The Pomp Podcast - 314: Master Sommelier Dustin Wilson Shares The Secrets Of The Wine Industry

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

Dustin Wilson is a Master Sommelier and a co-founder of Verve Wine. He was previously the Wine Director at Eleven Madison Park, a 3 Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City. Dustin was also featured in Somm, a popular documentary about the challenging Master Sommelier exam. In this conversation, we discuss the Master Sommelier process, how he built Verve Wine, the COVID-19 impact on the hospitality industry, the recent cheating scandal in the wine world, an overview of wine as an investment asset, his favorite wines, the most underrated wine region, and biodynamic wines. You can purchase wine and have it shipped to your house at https://vervewine.com/ =============================== Our second sponsor is choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to The Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Dustin Wilson is a master sommelier and a co-founder of Verve Wine. He was previously the wine director at Eleven Madison Park, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City. Dustin was also featured in Song, a popular documentary about the challenging Master Sommelier exam. In this conversation, we discuss the Master Sommelier process, how he built Verve Wine, the COVID-19 impact on the hospitality industry, the recent cheating scandal in the wine world, an overview of wine as an investment asset, his favorite wines,

the most underrated wine region, and biodynamic wines. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dustin, and I think you guys really liked this one. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is BlockFi. You know that I'm an investor and a really happy user. They currently have three products. The first is you can deposit crypto and get a US dollar loan against your collateral. The second is you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies on their new crypto exchange. Or the third is my favorite product and the one that I use, where you can deposit crypto or digital dollars into an interest bearing account and earn up to 8.6% APY. That's right. Just like your bank pays you interest on your deposits, BlockFi will

pay you interest on your deposits here as well. There's obviously risk, so do your own research. Go check it out at BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Earning up to 8.6% interest in an interest-bearing account is incredibly attractive given the current macro environment. BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Our second sponsor is Choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. Again, I'm a user here as well. If you're listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax advantage dollars to do

it too. Absolute game changer. An IRA product that allows you to use tax advantage dollars to buy Bitcoin and hold your private keys. Go check them out at retirewithchoice.com slash pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com slash pomp, or you can go in the description and click the link there. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Dustin. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by

Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys.

Bang, bang. I have a special treat for you today. Dustin is here. Dustin and I somehow have become good friends he's one of what 250 master sommeliers in the world I think it's less than that actually less than that yeah yeah two two hundred two I don't know somewhere around 200 250 let's all right so between 200 and 250 of him are running around the world and uh obviously he's number one in our hearts uh thanks for doing this my pleasure good to be here for those that know nothing about the wine world know nothing about you

Let's just start with your background, kind of everything before Master Sommelier, and then we can get into that process. But just kind of where'd you grow up and how did you eventually want to become a Master Sommelier? Yeah, so I grew up in Maryland, moved around a lot as a kid. I went to four different elementary schools before we kind of settled into a place that I lived when I was younger. And, you know, going through school, I never really knew what I wanted to do. When I went to college, I actually was a geography major because I just liked the topic and had no idea what I was going to do. When I was a teenager, I started working in restaurants just to pay bills, you know, be

able to put gas in my tank, my car and things like that, pay insurance. Started off working at sub shops like pizza shops, you know, flipping pizzas and, you know making cheese steaks and things like that and when I turned I think it was 18 or so I went to get a job as a waiter at TGI Fridays and that's my first waiter gig and you know I was making a lot more money doing that like getting tips so that was great and stayed there for quite some time actually ended up bartending and you know by the time I was so I was doing that through college. And by the time I was graduating college, you know, with a geography

degree, I was like, all right, I can, I can either go off and try to do something with my degree and make about half of what I'm making now. Uh, or just like keep doing this, this bartender thing. So I stayed doing that for a while. Cause I just didn't know what I wanted to do. Um, left, uh, left TGI Fridays, bounced around to a couple of different restaurants, Eventually landed at this restaurant called Ruth's Crisp, which is another like chain place, steakhouse down in Baltimore. And it was there that I got exposed to wine. So they didn't have a sommelier on staff, but all the waiters were expected to know a little bit about wine. They had a pretty decent sized wine list, a couple hundred selections.

So you're kind of forced to figure it out. and uh i was in college at the time and um i started learning about it and just kind of caught the bug really really quickly i just found to be really interesting because you know it's this kind of mysterious product that i didn't really understand and there's so many variations of it and it comes from different places in the world the prices were like so all over the place you could sell a glass of wine for eight bucks or something like that at the time or there was the most expensive bottle i remember at that back then was 2500 bucks and um i just you know i remember thinking who in the world would spend that kind of money and why you know like why why would why

do people spend money on on wine i don't get it so i started reading and uh just caught it like really fast and um you know found myself in between classes in school like reading wine books in my car uh going to the wine shop quite a bit and just like you know walking through and looking at bottles and buying things for myself occasionally and just kind of became obsessed um so when i graduated college i still didn't really know what i wanted to do um i knew i liked wine i was making money in restaurants and uh i was also a big skier so i love to ski i love the mountains so um when i graduated i was like all right i'm just gonna i'm gonna head to colorado i'm gonna ski for a little while keep learning about wine and uh and then see what happens and that's exactly what

i did so in oh what was 05 i moved to colorado to boulder and um found this gig at a restaurant called frosca food and wine where it was only open for dinner so i could you know escape and go skiing during the day uh closed on sundays which is awesome and it had a master sommelier running the uh the restaurant he's one of the partners in the restaurant so it was a great place to learn about wine so it was awesome it was like the perfect combination at the time um so i'm learning about wine skiing loving life everything is great and my goal when i first moved there was i wanted to uh i only wanted to stay for about a year

or so maybe two years tops and then the plan was to come back to Maryland, go to grad school. I decided I was going to get an MBA and go get a, you know, real job and move on with life. But then, you know, two years kind of came and went really quickly. I was kind of moving my way through the ranks at this restaurant. And Bobby, who was my boss and kind of my mentor at the time, gave me my first gig as a sommelier. And so here I was, you know, young guy like finally working in wine I could see like a trajectory with it you know I could see like a career in this and so I kind of made the decision I'm like you know what fuck it I'm not going home I'm staying here I'm going to keep working on wine and in order to kind of

legitimize it in my mind this is when I decided to start pursuing the quartermaster sommelier's diploma as a way to just kind of validate this decision I'm like well if I'm going to stay here and kind of keep working in restaurants and go after this wine thing I want it to like feel like I'm you know doing it the right way so I started down that path and frankly like when I first started it I didn't think I was ever going to go all the way with it my thought was you know take like maybe level one level two and kind of stop there and and see what happens um but kind of as it goes you know once you've kind of completed one level of it you're kind of inclined to want to keep going so i get to level three and um you know by that point you're like well fuck it i'm

already here i'm at like the finish line i gotta at least try for the for the final exam but so So what exactly is the levels you're talking about, right? There's kind of four levels is my understanding. And as I mentioned earlier, there's only about 200, 250 people who get through all four levels. So maybe just talk a little bit about like what is a sommelier and then how that process works. Yeah. So, you know, in the, to generalize, a sommelier is just a person in a restaurant who helps you out with your wine selections. normally that person also is probably running the wine program in the

restaurant so they're you know building out the wine list they're making the selections they're the ones dealing with the distributors and buying wine it's kind of like a little business within the business and you know then they're on the floor at night helping guests make selections and selling wine you know I think the the word sommelier has kind of expanded since when I first started doing it to mean a lot of different things like a lot of people in distribution or people who are teachers in wine or even like certain people who work on the on the production side will call themselves sommeliers in my mind

and there's an argument in the industry about like what is the sommelier what is exactly that that term mean but in my mind it's always been a position in a restaurant where you're helping guests with with wine selections now the master sommelier title um is a is a distinction and a credit a credit that's like earned through going this through this series of examinations so it's a little bit different it's not it's a title it's not a position in a restaurant like the word someone is um and to earn that title you go through these different levels so level one is basically a very introductory test where you go and for like two days you're uh you know you you take like a wine course and at the end of the

course you take a written exam and it's like 80 multiple-choice questions and either pass or you don't pretty straightforward pass rates really high if you know anything about wine going into it you can probably do pretty well and people from all different industries will go take this test just to learn a little bit more it's really interesting level two once you pass that level one you're allowed to take level two is more to it there's it gets broken and three pieces there's a service piece there's a tasting piece and there's a uh the theory or kind of like the written examination part um it's definitely harder uh you probably need a little

bit of restaurant experience to be able to get through it um you need to have been blind tasting and like learning how to blind taste a little bit in order to uh to get through it um it's still quite basic but it's definitely much harder than the first exam so the the rate of the pass rate goes from call it like 90 or 95 percent at level one down to about 50 percent for level two uh but let's say you get through it then you're uh entitled to go for level three which is called the advanced exam and the advanced exam is the same three parts there's theory there's service there's tasting um but you know again a much higher level of of difficulty um there's more to the blind tasting. There's a lot more to the service exam. The level of questioning for theory

is much deeper. This is kind of like really what separates. This is the biggest jump. It's what separates kind of like the real pros from, you know, maybe an enthusiastic consumer, for instance. The pass rate for that is usually somewhere in the vicinity of, I call it 20 to 30 percent most years. And then once you've passed that, and a lot of people will take that several times. I took it a couple of times before I got through. Once you're through that, then you have to wait to be invited to take the master's exam. So that's level four. And it's basically the exact same test as the advanced exam in the sense of how it's set up. Same number of wines that you blind tastes the same three sections but again the level of difficulty of questioning goes up

the intricacy of service that you need to perform goes up and the wines that they pour you for the blind tasting get a little bit more difficult and you have to score and to pass you have to score at a higher rate so it's quite difficult and that the pass rate drops down to somewhere below 10 percent. Some years it's like three percent. Some years it's five. Some years it's a little bit more than that. But if you get a 10 percent pass rate, that's pretty that's really strong. You know, and a lot of people never get through. I know a lot of people in my industry have taken it numerous times and never get through. And the thing is, you can only take it once a year. So there's a lot of people who have been in the program, you know, you usually, by the time you get to that level,

you've put in years of your life to begin with. And then I know some people have taken the master's exam a dozen times, you know, or close to a dozen times. It's just an enormous amount of your time and energy that goes into it. So it's a, it's a very difficult test. So I knew nothing about wine in general. Uh, I would literally embarrass myself if I try to pronounce 99% of wines. Uh, and I think we were at dinner once and you or somebody else brought up, uh, this documentary Psalm, uh, which you were featured in. And, uh, so of course I went home and, uh, Flynn and I watched it and I was blown away at one,

the fact that you subjected yourself to this, but to just learning about how intense it is. Right. So for those that don't know, you should, one, definitely go watch a documentary, but two, it's, it's things like the blind test, right? The, the, um, And most people hear that and they're like, oh, okay, so what? You just close your eyes and you taste a wine. But it's not just like, hey, is this red or white? It's literally, where is the wine from?

What year is it? What type of wine? What are the ingredients? Like the level of understanding and really expertise you have to have is pretty compelling. I mean, it blew my mind to the point where my favorite part of the documentary is like somebody's tasting wine and they're describing it as like a new can of tennis balls or it tastes like or smells like cat piss and like and you're kind of like wait a minute this is such a granular understanding of wine the different wine regions and periods of time etc that

the study period like how long did you study to actually pass that because it's not like you just study for three weeks show up and like cross your fingers and hope you pass right no no the uh so So the total amount of time for me from when I took my introductory test at first level until I passed my MS was about five years, which there's people who have gone through it not much quicker than that, but a little quicker than that. It's relatively fast though. I would say the average has got to be somewhere in the seven to nine year range for I think a lot of people.

it's a significant amount of time and you know leading up to the exam I mean you're studying probably a year out if not like you know probably call it at least eight months if you're if you're not studying by six months out and prepping you're you're behind it's just an enormous amount of information to prepare for and you know the blind tasting piece of it is really difficult like getting to the point where you can identify grape varieties and you know where something's coming from and, you know, picking the right vintage and things like that for the wines. It sounds like it's one of these things that you need to be like an innate taster

for, but it's not necessarily that. It's just a shit ton of practice and really understanding and doing it over and over and over and over again. So it's a lot. So the most important question I'm going to ask you is as you're doing all that practice, how the hell do you not get drunk every single day right you're just literally tasting and tasting and tasting and tasting like how do you not just get hammered day in and day out for a year yeah um well we spit everything so that's that's the short answer um you know what does that mean you you know you you put it in your mouth you swish it around and then you spit it right out and you can get enough information from the wine you know you're looking for very specific things you're looking for like acidity

and texture and tannins and checking for alcohol level and you know specific things on the palate that you don't you don't need to drink it to to experience that and to uh to analyze it so um you know you're spitting pretty much everything you taste until of course you know it's like late at night you saw in the movie you know when you're tasting with your buddies practicing and it's like two in the morning the last couple of bottles you're usually consumed so um it's about understanding when to stop spitting and when to start drinking uh my one little story on that and it's it's interesting just as a person in the industry i've worked a lot of these big organized tastings where you know you walk into like a a huge facility and there's like call it three or

four dozen tables with wineries pouring their wines and things like that and hundreds of wines being tasted and whenever it's like a an industry only tasting you know everybody's really pro they know what they're doing they you know they taste they spit they're taking their notes and they're out the door and they're usually a lot of people are usually even working that night if they're in restaurants you know they say they go these tastings during the day they do their thing and they head out to their job uh and then i've also worked it when it's you know the average consumer go into these tastings and the first 30, 45 minutes are completely normal. And then the end of these things are always the disaster because everybody has been, they're like, Oh, I'm just

taking these little sips, you know, but it, it really adds up. And, uh, it's a lot, it's, it's interesting. I love it. I love it. Um, once you get through the four levels, um, in the documentary it's very obvious like uh this is a huge moment right because as you said five seven nine years uh plenty used to was actually making fun of me during it because even though i knew you passed when you actually got told you passed i'm like running around the room being like let's go dustin what do people go do once they actually uh are awarded the title of master sommelier like what are some do they go to a restaurant do they go somewhere else like what's the kind of the normal path? Yeah, I wouldn't say there is any normal path necessarily. I mean, I think, you

know, the reason that a lot of people go through it, though, is it does open a lot of doors for you. It opens a world of opportunities because to earn the distinction is really rare, right? So there's a lot of companies that are willing to pay for that and want somebody on their team that has earned that so your your opportunities that come your way are really broadened and a lot of doors get open so but it can be in all aspects of the industry so you know I personally when I passed I wanted to run a really significant wine program in a restaurant setting because in my mind you know as like I said that being a sommelier is being in a restaurant it's there's an element of service to that um so i went off and became or i shouldn't say i went off and just did it but

i got the opportunity to be the wine director at 11 madison park here in new york so i ran that program for about four years um you know it was crazy time to be a part of that restaurant was when they you know were being purchased from ushg and the danny meyer group and uh you know elevated to three stars michelin and making their way up the 50 the top 50 restaurants in the world list and things like that was awesome experience but you know there's a lot of people that maybe use the earning the ms as a chance to actually leave restaurants to go into different aspects of the industry so that could be importing or distribution wholesale um it could be going to work for a specific winery uh like in in california for example like say napa valley you you go to become

the kind of uh you know global wine ambassador for a particular brand for instance and travel the world and sell you know that wine or be a representative of that winery globally um you know there's some people that uh that use it to become educators um and it's great for that too. So there's a lot of different ways you can utilize it. There's not necessarily one path. I think it really depends on what you're passionate about, which part of the industry you're the most interested in, and what you really love to do. You know, for me, for a while, it was restaurants. Obviously, that's changed since then. But, you know, there's no single, you know, one thing that a lot of people do. So you've obviously left kind of that restaurant scene, and you started Verve

wine uh maybe talk to us a little bit just like what is that where are the current locations and kind of what are you guys building uh under that brand yeah so um you know i spent call it close to 20 years right in restaurants yeah that's about right uh and i think like 11 or 12 of those were as a sommelier in in restaurants you know culminating with that that job at 11 Madison Park my mind you know i wasn't at the time gonna find it was you know the best restaurant the best wine director best sommelier job probably in the world um you don't really get much better than that so it's like a as a sum you don't you're not gonna leave 11 madison park and go you know be a wine director or sommelier somewhere else it's just you're at the top at that point so

you know and for me i always kind of wanted to have my own business um i thought for a really long time that was going to be restaurant. Having, you know, spent 20 years in restaurants towards the end of it, I kind of realized, you know, what it takes to do that. And I needed a little change of pace. So what I saw actually was an opportunity to get into the retail space in a really interesting way. And so when I left, I started Verve. And Verve is you know if you break it down very simply it's a wine retail business we've got locations physical locations here in New York we've got one in Tribeca we've got a location out in San Francisco we are later this year opening a location in Chicago we're super excited about so it's a

growing brand for me though the the opportunity was always on the the e-commerce side because What I saw that was lacking was, you know, me as a wine person, as a person that like loves to drink wine and knows what I like to drink and, you know, has a fairly discerning, you know, palate and choice when it comes to drinking things. I know where I like to go to buy wine in New York City. It's not just any old random place. There's only like a handful of places I think do the wine curation thing really well. but what was missing from that I think was like the e-commerce side of things you know you physically had to kind of go there or talk to somebody there pick up the phone or email somebody so to me the the experience of buying wine was still pretty still pretty backwards or just

outdated or archaic or whatever you want to call it so I felt like there was an opportunity there to to get into the e-commerce part of wine um but have it be that curation have it be a curated piece of it way where you know there's the wines wine.com for instance there's like wine library there's other people that do the e-commerce thing but they're doing it on like big brand discount wines they're uh you know large like wineries that you can find and you know they're very ubiquitous. You can find them anywhere. Not necessarily the kind of really interesting things that I personally love to drink myself. So where I saw the chance to do something was like, okay, let's have the same level of curation, but let's get it online and just make it easier for people

like myself to find these things on the internet. So that's kind of what we did. So we launched in 2016 with the location here in New York and the e-commerce site have since grown that obviously and the goal is I mean in the long term is to ideally kind of plop some physical locations into really strategic places where it makes it a little bit easier for us to do the fulfillment for e-commerce in a meaningful way and you know basically to get the kind of cool stuff that I like to drink and that you know people that love wine are really into just make it easier for consumers in other markets to get those wines because we're really spoiled here in New York right like we we get access to things that not a lot of other markets get access to so you know

wine drinkers that are really passionate that are really into it in say middle country somewhere don't get access to the same sorts of things that we do here in New York so how do we build that access and that's something that like the wine comms and you know the bigger ecommerce brands aren't doing they're only working with brands that you can find anywhere and everywhere they're not working with like a really curated stuff so that's that's kind of our in a nutshell that's what we're doing yeah I am we're friends but I will vouch and say that the whole idea of ordering this stuff online is a thousand times easier than walking to a wine store trying to

figure out what do i want where is it you know do they have it all of those kind of things um we regularly order and literally get same day delivery like it's kind of like an amazon like experience almost right but the wines are um brought right to your door and it's this great thing does it feel to you like uh the wine industry in general other than you named kind of one or two outliers just technology really hasn't been integrated into the industry in the way that we've seen maybe in other retail type businesses and some of that has to do with I'll call it like the mystique of wine like the whole idea of the high price points and and the stories behind some of the product and

all that or is it just literally like there's not that many people who understand technology and so they're just doing what they've always done yeah I think it's a mix you know there is a kind of a romance to the kind of the traditionalism of good wine you know when a lot of people talk about the great wineries of the world you know they tend to be like small places that are little farms and you know it's like families that have owned these small properties for generations and things like that there's like a romance behind kind of these old school small very traditional like winery businesses right so it's not necessarily cool to be really technology

forward in wine because wine in itself like the fun stuff anyways is very traditional and there's like this kind of adherence to that so I think that's that's part of it I think the other part of it is that you know the people that tend to get into the wines that like I like to drink and you know other professionals or people in the industry or really enthusiastic wine drinkers like to drink um the people that start those retail businesses are typically you know very much all about the wine and all about the curation process they're not necessarily tech people and i you know i'm certainly one of those people i'm not a tech person myself um but there's like an element of it's it's all about the wine for them and it's all about the the curation it's all about

the one-on-one you know customer interaction and things like that and kind of keeping things small um which i totally respect and there's nothing nothing against that by any stretch of the imagination but um where i saw the the opportunity was like you know there's a lot of other people out there that are like me that just want to like be able to order stuff and like not have it be a pain in the ass um that you know want to have that same you know where i know where to go in new york city to go buy a bottle in a store like you kind of want to know where's the cool place to go buy a bottle online. It's the same mentality. And that's kind of where we saw a chance to be a little bit different and do something differently. For sure. And obviously

you guys have over the last four years built an awesome business, both in New York and you've got the San Francisco location and then COVID hits. And I remember when first it was like more of a virus and not yet the government mandated shutdown. And then we had a conversation when actually the mandate went in place hey retail businesses you have to shut down uh in new york i think at one point it was a little bit gray area like alcohol uh businesses are they essential are they not um i think you guys ended up shutting down but thankfully you had the e-commerce business and so it was kind of this thing where like it almost feels like the virus has accelerated a lot of trends that were already underway uh one of those across all retail uh verticals being

e-commerce obviously uh and you guys were really well positioned uh over the last couple of years to kind of capitalize on the fact that hey if people can't leave and they've got to order things to their computer verb is one of the best ways to do that right yeah exactly yeah it's been really interesting because like um again kind of thinking about how people normally think about wine retail is a lot of people think like oh where's the good wine shop in my town or you know i've got to go find this little place that has like the cool things you know so and that's very much i think a lot of the ways that people still shop for wine um that are into it they like to find a little place that that's in their town that they can go to that they trust or that has an

interesting selection or whatever um so when we have this idea to do e-commerce with the same types of wines and like kind of make that more of a national thing uh it was really hard for us to get people to buy into that like it was still very much a mentality of like oh verve's just a shop down in tribeca and that's it you know like that's it was really difficult to kind of describe and get people to buy into like the bigger vision um but then you know to your point code hits we were having a not a hard time we're accelerating that that e-commerce business but it wasn't like it was taking a lot longer for it to catch on than we were kind of hoping it would um but then covid hits and it just like shot it way up um and you're right we were really well positioned for

that and i'm really thankful for it um we actually never did shut down um we we changed the model a little bit um or i should say we changed our operations and how we how we operate but we never actually fully shut down um i frankly my partner and i were like when this first came around we thought we were gonna have to close in my mind i'm like how is selling booze gonna be and it's a quote-unquote essential business i just didn't see it i'm like now this is this luxury like who needs to drink you know booze is basically the last legal drug you know like there's no way with like hospitals grocery stores and liquor stores like i just didn't see it so we thought we're gonna shut down i'm like making plans on how we're gonna you know deal with

furlough and employees and how that's how that's going to go down and all that and then it comes out that we were actually considered essential like we fell into that so you know we're obviously really pumped about that and thankful for it but we also wanted to do what we could to protect our team and uh kind of change the way we did things a little bit and we realized that having customers continue to come into the store wasn't wasn't great um so we actually shut the stores down uh for public walk-ins and things like that and just went fully e-commerce and it was a kind of a risky move because we didn't at the time it was still made up us you know percentage of the business but it wasn't a huge percentage of

business but we kind of leaned all the way into it and realized that it was it was a really great thing so the stores have effectively become small warehouses and fulfillment centers for all of our e-commerce orders and for the last call two and a half months or however long it's been now we've been like a hundred percent e-commerce company and the growth of the business has been pretty significant I can't I can't complain about it at all so it's been really interesting to see what's happened and to your point it's it's taken what we were pushing for for a long time and just accelerated it really quickly you

know and our biggest concern now is how long is that gonna last when things do fully reopen are we going to continue that online business and that's yet to be seen but i think we we've certainly acquired a lot of new customers which is great so you know if we're doing our job well we've got good products and continue to give good service we're really hoping that we can retain a lot of what we've acquired over this course of time for sure and right now you guys ship solely in the cities that the physical locations are in do you ship nationwide how does that work no we ship nationwide um not to every single state so you know alcohol is still a pretty you know regulated um product so each state is different it's a lot of post-prohibition laws

that every state has its own rules and regulations so it's a real big pain in the ass to be honest um so we don't ship everywhere but i think we ship out of the lower 48 i think it's like 40 of those lower 48 so most of it um you know we do local delivery in manhattan and san francisco seven by seven um and then we ship to everywhere else that we can ship to um so yeah we definitely get out beyond we have a lot of customers in other states too like i said like you don't if you live in nebraska or kansas or you know wisconsin or something you just don't get access to the same kinds of things that you see in california or new york so the people that love wine that are out there they need a place to buy it and so we ship we do ship quite a amount of wine a good

amount of wine outside of new york and california got it and then uh you're incredibly humble so you won't say this but i'll say it uh you're my most connected friend when it comes to uh the new york city hospitality restaurant uh alcohol scene um and i remember at one point you uh kind of a couple of weeks into the the shutdown um of a lot of these businesses basically told me like hey it does not look good for a lot of these restaurants it doesn't look very good for uh most of the hospitality industry um and so maybe kind of just give an update on like what does that look like in terms of how some of these uh businesses have been affected how effective have they been at kind of uh if you're a restaurant maybe transitioning to online type uh business and then if you had

to put a number on it like what percentage of let's say businesses in Manhattan in the hospitality industry don't come back kind of after this in an unfortunate manner yeah you know it's really hard to tell you know I think as time continues to go on and you know we see things start to come back to normal particularly here in New York we'll realize who really had trouble and who didn't you know I don't think anybody necessarily wants the press of like you know we're folding we're giving in we're done we're you know waving the white flag so i think we're probably hearing a lot less in the media about what's actually going on um i know places like eater which is you know pretty good resource for a lot of what's happening in the

hospitality restaurant world um they've been trying to keep track of who's closing for good here in new york um but i'm sure they haven't gotten to everybody they're just working with trying to figure out who the biggest players and the most popular restaurants are that are fully shutting down. But restaurants have it really tough, right? Because A, they need diners coming through. They've got a lot of staff. The restaurant business model is a very small margin business. They have a ton of expenses. I think it's going to be really hard for them to bounce back. And I think the longer that this goes on and the longer that they stay closed and they're continuing to pay rent, they don't have the huge, you know, piles of money just sitting

in stores, you know, to be able to continue to pay rent almost indefinitely on their spaces. You know, they need diners in their spaces to be able to continue to operate. So there's a, there's a limitation on how long they can last um through this closure you know smarter businesses that you know have saved up some money or have figured out really creative ways to operate through this whether it's via meal kits or to go or you know turning their their their restaurants into grocery stores or trying to sell wine um you know they're maybe bridging the gap a little bit um but you know for a restaurant to actually operate and and continue to live they need to be full they need to they need diners coming in and they need to be

full so even when we do reopen whenever that ends up being the 50% capacity thing and the six foot between each table regulations that are going to be put in place for social distancing which I think if you talk to any restaurants or anybody in the industry they agree that these are all good measures in order to keep everybody safe it makes it really hard for them to continue to survive because particularly in New York where rents are really high it's to be operating at 50% capacity is a losing battle you're losing money you're not making money at that point are my best guess is most restaurants in New York

needs to be at least at like 65% or maybe 70% capacity to just to break even so you know I think it's gonna be really hard and I think the the situation is pretty dire I think the larger groups you know the USH G's of the world or the places that have multiple restaurants and you know a lot of good backers or if like it's a small organization but maybe has good good capital behind them some good investors behind them they'll be able to get by because they have access to that additional additional funding but the small a lot of small mom-and-pops you know the places that are in our neighborhoods that we love to go to that are local to us and

whatnot that don't have big bank accounts or access to capital they're gonna have a really hard time so i mean my my suggestion is you know patron those businesses as much you can if you love them and you want them to get through this um and you know my girlfriend's gonna give me hell for saying this but buy from if they're doing stuff to go buy from them directly don't buy through third-party apps like Grubhub and and Seamless and things like that you know because if you haven't been paying attention those companies take fees and you know it hurts it's it's tough for the restaurants to buy them she's already giving me shit here we won't say we won't say why but there's a

specific reason why she's good yeah so I guess my my whole thing is I don't know what it's gonna look like I think the situation really sucks it's gonna be tough. I don't know. I've heard some people say they think 30% of the restaurants in New York are going to close. Some people say 50%. Some people are saying 75. I don't know what the right number is. I think the longer this goes on, that percentage is going to grow. And, you know, they're in a really tough spot. And frankly, it's a lot of uncertainty too. Even if they can open up into 50% capacity, you know, it's really tough to understand who wants to go out to eat in these times right like i don't know if i want to go out to a restaurant and be around a bunch of other

random people that i don't know and uh you know i think that so it's uncertain to there's uncertainty around demand um there's uncertainty around like you know what the regulations exactly are going to be you know how long certain restaurants are able to survive through this So, a lot of it's yet to be seen, but it's a really, really tough situation. The dining scene in New York is going to be changed significantly for a very long time. Yeah. The thing that's interesting to me is it's almost like forcing a restaurant to only be allowed to be open at 50% capacity.

It sounds like you're confirming, you're really telling them, hey, you got to open and run a loss for some period of time, right? but like you either if you're the restaurant owner you either say okay i'm not going to open at 50 even though i could be open at 50 i'm going to wait until i can open at some higher percentage so that while i have my staff there and customers i'm not running a loss or hey it's important to be open you know when things come back so people you stay top of mind and you drive foot traffic and you know all those kind of things it's kind of a hard decision right there's kind of no playbook no one's done this before you know some people will look at it and say okay do i am i losing

more money by staying closed or would i lose more money by opening up there's other risk factors of opening up too like and i'm seeing this in other states now that have already reopened and people are going back to these restaurants what happens if one of your staff members uh catches covid and you've got to shut down for another period of time you know that can be a nail in the coffin for a lot of these restaurants it's not cheap to reopen your restaurant you have to buy a lot of inventory you gotta hire staff back chances are if you've changed your menu or you change your operations around at all to accommodate these new times you gotta retrain so there's gonna be a few days at least of you know spending money on labor where you're not

bringing any money in um to go through all of that and then potentially have to shut down again is a massive risk, right? You spend a ton of money, reopen, and a couple weeks later, you got shut down again for a couple of weeks. It's a huge hit. So, you know, it's a huge risk, I think, to reopen into these times. There's no perfect playbook on it yet. I don't think it's going to return to normalcy until you probably have the vaccine in place and, you know, everything's kind of cool to be out and about again. Anytime before that is really tough. And that's why you see people like Danny Meyer making these big pronouncements that he's not going to open any of his restaurants until, you know, maybe there's a vaccine. Um, he doesn't want to operate under

these conditions. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. Uh, Balaji Sreenivasan came on and he also said something that I thought was really interesting, which was basically not only are there all the challenges you described, but you're also then asking these restaurants to essentially be able to operate in like biodefense mode right because they also are fighting the virus they have to clean tables much more often they've got to be able to make sure that their staff isn't sick and do kind of all of these things that they probably directionally were already doing it sounds like but now it's just on hyperdrive because they're specific health you know you know the last thing in the world you want is to be in the press labeled as a hot spot for

covid right or you know what what happens now too is like kind of the restaurant that maybe people want to go to is the one that has the best sanitization policies you know and tends to be the cleanest and it's the most on display with that you got to think about how you're doing your marketing your social media like you got to tell your customers and your guests like what is it that you're doing to make sure that all your preventative measures are in place um but then there's these additional costs too like ppe for your staff masks gloves temperature checks all this stuff that needs to be put in place is a whole nother cost item that just never took place before if you're doing it the right way if you're changing out your mask twice a shift call it

throwing those things away you know you're buying masks and gloves and stuff at a huge rate uh for these you know fairly large teams of people it's a it's a cost item that just didn't exist before this. So to open into a new landscape with all these risks where you can only operate at 50% capacity, there's additional cost items. It's really difficult. Yeah. Another thing that seems to be a new cost item specifically for wine, and we've talked about it before, is just the tariffs. And so maybe kind of help us understand all of the taxation that's been going on. Some of it sounds like uh there was threats of it happening some of it's already been passed and and uh just how these additional costs when it comes to the wine industry changes the economics for importers

exporters and various retail type locations yeah so it's funny because once uh the tariffs was like the big topic in the industry for like two months and then covet hit and you know now tariffs feel like it's a complete topic of the past but it's definitely having a significant impact particularly on French wine because you're seeing I think it's like a 25% there was two there were two potential tariffs that were being put in place I can't remember anymore which one was which but one was for 25% and another one was going to be for a hundred percent and I think that was like the the like airbus deal that trump was pissed off about or something um but what ended

up happening i think that one got pushed off and the 25 tariff on french wine was still put into place and you know all these things are a little bit on lag time because you know things are on the water they take time to get here um but now things are starting to arrive and you know you're seeing these wines that are certainly more expensive so how that ends up happening to what the effect is on the consumer I think kind of depends on what type of consumer you are so what I mean by that is if you're a pretty savvy wine consumer and you you're very particular about the types of wines you buy in the specific wineries like let's say that you really love Burgundy or Rhone wines

or you know certain certain champagnes or something like that you're really specific about the types of wines that you buy specific wineries you're gonna search them out and they're gonna be more expensive than they were in the past like if you're used to buying them before now they've got a premium on them and you as a maybe a collector or wine enthusiast or whoever you've got to make a decision on is that extra cost worth it to you or not and we've seen a lot of that like you know there's certain burgundy wines for example that we've always sold uh the last few years and you know you get pushback from from collectors they understand

the situation but maybe in the past they would have taken a couple of cases of something they might only take one case or six bottles something like that so you're seeing a a downshift in the quantities for sure based on that i think on for for the average consumer that isn't necessarily paying as close attention or have like the same um same restrictions with choice and kind of you know really want specific things you probably aren't going to notice it all that much because you know us for like a retailer for instance you know we need to make sure that we have certain categories and price points that we're always hitting so you know we need a Sauvignon Blanc from France for instance that comes in and hits the shelf at 15 bucks we're going to find that

wine no matter who's making it we're going to find one that we like that fits the right price that's the right category and put it in that slot now it might be not be the same ones before but the average consumer that's come through the door might not realize that it's different and they're not going to necessarily care so i think it really depends on where you fall you know in the in the spectrum of uh the type of wine consumer that you are if you're savvy and you're used to buying things you're gonna notice it because shit's just more expensive now um i don't think that that kind of normal consumer is gonna are gonna feel it as much yeah so most people listening to this are going to be that average retail consumer uh but everyone is fascinated

with uh the collectors or kind of the investors in wine we've talked a lot on the podcast in the past about like fine art or the private art market and to me the wine investing world seems you know somewhat comparable it's a different product obviously but maybe talk a little bit about kind of your understanding of how that world works and what's going on there and as we've kind of the world has changed a little bit yeah it's um you know wine investing I think is actually a really interesting kind of alternative asset if you think about it it's it does pretty well if you're the type of person that can spend wisely and then sit on everything and just not

consume you know it's a little different than art where you're just putting something up on the wall like you know you could it would be like if you could there was some benefit to taking that piece of art down and like destroying it you know like uh wine is it sits in your cellar for a certain amount of time and it can really appreciate value but then you're also tempted to want to just pop open and drink it and then it's gone um so if you can buy buy smartly and keep things around you can actually make a pretty significant amount of money on wine now the difference is you need access to it um you need to be able to understand like what the good things are and what aren't um but you know it i think it's a really interesting investment um and you can certainly do well where

where it still is yet to be seen how the tariff situation is going to impact that. I think for the really high ends of wine collecting, it's not going to matter too much because I think the same wines are going to be still in just as much demand. Everybody's buying them for the same price anyway. And maybe the acceleration in value is going to slow down a little bit because they're already starting out at a premium but i still think that over time those wines are going to be worth a lot more um and there you know you can still do well what's been interesting in the segment for me is like there's um other people are starting to get into this game and one company in particular that i've kind of like talked with who is finds wine

collecting to be a fascinating you know kind of segment for investing they're starting to try to democratize this a little bit because I think it really has been left up to the collectors and the people who really know wine to to make smart decisions when it comes to this so the average investor isn't actually gonna touch it even though it is a really good investment you need the access you need the relationships you need to know what you're buying there are companies now that are starting to put some algorithmic structure around how to invest in wines and doing basically all the trading for you. So to me, that's pretty interesting.

So I think the industry is evolving and changing a little bit up to that end, but it's yet to be seen like how well some of these things work. Yeah. So this might be a really stupid question, but let's say that you are one of those wine collectors and you're buying you know you mentioned earlier $2,500 bottle of wine how do you actually know whatever's on the label is actually what's in the bottle so whether it's the type of wine where it comes from how old it is like like all of these things that kind of make up that story and their kind of romantic element that drives the price it appears like how do people actually verify that stuff yeah I mean sources is a huge part of it I would imagine it's pretty similar

I don't know much about aqua lightning, but I would imagine it's pretty similar to that, where it could potentially be like a fake or something like that. But the source is hugely important, whether you're buying directly from the winery itself, or you're buying through an importer, or you're buying through, you know, a retailer like us, for instance, that you can guarantee the provenance and where it's coming from. That's a massive part of it. you know, outside of that, when you start getting into the world of auctions and trading between collectors or kind of more open market on wines, it gets tricky. Now, there are a number of people out there that do a lot of work into verification of wines and there are ways to kind of check for authenticity without necessarily just popping the wine open and checking on it. But you do run some risk. You know, if you watched that movie, Sour Grapes, or you've heard of

Rudy Kinnear one, who was kind of the famous guy who got arrested for a lot of fraudulent wine sales. There's a lot of fake wine out there on the market. And some of it can be very difficult to tell if it's a fake or not, if they've done a good job. So, you know, unless you're buying it, the best way to know that you're, what you're getting is the real deal is to buy it on release, either from a trusted retailer or from the winery directly. Outside of that, you start to really increase your risk of buying something. There is a risk, a percentage risk of buying something fraudulent. Yeah, that makes sense. One more topic before we get to the fun stuff. There was recently some massive drama uh and and frankly just a cheating scandal in the uh in the somalia

world uh maybe talk us through just kind of like what happened and where things stand now sure um so this was uh about a year a little over a year and a half ago now it was towards the end of 2018 i believe i think it was like september october 2018 um so what happened was at the master sommelier exam one of the examining masters sent out an email to a handful of people and I think it was people that he was close with who were taking the test and basically gave them a couple of the answers to the blind tasting thing like said hey you know here's a couple of wines that are in lineup for your blind tasting and what happened was is that that email was

brought to light after the exam was over so nobody reported that email during the exam everybody went took their test a bunch of people passed that year it was actually a record number of people passing the exam so it already to a lot of us were like wow that's a huge number of people I was like 20% of something like that it's like 20 people or something so it seemed a little weird but then about a month later it comes out that this email was sent out ahead of time and a handful of candidates received it what they did with it was was really up in the air whether they passed it along or not even whether they

use the information or even if they saw it before they went into their test but happened was that the organization decided to do an investigation which I later found out wasn't wasn't really much of an investigation it was basically they sat around the table and just decided to instead of doing an investigation to just yank everybody's pin everybody's diploma that passed and tell them to retake the test and it turned into a huge thing because a there was obviously the breach um which made it public but then you know the big question became did they handle this the correct way uh you know is it right to just it you know kind of consider that everybody maybe cheated on this thing or had had you know access to this information and maybe used

it incorrectly um and cheated so um it was a huge deal in the organization um you know there's there's still a lot of people myself included who feel it wasn't necessarily handled properly other people will argue with me about that um it's it's kind of settled down at this point but for about a year or so it was a huge deal in the organization and some of those people have since going back and retaking the tests and passed. Some people went back and failed, so not gotten through. Some people hated how it was handled and have decided to just exit the organization altogether and not pursue it anymore. So, you know, I think it was a big learning for the organization of how to maybe protect themselves against this kind of stuff in the future, but

and also you know if and when these things happen how to think about it and how to act the next time around yeah pretty crazy that this all happened especially after watching the psalm documentary and understanding uh the pressure involved in all of this uh you know you could see again just people caving right yeah well you know you think about it like you know people put years of their lives into this thing it's one of the biggest achievements they're ever going to have in their life. I remember how I felt on the day I passed. It's like, you just feel like you're on top of the world. It's crazy. You're like, holy shit, I just became one of these people. And you're elated. You worked for a very long time. You put your blood, sweat, and tears into passing this

thing. So I can only imagine what it's like to be called up a month later and say, hey, nevermind, you've got to come do this again. You're devastated. So I can empathize with the candidates. I can also empathize to a certain extent with the organization too. Like their exam was breached. They don't really have a really clear path to figuring out who got that access to that information and who didn't. What's the fairest way to deal with it? You know, their thought was, let's just pull it back from everybody and make them redo it. Let's just can't like void that test. Because for them, you know, the, the, you know, making sure that that test, and when you earn that diploma, that that's that, that integrity is intact, is super important. And I don't blame

them for that. So, you know, I can kind of see both sides of the situation. But, you know, it's a crazy thing. I mean, it's just, it caused a huge rift within the organization. A lot of people, you know, lost some jobs that they had lined up because the, you know, they were waiting for these people to pass their exam. Some people got kind of caught up in bad press because they were, you know, happened to be part of this graduating class there or the diploma got yanked from underneath of them. When, you know, I know a lot of these people personally, and I know that they, there's no way they've achieved it, you know, so it's, it's, it's tough to. to understand how to think about it, but, uh, hopefully we won't have to encounter something like that again. And, or if we do that, we'll be better prepared next time. Cause it was,

it was a cluster. It was a mess. Well, the part I think is so interesting too, is, uh, it came out that there was cheating and really the debate, it sounds like is not around, Hey, was there cheating or was there not? It's, what do we do about it? Right. And so it's kind of like, when you get in a situation where everyone agrees that like something bad happened that shouldn't have happened right the the like response to that uh i think there sounds like there's agreement around like hey there should be a response it's just who do you respond

to how do you do it like like that's where all the nuance really is totally you know and we we looked at it as like okay let's say you go you know take take the sat or maybe the sat is a bad bad example they got they have cheating at the sat now too so you got to be careful they they You're taking your bar exam or something like that. And if somebody finds out that there's a leak of information about the bar exam, are you going to just take that away from everybody that took it that time? Probably not. You're probably going to dig way more into it, figure out who had access to the information, who didn't, and maybe make them retake it or figure out some sort of punishment if there needs to be a punishment. But to just kind of void the whole thing for

everybody i think you know that was where you know personally i didn't agree with how they handled it um but i don't run the organization so it's not necessarily my choice so that's my stance all i'll say is maybe you should okay moving on uh so i asked uh twitter for all kinds of questions and as you can imagine i got everything from the ridiculous obnoxious ones to uh super serious so maybe there's so much action on my twitter feed let's play a little game of rapid fire uh first question is what's your favorite wine and why uh favorite wine i was if i have to pick one thing it's going to be uh wines from the northern rome region of france um i love syrah the syrah grape it's actually as we're talking that's what i'm drinking some syrah right

now um that's what i drink the most of and that's it that's like the homeland of sarah so northern rome and i'm not super specific on the specific winery or region or any of that but rowan sarah is where my heart's at all right what's the best brand or wine under twenty dollars Wow. I mean, there's a ton of things. It's really hard to say. What do I have right now over here? Man, that's a really tough question. It depends on the grape, it depends on the region that you're looking to drink. I mean, I guess if I was going to drink something for under 20 bucks and think about best bang for the buck. I might actually drink Beaujolais.

Sorry for the sirens here. Beaujolais is probably where you could get a lot of good bang for your buck for under 20 bucks. All right. There is a, I think a report that came out that the human palate can't tell the difference when you taste different wines over 20 bucks. I saw somebody tweeting about this.

I have no clue what they're talking about, but I figured I'd ask you since you're the expert, uh, what, how is the relationship of the human palate and the ability to taste the difference between wines, uh, and price point related? Yeah. People love to have this, this, uh, play this game. Um, I'm glad that I am surfacing it to play then. I do think, uh, you know, in my mind anyway, as you know, being in this industry now for a long time and tasting a lot of things,

I think that there is a significant increase in perception of quality between, you know, the lower priced wines and call it up to around 50 bucks or so a bottle, maybe even a little bit higher than that. Once you get beyond that, it gets really difficult and it no longer becomes a question of quality anymore, but more so, uh, branding, marketing, and, uh, and oftentimes rarity, um, you know, rarity and, and kind of the supply demand thing has a huge impact on pricing and why. but up to 50 call it 50 bucks um there's actually like a significant increase in quality like you're actually paying for um better winemaking or better fruit uh you know better grapes from a better site call it um so there is there is some some kind of linear um you know value to be had from from increasing the price there whether people can tell the difference or not is is a different thing right like you know telling quality and then telling whether you like it or not are two very different things like there's a lot of things that i like that are cheap and things that i like that

are expensive there's a lot of expensive wine out there that i think is sucks you know so i think people need to distinguish what is quality and uh what is personal preference first i think before you can have that argument um my feeling my and what i've always kind of touted is if you like it then it's good and just drink it so then it kind of removes that whole that whole argument so i know that you could do a blind tasting if i put five wines in front of you right now and literally you're blindfolded you could tell me with a scary amount of accuracy the type of wine where it's from the general year all of those things do you think that you would be accurate if i told you to predict the price it's selling for i think i could be pretty accurate with that we we actually used

to play that game quite a bit and it used to be a way that's one of the reasons why blind tasting is actually fairly practical when it comes to being a sommelier or being like in my position with retail where you're buying wines on a regular basis you kind of want to taste things and understand like where's the quality here and and be able to say like all right this wine's a good deal or this is way overpriced like if I taste something and I'm like okay this is really good it should roughly be you know call it 20 30 bucks on the shelf and then they want to sell it to me for 50 i'm like no no way this does not taste like a 50 dollar bottle of wine on the flip side if i'm like wow this is really freaking good um this tastes this drinks like something that's

maybe 40 50 bucks and they say oh it's only 18 i'm gonna buy that i think it's great so yes long answer yes i i love it and i by the way i don't doubt you but the thing is you know the general consumer probably isn't going to do that so i think you know between 20 and 50 for most people that aren't training their palate on a regular basis and drinking wines all the time and doing this for their job you know most people are going to be pretty happy buying stuff in the like 20 ish dollar range that's like really good there's a lot of really good wine at that price yeah what's the most underrated wine region most underrated

Oh, man. Yeah, that could be argued. Maybe, I think, that's a really good question. I can have a lot of arguments. Natalie just put this in my head, so I'm going to roll with it. And I'm going to say Australia. Why? i think australia gets kind of a bad reputation i would have if if this was like five years ago i would have said beaujolais again um because beaujolais used to have a really bad reputation but that's that reputation has changed and uh and now i think everybody knows about it um i think australia there's a lot of cool interesting stuff down there um that not a lot of people know about everybody knows like yellowtail and big barossa shiraz and you know the big cabernets and like the wines with critters on the label and things like that

but there's actually a ton of other stuff in australia that's really interesting and really good um that i think still is is kind of on the upward swing it's also australia all right uh what is the taste difference between biodynamic wine and regular wine and the caveat here is i have no clue what the hell biodynamic wine is so you're gonna have to explain that so biodynamics is uh just a method of farming it's kind of like a really geeked out version of organics if you think about it like you know you think of conventional farming as like you know the goal is to grow things the most efficiently and have the least the least amount of interruptions the most amount of control you're probably going to spray a lot of herbicides pesticides and things

and chemicals and whatnot in your vineyard to get the uh to get the to the goal that you're looking to accomplish uh organics is very similar to organics with food right like you're gonna not spray as many of these chemicals and things like that or you're gonna use other control methods where um you know it's kind of less harmful to the uh to the vineyard environment biodynamics is like the really like hippie nerdy version of that so it it follows a lot of really interesting um and and weird philosophies a lot of stuff that follows like the moon cycle and a lot of these what they're called preparations where you put certain things into the soils or onto the uh onto the vines themselves at certain times of the year in order to follow this and biodynamics is like

it's it's it definitely creates a very healthy um robust uh environment for the vines and for the vineyard like if you see a biodynamically farmed vineyard it just looks really healthy right if you look at a conventionally farmed vineyard it usually is like dirt with vines and some grapes growing on them and nothing else whereas a biodynamically farmed vineyard is like full of life and grasses and like insects flying around and all this stuff so you can tell it's like a very healthy environment but what it translates to into the glass is like not really um not really perceivable to to that much of an extent like you definitely get healthier fruit coming off the vine so at higher quality levels you're gonna you know you're getting better fruit

quality here, but you're not necessarily going to taste a huge difference between a conventionally farmed site and a bison farm site. It's just not, it doesn't translate in the same way. Okay. What's your favorite at-home wine tool? My wine key. What is that? Just the wine opener. It's the only thing I need. i don't use i don't use shit uh here yeah i've got my my of course verve branded wine key um you know one of these guys just a little simple double hinge wine key there's a lot of my gadgets

out there i think 99.9 of them are all a waste of money so i'll say that i will tell people that uh one time at dinner uh i opened a bottle of wine in front of you and uh i literally thought that you were gonna like banish me from the table i was like holy shit i have no clue what i'm doing this dude's opened like a million bottles in his life and i'm over here hoping i don't pop the the cork in half as i pull it out of the bottle yeah i think i think if anybody's like uh the one kind of gadget if you will that i think is actually worth the money is called coravin c-o-r-a-v-i-n um and that is i think it's really only applicable if what it what it does is basically allows you to access your wines without opening the cork um and you can pour out a single

glass of wine and it's it's a it preserves the rest of the wine that's left over in the bottle so it's a way that like if you only like to drink a glass every now and then and not have to pop open the bottle it preserves the wine for a longer period of time so it's really useful only if you are having like a glass of wine a week or something anything beyond that you might as well just open bottle or if you're a collector that has a lot of wines in your cellar and you don't necessarily want to pop something open or you want to check in on something to see how it is corbin's really useful for that um but otherwise i think most other things on the market the um the aerators and all that kind of stuff is just kind of i don't know i personally think it's a

waste what's the best movie about wine or the best wine movie and you can't say psalm okay that was gonna be my answer um you know i think my favorite sideways still i like sideways it's a good flick it's just really funny um it's pretty accurate in uh and how they describe wine they actually did the research and like talk about it in the right way um so that would be my favorite all right and now the most important part of our conversation i've saved for save for the end which is uh you and i both live with uh dictators and uh one of my favorite things by the way we're having this conversation and plan is in the room with me and natalie's in the room with you so they can hear this which makes it even better uh that we get to have this

conversation but uh one of my favorite things that you and i both do is uh use the excuse of i'm not done with that yet so i want you to explain the importance for every man to know the trick of I'm not done with that yet as a way to get out of jail whenever they need it yeah I think it's a great move and I think it's maybe under utilized I can probably look around the room right now and find a few things that I'm not quite done with yet meaning my coffee that's sitting on the counter over here maybe a a dish from lunch that's sitting in the sink something like that um or you know the coffee table right now is cleaned off so i can't really use a real

life example but you know if you finished your plate of food and you haven't done anything with it yet i'm not done with that i think it's a it's a very solid reason for why you've left it behind my i always get shit you know for you know i'll take my food over to the sink and put it in the sink instead of putting it in the dishwasher and i always get shit for that um but you know saying that you maybe want to come back to it later i think is a very viable reason to uh to leave it there it's really hard to argue with that logic you you might come back an avocado where the skin is just like you know sitting on the counter still but there's maybe like a smidge little sliver of the avocado left you could argue it's not you're not done

pretty reasonable so i think it's very reasonable what what makes this all funny is uh dustin and i actually how how how like uh red is polina with with anger right now because now natalie's like losing her mind over here i think they're actually texting each other at the moment so we're gonna be in trouble when this is over so let's get all of our anger out now uh but we obviously met each other uh because plinna and natalie knew each other and uh i always tell people that um you natalie and then our other friends ali and keelan are the only people i know that are in a group chat where somehow the group chat is dominated by just photos and text messages about all the things that you me and ali do that they're not happy about and so say something dumb it ends up

in the group chat you know leave something out a photo's going in the group chat and i'm like somehow I'm not ashamed like I'm perfectly fine because I know they those two guys do the same thing I do yeah yeah it's like you got somebody on your team on the other side of this it's like yes you know like I got away with it I know the other guys here are gonna like support me you know they've got my back it's nice to know that Dustin wasn't done with it yet I already know when I see the photo he wasn't done with it what do you what do you why are you taking that photo absolutely Yeah, Paulina sent something in the chat. I can find a very reasonable reason for why, you know, you did what you did.

Before I end up ask the same two questions. First is, what is the most important book you've ever read? The most important book I've ever read? Wow. I mean, from, gosh for my life well this might be this might actually be stupid but um it had the biggest impact on my trajectory my professional career um is wine for dummies that was my first wine book that's an awesome answer it was the it was the book that like gave me the introduction into this uh this world that i live in now and uh it's the book that changed my life not maybe not the most compelling book in the world or maybe the most interesting and certainly not the most sophisticated but it's had the biggest impact so i'll say that do you

ever recommend it for other people to go read it like if people who are interested in wine today would you recommend that book well you know when i read that it was a long time ago so i don't know I think yeah generally speaking yes but I also think there are some other really good introductory books that are out there for wine there probably do a little bit of a better job at this point all right and then last question then you could ask me one to finish up is aliens believer or non-believer definitely believer why I believe her the universe is just too big like we We have such a small view into what's out there. I just feel like out of the trillions

of other potential planets, there's got to be someone out there that's like existing right now. I think the odds are in our favor that there is other life at some point. recording this uh the day after it came out that these uh i'll call them uh alien researchers have discovered a second radio signal so about three or four years ago they discovered a radio signal uh that was every 16 days was being shot from you know deep in some other galaxy you know millions of years away or whatever the hell it is uh and so recently they found a second one that is being transmitted every 157 days on a like perfectly frequent basis and so when i hear things like that and then they follow it up with we can't explain it it just furthers my conviction

like hey there's a lot of things we don't understand and like you find enough of these radio signals one of them's gonna be an alien right yeah yeah i mean i don't know i just think it's uh there's just it's too vast um that we're the and for me to think that we're the only like life forms out there i just to me that just doesn't make logical sense it's just too big there's too much of a likelihood that there's other stuff out there so i believe i think that's going to end up being a very uh very accurate view of the world uh what's the one question you have for me to finish up uh all right so what should i ask what should i ask see how he's enlisting help from natalie so that later he yelled at now you want my help um

what should i ask you i will say where um what's the so I'll ask a restaurant question I know you're not necessarily a restaurant person but uh what is the when when things get back to normal what is the first restaurant that you and are going to want to go to when you can I'll give you the uh the actual most honest answer possible and then I'll give you the answer that you're probably more aiming for uh the first one is uh mcdonald's is always going to be number one um we've actually gone so i can't really uh say that it's going to be a thing that can open this whole time right like you get to go from mcdonald's that's what makes them the best restaurant in the world literally a pandemic can't shut down

mcdonald's like they're always there it's always consistent you know what you're going to get uh no so i think that uh if i had to choose one restaurant in mc or uh in new york um and obviously this is one that i like that also polina likes so kind of the the overlap of interest uh probably flex muscles like i feel like flex muscles is uh probably gonna be uh the first one other ones that uh that we like um what is the abc kitchen is that that's the restaurant right we've been there we like that place uh trying to think of what i like the flex muscles and so that's great it's been interesting to ask people because you know I think it's it's it's kind of shows what people have been missing during all of this and I

find that I think a lot of restaurant culture before kovat happened was everybody will always wanted to go to the new hot restaurant you know the new opening that like everybody wants to try to get into and now with everything shut down and we can't go to the places that make us the most happy and the most comfortable everybody wants like their standard go-to and like things that they they miss the most you know so i think it's it's gonna be interesting to see what's busy when things uh do reopen for sure and it's also a thing i think where uh people now understand that like the restaurant experience like restaurateurs have known this forever it's not just the food right

it's not just the the alcohol and the wine it's also like the social component of it it's the atmosphere it's the environment it's the staff it's like all of these uh things that feed into like the actual experience make going to a restaurant and so when i think of certain places um you know i don't know take something take kind of like a new york staple like uh union square cafe right like when you walk in there it has a very specific vibe it has a very specific type of menu it has a very specific like expectation you have when you walk in and so i do think that people uh will have a greater appreciation for a lot of that stuff who knows does that last forever or does it kind of you know decay over time again but it just to me like that part's really

interesting because there's some people who will go to a restaurant specifically because of the food i think a lot of people subconsciously though would also go for those environments and so you mentioned earlier like what you know it would be weird to go to union square cafe and be the only person eating in there right like it'd actually be eerie right like you'd kind of be like what's going on here so i do think that there's almost this like self-fulfilling prophecy of like as a society or as a community everyone has to decide to go back and then once that happens like you get those environments and like people want to go more and more and more um i just don't know how long it'll take right yeah yeah good question yeah we'll see we'll see i think it's gonna be

really interesting to see what what happens when things do reopen and i think uh there's gonna be an element of nostalgia and like appreciation for the places that like maybe you took for granted before right like you really hope don't go away you just can't wait to get back to and I think at least for a period of time my guess is it won't be it's not going to be the cool thing to try to go the new hot spot anymore it's going to be I want to go support the places that are that have always been my go-to's and my favorites and the places that I'm most comfortable with um we'll see for sure where um for people who want to order wine where can they go and then people who want to badger you with questions where can they find you on the internet uh so

vervewine.com is uh where you can order some awesome wines from us um we've got a great team of people uh really accessible um like chats and things like that um that you can you know if you're having trouble finding something or you're just looking for recommendations and things like that. We try to make it really easy for people to get those recommendations and talk to real live humans while you're navigating the website. So that's a great spot. I can be found on Instagram and Twitter at just at Dustin Wilson MS on both of those platforms. So those I check pretty regularly so what do you use more twitter instagram i'm more of an instagram guy i i get on twitter quite a bit for uh to kind of check news and see what's going on out there in the world and

what conversations are taking place but i'm kind of more of a spectator on twitter than i am like an engager on twitter um same same yeah not so much i love watching pomp on twitter it's great um i gotta remember that you're watching sometimes and maybe i won't tweet all the crazy shit no i love it it's great i particularly like outside of uh john legends and uh chrissy tegan as my maybe my favorite couple on twitter well i think you and pauline are maybe edging them out a little bit as my favorite couple to watch on twitter i'm glad that you're uh the two of you on air together is is pretty epic i love it i'm glad that you're buying us back some points after i said that we live with dictators so maybe we won't get too much trouble all right listen i

appreciate you taking the time to do this uh i could not recommend uh verve wine more so go check that out guys and we'll do this again dustin thanks man appreciate it all right guys thanks for listening to that episode i hope you enjoyed it just as much as i did my goal is to educate as many people with these conversations as possible, so please go subscribe on your favorite podcast channel, leave a five-star rating, and a review. These things really help the podcast get higher up on popularity charts, which ultimately brings more people to learn. Also, don't forget you can go to YouTube to watch each conversation in video format as well. Just search my name, Anthony Pompliano, on YouTube, and you'll find our channel with hundreds of awesome

and informative videos. Thanks again for listening to this one, and I'll see you for the next one. you