the pepper and I think it kind of balances out the olive so it's not as overpowering yeah I would say like the way I would articulate that is that you know I love Fabia and I meant to say that the Fabio Favia Corsosarra that is

literally the wine that got me into wine I had a buddy that like convinced me to part with $40 11 years ago that I had to think about for two days at the time and now I'm sitting here recording a podcast with you. So that is the, yeah, it's a good investment, but that is the wine that started at all. And then Jammé is the wine that got me into French wine. It's funny that they're both sarahs. So it's hard for me to say sarah's not my favorite grape, I guess. Well, there's a subjective element here, right? Because, you know, Sean can tell you I'm very sensitive to things like olive. There's an ammarone that I find absolutely undrinkable because it's like an olive punch to the face. Yeah. But if you balance it out, it's a wonderful note. Right. Like, you know, let's say

that in the fovea, the olive is maybe one of three or four things that you smell. And the Jame, if I sit here for 10 minutes, I mean, there's like 10 or 12 things I could probably pull out of this. So it's in there, but it's just integrated. Diluted. Yeah. Integrated. I think it's a better word. What I love about, and not just, I mean, other cootis have this. JMA, I think, has it in spades, is that it's also floral. So it sort of calls back the Pino's. And the weight class is not much heavier than Pino's. And again, I mentioned it that this is the lowest alcohol. This is 12, five. And you wouldn't guess. No. I mean, I don't know. It's funny, I don't think about it because I guess I just the balance, if you're drinking balanced wines, you're not thinking about it,

you know. I mean, I, they're all great and I don't want to say anything against any of them, but I'm getting the feeling that the old world wines are a teensy bit more sophisticated and structured than the new world wines. Yeah. There's more going on per sip in my right. You know, I, so I think about this a lot and doing what I do. And, you know, we're having this conversation in 2019, right? And we're dealing with a roughly 2,000 year chasm of experience difference in Europe versus, let's say, California in this case. But at the same time, in a way, not really, like I talked about philoxer. Like, there's been these reset buttons that happen. And, you know, the first winery in Napa,

Yeah, first winery in Napa. I don't know if it's the first one year in California. It had to be one of them. Charles Krug, that's 1861. It's a while ago. It's a while ago. And then, you know, you have prohibition. You have, you know, a couple of world wars to deal with.

You have the depression. You have these setbacks that happened in California wine. And then not until the mid-70s with the, in the wine world, infamous judgment of Paris, which I could touch on really quick just to give some context where there was. a tasting organized in 1976, but basically the top Bordeaux producers were sort of pitted

against this hand-picked lineup of California Cabinet producers, mainly Napa, but one from Santa Cruz Mountains. And California won. Yay, California. Now, what they don't tell you is that

France is lazy at this point, and California is hungry. So there's just these other factors. It's not as easy is like, yeah. You know, and like I mentioned with the phyloxera thing, France is like reeling from that, dealing with that. So those vines that those wines were made from in the French wines in the judgment of Paris, those are all really young vines.

So you've, yeah, there's muton and those opri on, but it's, it's in this kind of like dodgy era of French viticulture when you have California just trying to like just kill it, you know. So that hunger factor is huge. Um, so I, I agree with you. Um, although I, I like, um, it's super important to like, to not just like talk down on the new world. I'm not saying you're not. No, it is. And in fact, I love it. And I think one of the things that is very clear is how much fun it is and how enlightening it is to taste wines like this next to each other. See, yes, that's huge. That's why, yeah, first thing I walked in. How many wine glasses have Sean? Uh, because we all need to have

four. Turns out we have enough. Yeah, we have enough. Um, see, you can never, um, see, you can never have too many. Yeah, the context is huge. Just being able to go right back and forth between them, not have one and then, oh, taste this. Okay, dump it or spit it or not or whatever. Now here's another one. It's not, it's not the most educational way to drink wine. And that is really what I'm passionate about among many parts of the wine of wine service is that, look, this stuff is really cool. It's fascinating. And some people messed that up, unfortunately. But like, it's, it's objectively, there's a lot going on. And there's, there, There's a wine out there for everyone, absolutely.

It was like, I can't drink wine. I don't like wine. It's like, well, let's go in on that. You know, it's interesting. I used to be one of those people that said, I just don't like wine. I was never a big drinker. And then I realized it was just that I was drinking really bad wine. Yeah, it's out there.

You can get it. I want to touch on this on the glasses because you've picked very different shaped glasses and people can't see them, but we have sort of rounder, more bowl-like glasses for the pinos and more the classic, you know. the narrower wine glasses. Yeah. And why is that? And why is it important?

So the glassboard thing's kind of gotten crazy. You know, like, reedal now makes like an Oregon Piano War glass, a California Piano War glass, a Red Bergen glass. You have to make money. It's like, I want them all. I get it.

I want them all. But, you know, the answer goes, standard answer is, you know, with the back to thin skin, like more, let's say more delicate styles, of wine. You typically want to put in a bulb because that bulbous shape helps contain the aromas versus a bordeaux glass. So basically it's like burgundy or bordeaux glass. The bordeaux

glasses kind of funnel out more powerful wines. So they kind of emphasize them more. That's roughly the way it breaks down. You know, I definitely use different kinds of glass where you see more and more companies just making like the one glass. I think there literally is a company that that is the name where it's like all wine should go in this one. And I don't necessarily disagree with that. I'm kind of somewhere in the middle. I think I could definitely run a whole wine program on three glasses, just one, like almost like a smaller version of the Bordeaux glass for, you know, bright, clean, crisp, zippy white wines. I would use this exact same glass that we have the Pinot Noir's in for Chardonnays, whether they're rich and toasty or mineral and clean

and like Morson-Rusan, those bigger whites. And I also use these for champagne. That's a huge thing. If I have to go, people ask me what's your favorite wine region? I definitely, it's hard not to say champagne. But this sounds like sacrilege to put champagne in a pinot,

an burglady glass. Yeah, because aren't you supposed to either use the flute or the Marie Antoinette glass? Yeah, I vehemently disagree with both of the two most popular champagne glass choices. The flute helps you see the bubbles. And that's cool, but that's what you're into.

Yeah, and then the Coupe, I mean, has the legend that's hard to divorce from it. The Coupe is a great martini glass. We see the legend out loud. It's supposed to be based on the shape of Marie Antoinette's breasts. Yes. Cool. I dig it. I like it as a martini glass.

It's a grown-up podcast. No, it's a great glass shape, but it gives all the bubbles away, right? Well, so let's talk about that. So the bubbles aren't going anywhere, right? Like, just because you can't see them streaming. So champagne is a wine that is also sparkling, but it is a wine first and foremost. It's also logistically either the hardest or maybe the second hardest, however you want to view dry sherry production. But basically it's a nightmare to make.

And in a really precipitous climate, it's becoming less and less so. But the grapes they use predominantly are shardinay. Pinot noir and Pinot Manier. Those are the Burgundian varietals. So to me, champagne goes in a burgundy glass because I want to smell it. Again, the nose is, like, maybe not everything, but it's at this point for me, I mean, I could just smell all these for a couple hours and be all good. And great champagne. I think a lot of champagne is not enjoyed to the level it could be enjoyed solely due to the glassware, and that people serve it way too cold. We can talk about serving temperatures. It's actually a very good point.

Yeah. So, you know, most people serve white's too cold and red's too warm. We definitely had a lifestyle upgrade when we got a little refrigerator for our red wine. Damn, lifestyle upgrade. Yeah. I mean, because they were, they're meant to be stored in dank, cold French cellars. Yeah, which is the average, you know, it's around 54, 55. And we're in California. Yeah, right. It never gets that cold here. And so here, so, so what it goes along with that, storage temperature and service, temperature are two different things. Storage temperature, you know, the caves in Champaign and the caves in Burgundy and the

caves in Bordeaux, I mean, I'm sure there's some difference, but at the end of the day, let's call it 53 to 55. You know, typically you see lighter, brighter, cleaner white wines served cooler and then richer white wines served warmer. You know, there's these like the charts you see, especially in like the Summelier exams when you get grilled, you know, like, oh, what's the proper serving temperature? at this point I would just fail all that because I'd be like well I well forgotten slash like don't care because to me um if it's balanced if it's bright if it's complete then I can drink it at I can drink champagne at 55 and get way more of a nose off it and taste it more like a wine than the people that are drinking it when they put it in their fridge which is legally has to hold dairy which is 42 um so to me that's

a great example of like mastering the rules so you know how to break them. Love it. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. I'll take that with me. Yeah, I just, I want to enjoy each wine as best I can. And, you know, temperature, you can mess with temperature. And, you know, if there is a, like, let's take a hot, like, alcohol-wise red wine,

if I put it into canter and spin it in an ice bucket for five minutes and then pour it, you will notice less of the ethanol. There's, like, tricks that temperature can be used to. help wines along maybe, especially if in a food pairing, like restaurant setting. But, what's going through your mind when you do that food pairing restaurant setting? So you are working at a restaurant, like as you already said, a sommelier should do. I think that part of the intimidation factor with a lot of people is feeling like they need to know which wines go with which foods and they don't. And they don't have vocabulary to articulate what they want.

Yeah. So let's touch on that real quick. and then we'll go right into pairing about the vocabulary. So we were talking earlier, like, how should people get started? And I recommended to go to a shop, get some friends, put it up, talk about it, learn, be honest. I would say the goal is to be able to go to a restaurant and say to a waiter, bartender, sommelier, whatever. Yeah, we would like a clean, crisp, dry, mineral-driven white wine and a medium-body, earth-driven, red wine that doesn't have too harsh of a tannin level.

Could you help us with that? That is a dream. You are killing it. You are killing. Most of us do not speak that language. Yeah. And it's not that far away to be able to. No.

Like, you know, that's like maybe three trips with a couple friends to a wine shop. You could get at least half of each of those sentences constructed successfully. And that helps everybody. And you. I mean, it will only help you. Right. Right? At the end of the day.

Well, you have to figure out. what you like. I mean, it took me a couple of years to figure out that I could go into a restaurant and say I want like a medium to full body red, not too fruity, probably a little on the older side, not too young, and I want like kind of these leathery, smoky, long finish kind of elements. You're like 95th percentile right there. I mean, that is killing it. And I'm not an expert, but I basically said, here's a vocabulary I need to learn to communicate with my Somalié. Exactly. So, yeah, not knowing how to say it. And, you know, a lot of, actually, well, this just came to me,

and when you're asking about the food and wine pairing thing, a great way to learn, if you go to a restaurant, they offer a wine pairing, do the wine pairing. Yeah. Don't make the just let someone else, I always call it the I don't want to think about it option. Yeah, and take an Uber because you're going to be really plastered. Yeah, especially. A lift, Uber is evil, but that's okay.

Yeah, especially if you're coming to Males. Or, you know, if you're in the airport, go to the Vinovolo and get a flight of different things. Done, yeah. Yeah, totally. I'd much rather have, you know, three, two-ounce pours than one six-ounce pour. So what do you look at when you're looking at pairing? The pairing? Because that's difficult.

Yeah, that's a whole episode. But basically, so I'd say the number one thing I like to explain to people is that the protein doesn't necessarily drive. It's oftentimes the last thing I look at. So it's not a white line with fish and chicken and red line with meat? Yeah. That's all we've been taught. Yeah, well, and that's not like untrue. There's just like good exceptions to that.

Like the fish one, like salmon is always the blaring example. I always describe salmon. It's a rib eye that swims because it's got fat content. And if it's cooked properly, it's like medium at most, even like medium rare. Raw. And yeah, there it is. Okay. So then we're in champagne or dry reeling at a sushi bar.

But, you know, like in, you know, Pinoir, to take a classic, a quote, classic pairing that I don't, like, get with only a couple of exceptions, is like Pinot Noir and Salmon got really popular. And it make, like, theoretically I get it because you have a lighter, usually brighter red wine with, you know, the richest of the fishes, shall we say. And, but Pinot, even when it's, even when it's from Burgundy and even older, there's still a fair amount of fruit to it. And fruit and fat but heads.

I would think you want acid, right? You want acid, but I want tanant. I want to hug. I want to like like the gritty, grainy. Like if you tasted it on its own, maybe like your saliva is gone. You're like, this is dry, man. Like I don't know if I dig it. But then you have the saline and man.

And the ribby or the rib eye of the sea. It works really well. So that's one example of it. You know, I look at limiting factors. Like is it spicy? Like for real? like actual heat, the bandwidth gets pretty narrow as to what you can use. And you want sugar to counterbalance that. You also refresh the food that way. And, you know, I'm, for the most part,

dealing with pairings on long, like, or at least four courses, but sometimes seven or ten. So I'm trying to keep your palate alive the whole time. You know, you're taught that you go sparkling into light white, into light red, into medium red, into heavy red, into dessert, and then you're done. I don't agree because by the time you're two-thirds of the way through the trajectory, physically, you're tapping out. And I'm affecting how the food tastes. It's not just like, what does the food taste like? What does the wine taste like?

I'm like, you should be able to go to a great restaurant and have a menu like that. If you don't drink alcohol and be happy, theoretically, you should be able to sit down at a table and just have 10 wines in a row and be happy. And then when the two come together and when the food is no more than ever, 50% of the equation and the wine is no more ever than 50% of the equation and everything is killing it. That's the optimal situation. So, you know, I'll start with, you know, a light white or a champagne maybe to start off and then go right into an off-dry wine. If the course merits it, I like going right into a red wine at the beginning and then right back to a white. Because all the, that if I'm using acid-driven wines, which I typically am, that cleans the red wine out of your palate.

on the 10-horse menu oftentimes at Malesce, I look at it. It's like two five courses back-to-back, so I'll have champagne in the middle. So I'm just trying to like... It's a good sales pitch for Males right here. The philosophy of how to like bounce around. I mean, it's not... And people don't expect it. And, you know, if, again, the I don't want to think about it option.

This, I view it, the stakes are high on that. You know, I mean, it's important to be able to do the pairing thing well. And so that's like, you know, how I try to structure long menus. But there's a few things like beef, let's take beef, especially since we have two saras in front of us. Like, this is beef. This is like definitive. This meaning the two saras. What is it about the sarah that makes it good?

Well, that, like, you smell it. That like peppery, like, especially the Jame. I mean, there's like an animalistic, roasted thing to Jameh. And what you see all the time is, you know, state. and cab, steak and cab. And that's cool, but I, like, kind of preach the sarah gospel a lot of the time. That I think that that is a lot of times the, the, uh, Surrah seems to be, comes to me as more spicy.

Yeah. Yeah. Typically. And it's easy for it to get out of the winemaker's hands with ripeness. So. Unbalanced. Yeah. Yeah.

And then that's where wine stop being food friendly, right? So, like, things that are still bright and not a big, heavy, cakey, oily style of raw, but that with beef is great. Chicken's fun because chicken is kind of like the coin flip. I literally just serve white and red side by side, white burgundy, red burgundy, have fun. Depends on, you know, is this skin on? Is it herb? Do they're like truffles involved? And, you know, we're talking about, obviously, like the context of this is I'm fortunate to work in a high-end restaurant. This does not like pizza and burgers and and either the great wines of the world or entry-level wines, that is a great sport.

That was a really fun thing. I mean, is there anything specific I should have in mind? If I know I'm getting a nice pepperoni pizza, I'm allowed to have wine, I know that, I've done it. But what should I look for? I mean, it's obviously sort of fatty, cheesy. Yeah, well, you know, there's this kind of cheesy saying, no pun intended with that.

Of, you know, if it grows with it, it goes with it, you hear. So, like, that's why, like, Barolo and, like, the Pimonti's truffles, became popular. They're from the same place. So like medium body, but still bright, fairly earth-driven, but still fruit to glue it together. That works well with that kind of pizza. Good white burgundy and a good burger I love. I like doing, I use more whites than reds with pairing, which I know. I can imagine a white, I've not done it, but I can imagine a good white burgundy with a burger. Cheeseburger. Cheese burger. Is there milk, yeah, their cheese involved. A lot of people do cheese and red,

And there's only a couple times it works to me. Cheese is a white wine part of the meal to me. And especially some sweet wines, if they are red, like harder styles with like really succulent, juicy, bright red wines are fun. That's also a cool application for like the funky orange wine thing like I mentioned. Yeah, cheese is a whole whole pairing. And it's like, when we say cheese, like, I mean, that is like a lot of cheeses. Yeah. It's like wine.

Yeah, exactly. There's some cheeses that go beautifully with reds. No, yeah, totally. Yeah, I guess I'm just, I'm trying to like refresh always. I like, I like when things go up when the treble is there. You know, it's interesting. A couple years ago, I did a piece for Gizmodo where we did a Girl Scout cookie and wine pairing. Awesome.

They actually have worked this out. Oh, I want to do that. And it actually was. was a lot of fun. It was educational. It was extremely educational. It works less well for Halloween candy. I don't recommend it.

But, because too much sugar. Oh, candy corn, though, with, like, Madeira. White wines go very well. We found with, like, a short bread or a fruit. We found that a very, like, plummy Zinfandel went great with a peanut butter cookie because it's like eating a peanut butter and really sandwich. But the thing is, the thin mints, those Girl Scout cook thin mints didn't go with anything. They paired it with an amaroni, and it was dreadful.

Was it that olive-laded? That olive-laden, heavy amouroni, very sugary, almost, you know, it was, I don't like ameronies. I'm with you. I apologize to anyone listening. I think it's a palate difference. Wine is very subjective, and for me, Amorone is like a punt, is that olive punch to the face? And combine that with a thin mint, which I normally love. And it was just like, you know, kung fu fighting in your mouth.

Yeah, I was going to say that sounds like wrestling. Yeah, the pairing shouldn't, like, wrestle. Part of loving what you love is. Is there anything that goes with mint in the wine? I mean, I was going to say Madeira, although I said it with candy corn, that would probably work. So, like, chocolate, right? Yeah. Yeah, so chocolate and, like, specifically Tawny Port or old Madeira.

But the mint seems to be what makes it hard to pair. I would want to pay. I'd want to play acid off mint. You could do, that might be a fun, man, I want to, can we do this? I want to, like, a dry, where they all, would they all? Was anything sweet that you used? No, we didn't use any dessert wines. Were they all white wines?

Any white wines or no? There was some white. We didn't pair that. We didn't try that would be mint. Perhaps we should have. I must think like something like a really good pretty Sovina blanc could attack that. With a bit of acidity. Yeah.

A bit of acidity. I mean, someone suggested a beer would go well with a mint, but it seems to be a very difficult pairing. And that struck me as very curious. So, yeah, this is hard to get your hands on. But like old cabernet because there's always a minty. There can be like a eucalyptus kind of thing going on. Interesting. That.

Old Bordeaux. Old Bordeaux with a mint, I love it. Like, okay, this is what I'm talking about. Yeah, exactly. That's perfect. Old World, New World. Yes.

An old bordeaux with a high brow and lowbrow and everything. I mean, it is just like totally all over. That's what I'm about. That is, I mean, yeah. I love that. If it's red, it would have to be old, I would say. You're going to want to, you need, like, the fruit to be shed. to be shed, which I think was other than the olive problem.

Was probably the olive problem. That like concentration and kind of cakey, almost like viscous nature that a lot of Amaroni has. I mean, there's a lot of Amarone. It's like 16 and a half percent. I mean, that is hot. I don't like it. Yeah. I'm not a huge favorite, Amarani, to be honest.

More than you, but still not. Anyway, there's two big looming questions here that I got to get to before we finish up. Yeah. One is, you know, there's a bit of mystery not only with wine, but this. process of being a sommelier, being a wine expert, you can forget about the, you know, certification and so forth, a lot of people like to make themselves feel better by telling themselves that all of wine tasting is a bit of a hoax, right? I mean, what in your mind goes into, like, how accurate can you be identifying a wine in a blind tasting, you know,

how much of it is expertise, how much of its luck, how much of its reality, how much of its perception. Okay. Well, so the blind tasting, in the context of blind tasting in an exam setting, let's say, it's deductive. What is it not? What is it not? What is it not? What is it not? Until if I've done that four times, my world is small enough to where, you know, I have a pretty good idea of what's going on. So like, let's take the reds in front of us. Like, so I have two, again, thin skin, thick skin. thin skin, it can only be one of so many things. So I can, just before I've smelled it, like I'm walking up to the table and sitting down, I know that it's not a fair amount of things. Also, you're basically saying you're looking at it and you go, oh, that's thinner thick. Yeah, thin, tend to be lighter, thick, tend to be heavier. Like I said, there's like that granosh that can straddle both.

Zinfandel can be kind of screwy too. And then age factors into this. So I haven't tested at the high levels. I don't really care to. I just sort of love... You have your job. You have your dream job. Yeah, I have my gig, and I like French wine, and I like California wine,

and I just straight up don't want to, like, end up hating wine. And I don't want to, like, have to memorize all these things that I, like, really passionate about what I do, and I defend that. So what I was going to say is that, you know, when you're dealing with old wine, things get kind of screwy with the color, like, because red wine gets lighter and white wine gets darker, but basically I'm sitting down and, okay, thin skin, bright, like ruby, almost magenta kind of color. Okay. It's almost certainly not a sarah.

It's basically anything thick skin I can throw out. Smell it. Is it fruit driven? Is it earth driven? Again, these are broad strokes, but just to illustrate the process, if it's earth-driven, it probably is from the old world from Europe. If it's fruit-driven, it could be, but it's probably not. So right there in two steps, I've yanked out a lot of things it can be.

If they're white wines, I immediately taste and see if there's residual sugar because if there is, then my world just got really small or smell and hope it's that marlborough saplanc. And to go back to what I was talking about with the acid level, the tannin level, the balance between the fruit and the earth flavors, I mean, you can triangulate a lot of things through that. and they're not trying to screw with you. They're not trying to, like, they're not going to serve you Santa Barbara County Tempernillo. Like, they're serving you classic examples. Yeah.

They want to test your actual knowledge, not just sort of trick you up. It is hard because, you know, like you asked about, like, you mentioned vintage. Like, that's,

you know, oh, is it 78, is it 61, you know, that is part wrote memorization of, like,

classic vintages and just how, vintages function in different regions and that's definitely there's a learning curve to that and it's really hard to taste those want you have to either have a trust fund or you have to be a sum of it basically hard to be an expert and super expensive or work well but not even just expensive but like getting your hands on old wines that have been stored well that are going to show like they should show like which they tend to go up in price but i'm not even talking about the astronomical stuff it's just that's a hard thing to come across and hard thing to have a extensive mental

roll-a-x to be able to dial through and go okay um i think it's i think it's i think it's 30, 40 years old. I think it's Bordeaux. Okay, so what's it? 70. I got, you know, 75. It's classic. It's showing more tertiary flavors than something like a ripe 82 would. I don't think it's 82. It could be 86, weird, funky. You know, you're going like that. Like, you're jumping through the hurdles. But, you know, if you, with the deductive process, you can get pretty close. And, you know, you have to show your work, right? You can't just, like, show up and like, bam like I had it I drank you know I'm killing it I had this last night it's you know 1990 domain jam A co-rotty boom why you know long division um so and it is useful it's humbling

oh my god uh but it's real I mean it's real yeah I know it is it yeah of course I mean people who are good at and people were not good at it well yeah and so what I so I love so this makes me think of I get this a lot at the restaurant like oh, you must have a great palette to do what you do. It's like, well, I can, I think I have, my mind, I split hair as well, right? So, and it's like the palette, like, if you do it enough, there's a scene in the Somme documentary where they taught the best way to describe it. No one's a natural board samurai sword maker. Like you had a teacher that had a teacher that had a teacher.

And if you taste 20, 25 wines a night, five days a week for even a month, much less a couple years. and you're paying attention at all, your palate will exponentially, quote, improve. You just have more things to play off. Right. You know, Sean mentioned the sort of backlash against wine that it's all BS, that, you know, there really is no difference.

And there's a famous example where, you know, people like to cite that, you know, Somaliers were blindfolded and couldn't tell the difference between red, red, white, and white wine. And that always bothered me, because to me, the sensory experience of wine is not just the taste, taste is smell,

its vision, it's everything that goes along with it. It's a much more complicated thing, and the minute you blindfold somebody, you're tying both their hands behind their back. Yeah, I mean, I just think, like, okay, what do you kind of do, A? Like, what happened to you that?

You're like really against this. Yeah, like, what is the problem, man? And, I mean, a lot of people take this way too seriously. Yeah. supposed to be having fun. Just supposed to be having fun. Let's not forget. I mean, it is a fascinating subject matter. No one ever is going to know everything about it.

It's chasing the horizon of, you know, trying to learn, have this perspective on it. And it's people screwed up. People don't know that or insecure about it and want to. I mean, having said that, okay, let's be fair. Yeah. It makes, we've been in restaurants where there have been better and worse sommeliers. Totally. And that's partly an ability to distinguish wines, but it's also a sort of a human interaction, like what do they want kind of thing.

So it is hospitality before it's anything else. And it's entertainment, especially at that when you're, you know, actually not even, I was going to say at the level of, you know, these Michelin-Star fancy restaurants, no, I resend that statement. At every level, yeah. At every level it is entertainment. And going out to dinner should be fun. And if you are privileged enough to get to say that you make your money from being a sommelier,

you there is a like ideological philosophical weight on your shoulders to not be a doucheback yeah please right please um which is probably incompletely satisfied by the set of somnoliers in the world I mean I always say I think it's I think the Psalm documentaries have done a lot to help it good I always say like being a cosmologist should make you humble

yes compared to the universe you're very small and yet There are plenty of cosmologists who don't really fulfill this. Yeah. Like, let's figure out how, like, what we, how little we know. Yeah, that's right. That is the, like, at the end of the day, you know, there'll be a last time you taste wine. And, like, it's not something that is this competitive thing, is this lorded over people, like, culture that I unfortunately see just from, you know, clientele or not even client from, some liais, you know, like, oh, I. I'm drinking this, I'm drinking that.

It's like, cool, then be humble. Right. And you're privileged. Right. And, you know, a lot of us get to drink wines like kings of countries are never going to taste. So it's like, cool. Right on. Like, fortunate enough to choose his path and fortunate enough to get to pull it off.

You have to wield that with humility and, and empathy for you, it is not your dinner. Yeah. It is your two dinner. Excellent. It is the guest dinner. It is not, like, what do you want? If you want borolo and oysters, like, let's do it. If that's what, if you were in Pemonte and you had this borolo that lit your whole world on fire and you were eating oysters and you want to recreate that.

And I'm just going like, whoa, that is like nothing is going to work about that. Everything works about that. If you're sitting there with your like all systems go, everything firing, like this is about having fun. And let's not forget like you're consuming alcohol. Like why are you becoming more of a douche? Like everything is all good. except that the world is falling apart. So the final issue that I want to talk about is the idea that, you know, our climate is changing.

Wine, we've already indirectly hit upon the fact that it is. It is changing. This is not up for debate here at Minescape. How does it affect it? I can see at least two possibilities if there is an effect, which I'm sure there is. One would be like wine throughout the world gets worse because we're growing it in climates that we're not used to. But then there's the more optimistic possibility that, you know, wine just changes. We make champagne in Britain rather than in champagne.

Make sparkling wine in Britain. Sparkling wine, yes. But, you know, maybe the wine will change but be just as good. I don't know. How should it be optimistic or pessimistic here? Well, I mean, I don't, after having said what I just said, I think I have no choice, but to be optimistic about it, I don't know what the point would be. I mean, it is changing.

It's already changed. I've been involved in wine and interested in wine, loving wine for 11 years. And even in that amount of time it's changed. You know, looking at, like we talked about alcohol levels and regions, like they are going up. And it's not just due to like the critic thing like I mentioned as part of it. But like just things are heating up. And vintages, especially in the kind of marginal places, become more erratic. Like you see that in Burgundy.

You see more hail and like special. spring and in the summer, they deal with a fair amount, but that reduces the yields. So there's less wine. That's a whole other thing that doesn't get talked about a lot with what climate change is going to do. Obviously, everything's heating up. Ripness levels are going to go up. But each vineyard, like, there needs to be vintages that let the vineyards, like, reset. Like, in times, I was at this producer in Volney in Burgundy, the Marquis Donderville, the Marquis Dongerville, this amazing winery. And the proprietor was talking about how they're situated in this specific place in Volnais

where there are these basically valleys cut into the hill that makes up Burgundy called combs and winds come through there and cool down the vineyards on the edges, but then also bring in storms. And he said that there's a lot of cyclical storms. Like they know if they'll get hit one year at one time, they're like, oh, okay, so the next to, now we know. So that's happening more,

um, yields going down while things are getting riper. So that right there, just the straight math of that I think about because, you know, I've been mentioning how like wine ages and older wines are beautiful. Well, okay,

so there's obviously, time is ticking. The arrow of time. It's fascinating. Someone I know said, uh, you know, the wines are being made now are going to take,

you know, let's say these like top, top level burgundy's and board. those and from like 2015 vintage, those are at least 20, probably 30, 40 plus year wines before they're really firing on all cylinders. And those are being made in a time where we know more about viticulture than we ever have. And there's less of them. And because they're riper, they're more accessible young so people get trigger happy.

So like the allocations that used to be cases are now bottles and people are popping them. So when you extrapolate this out, the amount of people that are really going to know what 2015, you know, Reischborg is drinking like is smaller. And then you combine that with the way markets have gone crazy, the prices have just gone through the roof. Like it's this like unsustainable in certain regions. I mean, like there, I don't know if there's a correction that's going to happen or just things are like, they talks about how these, the marginal places, not even the marginal places, but what are now like, Like in the Goldilocks zone, you fast forward the clock, the grape makeup might have to be replanted. Like this like sacrilegious sentence of like, so like is Pinot Noir really what should be in Burgundy in 15 years?

Like it's like, are the winemakers really facing up to this, you think? Well, you're also doing what they're really in places in certain times, certain people, like a kind of dogmatic way. Yeah, it's a traditionalist occupation. European wine world works. But yeah, there's a couple like avant-garde people, like they're experimenting with Saraw and Burgundy and, you know, things like the Willamette Valley in Oregon that will be good for a minute, but then like maybe some sarah there wouldn't be a bad thing. But then you look at like Napa, like you're already at Cab, you know, like where do you go?

There's what are to some degree. Cab is just that really hot. Cabernice Sauvignon. Yeah, it handles warm climates well. Yes, that's what I'm trying to get out here. Yeah, it's a resilient grape can handle a lot. The way the canopies are trimmed is another thing I've heard people talk about, where, you know, depending on which way, like if you're in the northern hemisphere, for example,

the vineyard faces south, you get better exposure to the sun than the vineyard faces north. So people are planning north-facing vineyards and not trimming the canopy as much so that you have more cover things like that. But that's a Band-Aid if you're really looking at this macro view. Another thing that no one knows how to deal with it all the way. There's these experiments going on. But it's already much different than it was if you even just take the 21st century. It sounds like, you know, people are doing things. There's reasons to think that there will be changes, but not, you know, the end of the world kind of changes.

Yet, it would be nicer if we did not destroy the planet. Yeah. No, that's true. And, you know, the reality that I forget what the exact stat is, but, like, you know, just take gasoline cars, for example, like, you just snap your fingers and, you know, no more made and everyone's electric. You're still 25, 30 years out before those are in the junkyard. Like, you know, to this, like, trains obviously left the station. So, I think that, you know, it's not as simple as like, oh, so we, like, pick earlier. Well, you also have to physiologically ripen the grid. Like, again, band it, like, it won't.

It's not sustainable. Yeah, it's, it's, you already see it. The main way I see it is in the production, which is ironic because you're like, oh, it's getting warmer. like the yields can be higher, but not necessarily, especially since I'm dealing with mainly European wines, the erratic nature of the finages is the, is the kicker. I mean, it's a, it's a, I always like to end the podcast on an optimistic note, but I may I'll make a slight exception here. We've had plenty of optimism. There is plenty of optimism, but also, you know, we have to face up to the reality that this is part of the complexity and joy

and pleasure of wine compared to other things is the ancientness of it, the tradition of it, the fact that so much knowledge is just empirical. We're not exactly sure why. We can't point to the right chemical compounds and say this is what makes it good, but we know that growing it and making in this way makes it good, and that's changing, and that's kind of a shame. We're doing everything. People are doing things to make it better, but there's possibly something will be lost.

And so, again, more reason to enjoy it while we're. Yeah, definitely. Well, and, you know, I mean, something, something will be lost, but, you know, again, like being optimistic, we know more now than we did when these storied, vintage, legendary wines were made. So the best wines being made are being made now. Yeah, we're drinking better wine than Thomas Jefferson ever could have made. Yes. Yes, totally. And that's not stopping. So there is adaptation, there's evolution that, I mean, will happen, you know, like by choice or not, basically. And what are we going to do? Yeah, we got to. I mean, also, Thomas Jefferson never appeared on a podcast once in his life.

So, you know, too bad for him, really. Man. All right. Matthew Lucy, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for bringing the one. Thank you, Jennifer, Willett, for joining us. Cheers. Cheers.

This is a great experience. Looking forward to my next trip to Melisse. All about it. All right. Thanks, Matthew. Yeah. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals. At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors and their clients to thrive.

So what if you could? Paid advertisement. Investing involves risk, including potential asset principal, LPL Financial LLC member FINRA, SIPC.