The I Love CVille Show With Jerry Miller! - Joy Ting And Matthias John Joined Alex Urpí & Xavier Urpí On “Today y Mañana!"

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Joy Ting, Owner of Joy Ting Wine, and Matthias John, Owner of Matthias John Realty, joined Alex Urpí & Xavier Urpí On “Today y Mañana!” “Today y Mañana” airs every Thursday at 10:15 am on The I Love CVille Network! “Today y Mañana” is presented by Emergent Financial Services, LLC, Craddock Insurance Services Inc, Castle Hill Cider, and Matthias John Realty, with Forward Adelante.

Good morning everyone and welcome to Today y Mañana. I'm Alex, this is Nick. We're very excited to have you joining us this morning on a beautiful morning. It's gorgeous. It'll be even better later, too. I think today hit like 78. So it's a warm day. My type of weather. A brisk morning will become a very warm day. But that is not an excuse.

You should still go out and get your café con leche, settle into your cozy spot, and watch some Today y Mañana. We have two fantastic guests that we have lined up to join us this morning. We're going to be joined shortly in the show by Joy Teen from Joy Teen Wine, as well as, later on, Matthias from

Matthias Yon Realty is going to be coming on for our monthly meetup with him, just chatting, catching up, seeing how things are going. We've got a lot to cover today. Of course, we love being here on the Isle of Siebel Network set. Shout out, of course, to our presenter, Emergent Financial Services, as well as our fantastic

partners, Tradit, Sirius Insurance, Ford, Adelante, Mattias, Yon Realty, and all our great partners here at Today y Mañana. So, appreciate it. Nick, how are you doing this morning? I'm great. Doing well?

Yeah, ready to get into it. Life treating you well? You know, I know we're going to be, of the topics we're covering today, I think two are very interesting to you. Of course, later on with Matias homesteading, I think there's going to be an interesting topic. Oh, food and wine.

And then, of course, it's food and wine, which is another topic. My two favorite things. And I was of course, it's food and then wine, which is another topic. My two favorite things. And I was talking to my wife the other day, and we've always heard this phrase. My mother raised us on the idea, you have to eat to live, not live to eat. Now that I'm older, I realize that that's backwards. You have to do the opposite.

Because there's no point in living if you're not looking forward to the next thing you're going to eat and drink. So for me, I'm like, live to eat. But, you know, you've got to live for something. And then you have it. It shows, but this is what it is. You've got to face consequences. A little shout out here. We've got some people tuning in.

Andre Xavier liked in the show this morning. The Patch Brewery. Yeah, good morning, Andre. Good morning, Andre. Thanks for tuning in this morning. So I say, I don't know about you, but I'm ready to jump right into it. I'm ready. Let's do it. Let's do it. So we're excited to welcome to the show this morning, Joy Ting. She's the founder of Joy Ting Wine. Joy, thanks so much for coming on this morning. Thanks for having me. We appreciate it. So for those who haven't met you yet, new to the show, tell us maybe a little bit about yourself and how you first became interested in wine as a field. Sure.

Well, I'm trained as a scientist, and when my husband and I moved to Charlottesville, I started to teach for a while. I taught at the community college, and I taught high school, but I was kind of getting burnt out on teaching. And my husband and I just love wine as consumers. Before we were wine professionals, we were consumers of wine. And so I was interested.

I've always been interested in kind of the making of something as much as, I mean, I like the consuming of it as well. But I'm always interested in sort of how something is made, what makes the differences between the different things. And so I had started to do a little bit of learning on my own about how wine was made. Around the time I was getting burnt out on teaching, my husband and I had dinner with Michael Schaps and his wife.

Michael runs one of the few wineries in Virginia that has a full-time lab person. And he and I had talked about the lab multiple times, and we did at that dinner as well. And I asked him how things were going, and he and I had talked about the lab multiple times and we did at that dinner as well and and I asked him how things were going and he said they're going fine but the person who's running the lab is leaving in a couple of months would you like a job and full disclosure it wasn't the first time he had had we'd had a similar conversation but that time I was like you know what I'm getting that was it was a lot more interesting at that point because I was like, you know what, I'm getting, it was a lot more interesting at that point because I was really looking to kind of shift into something else.

And so I ended up kind of shifting over, I finished out the school year, and then I started at Michael Schaps Wineworks as the lab tech. I started in the summer of 2013. Oh, okay. Wow, okay. And so you started, and really, so I guess you almost came into it from the science side very much so yeah and out of curiosity what goes on in a wine lab what happens tasting is like what you think of but not the lab side yeah well i mean so winemaking is really

it's science and art put together and so there's's, I mean, it's farming for sure. So there's a lot of science that happens in terms of the agricultural part of that. But even once it comes into the winery, there's a lot of monitoring sort of what the wine chemistry is doing. So we use chemical measurements to decide when to pick the grapes. So is the sugar high enough? Is the acid at the right point? Is the color the way that we want on red wines? Are the tannins structured the way high enough? Is the acid at the right point? Is the color the way that we want on red wines? Are the tannins structured the way we want? There's some quantitative measures we can

do in the lab to sort of put a number behind that. But then we're also always tasting along the way. So you taste the grapes, you actually chomp on the seeds a little bit to see how they're crunching, and you put those two things together to decide when it's time to harvest and then when the wine comes into the winery you know every step of fermentation we want to know how fast it's going we want to know if it's doing what it's supposed to be doing and so there's lab measurements that happen every day during a fermentation and then as the wine ages there's spoilage organisms that can come in and essentially rob the wine of the qualities that we've been trying so hard to make.

And so we monitor to make sure that those spoilage organisms haven't been at work. That's amazing. I guess it all goes to help, because I guess from a qualitative perspective, it would probably be difficult to note minute differences all the time, and everything can affect it i mean the weather the humidity the temperature and so i guess it helps bring that consistency because you're able to see i guess in in the chemicals and what's in the wine yeah exactly what's happening on a very small level exactly and a lot of it is what you were saying is like it's sort of the time course it's like where was it two weeks ago and where is it now? Is it changing in the direction we want it to change or is it changing in a different direction? And so is it time to intervene in whatever process is happening at the time? But like I said, it always goes hand in hand with what the wine actually tastes like. So those two things help inform wine-making decisions together.

And I assume you have to even continue to monitor it while it's in a barrel, if it's being barreled? Definitely, yeah. So as it's aging, we measure the preservative level. So we use sulfur dioxide as the main preservative we use in wine. So we'll measure that every month or every two months. A lot of times we'll also measure acetic acid, which is sort of the vinegary flavor that wine can get if it's not preserved well as it ages. But again, we taste it also because there are some things that are happening that

it's hard. We don't have the ability in the winery lab to measure. Sometimes we have to send things out to a service lab that can do like much more complicated measurements. And I guess there's some of the things you can taste that you can't quite put your finger on what exactly scientifically it is, but you're like something, I need to do something. Well, and sometimes we know what it is, but we can't, we just don't have the means to measure it in small, medium-sized wineries. So most of our wineries in Virginia are, by worldwide standards, very small wineries. And so we have relatively simple measurements that we can do,

like pH and acidity and sugar and those sorts of things. But some of these sort of complex chemicals that can really affect the smell and the flavor of the wine are things that we would need to use an HPLC or a GC mass spec or something like that. So that's where we sort of, we don't have enough samples going through to necessitate having like that expensive of equipment and that expertise to run that equipment. And so that's where we'll utilize service labs in order to do some of that work as well. That's so yeah I've seen all that's everything that goes into it a couple shout outs here thank you a bill mcchesney watching

the show this morning Francis argument watching the show this morning Daniel Michael Rosario Almeida muchisimas gracias for watching the show this morning always appreciate our great viewers so how did you decide then so you've been in this business, you know, you're working in the wine lab, how did you decide to sort of branch out and start Joy Teen Wine? Yeah, so I, when I was, I started the wine, I started my work in wine at Michael Schaps Wine Works. It's a fantastic place to work because there's always, Michael's always there kind of giving vision for what's going on. The company is always

kind of growing quickly, so there's kind of the next opportunity to learn the next thing. So I started as the lab tech. Within a couple of years, I was managing production, and a year after that, I was the winemaker. So it was a great place to learn a lot of things, but I'd only ever worked in one place. And so in 2018, I had the opportunity to work for the Winemakers Research Exchange, which is really my day job at this point. So the wine brand is my side gig. So part of working with Michael is he always allowed us to kind of start to develop our own winemaking practices on the side. So part of my employment agreement was that I could make a couple barrels of wine under my own label while I was at Wineworks just all the time.

So it was a great way to get started. And then when I shifted over to work for the Research Exchange, I still wanted to make wine to some degree. And so that's when it sort of became its own, a brand of its own during that time. So basically I'm an independent winemaker. I don't have a winery of my own and I don't have a vineyard of its own during that time. So basically I'm an independent winemaker. I don't have a winery of my own, and I don't have a vineyard of my own. So I work at other people's wineries as a guest, and I work with viticulturists around the state who have little bits of extra fruit that I can sort of take on and make wine out of that way.

So to answer your question, I really got started when I was still at WineWorks. How interesting. way. So to answer your question, I really got started when I was still at WineWorks, but then when I left WineWorks, it's a way to stay focused on the actual physical, practical stuff of winemaking, even when my day job is much more of sort of the theoretical stuff of it. Now, so I'm curious though, when you start make, and you started deciding to make your own wine, was it to tailor something to your taste or was it to obtain an objective goal? I'm just kind of curious about that kind of process. Yeah, and I would say that it wasn't probably as thought out

as all of that. So I realized that when I started, it's even kind of comical that we call this a business. I don't really run my business the way you should run a business and I didn't really start my business the way you should run a business, and I didn't really start my business the way you should start a business. For me, it was really kind of that drive to continue to make wine and then to sort of figure out the other stuff. So, in fact, when I first left to go to the Research Exchange,

I was having lunch one day at Veritas because I was doing an appointment with Emily from Veritas, and Mathieu from King Family had a new intern who had come in, and they came over to Veritas to have lunch and introduce us around, and I had just bottled something from my time at Wineworks, and they were asking me about it, and Mathieu was saying, you know, what are you going to make this year under your own brand, and I was like, it's just really too hard to figure out. I don't know if I'm even going to make wine this year, and he looked at me and he was like, Joy, make the wine and figure the rest of it out later. And so I feel like I kind of needed that little kick in the pants to be like, you know, you have to, if you want to keep doing this, you have to put forth the effort to figure out where the fruit's going to come from and where you're going to make that wine.

And then, but you don't have to have all the answers when you start. And so that first year, I made my wine at Blenheim Vineyards. Kirstie Harmon is one of the board members for my day job, so she was kind enough to host me there. And I purchased some fruit from Tim and Ben Jordan's family property. I'd worked with Tim and Ben various different ways at that point through WineWorks. So that's kind of how I got started. As I

keep going, I think for me, it's first of all, I just really love doing it. But secondly, I think there is this idea that I through the work at the Research Exchange, I get to see all these different things that people are trying in their winemaking. New techniques or different approaches to things.

And this gives me an opportunity to put that into practice for myself, to say, of these things, how would I kind of structure that into a wine that I think reflects the vineyard sites and the quality of Virginia wine. But with all of that said, you never want to make a wine you don't want to drink yourself. Right. You always want to make something also that you would be happy to bring and share with friends and that kind of thing. Absolutely.

And I would say don't, I wouldn't be that hard on yourself because I feel like many entrepreneurs that we have on the show, that's basically how they get started. It's very rarely, okay, let me create a business plan. It's more like, I really want to do this. I'm going to start and then i will figure out the rest of it and you know what i was gonna say most artistic endeavors are actually the same way which is you don't really have an idea of where it's going to take you just kind of want to start

and see how it is but i was just kind of curious because you never know it's like something's like i need this you know absolutely so you've brought one for us to yes to try here so maybe as you're tasting you can tell us a little bit about this wine. Sure. Well, today I brought a Chardonnay. So Chardonnay is a hybrid grape. So it's a hybrid between Chardonnay and Save-All Blanc. So sort of like a Labradoodle, right?

A Labradoodle of wine. Kind of along those lines. The reason we like Chardonnay in Virginia is that it gives us a lot of kind of the characteristics of Chardonnay. But the way that it grows out in the field is a little bit more amenable to our hot, humid summers. So Chardonnay grows in like this clump where all of the grapes are right next to each other. When it's humid out there, there's some mold and mildew that likes to kind of sneak in between those grapes and ruin our grapes. Chardonnay grows with a little bit more open cluster. And so the grapes kind of have a better opportunity to be healthy. We don't have to work it so hard in the vineyard. And we have better quality grapes coming in.

And it's because of the other grape. It's because of the other species that it's kind of grafted on. Yeah. So so I mean, basically, yeah, when you put them, it's sort of, again, with the Labradoodle, right? So we like Labrador Retrievers, but we don't like how their hair makes us allergic, where the poodle hair, we don't get allergic. So it's sort of like you're trying to hybridize those things and choose the qualities from each one that you really like. So in this case, we like the wine quality that comes from Chardonnay. Save All actually makes a kind of interesting wine in its own right as well,

and you can find a couple of Save Alls through the Virginia wine industry. I'm pretty sure Loving, I think it's Lovingston, has some Save All that they make as a varietal wine. But put together, you sort of get this, what I think of as the best of both worlds. So this is Chardonnay. Salud.

Cheers. Oh, it does taste like, it's like a Chardonnay, but like smooth. Cheers. You guys are behind the scenes also doing the tasting at the same time. But it's true. When I first smelled it, I thought it was a Chardonnay. It has a nice, smooth quality to it.

Sometimes a Chardonnay can be kind of acidic. This is a little more, I don't know if it's buttery. I was going to say, a lot of Chardonnays are also very oaky, and this doesn't have that enough because there's no oak. Well, so I'll tell you a few secrets about the Chardonnay. So this Chardonnay, also very oaky, and this doesn't have that. I don't know, because there's no oak or what. I don't know about that. Well, so I'll tell you a few secrets about the Chardonnay. Oh, I love that.

So this Chardonnay, the fruit for this came from the 53rd Vineyard, which is in Louisa. I've been a guest in their winery, working, sort of making my own wine there and then sort of trading off for labor to kind of help with some of the manual labor that they need during harvest. But they have Chardonnay on their property, and it was always kind of some of the best grapes that they need during harvest. But they have Chardonnay on their property, and it was always kind of some of the best grapes that came in every year. They were just healthy and beautiful, and the chemistries were great.

So in 2021, I asked the owner if he had an extra ton of grapes that he would be willing to sell me, and he had extra that year. So they make a really lovely Chardonnay that's in a very different style. So they do a really lovely Chardonnay that's in a very different style. So they do a stainless steel fermentation. They really play up the like floral character of it. The winemaker there is Chelsea Blevins and she's doing a fantastic job with sort of making those, her white wines kind of in that style. But I always wondered what would happen if you treated it more like Chardonnay. And so I kind of bought the grapes from them, but they made it in a completely different style as a Chardonnay.

So this was fermented in, it was completely oak fermented, but it was fermented in a 500-liter barrel that had been used many times before. And so that's sort of the difference there, is that you don't, because it's older and because it's bigger, you don't get as much of that oaky flavor. But being in the barrel and aging it on, like even when the fermentation was done, I aged it on the, we call them the yeast leaves,

but just those really dead yeast cells that settled at the bottom of the barrel. I aged them that way for about nine months before we bottled. And that's another thing that you do with Chardonnay, to kind of give some mid-palate volume, so kind of make it give you a little bit of weight on the palate. And also it helps to keep that acidity from being too sharp.

And so I'm glad that you were sort of tasting those notes because that's really what the intention of the wine was. We were tasting it, we just didn't know what it was. Yeah, well, no. And that's exactly what I was thinking. But usually I've noticed that they very much come hand in hand. When I have Chardonnays that were in stainless steel, you get more acidity but no oakiness.

Yeah. When you get the ones that were in oat, you'll get that more smooth or buttery thing. But every once in a while, depending on what oat was used, you're like, okay, I'm getting the oak. Sometimes it's oaky, too. Well, and the butter is a whole other thing. So the butteriness comes from another fermentation that happens after the alcoholic fermentation. So we start,

like the alcoholic fermentation is the yeast cells are converting sugar to alcohol, and they kind of make all these yummy flavors around that as they do their metabolism. But then the second fermentation is the malolactic fermentation so wine or grapes that turn into wine have two well they have many acids in them the main acid is tartaric acid the second main acid is malic acid the malolactic bacteria

eat the malic acid and they convert it to lactic acid so malic acid sort of has the taste of like green apple acid. In fact, apples are malice. That's their scientific name, so malic acid. From Malo. Exactly. That makes sense, right? And then lactic acid is sort of like what you would get in like milk or yogurt, right? That's kind of that effect.

So it's a little creamier. But when they finish the malolactic fermentation there's a little bit of citric acid in grapes also when the malolactic bacteria eat the citric acid they make diacetyl which is the butter flavor it's the same thing that you use in in movie movie popcorn or movie like that butter is diacetyl that's the chemical that so so when people say that chardonnay is buttery, it's literally butter. It's not even just like figure two.

Well, it's movie popcorn butter. It's not actual butter. But that is the most buttery tasting butter. It's the one that's not butter. Yeah. But you can definitely have something that goes through, like a Chardonnay that doesn't have buttery character if you haven't gone all the way to convert that citric acid.

And then the other insider trick is that if you want to go all the way through malolactic but you don't want to have buttery flavor, if you let it sit for a while, it eventually eats the buttery flavor too. So it's a choice you can make as a winemaker to say, what do I think makes the most balanced thing in this glass in terms of acidity and mouth palate volume and butteriness and oak character because some i mean there are folks that really love those big oaky chardonnays those big luscious things that you get sometimes so there's but all of those things are just sort of some of the thousands

of different decisions that winemakers are making all the time as they're making their wines I was going to say this because this is a very rich flavor without being very oaky which is what I like that hits our sweet spot that hits our sweet spot

I do like the big oaky ones but I do prefer when it's sort of like it's not the first thing that I'm tasting. So how far did you take this one on that process? So this one actually didn't go through malolactic fermentation at all. So we finished alcoholic fermentation, and then I stopped it, and it didn't go through malolactic at all.

Oh, you're faking it well. It's not very smooth. Well, I mean, so you asked before sort of what kinds of wines I like to make, and I'm not super philosophical about my winemaking, but I would say that there's a couple kind of through points in what I tend to like in the wines themselves. I really do like wines that still have a lot of fruit component to them. So, like, sometimes when you take it all the way through

and have all that oak, you lose a little bit of the fruit. Yeah, right. So I probably would tend toward less oak influence just because I really like all that fruitiness. I also, I mean, at our house, most of the wine is consumed at the same time as we're eating our dinner, either as I'm cooking the dinner or as I'm eating the dinner.

So we really want things that are food-friendly wines. And in that case, you do need to have some acidity left in the wine in order to really kind of amplify what's happening. The food and the wine go together really well that way. It's like squeezing a lemon on your food. That's kind of what's happening with that. Yeah, my dad would call it cut the grease.

Yeah, exactly. Cut the fat, he said. Cut the fat. He was going to say not cut the grease. Cut the fat. Cut the fat. And I would say in white wines, that's acidity that does that. In red wines, the tannins do that.

Oh, interesting. But it cuts the fat, but it also sort of amplifies the flavor at the same time, right? And so I would say for my wines, I always do want to make sure that there's ample acidity there, that it goes well with whatever we're going to be eating that day. I was going to say, because this could easily go well. Because I know there's a lot of white wines where it's like, I understand that they always say white wine with fish and red wine with meat, and I'm like,

I know that there's been, I've had enough wine that I know that that can be massaged a little, but I feel like this could easily go with pork. And that's one of those things, white wine, especially with pork, if it's like this, it would be perfect, because you could have a lean piece of pork, like a pork chop or something like that,

and that would be a great pairing just because of those fruity flavors. That's amazing. Yeah, and I think that food and wine pairings too, generally food and wine go together, and then there's sort of the broad range of things that go well together, and then once in a while there's that magical match. But I think that sometimes we sort of ignore the middle part of it that's just like, you know what?

Generally, wine makes your dinner taste better, and your dinner makes your wine taste better. And there don't have to be all those fussy rules about all of it. Exactly. So there's that. We have ignored those rules many times. I ignore them all the time. Yeah, I was going to say.

Well, going to our father's such a fan of red wine that the white wine with fish thing was almost never yeah observed he's like it still tastes good if he felt like it or if you still have from the from the night before he's like what are you gonna do well and i think so where that one actually comes from what my understanding of it is is that especially kind of fatty fish, the type of fat that you get in a salmon or a tuna, for example, has a weird interaction with a really tannic red wine to give you kind of a tinny kind of flavor. And it sort of amplifies the off-flavor fishiness instead of the good side of it.

So if you do want to have red wine with fish and you have the option, like a lighter-bodied red oftentimes is a good option because you don't have that tannin component to it. And same thing with white wines. If you're a white wine drinker but you're eating a steak, you just want to make sure you have a white wine that has enough acidity to cut the fat instead of having tannin to cut the fat so you can certain there's a reason behind some of those but again component

yeah but we've like i said i think we've made it too much like this exclusive club of rules instead of just saying this is a wonderful part of like like you were saying in the beginning like you know living to eat and eating to live Like this is just part of having family meals together and lingering longer at the table and having a conversation and, you know, finally getting into it with, you know, Uncle Joe about that thing that you talked about. Whatever that is.

Sometimes just a nice bottle of wine helps that to go better. Absolutely. It's just conviviality and congeniality. Well, one of the things I was going to say is that one of the highlights usually of the conversation is talking about the wine that you're drinking. How many times

every single time we're with friends or with family, the subject that always comes up is the wine that we're drinking. Without fail, you talk about it at some point, even more than the meal sometimes. It's sort of like this wine and then you talk about the thing. What have you tried lately? And the beautiful part, we talk about it in purely point, even more than the meal sometimes. It's sort of like this wine, and then you talk about the thing.

What have you tried lately and everything? We talk about it in purely layman's terms. I mean, there's no... Yeah, there are no experts in our family. So guys, no matter how much they've drank, it doesn't matter. Well, I wonder too if it's like one of the safe subjects that's left, right? There are some things that get harder to talk about sometimes. Whereas we can talk about the weather, we can talk about the things that get harder to talk about sometimes, and whereas, like,

we can talk about the weather, we can talk about the food, we can talk about the wine, and there's still something about that that connects us to one another, because we're having a shared experience of it together. Exactly, exactly. Love it, exactly. So what are the other types of wine that people can find from you? What varieties do you make? Yeah, so again, because I don't have a good business plan, I kind of do what seems right in a particular vintage. So generally, I will make one white wine under my own label each year, and I will make one red wine under my own label each year. My red is almost always Cabernet Franc.

I love making Cabernet Franc. I love drinking Cabernet Franc. I think Cabernet Franc is just a really great red variety for Virginia. It does a nice job of showing the different vineyards. It's different from different vineyards, and as a winemaker, it's kind of fun to play with that. There's a particular way I make my Cabernet Franc to be one of those sort of fruit-forward, less tannic, early release, easy drinking kind of reds, which is what I like to do. There's folks that are making lovely big extracted Cap Francs as well.

Nothing bad there. The white changes every year kind of just depending on what I'm excited about. So again, in this particular year, I wanted to play with Chardonnay a little bit. I've certainly played with Petit Mensang in the past, and I have a Petit Mensang that's just about out of inventory now. The next two that I'd really love to play with a little bit, I'd love to play with some Albarino. Ooh, yes.

Albarino is sort of the thing that people are talking about more and more in the viticultural world. The Governor's Cup this year, I think there were six Albarinos that got gold medals or something, which considering the few number of Albarinos that are made in the state, I think really shows well. And then I'd also,

at some point I'd love to play with Riesling a little bit. I made some Riesling when I was at Wineworks, and I really love Riesling. So going back to wanting to make wine that you like to drink. I should also say, I do make wine as a private label for the Wool Factory, and so for them I make a different Cabernet Franc from them in a little bit different style,

and the last couple of years I've made Petit Minsang, which I love Petit Minsang, and you can do all kinds of different styles, and then I made a Sauvignon Blanc for them. So those are sort of all out there, but again it's a small production every year. So it's sort of like, it's not a whole line on purpose. Oh, of course, of course, yeah.

Oh, and there's a Tannat. So in July, I'll be bottling a Tannat for the Wool Factory and a blend of Cab Franc and Tannat for my own brand. And I will say, I really love the blend of Cab Franc and Tannat. Because again, I don't eat a big steak for dinner every night, whether I would want to or not. And so Tannat is great for like cutting the fat. But the Cab Franc sort of lifts it to make it a little bit more versatile of a wine too. So depending on how you want to consume it, both of those are options. Can I ask what the difference between the Cab Franc for the Wolf

Factory is? Yes, you can. Sure. I'd love to talk about that. Yeah, okay, good. Yeah, so the, again, philosophically, it's not that different in terms of we really wanted to have, for the Wolf Factory, we wanted to make wines that would go with the food that Tucker Yoder is producing in that kitchen back there at Broadcloth. We wanted to have something that really you could drink with all of the different little courses that come out. So again, that food friendliness and that versatility is part of the vision there. For my own Cab Franc, I make my Cab Franc with a lot of whole clusters included in the wine itself. Whole clusters are kind of controversial in the wine world.

So some people really love whole clusters and some people really don't. And the clusters do two things. So you bring in, when you keep the berries intact, there's actually a little fermentation that happens inside the berries that gives you like this really high fruit character. They call it tutti frutti, sort of like juicy fruit gum.

And so it sort of really pumps that fruit character. But you also, when you put a whole cluster in there, there's stems in there too. And most of the time in Virginia, those stems are green. In other regions, they might be brown or lignified, but in Virginia, they're green. So I put those whole clusters in there, and there is some stem character to the

wine, but in a little bit of time that ages to something that gives it a little bit more natural tannin and it kind of gives it a violety kind of character to it, but it's a specific character. So like not everybody's going to love that wine. I love what that does to Cap Franc. I think it gives good complexity, but it's a little bit, like I said, not everybody loves it. With the Wolf Factory wine, we still use Cabernet Franc. Well, we use Cabernet Franc when we're making our Cabernet Franc. That gets de-stemmed so that there's no stems involved, so they don't have that stem character.

A lot of times I'll extract it a little bit more from the skin, so I'll get a little more tannin from the skin that way to make a little bit more traditional, like a good solid Cabernet Franc that really just shows what Cab Franc can do in Virginia. So I would say the Joy Ting version is a little bit of like a riff on the theme, whereas like the Wool Factory Cab Franc, I try to make it as well made of an example of a Virginia wine as possible.

And so, and I think that's kind of, you know, they have a wine shop there too that's really kind of trying to showcase some of the best things that we have around in our local area. And so we want the Wool Factory wines to fit within that idea as well. That makes perfect sense.

It's amazing what you can do, just all the different options. I can see why you enjoy it so much. Like your enthusiasm just comes across. And I have to say that that's part of it. It's my day job is to work with winemakers all over the state to do experiments in their wineries on all these tiny little winemaking things.

And so I get to see what everybody's doing and taste what it's doing there. So it's great to sort of have a place to put that so that I can say, okay, what does that mean for this fruit that's coming in for me? How would I choose on that? Um, and just sort of put that together. And it's not the same every year, but it, because it's a small business, it doesn't have to be, you know, it's like, if you have, if you're, if you're having to sell thousands of cases every year and cultivate a wine club, you want a lot of consistency and that's what we owe

our customers. Um, but I think my customers kind of know it could be anything at any time. It's kind of fun, though, right? It's a little avant-garde, you know? That's the fun of it. So, Joy, before we let you go, where can people find your wine or even the Wolf Factory wines themselves? Yeah, so my wines themselves, I don't have a tasting room of my own. So mostly I sell my wines either at other people's wineries. There are wineries around that will kind of do bar takeovers so that I'll go and sort of,

we'll have an event where it's I'm pouring that day. And so I'll do those. Eastwood here in Charlottesville, Eastwood has started to do those. And pretty soon she'll have a production facility where we'll have a little bit of a space on the tasting sheet at Eastwood as well Bluestone has certainly done that in the past Walsh family in Northern Virginia does that and then I've been making my wine at 53rd the last couple of years and now I actually have

they're pouring my wines on their tasting sheet as well so if you want to just do a tasting of joints wines those are kind of some things to look for. And then I also sell through wine shops. So we've got lots of wonderful kind of independently owned wine shops here in Charlottesville. So Market Street Wine, The Wool Factory has its own wine shop, so you can buy bottles there.

Wine Warehouse is a great option, and they do have some of my wines as well. Greenwood Grocery out in Crozet. She does a great job of cultivating a set of Virginia ones in there. And then both Common House and Farmington

have my wines on their menus here and there. So those smaller operations because it's smaller productions. That's fantastic. Lots of opportunities. Lots of great places to visit and enjoy some of your wine. But Joy, it's smaller productions. That's fantastic. But lots of opportunities, lots of places to visit and enjoy some of your wine. But Joy, it's been an absolute pleasure.

It's been a joy. Thank you so much. It's been a joy. You had to make the... I had to, sorry. You've been waiting for that. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much for coming on.

Well, thank you so much for having me. It was fun. And it was delicious. Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it. And as we go ahead and transition here, I'll give a shout out to Damian Hamill. Thanks so much much. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. And as we go ahead and transition here, I'll give a shout-out to Damian Hamill.

Thanks so much for, he says good morning. Thank you for tuning in this morning. I think we have a couple other viewers tuning in this morning. We've got Weiss Khan. Thanks for tuning in this morning. Appreciate, of course, all our fantastic viewers. Be sure to ask us any questions, comments. And, of course, as you can see, I do respond. I do respond.

I think, let me see. Ah, and Dr. Elizabeth Irby, watching the show this morning, have to give a shout-out to my favorite doctor out there. So, from one fantastic guest to another. Matisse has got me nervous. He's got notes. Well, you see, he's been watching. He realized that you love to test and do trivia.

Oh, I test Xavier. So now he's going to test you. I'm going to test myself. He's going to test you now. So we're really excited to welcome to the show this morning our monthly meetup with Matthias, Matthias Young from Matthias Young Realty. Thanks so much for joining us once again. I'm glad to be back.

It's always good to have you on. I've been here once a month sitting in this chair talking to you guys. Thanks for having me. Talking about anything and everything. So how's the start of spring been for you? Oh, it's fantastic. I mean, doesn't it feel different to be outside? It does. Especially this week, we are blessed with warmer weather. If you look at the forecast, the next few weeks will be milder as well. And to be frank, we had a few very bad days. Lots of rain. It was cold. It was gray outside.

It affected everyone's mental health, right? And this week, it looks different. Yesterday, I was driving outside of Charlottesville in my car, and I saw so many people on the road with their bicycles. I saw people walking. It's just a very different atmosphere. So to answer your question, I think everyone's looking forward to spring. What are your favorite things to do?

What do you and your family do around spring here? What do you do outdoors? What are some of your favorite things to do? It doesn't have to be outdoors. It could be anything spring-related. Well, to take advantage of the weather. Yeah, I think that's what we have in common with a lot of people living here in the area, right?

We have the mountains close by, so we have so many hiking opportunities. We have trails everywhere. We live in Waynesboro now, which is the gateway to the Blue Ridge. And that's not an understatement because, yeah, we can just step outside our house and we walk through a park that connects to the Blue Ridge Parkway almost. Oh, that's beautiful.

And so, yeah, this is the time of the year where it's not humid and as hot yet so we will spend a lot of time outside right it's one of the one of the the blessings we have here living in central virginia yeah when the weather's beautiful nice there's nothing like it's perfect the nice thing we do get rather long temperate seasons. Like our spring and fall, I know we complain sometimes that summer eats into them a bit, but I mean, I'm fine with that. Better than winter.

My in-laws living in Montana, I mean, there are places in this country where winter does not end until April, May, June, right? So it's beautiful that starting in March, you begin to actually get these days where

it is 70 degrees, it's mild, you can go for a hike without sweating profusely. You know, you just, you get to enjoy, I think that you get to actually enjoy four seasons, and we're in one of those four now. Exactly. And you know what I'm also looking forward to?

Restaurants that have an outdoor patio. We have the downtown mall with all the seating areas outside. I look forward to that atmosphere. I've been missing that. We've all enclosed inside for too long, and here we are. I was going to say, this weekend I was at Ragged Branch, and it was raining, so everyone was huddled inside to your ear.

It's like, how does this smell to you? It's different when you get, especially that they have such a nice view out there. You could spread out, go out and sit down somewhere. But even the wineries, all those parks where it's designed to go out and go out and sit out. Like that's really nice. That's not something you can do during the winter. I mean, it's funny. As I've been driving around Southern Sweet, you begin to see more people not just being outdoors,

but I've actually seen a lot of people, you can tell they're driving around like looking at land as opposed to just houses. Because I think obviously obviously, in the winter you're not going to go around like, let's see what this piece of land looks like, wet, cold, barren. But as things bloom,

you can see on the pathways, because I'll see people turning off and then what I myself have done, driving around looking at places, I'm like, I'm not the only one here doing it and I think it's funny I don't know if this is this to be purely anecdotal but I've been dating a sense that like people more and more people are beginning to look at land rather than merely just housing and to say okay what do I do if I want to, I think it's homestead, if I

want to grow things, if I want to have more than just a small backyard. And maybe it's just purely anecdotal, but I know it's something that has piqued all three of our interest and kind of just wanted to talk a little bit about homesteading, what that is, and whether you're seeing a greater interest in it as well. I come prepared, my friend. Nick mentioned my notes. Now, we've been talking about this, the three of us, even with your father in the past, and it's something that we see a lot. It's picking up in terms of interest. But

you mentioned that that might be purely anecdotal, but now the statistics actually show homesteading is becoming more and more popular. And do you guys remember during the pandemic, especially in the beginning when you went to the grocery store, what did you notice? We had empty shelves. I think that was an interesting observation and experience for all of us.

And sure, we all remember the toilet paper, but it was actually also groceries. So supply chain interruptions might play a role why more people all of a sudden, I say all of a sudden because the statistics show that we see this increase in numbers, especially in Virginia. But it might be a reason for some people, keyword food security. Yes. Right?

I mean, there are several reasons why people look at land as you observe correctly. And, again, the numbers that we're looking at in the MLS really show that as well. But what would you interest about homesteading, for example? I'm just collecting ideas because as I was researching the topic, and I have to because clients are asking me, conversations that we all have among friends. So I know the reasons. What do you think, Nick?

What's the number one reason for people? You and Mrs. Irby, Mrs. Nick Irby, are very interested. But she in particular, what are some of the reasons? Well, by now, according to the definition, my wife and I are already urban homesteaders, for whatever that's worth. It doesn't feel like that, but sure, because we have herbs on the outside of our house they do things ourselves for self-sufficiency because we can because it's cheaper so in fact

Xavier who's watching should sent us a little statistic that maybe you'd find it he said a few years ago food purchases made up six point five percent of disposable income and now it is 11.3%, which is the highest since the early 1990s. And I think that's a big reason. Food, you can't, you worry about if you can get food, worry about the price of food, and you realize that sometimes it's also, at least for my wife and I, if you're going to ask, if you're going to talk to us personally, one of the things we realized was that the difference between the finished good and the raw product was also going up.

It also had its own kind of inflation effect. So we decided to start doing things like, for instance, making our own beef jerky because the difference between the raw product, buying beef went up, sure, but that also carries on to the cost of everything else you're getting in terms of if you're going to make snacks. It's healthier to avoid the processed food, but it's also cheaper if you just go to Costco and buy six pounds of meat and on a weekend pounding meat into jerky strips and there we have a snack that didn't break the bank. So I mean, for us,

to be honest with you, it comes down to finance. It's money. Okay, so we have rising costs for food as one reason. Another reason people bring up is it's healthier food. Most of the time.

I mean, at least you can influence how healthy it is because you know what is in that food. And that's a reason for a lot of people. You go to the grocery store, you do no longer know what pesticides are being used. It has an organic label, but what does that actually mean? And how does the organic label and the produce aisle and the grocery store compare to

what your trusted farmer or your neighbor with a homestead um is is doing how does he produce and what what holistic approaches does he choose as opposed to pesticides insect insecticides, and so on. So you want to know what food you're eating. That's another big reason, yeah. So we have food insecurity. We have supply chain interruptions. We have the cost of food. We have the health aspect. And it's a topic that we're talking more and more about,

luckily, in this country or worldwide. Can you think of another reason for people to look into it? I mean, mine would have been the health, just knowing what's in my food. I mean, my wife and I watched a documentary about blue zones, places where people live much longer. And with one exception, almost all of them were basically smaller communities that they pretty much knew where their food was coming from. It was local. It had been grown.

Like you said, even organic now is just such... Things can be organic and industrialized. And that's part of the issue. But I think also, for me, I would suspect a reason would also be just to feel a greater connection. It's a way to be outside, to have a connection to the land that you own,

to do something. Because I think a lot of us, let's face it, many of us, we don't really produce things with our hands anymore in this country. In other words, yes, I help people save for investment, but when that's done, there's no physical thing created. You help people find a new home. You're actually a little closer, because at least when you're done, there's a physical home. But in other words, there's not like something new that was created.

And I think some of us, you know, you think back in the history of this country and other countries, most humans in history, they worked with their hands. So when they were done, you had something that was agricultural. You had, you turned a piece of wood into a piece of furniture.

You turned cloth into a shirt, right? Or the material into a shirt. For most turned cloth into a shirt right or the new material into a shirt for most of us that we're in service industries we don't produce things with our hands anymore when we're done we don't say here is this thing which i have created but it's a way to do that a little bit in an easier way it's just homesteading it's not like it's farming it's not like you sit there and say i need a huge farm because I'm going to sell grain and do these things. But it's a way to say, I grew this herb from a seed and now I will eat something that I made with my own hands

out of something else. And so I think it's a way for those of us, since most of us are in white-collar jobs, we're in service jobs, to actually produce something with our hands that's different from what we do on a day-to-day basis. It's incredibly satisfying, right? And I'm not sitting here claiming that I'm good at farming or working with my hands. I would like to have carpenter skills, for example.

I admire everyone who, or the farmer. We all know a farmer, a cattle farmer, or someone with chicken produce. It's very admirable because you can see the result. And that's one of the aspects of this whole topic that's so attractive to me. Now that I have a family, we think about how do we want to raise our children, and this circle of life experience to watch a chicken lay an egg, for example, for a child,

it's something that is attractive to me and a lot of people. As you said yourself, I want to produce something with my hands, and I want to understand where it comes from. And it can come from the land I live on. That's the interesting part. Exactly. And then we've also made choices in how we, I think for some people, I think we've also made choices in how your food is raised.

In other words, we all know sometimes, especially if you do a little bit of, sometimes the moment you do a little bit of research, you find out too much. I read a book about the food industry, just trying to learn a little more. It was Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. And by the time you're done, you're like, I know too much now. You shouldn't have read it. Because you know the condition that cows experience, that chickens experience. For most of the country, they say,

well, I would love to have eggs and know that the chicken that laid that egg was not cramped in a thing and spent its whole life squashed up and just laying eggs and living in dirt and disgusting conditions. I'd like to know that my cow... Granted, yes, I killed the cow at the end.

Not me, but in other words, yes, I know the cow was slaughtered at the end, but I'd like to know that at least it walked around in its life. It was a cow. It was a cow. It wasn't a slab between two iron grates its whole life. So I think this... So one of Elizabeth's

co-workers has chickens. And she said, you've got to be careful because chickens lead to conspiracies. And I said, no, I think it's the opposite. I think conspiracies lead to chickens. You own the chicken, you start going, because I would say we had a statistic that said 55% of homesteaders raise livestock with chickens and stuff, with chickens being the most popular choice. But I think that's part of it is that you start, if you do any research at all, or if you start going down that rabbit hole and you find out where your food's coming from,

sometimes you just, you prefer just having it yourself and doing it yourself, and especially more HOAs, I feel like, are being a little bit more lax about whether or not you can have chickens, because you can do it in a state. Small animals. Yes, small animals that you can do it, you're not having them run around the yard,'s you know they have now more efficient coops you can keep them secure you fence them in and they're not necessarily like walking around the neighborhood and like they're in somebody else's garden um you you can have them constrained but you provide your own eggs and that's an important part of of your diet so i think part of it is like you supplement your diet with what you

eat the most i think is an interesting point i think that's what my father does with his tomatoes like when he loves two things tomatoes and eggplants right those are his favorite summer vegetables so he grows those because he wants to have a steady cheap supply of tomatoes and eggplants especially for eggplant parmesan. So he grows them and then you can them? No, my mother just cooks with them right away. We'll eat them raw or she'll just make a, like, that's, like, during

the summer, we'll eat all our, well, my entire family will eat our fill of eggplants and then just go dry of eggplants for nine months and then summer comes back and there's 80 eggplants and my father will just pick them and then it'll be like you can have them all sorts of ways. You can have them fried. You can have them breaded and fried. You can have them

eggplant parmesan. You can have them with the pasta. There's a bunch of things you can do. There's a lot of options. You don't get tired of them until they start tasting bad and that's when the end of the season is. If we needed proof that you have Mediterranean blood, here it is. Talking about eggplants and tomato and sauces.

That's what we grew up on. It's like nothing else. Absolutely. So what would you say, in your experience, what are people beginning to look for? So as people are interested in homesteading, what are they beginning to look for? Like, okay, I need a certain amount of space, or are they figuring out ways to do it in the space that they already have? Yes.

One of the biggest questions people have is, how many acres do I need? Right? And if we are honest, you don't need much space. And if you look at the statistics, and Judah has a nice graph showing that most people actually just have below 10 acres, and it's considered a homestead for them. And actually, about 10% have less than one acre. And homesteading does not mean that you are 100% self sufficient a lot of people actually form co-ops

homesteading co-ops where each family contributes in a specific way some have chicken and others produce soap for example it's just this interesting lifestyle but you also form a community right soap, for example. And it's just this interesting lifestyle.

But you also form a community, right? To take a step back, for the longest time, I thought that homesteaders were part of this counterculture, right? They were against the government. They resisted the government. They wanted to be among themselves and probably all engaged in conspiracy theories and were considered preppers, right? That was my understanding of it for a long time.

And I think we have to acknowledge that it's actually more of a subculture, right? And sure, I brought up COVID and what people realized that might make sense to produce food on their land or maybe change the way you live. It comes along with that lifestyle choice of being more surrounded by nature, to be outdoors. There's more and more data supporting that we should spend more time outside and raise our children outside. And we all know those things in theory, but more people are actually doing it now.

And so, yeah, size of the land matters, but again, you don't need many acres. And if you look at Virginia homesteaders, and interestingly, Virginia is the state with the second most homesteaders. I think after California. It's interesting. And most of them are here in the mountains. So whether it's Nelson County, Augusta County, Rockbridge, et cetera. And as we know, luckily, land is not that expensive up there.

So you're still close to the interstate. You still have Charlottesville. You have Stanton. All those cities close by. And you find affordable land. And, again, to get started, you only need a few acres. But interesting how that has changed. Do you know where homesteading comes from?

I had to look it up back when it became a topic. Yeah, the Homesteading Act, 1862. So back then, the government would grant you up to 160 acres of federal land if you just filed for it and you had to spend five years living on it. That's how you claimed land. And that was considered a homestead. Wow. I did not know that.

That's interesting, yes. So 10% of all federal land changed hands that way. And it's interesting. It was a great way to develop the West of the U.S. Unfortunately, that's no longer possible. You don't get the 468 years for free anymore. I think there's still some jurisdictions in the Northwest where counties have those incentives in place

because they struggle with having enough population and developing it. But, yeah, things have changed, but the name remains the same. I was going to say the concept. It's the concept of the family farm. That was back then the family farm. And now the family being involved in the creation of food as opposed to a large, a corporate farm.

As opposed to I'm starting a farm for the purpose of selling agriculture. It's I'm starting a homestead for the purpose of providing, having my family involved in the provision of food. Don't forget, that's roughly around the same time we had two of the biggest Americans in all of American history

pushing self-sufficiency. You had Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. And Walden Pond was a big, had a big influence on how not only the rest of the world saw America, but how America saw America, and the idea of

Emerson's self-reliance as a thing, like you could rely on yourself entirely, was very popular during that mid-1800s especially, and I think it spilled over and I think it's one of those things that we had that as an American ideal,

then we started realizing that with capitalism being so productive, the more you produce, the less things cost. And so we started to try to conglomerate. Now we're starting to realize that maybe we should have a balance of, yeah, the grocery supply chain can do wondrous things, but if it has a hiccup, you should hopefully have something that you can lean back on. On that vein,

why do you think Virginia may be set in? Are there particular opportunities or things specific to Virginia? No. I think it's a trend we see all over the U.S., especially on the East Coast right now. Virginia is not even providing the best or most incentives for owning land, developing land, hence the word homestead. There are incentives in place, but there are states that give you better tax incentives, for example.

Virginia is among them, and it's highly attractive. And I think it's less a question of where in the U.S., but what's the demographic that chooses that lifestyle. And that's so interesting because if I look at myself and my family, we are thinking about it. My wife, born and raised here in Charlottesville, not necessarily a country

girl, she is making soap herself at home now. She's looking into canning those things. We are kind of urban people now living outside of Charlottesville thinking about buying land and having a homestead.

And that's so interesting because the majority of homesteaders in the U.S. now are my age. The age bracket is 30 to 39. So it's a younger demographic. Yeah, that's the biggest group. And most of them are college educated. So it's not necessarily this old stereotype that we can use about them being older people or part of this

counterculture resisting the government. No. They're older people like you and me. I mean, we're sitting here talking about it right now. It's clearly important for us. Not because I work in real estate. Sure. A lot of people are asking about it. And I'm actually pretty excited about helping them find this piece of land. But also for myself. And your family is part of that as well. Part of the movement.

Exactly. I think each generation is also partly formed by that which has occurred in our history. And it has been for us, you know, that period of uncertainty. I mean, our generation grew up in an uncertainty from an economic standpoint in 08, 09. And then now we've seen both. We've seen things that the generation right before us, like the 80s, 90s, 80s, I would say post-70s and 80s, didn't really see. In other words, it's been 30 years since we had inflation at this level, since we had anything resembling supply chain issues. I mean, when you look at supply chain issues, you end up back in 1970s where you had gas lines and things of that nature and yet in the past five

years all of us have now experienced and if you go if you go back the past 12 13 years right if you basically start from 08 right all of us have experienced periods of high unemployment and then with covid periods of supply being unable to find certain things and now has seen the amount that we have to spend to feed our families double as a percentage of our budget. So we've seen things now that I think has impacted the way we see the world that maybe those who didn't experience the 70s didn't really comprehend because you would not have known that that was a possibility. I think before this,

you would have said, oh no, the world is globalized. You can always get everything anytime. And now we realize that's not necessarily the case. There may be some things that you want to make for yourself. And just I think it's changed

the way our generation looks at things. Yeah, you know, those trends go hand in hand, I think it's changed the way our generation look to things yeah you know those trends go hand in hand I think we continue to live in a globalized world but we can still you know exist in this microcosmos in our small community

you know growing tomatoes and eggplants for example it doesn't mean that we will no longer go to the grocery store. But it's, again, it goes hand in hand with this lifestyle choice. And I think we're observing a little bit of a trend towards that that I find very exciting because what does it mean? We spend more time outside.

We teach our children how to produce something, something I never learned, unfortunately. And we spend more time outside. We teach our children how to produce something, something I never learned, unfortunately. And we spend more time outside. Exactly. And I think for our children too, I think, and I mean, I say this, obviously we say this as hopeful one-day fathers, and you say this as a new father,

just in a world in which they will grow up with so many screens and computers and things, to have them have experiences that involve real things, land, animals, plants, the outdoors, I think is an important counteraction that they need. And I wonder if that's part of it too, going to your point. I think that's a big part of it, these screens.

I think it's a form of compensation in a way, right? Because a lot of people always owned their gentleman farm or their hobby farm, but they might not have used it the way we look at it now. Now we want to produce something. I think you're right. I think we are compensating a little bit for the time we spend in front of the screens and we

see the younger generation being glued to their phones. We talk about the TikTok brains and I think one way of solving that issue would be to be outside exactly it's kind of interesting when you think about just even 20 years ago like people used to work not with a lot of computers just and then they used to go home and watch tv as a way of relaxing but

now if you're on your screen all the time you want to get a you kind of like want to get away from the screen it's funny because there's always been that stereotype about the old, retired New York guy. He's got no land at all. It's usually Italians and they're growing a big zucchini. They go out and they pick their zucchinis and everyone's got zucchinis. They just end up making tons of soups.

To your point, it's moved from that but part of it is that I feel like it's interesting because in those days, it's just sort of like you had a man that was working, probably worked like most of the longshoremen, our family, a lot of longshoremen, retire. You can't just watch TV all day, so you start your little garden because you're reacting against the situation you're in.

Today, it's the same thing. We have all these people. We're all on the screens working, and then you're just sort of like, I want to get out and see the sun just every now and then. There's a lot of workers. Like my wife during the winter at the hospital, if she works that day, it's a 12-hour shift. She doesn't see the sun for two, three straight days.

It doesn't matter how sunny it is. She doesn't see the sun pass. She doesn't see anything. There's something valuable about being able see anything. You're like, that's, you know, there's something valuable about being able to go outside and be like trees, sun, land, you know, any, just even if it's a patch of dirt.

Exactly. Yeah, so we know the number of homesteaders goes up here in Virginia in our area, but it will be interesting to see what we individually actually do with that information.

I know about you guys growing tomatoes. You grew up in a family where gardening was important. I grew up with a big vegetable garden as well. And I would just really like to have that again. Have that again. Yeah. I'm thinking more, maybe not the garden part, but I know my wife more and more, she's like, oh, we should learn how to make that. I think for her

she would love to learn how to make things like chocolate. She loves her chocolate. Could we make chocolate? Could we make this? Could we make that? Maybe more and more making things rather than buying them. At least until I get my green thumb. Should we mate that? Maybe more and more mating things rather than buying them, at least until I get my green thumb. You'll never have it. I'm not sure I'll ever have a green thumb, but I can mate things. I don't have it either, so you and I are going to struggle. Chickens I see in my future because my wife wants them so much.

I already can see them in the future. Chicken and goats. I prefer the goat because goat will cut the grass. That's one less thing for me to do. And fertilize it. I'm fine with that too. I think the chickens will be easier to keep in the yard.

Very interesting to see the trends and know that we can understand it from a personal level. And experience it. I know you're there to help, since you're doing it for yourself too, to help people find what they need for this.

Yeah, but I'm just glad it's a topic that I'm passionate about myself and that makes it a fun thing to talk to people about and work with them. Because everyone wants to do it in a different way too. Some people want to go straight for the chicken. Some people want to do just the garden. Some people want, I mean, right now, the only thing I'm doing is herbs,

but I love, to be honest with you, it's one of those things that like fresh herb for me really makes the difference versus a dried herb. So like I, no matter where I go or what we do, we're going to end up at least trying some sort of herb thing because herbs, I think, for me, changes everything. Well, because it's a cooking thing, right?

It changes everything. Exactly. This is why we love having you on, to have these kinds of conversations. Food, wine. Well, things that are really interesting and important to us and that obviously other people share. So it's always good to have you on.

It is a fascinating period in U.S. history at this point to have this homesteading. No, and as you said, we all anecdotally knew about it, but leading up to today, I looked at the statistics and was just surprised. Your statistics are incredible.

I'm glad to know it's not just anecdotal. There's a lot, and so we'll keep following it, and we should definitely bring it up as you come on every once in a while, just to see where it's going and what we're seeing on it, because it will be very interesting, I think. Ask me in a year if I've managed to grill some. I'm going to write that down.

Say, Matthias, where are we on the homesteading? Well, thank you so much for coming on the homesteading? Well, thank you so much for coming on. It was great. Thank you for having me again. Always a great time, and I'm already looking forward to the next time. Absolutely. Next week, we'll have some other great

guests. We might talk some finance next week. I know it will be either you or whoever it is will be talking some finance. Well, you promised Xavier last week. That he would come back on. And you led our viewers astray, because here I am. But now, hopefully, we might be able to have him back. Or Michael.

We'll see. We'll find out. We'll find out. So we look forward to that. We thank everyone for tuning in today. Of course, thanks to our great partners, Matias Yon Realty, Credit Series Insurance, Forward Adelante,

our presenter, Emergent Financial Services. Thanks to Judah behind the camera, keeping us steady, keeping us going. I love being here on the I Love Seville Network set. We look forward to seeing all of you next week. Be sure to send us any questions, comments, people you think we should have on, great guests that you think would enjoy being on the show.

Definitely appreciate everyone who tuned in today. We look forward to seeing you all next week. But until that time, as we like to close it out, hasta mañana. ¡Suscríbete al canal!