The Tim Ferriss Show - #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts

Episode Date: October 5, 2015

Richard Betts (@yobetts) served as the wine director at The Little Nell in Aspen from 2000 to 2008. Much more interesting to me, Richard passed the Court of Master Sommeliers' Masters Exam on his first attempt, becoming the ninth person in history ever to do so. I first met Richard through investing wunderkind Chris Sacca, and we immediately hit it off. Richard can help you train your senses for anything, including wine, whiskey, his current love of mezcal, and far beyond. He's also done a lot of wild experiments, got a lot of tattoos, almost been shot in Mexico, and developed an incredible ability to simplify the complex. We get along. In this conversation, we talk about nearly everything, ranging from the value of quitting to tricks of the trade, travel tips (he's traveling 300+ days per year), and "starter" wines. We also drink a boat-load of whiskey, me tasting and Richard teaching. The pictures below show a sample. Side note and cool rule of thumb: did you know it's spelled "whiskey" when from countries that have "e" in their names (e.g. America) but "whisky" when from countries that don't have an "e" in their names (e.g. Scotland, Japan)? Richard taught me that. Last but not least, Richard is the author of a brand-new book, “The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All,” which is sitting on my kitchen table with whiskey stains all over it. It distils (see what I did there?) a couple of lifetimes worth of study down to 24 pages...then makes them smell good. Definitely check it out. At the very least, it gives you a bunch of rules of thumb (like the whiskey vs. whisky trick), so you can impress your friends and not look like a dumb-ass at the bar. Sweet! Less dumb-ass and more smart-ass is always good. Get 'er done. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies. If I’m not going commando, then I’m wearing MeUndies. I’ve been testing out pairs for about 3 or 4 months now, and, as a result, I've thrown out my other underwear. They look good, feel good, have options for men and women, and their materials are 2x softer than cotton, as evaluated using the Kawabata method. Not only does MeUndies offer underwear, but they also have incredible lounge pants. I wear them when I record the podcast, and when I’m out and about grabbing coffee. If by some chance you’re not happy with the first pair you try on, they’ll refund your purchase completely. Check out MeUndies.com/Tim to see my current faves (some are awesomely ridiculous) and, while you’re at it, don’t miss lots of hot ladies wearing MeUndies. This podcast is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at Athletic Greens.com/Tim.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sir Richard, what did you have for breakfast? I had yogurt with pistachios, some coffee, and water. That was once I got to the airport, and I've had some almonds. Good man. More water. Yeah, more water. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

Now would seem an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free

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a flash of a creature go across your screen and take out a criminal, just look for canine Belgian Malinois on YouTube. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. And every episode, as you may know, it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to try to seize out, seize out, I'm not sure if that was English, the habits, the morning routines, the influences, the favorite books, et cetera, that have made them so exceptionally good at what they do. And that ranges from the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world, literally, to Jon Favreau, to stand-up comedians, athletes, musicians, chess prodigies, everyone in between. And today we have a tattooed heretic, Richard Betts. He's known for wine and whiskey. Why is

that? Well, Richard Betts served as the wine director at the Little Nell, very, very famous spot in Aspen from 2000 to 2008. But that's not so interesting compared to the next point, which is Richard passed the Court of Master Sommelier's Master Exam, so becoming a Master Sommelier, on his very first attempt. And that meant he was only the ninth person in history to do so. And I first met Richard through the investing mastermind, Wunderkind himself, Chris Saka, who will no doubt be the most successful venture capitalist of all time if things keep going as we see them moving. And I also had him on the podcast. And Richard and I hit it off immediately. He can help train your senses for anything, including wine, whiskey, his current obsession of mezcal, and far beyond that. He's also done

a ton of experimentation, gotten a lot of tattoos, almost been shot in Mexico, and developed along the way an incredibly uncanny, a lot of adverbs in this intro, to simplify the complex. So we get along. He's very good at deconstructing and simplifying himself. And in this conversation, we talk about nearly everything imaginable, ranging from the value of quitting. I didn't expect this to be such a big part of his story, but from that to tricks of the trade, meaning related to tasting wine, the test itself, travel tips, because he travels something like 300 plus days a year and starter wines, all sorts of things. We also, as we are doing the interview, drink a boatload of whiskey. I taste, he teaches, and I have pictures on the

blog post or in the blog post that show you what Richard looks like, what we drank, et cetera. So that, that may be a good visual reference for you. So just go to fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out, or just go to fourhourworkweek.com and click on podcast and you will find Richard. Uh, the, uh, the whiskeys were amazing. were amazing. And side note, by the way, maybe you didn't know this, that it's whiskey, W-H-I-S-K-E-Y, when it's from countries that have an E in their name, such as America, but it's whiskey, W-H-I-S-K-Y, without an E, when the country names don't have an E. That is where the origin is of the given whiskey. So Scotland, Japan, that's whiskey without an E. Richard taught me that among many,

many other things. So last but not least, I must say it because I love it and I've already given it out as a gift. Richard is the author of a brand new book, The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All, which is sitting right in front of me with whiskey stains all over it. It distills, see what I did there? A couple lifetimes worth of study down to 24 pages. It's super short, and I check it out. At the very least, it gives you a bunch of rules of thumb, like the whiskey whiskey trick with the E versus no E,

so that you can impress your friends and not look like a dumbass at the bar, which is pretty awesome, because less dumbass and more smart ass always good. So with that said, and without further ado, some of you have given me shit online for saying without further ado, and then talking for another two minutes like I'm doing right now. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Richard Betts. Richard, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim. Good to be here.

Yeah, man. It's been a little while since we hung out. Has been. And let's start at the beginning for those people who don't know you. Yep. Why wine? How did you get into wine? I got into wine because of my seventh grade German teacher, Mrs. Pritchard. And she's a total bitch. And I didn't learn anything about German in seventh grade, but I did learn. And sometimes I'm slow to digest the lesson, but I definitely learned that you got to do what you love. So I walked into class that day and first day of school, I was like, this lady's intense, and I don't like this subject.

And I didn't go. And it didn't matter. And that I did know at that time, that it just didn't matter. Like, if I don't go to this class, the other class I never went to was typing. Just not doing it. Just not doing it. I had one of those student council hall passes that let you screw off like that, you know, 20-some years ago. But it felt great at the time,

felt bad at the time, but, and I didn't understand the larger lesson, but it came back to me over, over time when I went to school, I went to Oxidol and did my undergraduate work there and just struggled. You know, it was really, I tried a lot of things. Uh, I went with the idea of doing marine biology specifically. And the whole biology department was populated by young kids that didn't really have an interest in biology. They had an interest in going to med school. And when you grade on the curve, that means that intense things happen.

Like your slides are broken and it's very cutthroat and backstabbing. It's like, this is just anathema to everything that I believe in and how I want to live. Right. Um, so bailed on that and then had this wild hair that I should study econ. And that was just foolish because that was also boring. So I went to poli-sci and ended up with a minor in poli-sci.

And that was interesting. That's kind of how the world turns. And that was cool. But I needed to be outdoors. That's really my compass is being outdoors. I don't think I wore shoes until I was five. And so I found my way to the geology school. It's definitely not rocks for jocks there.

That's a funny thing that should be dispelled at some point. Rocks for jocks meaning an easy way for the jocks to pass like a science rec. Totally. So the lesson then from the German class was you could opt out of things that you disliked. Exactly. Totally. You know what? I'm just not doing that. And so, um, geology was great. Got me outside again, got me out of Los Angeles, which was awesome. I mean, I love LA. I love being there then. I like being there now, but you know, I, I need to spend time outdoors. And if you're in the middle of Los Angeles as a student, it's kind of, you know, it's hard to do. Um, so geology was the thing. And then, um, I took a break from it,

blew off my senior year. I lived in Italy. Um, all my friends thought I was a nut, but it was great. And after my own heart, I was on the five-year plan. Awesome. That was great. Um, came back finished and, um, I really wanted to do environmental law. That was really a thing. So I thought, well, if I'm not a marine biologist, I want to work to conserve this stuff. How do we do this well? I thought, well, I think one approach could be to speak the language of the scientific community, take that to law school, then speak the language of the legal community, and do your job well. So I went and did a graduate thesis in paleofluvial morphology,

so ancient river system makeup is what that translates to. What was the second part, fluvial? Fluvial, that's the river part. And it wasn't so much about that topic at hand. It was about digging deep in the scientific method and what it means to be an investigator at that level. And that was great. I did find through that time that the farther you go with it, the smaller the scale at which you investigate.

So I spent a lot of time in a small, dark, hot room with a scanning electron microscope. And this is when I'm in, you know, during the summers, I'm living in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is beautiful. I mean, right next to the Grand Canyon. It's amazing. I didn't see any of it, you know, because you're in the lab. So that was happening simultaneously. I was clerking in a small firm there. I clerked for my senator on Capitol Hill, Dennis DeCansini from Arizona.

I clerked at Skadden Arps, which is the world's largest law firm. Skadden's. Yeah. Big kahuna. Totally. That was when I was in LA. And then when I was in grad school in Flagstaff, I was clerking for a small environmental firm. And I found it didn't matter whether you were doing environmental or you're doing bankruptcy.

It was the same board, like the Monopoly board, making the same motions past Park Place every time. You just traded the hat for the shoe or whatever your piece was. It's still the same game. And I found I didn't like the game. And so I was really ripe for this moment. And this is what brought back Mrs. Pritchard in seventh grade is that at the end of a, of a very, um, long day with that scan electron microscope, um, it was, I was about to be thesis defense week. I was a couple of days in advance of this moment. Um, I walked out and I was, I was just not feeling it. Um, thesis was great. I was ready to defend it. Uh, and I was supposed to go to law school six weeks later. So, uh, I walked out of the lab, I hopped over the fence and ran across what is route 66 there in Flagstaff to a small, um,

restaurant slash wine store. And I walked in and I didn't know anything about wine. I just know that I drank it on the daily in Italy and how much that meant to me. And I walked in and I bought totally based on site. And I was like, I kind of recognize that label. And I pull off the shelf and I took it home and I popped the cork and I poured a glass. And that first smell, that first smell took me back to a moment that I had lived almost four years earlier when living in Italy. And I remembered a dinner I had had specifically at the Osteria Cinghiale Bianco, which is on Borgo San Jacopo in Florence. I remember where I sat and where my companion sat and what she ate and what she wore and what I ate and what the waitress did right and wrong that night. And all that just came rushing back from one smell. And the next day I was describing this experience to a friend, um,

really good friend, best friend in life, actually, uh, Bobby Stuckey and who was getting into food and wine himself. And I said, you know, Bobby, I don't want to go to law school and I don't want to do the science anymore. I want to do food and wine. He's like, well, you should. I was like, well, then I will. And so I walked back to the firm. I was supposed to be in the legal library at that point on someone's billable hour, which wasn't happening. Um And so I walked back to the firm. I was supposed to be in the legal library at that point on someone's billable hour, which wasn't happening. So I walked back to the firm, and I quit. I did defend my thesis because it was that week. But I called law school and said, look, I'm not coming.

And hopped off the cliff and got into food and wine. And that was a big moment. Your parents, everyone has expectations for you. It's like, you know what? I'm just not doing that. It just doesn't feel good did anyone else in your family have that that confidence or compunction my dog is is clawing the bottom of her crate just for for no discernible reason for enjoyment really was there anyone else in your family who had that ability to switch gears and to quit, not in such a negative connotation,

but in the sense of changing directions? Did you get that from anywhere else? You know, it has to have come from my parents, I think. But they switched gears in, to me, a much more impressive way. They both came from very, very tough places, complete poverty, to me, a much more impressive way. They both came from very, very tough places. Complete poverty. Very rough, particularly in my father's case. Very nomadic in my mother's case and her large family.

Where did they grow up? My mom all over the eastern seaboard, but really settled in Syracuse. And my father in Syracuse. And his dad was a really rough dude. I mean, you know, street brawls, nickels in his fist and drugs, alcohol, all kinds of intense stuff. Um, and so they, I mean, they're the people I'm, I'm most proud of to, to come from such intense circumstances like that, be the first of your families ever to go to college and then make your way out West and actually make your way. I mean, that's, that's, they definitely changed relative to what came before them. So heroes in a different way. What did your, what did your parents do when you were growing up?

So my mom, um, educator and she, um, ran for a long time, something called the teenage parent program, which gave kids an opportunity. If you were pregnant, you could stay in school. They had a daycare facility in the school. And this is everything from sixth graders through high school. So one, you can bring your kids as cool, but two, you actually are in school and you graduate and three, you learn how to take care of your kid at the same time. So she really, she kept so many kids in school, which is huge. That's huge, yeah. She eventually made her way to the University of Arizona, and she did her PhD and then ended up as a researcher there at the U of A. My dad, a biomedical engineer at the university hospital there his whole life.

So I can see now, I'm skipping ahead in my own mind, but I can see how the sort of biomedical engineer scientist aspect and the educator aspect tie pretty neatly into a lot of what you do now. Totally. But I'm skipping ahead. I don't want to, I don't want to give away too much of the middle of the movie. So we'll go back to the beginning.

So you decide law. Thanks, but no thanks. Yep. Food and beverage. Then what? And how old were you at the time? So just finishing grad school in 96, I'm 25. And, um, you know, I always think that I'm somewhat

late to the party, you know, like people decide I'm into food and wine when they're like 18, 17, 16. And you see those very young people into it today. And that's great. I'm always slow to make my decision. But when it's made, it happens. And so we moved, I just gotten married to my first wife. At the time, we moved to Missoula, Montana, not known as a bastion of great food or wine. No offense if there are any Montanans out there. I've eaten very well there very frequently. But if you want to go learn about this stuff, it's probably not the best place to do it. But my first wife had gotten a tenure track job at the University of Montana. A what job? Tenure track.

Oh, tenure track. Yeah, job at the University of Montana. Not unlike the legal profession in some ways. Exactly. Yep. Sign up. There it is. Here's your life before you. That's an intense thought. So we moved there and I worked in all kinds of places, but the first place I worked and cooked was I walked into the Red Lion Motor Inn, which in 1996 was for sure the nicest restaurant in town. And it was a motor inn. You park your car in front of your room, that kind of place. So I walked in and there is a master chef, which is a real designation. Um, I think it means, it means you can do all kinds of things, including put on a brunch for

like 3000 people and carve the hell out of a block of ice and turn into a swan or something. But, um, that that's a real thing. And I walked in and his name was, was Hans and Hans said, Oh, you want to learn to cook, huh? Okay. Yeah, sure. Here, hold this. And he puts an egg pan in my hand, a little saute pan. I'm holding it and he slaps a piece of toast in it and he says, flip it. And I flip it. He says, great. You're the breakfast cook for the whole hotel, whole hotel. And so we were really working on our, our super hippie mantra at that time, which meant no car, nothing automated, riding bikes, which is great in the summer. And that's the big bait and switch with Montana is that summer's Eden and winter is the opposite.

Right. So October came and the sun went away. And then you're on your bike at 4 a.m. and the snow and the bitter cold pedaling in to open up this huge hotel and cook breakfast for everybody. And it was thrilling. It remains one of my favorite jobs ever. It's a funny point in life when you don't really have the same stake in things as you do later in life. So it was great. Like, yeah, I'm going to open this thing up.

And you have a flat top, like that flat griddle you cook on that's 20 feet long and you're rocking eight waffle irons and you're cooking oven, you know, by the sheet pan in the back. And you know, while you're doing that, you're stirring notes and getting the whole thing ready just to open up. Then you open that huge line by yourself and the orders start flooding in. And I think I'm a big believer that in the restaurant business, you either have the synapse or you don't. And it doesn't mean you're a good person or a bad person, but it does mean you either shouldn't be in the business or you shouldn't be in the business. And you mean like back of the house for that type of multitasking, order sequencing and all that timing, et cetera. Yeah. It's a, it's a real thing. It's tough. Yeah. Um, and some people find it thrilling and do it really well. And some people

find it thrilling and don't do it really well. And some people don't find it thrilling and do it really well and some people find it thrilling and don't do it really well and some people don't find it either you know but if you have that and I imagine some of you that are listening do it's thrilling and I loved it what is a way that someone who hasn't worked in that type of circumstance

I've worked in restaurants I've worked in restaurants for many summers but I was never on the line or cooking in the back or anything like that I was I was always in front of houses, a bus boy or whatnot, getting abused by patrons. But the, uh, you can get that too in the back of the house, but what, if someone wanted to try to predict if they would be good in that type of environment, what are characteristics or experiences or traits that's like, if you had to pick someone, if you had to recruit for the back of the house, but you couldn't test them in the back of the house right i would i would look for someone who um for sure can handle stress because everyone around you has the possibility to just totally

lose it and if they start freaking out are you going to freak out with them and then the whole ship thing so so stress management's huge um this seems silly but you got to be able to deal with the heat like the physical heat. Later, a few years later, or a year later, I had a different cooking job, and standing in front of, I was grillardin, which means you work the grill, and standing between the grill and the line, I'd have the little pocket thermometer in my chef's coat pocket, and it would read 130 degrees all night long. It was a real thing.

It's really, really warm in some of these places. So you got to deal with the heat. You have to deal with the stress, the pressure and keep cool. And you have to be able to multitask. You know what I mean? If you, if you get, if you're like a myopic thinker, it's not for you, you know, but if you can say, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. And meanwhile, you have all these little timers going off in your head. You know, it probably means you don't sleep well all the time. Um, I'm that guy woke up three times last night, just thinking about stuff. Right. Um, and it doesn't bother me, you know, it just is. Um, so those, those would be the three things. So you're in Montana biking through October snow to open up the line. What, what did you like about that? I mean, what,

what excited you about that? The pace for sure.. You know what was really important to me, Tim, is that it was on-the-job learning. And so before I actually got that first job, we got to Montana. I was like, okay, well, I guess I'm going to figure this out. Or am I going to take time off and then go to culinary school? And I was like, you know what? I've done a lot of school, right? And I'm kind of done with that. A lot of prep.

A ton of prep. Let's do something. And so I went and talked to a chef. And I said, hey, man, this is what I'm kind of done with that. A lot of prep, a ton of prep. Let's do something. And so I went and talked to a chef and I said, Hey man, this is what I'm thinking about. Like, I'm either going to like ask you for a job or, um, this was after I was already working at the red line and, uh, I'm either going to ask you for a job or I'm thinking about culinary school. And he's like, well, here's the deal. You can come here today and you can ask me for a job and I'll say, yeah, great.

Here are the potatoes get peeling. Or you can go to culinary school, spend two more years of your'll say, yeah, great. Here are the potatoes get peeling. Or you can go to culinary school, spend two more years of your life preparing, spending, you know, 30, 40 grand a year in bills to be there. Then you can come to me and ask me for a job and I'll say, yeah, sure. Here's a, here's a, you know, big pot of potatoes get peeling. Same thing. Up to you. Yeah. Same, same. Like, okay. I'm, I'm pretty good at math. I got this. Where are the potatoes? Let's do it. So it was that simple. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

And when then did the nectar of the gods, when did the wine enter the picture? Yeah, so I was, while in the kitchen, I was always reading about wine. I knew that I wanted to do both, cook and work as a sommelier. I thought working in the back of the house made the most sense to start. I do like that self-reliance of really learning how to feed yourself and feed others and make your table warm and interesting. That matters to me. So I started there, but all the while, read, read, read, taste, taste, taste.

And I had an early mentor who said, beg, borrow, steal, but taste, taste, taste. And that's the everything. If you don't have a context, and we'll talk more about that later, but if you don't have a context, you don't have any framework within which to hold anything together, even to accumulate knowledge. You've got to have a context. Context, meaning like having the letters of the alphabet to spell words having just like descriptors that you can only acquire through developing a database of exactly that different flavors exactly that yeah i mean it was actually no different than geology you only know what sandstone is because it relates to mudstone and it's more coarse grain and you know that mudstone is like mudstone because

it's more coarse grain than siltstone yeah so on So on and so forth. Not to geek out on, but yeah, it's just how things relate to each other. Um, so I was taste, taste, tasting. We left Montana about 11 months later, almost to the day. Um,

so we moved there, bought a house, an old house, remodeled it. The sun went away, as I said, and, uh,

I'm a solar powered kid growing up in the Southwest. Um, so that house was sold before the sun came out in may and we moved to Tucson where, um, I worked for the second chef I cooked for and really loved Alan Zeman. Who's if you didn't use a rubber spatula to get the gloss, you know, the intense beef protein that you worked on two days to reduce down from beef bones. If you didn't use a rubber spatula to get that out of the pan, he would dock your paycheck and make you make soap. It was a real learning experience.

You made everything. Nothing came in a box. So while I worked for him, that's where I had this gruyere dame position where you're on the grill and it was 130 degrees all night. It was also where the waiters had to walk by, and they knew that I was really into wine. So then they started asking questions like, Oh, I know Richard, you know the wine list and like, what should I pair with this?

What should I pair with that? So I became the sort of de facto volunteer sommelier from the kitchen. And had you been, had you been acquiring, uh, tastes at that point? Yep. I spending, I mean, still had basically no money. You're earning minimum wage. Um, and I spent every dime I could on every bottle of wine I could find. Yeah. And so you bought, uh, how did you choose bottles to taste things I hadn't had before and areas I wanted to explore. So, um, you know, I don't drink much Chilean wine today, but at that point it was like,

okay, this people are talking about this. So what is this about? So then it was a deep dive into Chile. Like how did these, what are these things about? How do they relate to each other? Is this one just an outlier? Or how does it fit in the context of the whole? Really very methodical about that. So you thought you then categorized mostly geographically in the beginning. Yes. Cool.

Yeah. Well, it makes, I mean, it gives you at least a plan for starting, right? Totally. As much as you can compartmentalize in an orderly way so you're not just helter-skelter trying capriciously this wine after the next. Exactly, exactly. And ultimately, the intellectual value of wine comes from this idea of terroir. And terroir is a French word for this notion that everything that makes up the wine

makes up the place that goes into the wine is this idea of terroir. So you should pick up a glass and it should reflect reflect a place just like that ordinary bottle of soil the climate the barometric pressure down the road everything everything goes in there and so i mean that's what got me into it in the first place you know because i picked up that bottle of wine i didn't know anything about it but that sensory memory got me to blow off law school right so so i kept on that path like, okay, well, what is it about this place that makes, you know, that's a common thread amongst these wines, be it Merlot or Cabernet or whatever it may be. And, and when you can take

that trip in a glass of wine, that that's the intellectual value. That's the part that matters and how I convince myself I'm getting smarter when I'm drinking. And so you're, so your wait staff start asking you questions and you're on the line. I'm on the line I'm drinking. And so your waitstaff start asking you questions. Yes. And you're on the line. I'm on the line. Cooking. Like, do this, do that.

And, you know, it was like a free swing because I didn't have to face the guest. Yeah, you didn't have any consequences. Totally. Practice without consequences. What might a question be that a waiter would ask? What goes with this entree? Yeah. Or, hey, you know, you're special tonight. Like, where's the acid at? Like, is it going to work with a Sauvignon

Blanc or is it lower acid and I should use Chardonnay or, Hey, I saw you put Sorrel with grapes and you know, how's that going to work with this? You know, those sorts of things. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's super cool. And then what then? Then, um, this was in Tucson and you're like, well, why would you go from montana to tucson another place that's not necessarily known as a as a culinarily hot uh important hotbed um i went to tucson after going to portland and san francisco both and this is in 97 97 98 and um i believe in myself and really believe um um, that, you know, in, in my ability to make a decision, um, to do something I love. And then when I'm doing it, then I'm going to put

everything I have into it. And am I the best at it? I have no idea, but I know I'll try harder than most. Um, so I went to Portland and it's like, man, there's so many kids getting into the food scene that I'm just gonna have to get get in line with these kids. And I went to San Francisco, same story, like just super expensive to be here, although less than now, but also just huge lines of kids competing for positions. And then there were these two chefs that I wanted to work for in Tucson that were actually great, well-regarded on a national level, and nobody wanted to move there to work with them. So I was like, I can get immediate access, supercharge my learning and my path. And I did. So I went to that second chef and I said, hey man, I want to, Janice, I want to work with you.

This is why I'm in Arizona. And he said, great, what have you been doing? I told him, how about my work with Al Zeman, the other chef? And he's like, okay, cool. Well, why don't you audition? So you spend a week auditioning in the kitchen and doing all this different stuff. At the end of the week, we sit down in his office and he's like,

okay, so I understand you've also been spending time learning about wine. I was like, yeah, yeah. Doing this and pass my first court of master sommeliers exam. And your first one court of master sommeliers court of masters, the court of exactly.

Yeah. It's a big mouthful. I like that. Um, which is a certifying body for sommeliers and it's, there are four exams in the, in the process. And I'd taken the first one while cooking at that first restaurant in Arizona.

So just so we can lay out that for people, what are the four tests? There's an introductory lecture and exam, and that's not a very hard test. But you have to know a little something. If you're a quick learner, you can pick it all up in the lecture. Then there's the certified. Oh, so they give you a lecture, learner, you can pick it all up in the lecture. Then there's the certified, they give you a lecture and then they test you on what's in the lecture. Yeah. Yeah. Ideally you've read something before you get there or, you know, you have more than a passing interest. Um, but it's a, it's a, that's a course slash exam.

That's very much meant to inspire like, Hey, here's the cool world of wine. And if you're into it, you're going to read about it, check it out, build yourself a plan to acquire the knowledge, and then come back and see us for more exams as you go. So that's the first one. The second level is the certified exam. Because there's a need. And the organization is called the Court of Masters? Court of Masters Sommeliers. Okay, Court of Masters Sommeliers.

Yeah. Sorry. Different than the Master of Wine. Those are, they're two, I don't know. Organizations. Yeah. Certifying bodies. Yeah.

Two certifying bodies. Like Patty and Nowy for diving. That's exactly it. Got it. That's exactly it. Which are you? I am Patty. I'm the other.

Yeah. So. This podcast is over now. I'm done. So anyways, I'd taken the, oh yeah oh yeah right so certified exam is the second step and that was necessary because people's like oh i'm a sommelier i passed the first exam and just from the court's perspective and i'm i'm not intimately involved with it um on day-to-day basis but it people are going to use this as a this is the standard and i am now this then we felt like we

actually ought to make it a real standard. So we inserted the certified exam where you have to be proficient in certain elements of wine service and champagne service, old decanting wine service, all these sorts of things. So that's level two. Level three is the advanced exam, which is indeed really, really hard. And it's three days of examination. There's a blind tasting exam where you blind taste six wines. And I don't mean blindfold. You just walk into a room and there are six glasses with wine in them and you have no idea what they are until you sit down and get after it. So six wines in 25

minutes, what are they? How specific do they expect you to get? If it's Ridge, Lytton Springs, Zinfandel from 2010, you should come up with, hey, this is Zinfandel, California, North Coast, 2010. You don't have to say Ridge, but you've got to get there. You're not that far off. Exactly. That's one part of the exam.

The second part is a theory examination. Anything that you eat, drink, or smoke could be on that exam. That's a written paper. Oh. That's a written paper. Oh, it's a written paper. Yeah, well, pardon me, multiple choice or in some shortness. What would a hypothetical question on that exam look like? There's so many that we all are sworn that we'll never talk about.

Oh, I got it. But eat, drink, or smoke, not a precise question. I'm just wondering, could it be something about pipes or cigarettes or smoking? Yeah, cigars predominantly. And that's actually, it's super de-emphasized now. And I'm not even sure that there are test questions that deal with it any longer. But at that time, you need to know that cigar service is actually done from the left side, whereas everything else you've done in that test to that point,

wine service, for example, is done from the right side. And it's things like that. Ring gauges. Which is which? Right is? Right is wine service. Left is cigar service. Oh, left is cigar service. Yeah.

And then memorizing ring gauges of cigar sizes. Things that are, for me, completely worthless. Just like the periodic table. I learned it for a moment, and I forgot it the next day to make room for something different. Right. It's the same thing with cigar ring sizes.

And that's the advanced? Well, that's part two of the advanced. That's part two. Part three of the advanced is actually service. So you walk into a room filled with Master Sommelier's ostensibly. It's a restaurant situation. And you go from table to table and perform different tasks that you're asked to do. And they're hard.

And it's a real thing. And it's amazing, actually. And then the fourth and final level is exactly that again, but the volume's cranked all the way up and the theory portion is not written. It's oral. Got it.

And that's the master sommelier test. Exactly. There are just about 200 of us in the world today. And you were the ninth person to pass it on your first attempt. I was, it's that, you know,

I just got done bagging on myopia when it comes to working in the kitchen, but I definitely had myopia when it came to studying for that test. Well, we'll, we'll come back to that. So the, so you, you're talking to the chef you wanted to work for all along.

Yep. And he's like, so you've been getting into this wine stuff yep and you give him the replay of having already passed the first level of examination yep and then what and he says okay um you cook well so do you want to be the sommelier or do you want to cook i was like you've never had a sommelier he's like exactly right we're gonna move the restaurant to the foothills and it's be a bigger space we We're going to have a 10,000 bottle cellar and someone's got to fill it and sell it. You want to do that? And I was like, I absolutely want to do that.

It was an incredible first job. Yeah, it was amazing. It was really amazing. And you learn so much when you build your own list and you're responsible for budgets and you work for a chef owner who are, I mean, chef owners are notoriously maniacal. Um, and it's true they are. Um, so that was an amazing experience. I'd walk in with my order sheet every week, which is, you know, he had this standardized order sheet. This is what I want to order. This is who it's from. This is how much it costs. This is how many bottles, blah, blah. And it would be so well reasoned. I would have thought out everything and everything would have been researched from a point of view, like how good is the wine? How well is it going to age? What

if it doesn't sell? What's its trajectory? Does it pair with the food? I guess asking for these sorts of things. I was totally armed to the hilt and I'd go in there and I hand it to him. He'd slide it across the desk to him and he'd sit there and put on his reading glasses and look down and pull out a pen and just start crossing things out without even asking questions. It was brutal. Was it mostly pricing based? Those that got crossed out? I think it was, I think I approached that with the wrong philosophy. Like I went with, this is exactly what we need. And he probably thought I was coming with more, knowing I would get cut down to less, which is what I ended up doing over time.

So you learned to negotiate with the chef owner by bringing in a couple of gimme's that you're happy to let go. Totally. Yeah. The real obvious ones, expensive neon lights on them. Right. Right. Yeah. And just watch them. And when you said if they don't sell, does that mean just looking at return policies and things like that or how you would resell them, how they would age, how they would age, how they would age? Yeah. There's really no return policy, you know, in any real way. So, and it's funny, you know, I'll go look at lists now and you'll be like, wow, there's a whole bunch of, you know, 2004 California Sauvignon Blanc. Well, you know, that's probably most of those are no good any longer because it's not something that from this

particular place is known to age well. And someone was enthusiastic for it. They bought a bunch, but in reality that restaurant only needed two or buy one, sell it out. Then buy the next one, buy 20 avocados at a time. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. You know, but,

um, if it's something that's, that's meant to age or will improve and actually appreciate, then it's, then it makes some sense to do it. Yeah. So you're building this list. You're getting wise to, uh, the sort the horse trading that you do with your boss.

Yep. What other things do you learn in that first experience? One of my most humiliating experiences as a sommelier, I remember the first time, even the table, it was table 110, you walk down the stairs first one on the left and someone ordered a bottle of Romane Conti Eshizoe

Romane Conti Eshizoe which today is fantastically expensive in 1999 or it could have been fall of it, 98 that was all like $448 on the wine list and I was trembling I remember going to the table and my hands were trembling and shaking or it could have been fall of it, 98. That was all of like $448 on the wine list.

And I was trembling. I remember going to the table, my hands were trembling and shaking and super nervous. And since then I've served bottles at 50 grand or 100 grand. And it's 50 grand or 100 grand, and that all goes away. But it was right.

It was not shortly after I sold that very... I'd be nervous opening a $450 bottle of wine. Yeah. So that's not where the embarrassment came. But that was the first one. And then it was like a week later. I was on a roll. And we were selling these things at a real clip, really expensive things.

And it was an 85 Behringer Special Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa on the table with an 85 Mouton Rothschild, which is a first growth Bordeaux from France from the big deal, five big deal Chateau in Bordeaux, recognized as one of the great wines of the world. And this guy had a table of six. He ordered both bottles at once. He wanted them served side by side, and they were just going to compare and enjoy these things. And so I decant them both and serve them both as he wishes. And then, I don't know, 30 minutes later, I go back to refill. And of course Iant them both and serve them both as he wishes. And then, I don't know, 30 minutes later, I go back to refill. And of course, I pour the mouton on top of the Behringer. And I'm going, oh boy, this is going to be horrible. And he just smiles and laughs. And he looks at me and probably knows I have no possibility of paying for this whatsoever.

And he couldn't have been more gracious about it and uh i thought i was gonna die at that moment it was for sure because i mean you come on how much were both of those combined uh more than a thousand bucks yeah it's a lot it's a lot yeah and 99 and young sommelier it's like i spent 169 on my suit yeah there's my rent for the next four months exactly the whole thing the whole thing um and he couldn't have been more gracious, which was actually the real Leslie. And apart from paying attention, it was really about what does it mean to be graceful and thoughtful and so on and so forth. So that was an amazing moment. I worked at that restaurant until 2000. And remember the guy who sold me that bottle of wine that changed my life in Flagstaff in grad school? Yeah. Yeah. About 30 minutes ago.

Wait, you're talking about the bottle that was across Route 66. Exactly, that one. In the meantime, he had gone to Aspen and taken the job at the Little Nell, for sure one of the world's best places to drink wine. What was the name again? The Inn at the Little Nell. The Inn at the Little Nell. Or even just the Nell, as it's commonly referred to.

N-E-L-L. N-E-L-L, in Aspen, Colorado, right at the base of the mountain. It's ski in, ski out. It's an amazing spot. Sounds incredible. It's special. So he had been the sommelier there, and he was leaving to go become the sommelier at the French Laundry, and said, hey, I'm leaving.

You should apply for my job. I was like, of course I'm going to apply for a job. Great. And huge shoes to fill. I had no idea what it meant to be an Aspen. And I mean the caliber of wine drinker at that time is like, it's as big as it can be. It doesn't get any bigger. It's, it's an amazing place. You mean in terms of the clientele? In terms of the clients? Exactly. Like way over my head. Um, but I apply for the job and I'm

flown to Aspen and we do the whole dance there and I fly and meet the GM. He's in Los Angeles for a day. We meet there and then the food and beverage director comes to Tucson and, you know, you saved your best suit all week for when she comes in and, and it was great. And I got the job. I probably had no business giving it to me at that time, but I got the job as a sommelier slash wine buyer at the little Nell where I had no budget and had a ton

of storage and everybody drinks everything and we sold a lot of really great you said you had no budget no budget buy what you want and it was oh i see okay unlimited budget unlimited budget there was no one crossing things out across the desk from you just had to count it once a month yeah which is also a reason not to go crazy, but, um, it was outrageous. And it very quickly, I mean, I very quickly I realized how big the shoes were I had to fill, uh, which is good. I very much respond to pressure. Um, you know, it's like, if you want to get fit, I signed up for an event. I will run. I don't want to suck.

What were the pressures? Like what, what were some concrete realizations that you had? Almost all the guests knew more, knew more than I did. And that was intense. That's a lot. That's huge. And so what that means,

like sleepless nights, read, read, read, read, read, read, taste,

taste, taste, taste, taste, practice for the master some test. Exactly. And part of the tasting is I did healthy education. That's the only place I did have a budget.

Quote unquote is an education budget. Open whatever you want. And you have a certain number of- Oh, for tasting. Yeah. So you can learn really quickly. That's cool. Yeah. That came back to that. What is the right way to taste when you're given an opportunity like that? I mean, is there like palate fatigue? Do you have to do, is it just like kind of physical training where it's like you can overdo it? You can definitely overdo it. I don't really, I think everybody can overdo it no matter how much you practice at it. There are some obvious things like, you know, don't eat jalapenos before you're going to

go taste wine. Don't mess up your receptors in any strange way. Similarly, walnuts or artichokes, you know, all those things, walnuts and artichokes contain tannins, which dry out your palate and make it feel strange. That's very funny considering that I just had before we started talking. I know we're going to have a few things to drink in a bit. What is iced artichoke tea? Yep.

Oh, Ferris. Yeah. Here we go. Definitely not a good way to start your wine tasting. So there are a few rules like that, but for the most part, it's the thing that you really have to have is a method. And I spoke earlier about a context. That's half of the program. The other half of the program to do this well is you have to have a method.

And by that, I mean you do the exact same thing every single time. It's an experiment. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of this. I have a friend that articulated this. It's an experiment. and I love that saying. And so when you have this method, it's really about collecting the data in the same way every single time, and it's objective. It's not subjective. It doesn't start with, do I like this wine or don't I?

That happens when you decide what you're going to put on your table. But when you're trying to learn about wine, it's not about you. It's about doing the same thing every single time and collecting the same observations. And you're taking this down in a notebook or something like that. What do you, um, so to someone who's listening,

it's like, you know, I'd like to give that a shot. Yeah. How would they go about it potentially? So, well, shameless plug is start with buying the scratch and sniff wine book.

Yeah. It's great. And I've, uh, I've read it. I've mentioned it. I've given it as gift to people. Yep.

Within that, it's really a subset of the method that I use to get through the master sommelier exam. And that's looking at three main areas of wine and that's fruit, earth, and wood. And essentially those three categories populate almost everything that you're going to smell and therefore taste in wine. So make the same observations every single time. What are the fruit elements I smell?

What are the elements that could be imparted by wood if the wine was Asian wood that I smell? What are the earthy elements I smell? And that's the place to start, right? You do it with what you smell and then with what you taste. Beyond that, you have to make observations on what you see. You talk about color, you talk about visual clues for alcohol levels. And all these things lead you to a place. Those are visual cues for alcohol levels, like legs? Legs, exactly. Legs, tears, whatever you want to call it. So how does it correspond?

So the slower the legs fall, the higher the alcohol level. Got it. Assuming there's no sugar. Those are the, I mean, I'm going to be blasphemous here, but there are sacrilegious. It's the drips. Like if you swirl the wine. Exactly. It's the drips down the side of the glass. From the high point of the liquid, what drips back down to the glass, those are the legs or the tears.

And so it seemed counterintuitive to me when I first learned this. Like, well, alcohol is thinner than water or the fruit juice. So if you have more alcohol, why would it run more slowly? But there's actually this capillary action that pushes it back up the side of the glass. So it's, and plus it's always evaporating and condensing the size of the glass. So the more alcohol there is, the slower those tears fall. Right. Um, and the reason you want to know that is if you're going to be, you know, geeked out wine tasters, it talks about a winemaking style. It talks about an origin, right? So in Germany, you'll have thick tears by virtue of the sugar, but not by virtue of the ripeness. It's a cold place, right? Or even go through the Loire Valley in France and Sauvignon

Blanc and Cabernet Franc and all these very beautiful varietals, but they don't have much alcohol, which is as it should be because it's not a warm place. And you come to California, particularly this year, where it's really a warm place, you're going to develop riper fruit, which is, you know, riper fruit means more sugar, which means more food for the yeasts and more potential alcohol. And once the yeasts eat it and create the alcohol there, there it is. Right. So is that, would that be, for instance, why, and I'm just kind of making this up on the spot, but why you find like a lot of Zinfandels and Malbecs have a high alcohol content?

Exactly. These are new world wines. Yep. What would, if people wanted to try, now when you're taking this down, let's get sort of prescriptive on the tasting. Okay. How much wine do you drink it it i know a lot of people spit when you go to like the wineries do you drink it and how do you taste like what's the

you have a bottle of wine pour yourself a glass yeah pour yourself a glass the first thing you do is you you turn it over sideways and you don't want to spill it out away from you so tip the glass away from you and look down through the wine against a white background. And that color tells you a lot. So we don't smell color and we don't taste color. It's very important to know that. But color is an indication of the varietal and potentially also the climate. So Pinot Noir should be... The varietal meaning? The type of grape. The type of grape. The type of grape,

whether it's Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, whatever. Exactly. So Cabernet Sauvignon is a thick, dark-skinned varietal, so it's going to make a dark-skinned red wine. In fact, if you bite any grape that you want to make red wine from in half, it's white in the middle. So all the color in a red wine comes from the skins. So be it as Cabernet is thick and dark, you're going to have the resultant thick and dark or pardon me, dark colored red wine. Whereas Pinot Noir is thinner and lighter in color and so you're going to have a lighter colored wine. It doesn't have any less flavor.

It isn't worth less of your attention or interest. It's just different. So the first thing you want to do is look at that color and it should give you, if you don't know what the wine is, it'll give you a visual clue. Like if it's light red, don't, don't think about Cabernet, right? Start crossing that off your list. It's about deduction. Um, but if you know it's Cabernet and it's light red, well then you might think something's wrong, right? Cause that's not a typical color for it. So the first thing you do is you look at it, um, look for color, and you look for sediment.

Is there anything solid in there? You look for gas. Is it bubbling? If it's red and it's bubbling, there's kind of maybe two or three possibilities on the planet of what it could be, including things like sparkling Shiraz, which is totally gross and I don't drink. But those visual cues tell you a lot.

And then if it starts to brown, if we assume our glass of wine is tipped away from us and we look out to the far Northern edge, if it starts to Brown, it tells you that potentially is made in an oxidative style. So the wine saw some oxygen while it was being made or it's older. And that's probably, you know, more common. Um, and let me ask you this so what happens to an avocado if you cut it and leave it on the counter it oxidizes yeah it's brown it turns brown same thing with old bananas or whatever it is and so the same thing happens with wine it's just

grapes right and so grape juice goes through the same process it starts to turn brown so if you see that sort of brickish browning at the edge of the glass you can start to surmise like oh okay so it's showing signs of oxidation therefore it's's older, right? And then you do the exercise, you look at the legs or the tears, and you can start to discern like, what's the alcohol level? And so that brings us back to the context. I'll take a quick tangent on that. If you don't, I can look at that and say, okay, those are medium, medium plus viscosity based on how those tiers fall. Well, you only know what medium plus viscosity is if you've had all the wines of the world. So that's the context, right? So you got to have a method, got to have a

context. You have to have experienced the extremes. Exactly. And the spectrum. Right. So for everyone that wants to do this, this is your homework. It means you just have to taste a lot of wine. It's great. And do you, do you, uh, no, I've heard for instance that, and I want to be corrected if this is not correct, but that you should sort of take the first swish of wine and just rinse your mouth with it because that's not the, that's not the sip that you want to try to evaluate. Is that necessary? Uh, incorrect. Well, it depends if you just brush your teeth, you know, not the sip that you want to try to evaluate. Is that necessary? Incorrect?

Well, it depends. If you just brush your teeth, you should drink a whole glass. Right. But yeah, first palate impression is not necessarily the right one. So spend some time with it. Before you do that, though, you definitely want to smell it. The things we really taste are sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and if we're fortunate, this idea of umami, this savory Japanese.

I just had an umami burger last night. I like it. Very delicious. Nice. So everything else we think we taste, we're actually smelling, and so it makes sense to smell the wine. So when I smell the wine, I always think about this acronym FEW, which stands for fruit, earth, and wood. And so you want to smell for those things and force yourself, require a diligence to answer all three of those questions.

Don't just blow by it. So you might pick up a wine and it's just like, oh, my God, strawberries, raspberries, cherries. Great. All right, cool. Let's taste it. Well, what about the earth and the wood? Because those are two huge pieces that inform the wine. They give it that intellectual value and make it complete and make you smart so um always come up with at least three fruits

whatever they are and use your own use your own language there is no wine speak that's so i guess to to do that you probably also have to get into the habit of tasting i mean you should taste things that have fruit earth and wood and wood characteristics. Totally. Yep. So, I mean, we can talk about all kinds of things we can juxtapose to supercharge that process. But you definitely got to do it. What do you mean by juxtapose? So, if you want to understand, you know, what is earth? Okay, well, let's buy, you know, Napa Valley Cabernet and compare it to Cabernet from Bordeaux. They're both the same grape, but the place really makes a huge difference.

They're likely made in very similar ways. They're aged in the same oak, but it's that soil that gives the Bordeaux the earthy thing that'll isolate that for you. That's pretty cool. So if people wanted to say, get a handful of reds and a handful of whites, all of which were very different, just to start developing this, what would a few choices be? So let's think about three whites. Buy a German Riesling, right? There would be no oak.

So that's an example of an oak-free wine. It will likely have a little residual sugar, depending on what kind you buy, which is really interesting because you say, oh, I don't like sweet wine. Well, this isn't about you right now. This is about your learning, right? Not about your palate. So what you will learn there is that it's about balance. And so the sugar will be balanced by acidity.

It's all about balance in any wine. So you'll also have earth. So in the German wine, you'll have something earthy. You'll have a great example of balance with residual sugar. And you won't have any oak or um, or woody characteristics and compare that to California Chardonnay, which won't very likely have any earth. Um, it won't have the same level of sweetness. It will have oak. So you can start to say, Oh yeah, there's that caramel. There's that vanilla. There's that butterscotch. That's the oak, right? So then you can like put

your finger right on that and then compare it to something like maybe French Sauvignon Blanc or even Bordeaux Blanc, which is Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon together in a blend, but it speaks to the place, Bordeaux. And so you will have oak like the California Chardonnay, but you will have earth like the German Riesling. And so you have little bits of each one. And when you can triangulate, that's when you start to get really smart. Like, okay, that's the wood. Okay, that's what earth smells like. When you're removing one element at a time.

Exactly. Or examining one element at a time. What about for reds? Red. You know what would be pretty interesting to do would be, well, I'm a big fan of, as we just chatted about, same varietal from different continents. That can be pretty interesting. If we want to do different varietals, do something like Dolcetto from Piedmont in Italy.

There's lots of great Dolcetto. I'm so bad at remembering Italian wine names. Yep. Dolcetto. Dolcetto is actually the name of the grape. And unlike most of the wines in Italy, this is actually named for the grape and not the place. Not the region. Exactly. So, but Dolcetto is most frequently, so it's a red wine, but it's most frequently made in stainless steel or with the absence of new oak.

So you'll taste grape and you'll taste place, earth, but you won't taste any influence of wood. And then why don't we, you can even go right next door and drink Barbaresco or Barolo. So same region, different grape. So you can identify with what that grape is about. Almost, I mean, 99% of the good cases definitely aged in oak. And so you can feel what oak does there. And you'll probably find a tie-in in terms of the earth, right? So as long as they have like one tether to each other, then it makes it really useful to see like, okay, well, what's different? And then, you know, grab a Zinfandel from Napa Valley. And there you'll see like, okay, the alcohol is really different. And what does that feel like?

And oak will be different because it'll be new oak and maybe it'll be American oak, which will taste like dill. So all these little things where you just start to triangulate. But you've got to keep notes and keep it organized in some way. I actually don't keep notes physically any longer. I just keep it in my head. But you did keep physical notes for a long time. Oh, my God. Stacks and stacks of notebooks.

If they fell over, they would hurt you. They're stacked that tall. What is one of your favorite Zinfandel? Just out of curiosity, because I tend to like Zinfandels. Yeah, I have lots of favorites. I love the wines of Turley. Say it? Turley. Turley. Yeah, T-U-R-L-E-Y.

They're based in Napa, but they make Zinfandel from all over. And Christina Turley, it was Larry Turley who found it. It's his daughter. She's working with Tegan Pasalacqua to make some of the really, really special Zinfandels from California. And then Ridge is a classic. Paul Draper has been making wine at Ridge for north of 40 years.

Um, and it's, it's as blue chip as Zinfandel can get. Cool. Yeah. What, what are some underrated wines? And I'd love to get as specific as possible. This is for people who are looking to try some wines that perhaps they wouldn't be exposed to, that haven't been sort of over lauded. Yep.

What are some that you could bring up? So Pinot Noir is all the rage, right? It's for sure an overindulged princess. There's so much sweet, expensive, unduly expensive Pinot Noir that I look elsewhere, but I look for that same set of characteristics. And I call them the S words, wines that are silky, sexy, supple, soft, things that are full of allure. Those are wines that appeal to me. And Pinot Noir doesn't have a proprietary right to those, as I described them, Pinot characteristics. They happen in things like Grenache. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of Grenache and believe that it's just the warm climate analogy of Pinot Noir. So think about Pinot with just a little extra warmth, a little extra give, but all those same S words.

And it's great. What would be a specific Grenache that people could try to find online to check out? I'm a big fan of Rusden Grenache. Rusden. Yeah, R-U-S-D-E-N. Rusden Grenache. And they make a Christine's Vineyard Grenache. It's from the Barossa Valley in Australia.

I spent a lot of time there. But to me, Australia is a whole other thing that we could talk about for days. But that wine in particular exhibits so much elegance when Australia maybe as a country is not known for elegance. It's a good country. Exactly. Sorry, I know I butchered that, but it's my Kiwi's friend, their influence. It's something very elegant and it punches way above its weight. Very cool. Yeah. Uh, what are some common, uh, and we're going to talk about other things like, uh, whiskey and mezcal and all sorts of goodness. But

before we get to that, what are some common misconceptions about wine or old wives tales, things that annoy you? That's a, that's an interesting question. Um, well the first one is that more expensive is better. That's definitely not true. I mean, it's absolutely not true. It's like, it's a supply and demand thing, um, to a large degree. And so, you know, why, you know, and hype, you know, that, that Mouton that I poured the Behringer on top of, you know, 20 top of 20 minutes ago, my most embarrassing sommelier moment, that's on release maybe 500 euros a bottle in Europe today before we even get wine. So why does it cost that much money? Because someone said, hey, this is the best thing in the world, and so everybody has to have it. Right.

But is it really worth that? Right. It's like fashion. It's just like fashion. Exactly. And importantly, people, I actually get asked that question a lot. They say, is this wine worth this much money? I say, well, it depends on the individual.

I mean... Yeah, it's a marketplace question, not necessarily a quality question. 100%. Exactly. And so for someone, it might be worth it. And for someone else, it might not be. Yeah. Um, but more expensive is definitely not better.

That's a big thing. Um, if somebody wanted to apply a positive constraint to themselves where they couldn't buy wine over X number of dollars. Yes. Uh, and let's say this is somebody who's, you know, not, not poor, but makes $50,000 a year. Yep. Right. So they're not extremely wealthy either. Yes. And let's say this is somebody who's not poor, but makes $50,000 a year. Yep. So they're not extremely wealthy either. Yep.

Super easy to do. Yeah. What is the sweet spot, right? In terms of... Between 15 and 20 bucks. 15 and 20 bucks. Yep. To find a bottle of wine for under $10, you probably don't want to drink it.

Yeah. I mean, there are, of course, exceptions. There's people getting the weeds. They blow things out, you know, so on and so forth. And so maybe you get a steal every now and again. But as a rule, it's very, very hard to make something for under $10. I mean, you do it by using fermentation tanks that are as large as a city block with mechanically harvested grapes that were mechanically grown in a place that's probably environmentally very bad.

I've seen this stuff in process, and it's gnarly. And you won't have any connection to the land. So between $15 and $20, you can actually get real wine from real people. It probably won't come from the fancy appellations, but that's great. I mean, those are always there. Who cares? Go explore the margins and learn something. and there's so many thrills what's another wine between say 15 and 20 or in that range that people probably haven't tried that that you

would suggest they give a go um like i haven't had much grenache so i'm gonna try some more yeah please do um you get a lot of get get a lot of great Grenache from Spain. For a long time, it's the most widely planted red variety in Spain. So there's just tons of it. Sometimes it goes by the name of Rioja, where it might be in a blend. Oh, Rioja. Okay, so Rioja is Grenache. With Tempranillo in a blend. Interesting.

Okay. I'm a big fan of Rioja. Yeah. We can drink white Rioja, too. No one thinks about that. We say Rioja and everyone thinks red. But white Rioja can be No one, no one thinks about that. We say Rioja and everyone thinks red, but white Rioja can be great. It can be super age worthy.

It can be very affordable. Um, I drink a lot of, uh, I drink a lot of Rose from the South of France. That's, you know, 12,

15 bucks. And I, you know, a new producer I'm really smitten with, uh, from the Loire, um, name is Moss,

M O S S E. Uh, the wines are made from the Chenin Blanc grape. They're totally cheap, $20, and amazing. Really, really, I mean, world-class special. I would drink them before pretty much any white wine from California, for which you could spend $300. Right.

Wow. Yeah. Very cool. So I interrupted you, though. You were saying misconceptions, more expensive is better, and then you said, I want to say you said color. Oh yeah. So color, that was a real pet peeve of mine is a sommelier. You open the bottle of something and pour the taste. And before the taster had even tasted it, you'd be like,

oh, that's great. Or, oh, that's going to be terrible. Completely based on the color. And as we chatted about, you don't smell color and you don't taste color and color has no bearing on quality at all. Um, so just because it's dark doesn't mean it's going to be good. You know, I'd much rather look at my beautiful date and smell and taste something beautiful than just be impressed by a big inky glass of whatever. Um, and the only bearing color has is on the, on the actual type of grape, not whether it's good or not. Bear with me one second. My puppy is eating my documents. The dog is literally eating my homework. One sec.

Cutie, what are you doing? Sorry. No, it's all good. She's really getting amongst it today. All good. All right. So we are still rolling. So we got the color.

And what else? I mean, I know you've, you've said before that you think of wine as a grocery. Yeah. Could you elaborate on that? Yeah, definitely.

That's, um, that's also born out of that time living in Italy. The table is not set until there's wine upon it. Might come out of a pitcher and poured into a tumbler, but it's always there. Lunch and dinner. It's on the table.

And I lived that when I was living there, and I actually brought that back and live it now. And so that's an idea that isn't a very American idea because we're so new in terms of wine drinkers. As a wine drinking community, we're still so young. But there it's well established for centuries, millennia. And it's that idea that wine ought to be a part of your everyday life. It makes your life better. And so, yes, this isn't that wine is a grocery, not a luxury. And I never, this is embarrassing to admit, but I've been in the Bay Area for 15 years and I didn't become interested in wine until I lived in Argentina for a year. Awesome.

And wine was on the table every single meal always everyone drank wine at dinner it was just that is part of the process it's like setting the table with a knife and fork yep you put the wine on the table and then came back with a renewed interest in sort of exploring yeah um i mean similar to the pinot noir i feel like malbec kind of flooded the market. Totally. Became very popular and as a result,

people could get away with sort of murder in terms of low quality and high prices, but they have been exploring more. I just like the really kind of fruity,

high alcohol content. Yeah. Chilean and, you know, Carmenarias and whatnot. Yep. But, you know, you have expanded, though,

since all of your time in the wine world. And I'm sure maybe they're similar languages, like wine is Spanish and whiskey is Portuguese. But we have a bunch of bottles sitting behind me. Should I go grab those? We should. Okay. And six glasses.

And six glasses. All right. So we're going to pause this and go get a number of things, a number of tools to have alcohol at 11 a.m. in the morning. We'll be right back. So we're laying out six glasses. I asked what type of glasses, and the answer was they really just need to be large enough that you can smell. So, you know, like a sake glass wouldn't be large enough. But I'm using, for those people interested, beakers because I'm a weirdo, and I like to scare people who come over for dinner into thinking that they might be drinking out of something I put urine in previously. They're 250-milliliter Kymax Kimball beakers. And 250 milliliters is exactly one-third a bottle of wine, a standard bottle of wine.

And I love these glasses. I was first exposed to them at a place called Flower and Water. And I'm actually an investor, and group's, one of their other restaurants called Central Kitchen in San Francisco, but they used beakers and they also use beakers for candles. And that is, we have a lot of booze laid out in front of us. I'm excited about this. And the whiskey story,

I mean, how did you segue? I'll let you finish the last pour because we have six of these. But I'd love to hear how you segued from wine to whiskey or if that's always been present? No, it's definitely a segue. It's, I think of my job as to help people enjoy their lives.

And I think we do that by helping people find easy ways to get smart about things, which can then increase their, their enjoyment. Frankly, you know, wine was scary. So we write a scratch and sniff wine book that makes it not scary, you know, knock it off the pedestal, make it easy, make it accessible and tell people that it's actually super democratic. It's up to you. What's what's good. It's not up to me. You know, don't, don't drink them because I said, drink it, drink something because you figured out that you like that, right? That's, that's the key. Um, and so in, in creating that, that book,

you create a methodology and, and it's again, breaking it down to its component pieces. It's just like dissecting a frog, like, okay, where's this, where's this, where's this, and how do they make the thing tick? Um, and we did that with wine. So you understand that it's again about fruit and earth and wood and those, those things populate all the smells that you're going to smell. And then you can put them back together in whatever order you want to make what you want.

Make what you want to drink. What will make you happy? And that same methodology applies to whiskey. There are some things to which it doesn't apply. Like I don't think it applies very well to beer, particularly with the explosion in craft brewing. Why is that? Because the place part has been so obscured. And so now we can make a beer in California. The origin. Exactly. Yeah, the place part has been so obscured. And so now we can make a beer in California.

The origin. Exactly. Yeah, the origin part. So whereas 10 years ago, I think it really mattered. We would say, okay, well, this has to be Belgian. Because you recognize certain flavors that come from certain yeast that only happen in this place. But now those yeasts are imported here. And there's all kinds of souring techniques and things that people do to really obscure place.

So it doesn't apply to beer, but it applies really well to whiskey. Now, whiskey, I'm cheating a little bit here, because I know the answer, but I was so excited to see this, because I've always felt like a dumbass when trying to write the word whiskey, with or without an E at the end. It depends on the country of origin. And that's it. So it's a great, it's a great rule. It's W I S K Y. If you, if the whiskey comes from a country that doesn't have an E in the name, Scotland, Scotland, Japan, if it comes from a country in Canada, if it comes from a country with an E in the name Ireland or America, then it's spelled W-H-I-S-K-E-Y.

Pretty cool. I love that. I love that trick. It's very, very cool. There's another one. This is just for people like me who are maybe a little slow, perhaps born in a place like Long Island like I was. I always forget.

This may reflect how ill-suited I am to something like a master Psalm test, but I always forget which bread is mine and which water is mine. So I I'm stealing bread. I'm drinking other people's drinks. And if you, if you touch your index finger to your thumb on both hands, like you're making an okay symbol, your left hand will make a B that's bread and your right hand will make a D which is drink. And that's what I will do under the table sometimes when I'm unsure of which to grab. Tim, I love that. That's super smart. And then fork, or if you're setting a table, fork, knife, it's the letter of, it's the number of letters. So, uh, fork is four letters left is four letters. So

they, they, they, they fit on the side associated with the number of letters. But, uh, so, so you're talking about whiskey. So a lot of the, so if wine is few, is whiskey also a few? It is fruit, earth, and wood. And so, um, but wood. But the fruit in this case isn't fruit as in a grape. It's grain. And so the first thing that affects the outcome of whiskey, I mean, the first thing to know about whiskey is it's just distilled beer. That's it. Like you take beer and you put it in a still and you turn on the heat, not too high, but just high enough so that only the alcohol evaporates, right? Because it evaporates at a lower temperature than water. And then you condense it and you capture that on the other side of this thing.

And you've separated the alcohol from the water. Genius. It's called distillation. So what we put in at the beginning is just beer. So you make your beer and what do you make the beer from makes a big difference. Predominantly corn, wheat, rye, and malted barley are the four big grain types, cereal grains that are used to make that beer to become whiskey. In America, corn is king. And now rye is sharing the stage as well. But if you're drinking bourbon, it has to be at least 51% corn. Now, I'm going to ask yet another embarrassing question. What is the difference between bourbon and whiskey?

Is bourbon a subset of whiskey? Is it a regional name for whiskey? So bourbon has a set of laws. It has to come from America. It doesn't have to come from Bourbon County, Kentucky, as there is a Bourbon County, Kentucky, but we make bourbon all over the country. So it has to come from America. It has to have been made from at least 51% corn.

So the balance can be that rye, it can be the wheat, whatever. And it has to be aged in charred new oak barrels. New oak? Yeah. So you fell a tree, you cut the tree into planks, or in this case they're called staves. Then you bend them using heat to make a barrel. And then you actually char the inside of the barrel with a flame. And when you do that, it obviously changes its color, but it also pulls out all kinds of flavors and caramelizes things

in that tree, which also contribute flavors. So it's that, you know, it's the brown sugar, it's the brown spices like cardamom and cinnamon. It's vanilla, lots of vanilla, butterscotch. All those flavors come from that oak barrel. So if you age it in that barrel and it's made from 51% corn you did in America, you have bourbon. That's bourbon. Yep. Cool. So didn't want to interrupt.

So the main options, again, can you roll through that? You've got corn. Wheat. Wheat. Rye. And malted barley. Malted barley. What does malted mean?

So it means you you sprout it and you know just like we would eat sprouts you know they you sprout the grain and then you arrest that process so you you kill it essentially with heat um and so they it's a big deal in scotch production um and in japanese whiskey production as well so what is scotch then so scotch is any whiskey that comes from Ireland. Ah. Pardon me, Scotland. Scotland.

Yeah, Scotland. And of course, Irish whiskey coming from Ireland. Got it, got it. Okay, cool. This is making a lot more sense now because I've never really felt confident. I think part of it is that I'm usually drunk when I'm trying to have these conversations.

But to have a whiskey conversation, which has been actually a handicap for me in some cases, because I spend quite a lot of time in Japan and they love their whiskey. Oh my God. And well, I mean, it doesn't help that we're also speaking Japanese, but, uh, so what, so what are we looking at here? We have, so we're looking at a bourbon from Jack Daniels. We're looking at EH Taylor, uh, rye, which is is whiskey made in America, but rye is predominant grain.

We're looking at Jameson, straight up Irish whiskey. We're looking at Anika Takatsuro, 17-year-old Japanese whiskey. We're looking at Edredower, which is the lower part of the Highlands in Scotland, the region of Scotland, whiskey. But mainland Scotland is the key. So Edgerdower, 10-year-old. And we're looking at Ardbeg. Specifically, it's called Ugedal, which is a scotch made on the island of Islay, which is off the coast.

And so very different than mainland Scotland because you're right on the ocean. And so we'll see in these six glasses the difference that grain contributes, and we'll see the different types of oak and what that contributes and then how place really influences the final product. Cool. I'm going to go grab a camera because I want to take a photograph of this for folks before we get into it. Could you please describe or explain the tattoos that you have?

Why do you have the tattoos that you have and what are they of? So on my right arm is a dandelion. It's a love note to a woman named Carla Rizuski, who I love more than I've ever loved anybody, actually. I didn't think it was possible. It's great. And she has something very, very similar. Very similar dandelion.

Dandelion. Why a dandelion? I'm a big fan of how a dandelion changes so rapidly through its life and I love the part where it ends up with a great big shoot and it actually depends on the wind to disperse its seeds. I think that's just a beautiful,

quiet, profound thing that happens. Poetic. Yeah, it's really, really pretty. And the left arm, it's a collection of memories and of things that have made me happy over time. And there's Mount Vesuvius, which I had probably the most amazing single day of my life on. Where is that? It's just off of Naples in central southern Italy. There's a fish on a bun, so think a fish burger and a mermaid and a heart.

And that's an ode to a mermaid I fell in love with. Um, Carla, uh, fell in love with eating fish on a bun sandwiches at the cup and saucer diner on the corner of canal and Eldridge in Chinatown in Manhattan. Um, there's a seashell with some, uh, sea critters in it that are from a, um, a story I spun for my daughter called Samuel the Sea Cucumber. And he and his friends managed to travel around the entire globe in a seashell tethered to a piece of seaweed. And we use it as a lesson in geography. Wait, this is a story that you made up or a story that you read? No, I made up. That's awesome. I would spin it to her every night at bed. And so we just keep going. You know, that's how the Princess Bride came I made up. That's awesome. I would spin it to her every night at bed. And so we just keep going. And you know, that's how the princess bride came to be.

Also, there's a story that William Goldman would tell his, I think it might've been his daughter or his son and then eventually put it down. That's awesome. Yeah. That's really great. What's the 27, 27 born in the 27th, 27 is a lucky number, um, for me over and over and over. It keeps repeating itself. And in this case, the red above the gold are from an apartment that I shared with a Carla in Chinatown. And there were actually three 27s on the building where they were just, that was the original address. And then it all got painted over and they stuck another 27 on it. And a hundred years later it had patina and they stuck another 27 on it. And they were just as beautiful.

That's cool. 27 is very cool. Be nice. Be nice. It's, you. Be nice. Be nice. It started as a B, and it was in there for 10 years all by itself. Just B-E? No, just the letter B. It's kind of on the inside.

So it was a note to self to just be kind, be thoughtful, benevolent, take your time, just be a good guy. And sometimes I thrash about, and it's a little of a note to self. Right. And it just grew into be nice and just plain and simple. What about the safety meeting? And what is that? Oh, it's some type of mythological creature between the safety and the meeting? Yeah, it's a dragon off the Corona bottle.

So what's the story there? It's a shout out to my homies from Little Nell where we would have safety meetings. This is like one of the joys of restaurant work. You'd be on the floor and you'd be in the weeds or someone would be yelling at you about something. And you just look at your favorite waiter and we'd say, safety meeting? And we both knew that meant walk into the kitchen, walk into my white wine cooler, lock the door from the inside, pound a Corona. Walk back out on the floor and rock service. Period. That's amazing.

Safety meeting. Safety meeting. I was just talking to someone who shall remain unnamed, but very, very high performer. And he, with his friends, they'd have some harebrained question that usually had dangerous implications and they would say, well, let's play, let's find out. So their code was, let's play the game and let's find out. It's so good. Uh, so I, I interrupted you though, because I was, I wanted to take photos of this for people. And for those people go to the show notes and you'll get, you'll find links to everything we're talking about, but you'll

also find the photographs. That's just 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out. Click on podcast. And you'll also see photographs of some of the audio gear that I'm using here. So I'm excited about this. So what's the next step then? So the next step is you're going to smell the first, which is Jack Daniels bourbon. And the second, which is the E.H. Taylor rye.

Okay. Am I looking for which is the E.H. Taylor rye. Okay. Am I looking for anything in particular or just impressions? So the real thing here is, okay, so they're both aged in new charred American oak. They're both made in America and aged in America. So wood and place are relatively equal. The big difference is that the bourbon is 51%, at least, corn, and the rye is rye. And so when we talk about what are the three things that inform a whiskey, well, the first one is grain. And that's what I want to illustrate for you here.

Hopefully you can smell the difference. The rye should be more pungent and spicy. Okay, let's see. One moment, folks. He's got his nose all the way in that beaker. This is like golf commentary. Yep. Oh yeah.

It's crazy, isn't it? It's a huge difference. Yeah. So rise actually classically, I mean, it's been around forever, but also it's,

it's used in a Manhattan. Yeah. It's got a, it's, it has almost like a, uh, more of a paint like bite to it. Okay.

So that, or maybe not paint, maybe it's paint thinner than I'm thinking of her like a turpentine. You get that varnish thing with protracted aging in a barrel. So it does take, take that on. So that's a function of time. I said,

time. Got it. Got it. The spice from the grain itself should also be there. And, you know, it plays in the same, in the same area.

When I smell things, I think about it a lot like musical ranges and so the bass you know hangs out down here and those rich things like chocolate and you know the the vanilla can happen down in there sometimes i have a question does it ever take your nose time to warm up because i feel like i just smelled this like the fourth time and i'm getting a lot more from 100 it does okay another key would be open your mouth when you smell everyone like slams their mouth shut and you actually get less information. That's right.

Open your mouth. What is it called? The retroactive. Retro nasal. Oh, damn it. I was so close. But it makes a huge difference. And don't, you know, for those of you listening, don't like take a hard pull on it like you

do wine or it'll actually really burn. So with spirits, you can smell really gently. Yeah. You don't want to give yourself a, a the alcohol a rye nasal irrigation yeah so i mean it almost smells like a rye bread yeah which is so interesting that that actually comes through yeah it does you're right yeah and then this guy the jack daniels just smells sort of sweet and round and it doesn't have any of that same spice. So that's the first piece, grape. The next piece—

Or grain, in this case. Pardon me, grain, exactly. Of grape and grain, one of my favorite spots. That could be your next book title. It should be. Well, we have to throw agave in there, so succulents. The next is Irish. And so this is Jameson.

And just straight Jameson, which is a brand going crazy, but what makes Irish Irish? And I just want you to think about it as it compares to the things before is that, um, frequently they distill more than twice, three times. Um, and the farther you go with the distillation, or you can even use a column still, um, which we need not bother ourselves with the point is the farther you go with the distillation, or you can even use a column still, which we need not bother ourselves with. The point is the farther you go with the distillation, the more you take out of it, right? So if we start with our beer is 100 liters and we distill it, we end up with, I don't know, what, 30 liters. And if you distill that again, maybe now you're at 15 liters. And you distill it again, and now you're at 7.5 liters.

Is it subsequently removing more of the characteristics that make it unique that's exactly what you're getting closer to rubbing alcohol that's 100 you're all over it vodka essentially yeah it has nothing to say um it has something to say but it's not saying it very loudly so that's a very irish thing to do this is like the catholic school version exactly spoke one spoken to 100 100 so it's it's um it's this is where process is a function of place and so this is typically what happens with the vast majority by volume of of irish whiskey any idea why they do that because i would i'm just thinking back to like ireland potato famine why would they take such a high volume of stuff and And make it smooth.

And make it, well, make it so much smaller. And reduce it. Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think it was really a matter of what people favored in terms of drinking. Okay, sure. And so it's so different than Scotland. And each of them were competing for the royal favor. You know, what are people going to drink and what's going to be the drink, right?

They're very, very different and they've each enjoyed popularity at different times. So Jameson, this should bring back some memories for me because I remember being in Dublin and this was in, for those of you who've read the four-hour work week, this was in late 2004. I had just landed. I was in London, then Ireland was recommended, landed in Dublin. And later they said, what the hell are you doing in Dublin? You should go to Galway. And that's how I ended up there.

But I got really into hurling. And Guinness sponsors the senior sort of nationals and the competition for this. For those who haven't seen hurling, not the puking game, that's also popular in Ireland. But it's the fastest field sport in the world it's like lacrosse plus baseball with axe handles on a soccer field it's extremely violent fantastic game but i wanted to take a tour of the guinness factory as a result i was just curious i don't really drink beer got on a bus it was a hop on hop off bus got to the guinness uh factory or brewery i suppose massive as you imagine and the line was this was probably 9 30 in the morning and the line was just hundreds of people

well now and i opted out i was like no i don't even really drink beer if it were easy i would do it but no thanks a few stops later the jameson distillery shows up and i I'm like, okay, sure, let's check it out. I go in and they go, okay, well, for later, we're going to need a few volunteers. I raise my hand, they pick maybe two or three of us. And later, we have to do a tasting, but a marathon tasting. And so all of us wander out at like 10 a.m., completely shit-faced drunk. Awesome. That was my introduction to Jameson.

I love it. So should I smell for anything in particular? I think just relative to the last one. So again, this is like developing your context. And I mean, I have some things that I attribute to Irish whiskey, um, but I would rather you smell unfettered. And it's very subtle yeah it is subtle exactly god I'm getting anxious like a school child no no there's no

wrong answer that's the whole key to this you just use your own vernacular I found out that I have a deviated septum on one side of my in one nostril which has been bothering me for years but I just thought I always had a stuffy nose. I know that it's much understated compared to the other two.

Totally. But I'm not sure. And so why is vodka so popular? Because it doesn't taste like anything. And you can mix it with things. You can mix it with stuff. So that subtlety and its amiability make it actually quite popular. It's very flexible.

Yeah. It's very flexible. It's very easy to drink. Um, it's a little bit lower proof than the rye I poured you, um, you know, lower percentage alcohol. Um, so for me that, that comes from the process associated with the place, you know, keep distilling, you keep thinking, taking things out, it has less to say. And to me, it's always kind of grassy, kind of herby, a little bit of like a honey thing maybe. But those are just personal adjectives. Have you found

is the nose like height, meaning it's like you were born with a certain nose and it's maybe malleable a little bit, but not very. Or is it like muscle mass where you can develop it? I think it's totally trainable.

My dad's a great example. He was like, I can't smell anything. And her son's getting into wine, and now he can smell everything. And it's like a radio. You just have to tune it in, right? And once you get there, I think it's… I'm getting so so greedy. I'm like my dog has stuck my nose right into it. It's, um, you know, when, when we're hunter gatherers, we depended on this scent of smell for life, right? You know, I can eat that or I can't eat that. That's rotten. That's poison, whatever it

is. And it's, we don't have to rely on it at all to the same degree. So it's the first of the senses that we tune out. And so when you get into this So it's the first of the senses that we tune out. And so when you get into this, it's a matter of just tuning it back in. I think part of that is the amount and the frequency with which we eat. I've done a number of fasting experiments. And for instance, I just fasted. I broke a fast last night. So I fasted for a short fast for me, like 48 hours.

And your evolutionary biology upgrades your smell immediately. Like whatever brain power is dedicated elsewhere is suddenly harnessed for the nose. It's really interesting. That's super cool. Yeah. Very, very cool. They do that for, uh, falconry also. I understand as if they're doing hunting or any type of precision work with falcons, they will starve is a hard word,

but they'll restrict their food so that their senses are sharpened. That's amazing. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. If you guys want to see something crazy, you can watch falconry in Mongolia where they hunt deer with falcons. So what's,

let's see, we were here. Yep. The Jameson. So we're going to leave Ireland and we're going to go to Japan. And so the Japanese model is very much based on the scotch model which you're going to have in the last two glasses um so malted barley so this is really a single malt when it's a single malt or you read that on a bottle it just means that it's made from malted barley now the jameson what are the grains in the jameson um soye. Okay. No corn, which makes sense.

You know, there could be corn in here, but it's definitely- Those are the primary. Exactly. And then the Japanese is the malted barley. It's malted barley. And so those guys took their cues from Scotland as to how to do this. And they're very much trying to, or tried to emulate what they did in Scotland, but it happens in Japan.

So it has the place factor is a, is a big, big difference. And I always get some, um, for me, it feels you have a much deeper understanding of Japan than I do, but I always find things to be very subtle and very beautiful and very complicated, but not outwardly. So not ostentatious. Exactly. Yeah. Um, so I love Japanese whiskey smells delicious doesn't it smells very floral to me yeah so that's it you're right on it tim's actually a great taster i appreciate the pat on the podcast your bag but i got the floral uh so that's that's the

japanese also love barley so one of my favorite things the part of the reason that i'm liking this artichoke tea that i'm keeping cold yep is i really became a fan of huge fan of barley tea i think it's barley tea mugicha yeah go for it uh there's a tea called mugicha m-u-g-i cha is just t-c-a-c-h-a so it's like like you know if you have even in chinese it's the same like o oolong cha. Cha is the same thing. But the mugicha, they use in the summer and drink cold. Cool. So barley is used elsewhere in Japan. But I get a very, yeah, you guys should try that out if you have the chance.

Or you can try some chilled artichoke tea without anything else. But I really like the smell of this. And this is, what is this smell of this and this is what is this called again so this is from uh nika and it's specifically taketsuru taketsuru and 17 years old that's like taketsuru is like uh uh bamboo crane i think somebody can correct me here but i think is crane it might be heron but take is uh uh i think it's like shiitake or no maybe those are two different uh that made like is in the mushroom but bamboo that's cool that's very cool it's very cool well that floral thing you hit on and sometimes refer to as old temple in this whole whiskey temple and it's like

incense sea incense cedar and and sandalwood oh what an amazing smell isn't that cool that smells really good so that's made a whole lot like this next one is made. Edgerdour. What is it called? Edgerdour. How the hell do you spell that? You spell it E-D-R-A-D-O-U-R. Uh-huh.

Got it. And so that's from mainland Scotland. So the big variable here is place, right? And so all things being equal you've got japan versus mainland skyland very different so different different right god you know i need to smell more things i need to like follow my puppy around and smell everything or most things not everything my puppy likes i'd like i'm having a really tough time pinning it down, but it has a very, very particular scent to it.

What would you? Oh man. It's fun to poke at it. And then when it, when all of you are smelling, they shouldn't, you shouldn't rush. I would say one of the great joys of smelling and tasting things. And if I had to pick one particular moment, the first time I smelled a Rutherglen Muscat. So Muscat dessert wine made in Rutherglen, Australia.

And I'd never had one before. And I picked it up and I smelled the glass. And immediately I was back in fifth grade, after school, running through my grandmother's front door and she just pulled ginger snaps out of the oven. And that memory, I mean, I was 35 years old when that happened. And that memory comes streaming back. It's like, it's like, it's like the ratatouille in the movie.

When Anton Ego eats the ratatouille. Exactly. It's so cool. It's so cool. And so however old each of us are, we have that many years of memory based on smell. And it's so cool to let those just come floating back to you. I can't pin this down.

I want to say it's like a very dark chocolate or something, but I'm with you. Yeah. I, I can't, I can't quite nail down. I want to say it's like a very dark chocolate or something, but... I'm with you. Yeah. I can't quite nail it. It's a very familiar smell to me that isn't scotch. But what would you, I mean, how would you describe this? What descriptors would you use? For me, this is actually quite rich. And it's actually, it does have this sort of malted milkshake thing, the vanilla part, but it also has a lot of oak on it. So it does have that richness that almost milk chocolate, caramel, vanilla thing. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty round and voluptuous for scotch.

Yeah. I guess it's like a milkshake. It has that kind of milkshake type smell to it. Exactly. So what do they put in the milkshake? Just malt. That's true. That's right.

So it's the malt from the milkshake that smells like the malt. That's what I'm associating with because I've had more milkshakes than I have had scotch. Isn't that cool? That is cool. That's super cool. Okay. So the last glass, same country, Scotland, but now you're out on an island where the cast, so this is really about place. And so, so in terms of making this stuff, in terms of distillation and cask aging. Oh, cask aging. Exactly. What type of wood are they aging it in? So great question.

Used barrels from Jack Daniels, amongst other bourbon producers, and used sherry barrels. So from the south of Spain, used Madeira barrels from the island of Madeira. And the sherry barrels are made out of what type? Is that also oak? It's all oak. It's all oak. And so if you... Is there any type of cask aging that is not done in oak?

Yeah, there's chestnut, which is common in northern Italy, but that's more for wine. Got it, got it, got it. Yeah, exactly. All right. So this all happens by the ocean. So there's the use of peat. This last one. Yeah, exactly.

So place matters a lot here because peat is used in a really profound way. So when we malt the barley, right, you're taking the barley, you're getting it wet, you're letting it sprout. And then we halt that sprouting process with heat. And the heat comes from burning peat. In this case. In this case. In the last case, on the island. Yeah.

It's a moss, right? Yeah, it's essentially a stage short of coal. So it's compressed dead grass, dead moss, and so it's a biofuel. And so you cut it out in bricks of really dark-looking adobe, almost. Interesting. So it's like cow dung that you would burn for fuel in Mongolia to eat.

Interesting. So that flavors it, but then also you age these casks by the seaside. Yeah. I get things like, in addition to smoke, iodine, brine, salty.

Yeah, it does have a briny, a briny, a briny smell to it. So different. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, that's cool. Yeah.

This is fun, guys. You should definitely do this. And those are the short strokes with this. So you just put some things next to each other and you can really supercharge your learning. Okay, so what does place do? Well, you've just seen. What does oak do?

Well, you've just seen. You can treat it like a workout. I mean, you treat it like an actual learning session. Exactly. So you sort of separate the recreation from learning even though you can transport the learning then to the enjoyment but exactly keep the training separate so uh what's next what's next uh we release a book on this stuff what's next as it relates to me with this this this plethora of get drinking get drinking how

would you now so i have six of these yes in front of me any particular order i would go in the same order that we taste it actually no i'm going to put the irish first it has the least to say let's start there okay so you're starting with the lightest exactly okay so this is the jameson that we're saying jameson exactly how much when you're tasting something like this? You know, just a little bit. Enough to get it down your throat. I think you see a lot of wine tasting, everyone spits and so on and so forth. I mean, first of all, I want to advocate responsibility.

That's important. You've got to do what's right for you. But if you're really going to get the information and you have nowhere to go, you've got to swallow a little bit because you feel certain things in certain parts of your mouth. There are also taste receptors outside of the mouth. A lot of people don't realize this and all the way down to the stomach even, or I mean further through the GI process.

Yeah. All right. Okay. So it's your first of the day. So you're probably feeling the alcohol yeah but beyond that you know what do you feel oh god i just feel like i lack the vocabulary here i'm being i'm being asked to name musical notes but i don't know how to read sheet music don't you don't read sheet music use your own vocabulary uh this is like for those of you who have seen the chess lesson between josh waitzkin and myself

it was an extra for the tim ferris experiment my face uh looks about the same right now uh the irish should really have an answer and i don't have an answer yeah it doesn't really have a lot to say i mean it tastes kind of boozy and it tastes kind of thin and there's not a whole lot that's that's okay that's pretty much what I would say. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have a lot more to add to that. Totally.

I mean, you could add ginger ale and maybe make it, I mean, there's nothing wrong with Jameson, but you know, point being like, you know, that's why it gets mixed with things. Got it. Got it. Okay. Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels. And this is bourbon.

Yep. Got it. Back to me. Well, corn. Essentially. It's Tennessee whiskey. Tennessee whiskey.bon. Yep. Got it. Back to me. Well, corn, essentially. It's Tennessee whiskey. Tennessee whiskey. Yeah. Okay.

So what's the difference? This is a question while you're tasting. The difference between Tennessee whiskey and bourbon is that Tennessee whiskey actually does if you come from Tennessee, you actually have to go through this other thing called the Lincoln County process where they filter the booze through a 10 foot column of charcoal. And that just takes out impurities. And so it makes it smoother. Right. But essentially the, the Tennessee process, apart from that, that filtering and bourbon are very, very similar. So I want to say, I think I'm just, I might be pulling rabbits out of a hat here,

and I don't even know there are rabbits in the hat. It's a terrible metaphor. But I get a more viscous, sort of caramelly type experience. Absolutely. Totally different from the Jameson. That's due to the heavy corn used here, and it's due to the new wood that's used here. So the Jameson doesn't use near the same amount

of the charred new barrels that the Jack does, and so it gives it that richness, gives it that viscosity. Now, what about... How would you explain, for instance, I went to Kentucky to visit drew curtis who's a friend of mine at one point he runs a site called fark which fart.com which is hilarious and amazing you should all check it out and we went we went through a lot of bourbon and whiskey and whatnot and i didn't really gel with bourbon until i had bullet bourbon and i have a bunch behind you know kind of behind us in the in the cabinet

uh b-u-l-l-e-i-t and the way that someone explained that to me was it has a higher rye content and that's probably why you like it but if if you had to guess or to explain that, what would you say? Why was Bullet so much easier for me to drink? I think it's a little, compared to the Jack, I find somewhat showy. It has a lot of, the volume's turned up on just a couple of things. To me, the volume isn't turned up quite as loud with the Bullet, and there may be more pieces to it. It's almost a little finer, has a little bit more cut on the palate.

And I don't mean bludgeon, like straight punch in the face of flavor. It's almost more live in a certain way. A little more subdued. Exactly. Got it. So it's like if you're listening to music and the bass is out of control and shaking your car, the rest of it might be fine, but you can't listen to it for very long. Exactly.

Got it. Interesting. Yeah, the Bullet's tasty. I do like the Bullet quite a bit. So let's see. We are on the E.H. Taylor Rye. All right. What do you think?

Sorry, guys. These silences must be fascinating for us it's it yeah it's it's very has a lot of bite so i'm i struggled to oh yeah it comes from two things it has a lot of bite so i was really struggling to try to separate the and this is the one that i said smelled more like turpentine to me it Exactly. I was struggling to sort of separate that kick in the nuts from the flavor profile, but I was having trouble doing it. It takes practice, practice, practice, practice. So the bite comes from, you have 10% more alcohol here than the last one you drank.

So for sure, you feel that. But also the rye gives it a bite. And they sort of play in the same range. And we were talking about musical ranges. The turpentine can also play in the same range as the rye. They're all high-toned aromatics. What is that? What do you mean by that?

So when I smell, I think about the musical range. And the fat notes are the bass. And then there's this mezzo, which everything it's kind of uh you know neither here nor there but the alto tends to be where these these high tone notes of of flowers of spice um yeah something like turpentine these it's it's the stuff that lives up up high and you can almost physically feel that in your nose when you smell oh oh yeah i. I did. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty interesting.

And so the rye on the palate plays almost in the same vein as the alcohol that serves to make it spicy and give it cut. Now, I was just wondering, there are standardized tests for vision and people have eye checkups. They go to the ophthalmologist or whatever. There are standardized tests for hearing. Yes. I can't think of any time in my life when I've had my smell tested. Yeah, unless you faint and they put, you know, smelly salts under you.

Do those exist, though? I mean, are there standardized smelling ability measurements of any type? Not that I know of, no. What the hell's up with that? That's so weird. You know what? I wouldn't endorse them even if there were. I'm a big believer in making this thing inclusive, exclusive no no no understood but like for instance if you wanted to

not exclusive in the same way like some people say if if you have a mixed dog you shouldn't try to find out what the breed is because then you'll impose on that dog expectations and in the same way if you found out you had a low i'm interested in not so much to decide if I am a good or a bad smeller, but to be able to track some type of progress as a metric. That's fair. But just, you know, like if you wear glasses, you can never fly a fighter plane. I wouldn't want anyone to feel like they can't be a happy drinker if they, you know, I have a bad nose and they feel condemned to not participate. Fair enough. I guess it depends on how quirky their nerddom is when it comes to metrics and tracking.

I have lots of foibles and neuroses, but fortunately, I guess I can get a bad report card and just want to improve it. Totally. So this is the Japanese. Back to Japan. Oh, it's been a while. That means long time no see, basically. Which, by the way, is from Chinese, actually. It's hao jiu bu jian, which literally means, well, yeah, it's like long time no see, basically. Which, by the way, is from Chinese, actually. It's hao jiu bu jian, which literally means, well, yeah, it's like long

time no see. Hao jiu bu jian. Which is the same jian as zai jian, see you again. This is the Japanese taketsuru. He's thoughtfully tasting everyone. That is amazing. I love that.

That's very, it's just very silky. It's not, there aren't any kind of rough aspects to it. Nope. Like I could just sip that for hours. Me too. And I do. Wow. It's, I'm going to write that one down.

This is the, what was it? 17 year? Mm-hmm. 17 year. Nika, N-I-K-year? Mm-hmm. 17-year. Nikka, N-I-K-K-A? Yep. Take Tsuru. Take Tsuru.

T-A-K-E-T-S-U-R-U. Yes. Wow, that's good stuff. Yeah. So it comes back to that idea of balance, right? Yeah. And use. So the first four you tasted were maybe balanced in different ways, but I don't think you liked

the rye quite as much. The rye, I could like on the rocks as one drink with some bros before we play pool, fine. But I couldn't sit down and nurse that over like hours of a poker game. Isn't that interesting? And then similarly, you might not take the Takatsuru and make a Manhattan with it like you would the rye, right? So then you add sweet ver vermouth it calms the rye down you stir it over rocks and temperature calms the rye down right so all these you know it's like where where's the end point for these things so i'm with you i'm probably not sipping the eh taylor rye yeah very often um unless i'm around a campfire that's all there is but the takatsura the um it is really fascinating how uh whether it's the Irish distilling process, the characteristics of the Japanese scotch, they really match the sort of cultural stereotypes well.

Totally. There's a really, I think it's a fascinating book. There are gems in it, even though some of it may be found very boring to people. It's a short book called In Praise of Shadows. And it's a book on sort of architecture and aesthetics written by a Japanese fellow whose name is escaping me right now. I want to say Tanizaki, but I could be making that up. And it just talks about how, for instance, people in the West will buy objects from Japan that have gold foil or embroidering and put it in their homes, but it looks gaudy. And the reason that's the case is that Japan, in Japanese aesthetic, makes use of shadow and darkness more.

So they compensated for that darkness by having more ornamentation with things like gold. Smart. Because you'd be seeing it in low light settings. Yep. And just the whole book is really interesting. It talks about his very strong opinions about Japanese versus Western toilets and whatnot. But that type of sensibility you can detect even in the Scotch, which is cool. And it applies to wine, too.

Same parable. Huh. Yeah. And then this, now we have the mainland. Mainland. Edgerdauer, 10-year-old scotch. All right. Now, while I taste, I'll let you answer this.

I think that a lot of people, myself included, tend to assume or have a bias towards older age. Like, oh, it must be better if it's older. It's the same rule with wine. More expensive isn't better. Older isn't better. And in some cases, you can actually go really too far. I mean, I feel like for you that the rye, which is 10 years old, is probably beyond the pleasure principle for Tim. And things age at different rates depending on where they are. So it's cold and wet in Scotland. Proof can actually tend to come down in the aging. You can lose some alcohol through evaporation.

Whereas you lose less water because it's so humid. But because it's cooler and wetter, it takes more time to develop the patina that happens with age. Whereas if you're in a rick house, which is just an aging warehouse in Kentucky, like even today, the end of summer, it's hot. It's really hot. So that whole thing proceeds at a much greater pace, much faster. And you can, you can blow right by the sweet spot and get to something that just becomes a varnish-y, turpentine-y extract of oak, and you've lost all the other character and nuance. So, which makes perfect sense, right?

I mean, because if you have that added heat, all the metabolic processes are accelerated. Now, what was the name of this again? I'm so bad at spelling anything from Scotland because there are lots of O-U-G-Hs and so on that I can't make sense of. But what was the name of that again? This is Edredaur. So E-D-R-A-D-O-U-R. Tenure. I think it's actually Scotland's smallest distillery.

I like this a lot. It's my favorite in Scotland. Oh, no kidding. Yep. This is delicious. On the mainland. Yeah. Really, really nice. And I i don't words are failing me uh which i suppose happens a fair amount but particularly

in this case how would you describe this to me it's it's pretty and rich which is kind of a it's a again back to balance it's a hard balancing point. It's easy to get rich. Well, I feel like it's... But how do you stay pretty, too? Yeah, well, I also feel like it's strong. Like, it has... And, look, guys, for those people listening, like, I get really irritated by sort of the snobbery

that can come with a lot of this, but I'm lacking better words to use. But if so, yeah, there's a lot of ridiculous stuff out there when it comes to beverages at the high end and so on. However, with this, the way I would describe this is it's a lot stronger, not necessarily in alcohol content, but the characteristics and the flavors are a lot stronger than Japanese. Exactly.

But just short of really head-butting me in the face like the rye. The rye. Yeah. And so this I could do for a longer period of time. Totally. You know, it's kind of like 75 is perfect. 85 if you're in the sun can be too much. And this is like hanging out right below that threshold.

Yep. I totally agree. It feels like more. I mean, when I taste this, I actually taste raisinets. Oh, interesting. It's such out right below that threshold. Yep. I totally agree. It feels like more... I mean, when I taste this, I actually taste Raisinets. Oh, interesting. It's such a trip. I mean, I get the malted milkshake thing, but also the chocolate over the raisin. And it's rich, and it's yummy, and it wears the alcohol well.

Yeah, I do get it. I mean, power of suggestion being what it is. Who knows? But yeah. What about, so this is the Islander. Exactly. This is full gas on a lot of fronts.

It's big. It's rich. It's the most alcoholic on the table. It has 54.2% alcohol, so that's 108.4 proof. Not for the meek. From Ardbeg. Oogadal. so that's 108.4 proof. Not for the meek. From Ardbeg.

Oogadal. Yeah, that'll put hair in your chest. Mm-hmm. I had trouble with that. I was trying to do the, what is it, the aeration and swishing and whatnot. I was like, oh, my God, I could barely get the first part down. But you just put a little bit in your mouth and it just like fills your whole cranium with this crazy perfume. Yeah. It's, um, very perfumed, very smoky. Just like before. I love sipping on these, but just in small amounts. It's not a drink. It's like, it's a sip. Yeah. That would have to be like sitting,

reading a book someplace at your own speed, someplace cold, cold, snowing outside. Sounds like an Island in Ireland. Maybe. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. I'm a Scotland or Scotland. I'm so sorry. Jesus. I did it earlier. I'm supposed to know punching them, the earphones as we speak. Uh,

so the, now let's, let's talk about one other thing and we can introduce it maybe as as a story so tell me this the story you told me about the convoy and let's use that as a segue okay to mezcal yes let's do um so i was telling a story about i have a mezcal brand it It's called Sombra. I started 10 years ago, actually, when everybody thought I was selling mescaline. I was like, Richard, you're going to go to jail. I was like, what do you mean I'm going to go to jail? Well, mescaline's illegal.

It's a drug. I was like, no, no, no, no. It's not mescaline. It's mezcal. Without going through the long strokes, 10 years has taken us a long ways. And we've gone from a time when everybody thought that it's actually on everybody's lips. So Mezcal is really the authentic agave spirit of Mexico. Everyone talks about tequila.

Tequila has really changed and in a lot of ways has been bastardized over the last, well, since 1860 when it became tequila. Before that, it too was Mezcal. So for me, the idea is how you- In what ways, I'm sorry to interrupt, in what ways does it become bastardized? So at a certain point, you could have used dozens of different types of agave to make, and you can still, mezcal, and tequila was one of those things.

And when it went from being vino de mezcal to being tequila, they legislated for industry, not for artistry. So no longer could you use these 20-some flavors of agave. No, it's just blue agave? Just blue. And they'd say, because it's the best. Well, it's not necessarily the best.

It's the best if you want something to grow big, fast, soft, so it's easy to cut. And now they've created this monoculture of, I mean, it's like the cheetahs. There's no DNA variability. And so the first thing- You said like cheetahs? Yeah, you know how they're about to be extinct because there's like-

Oh, no. Oh yeah, their gene pool is so tiny that if like everyone's afraid, if one of them catches the flu, they're all going to die. Oh, there's no variability. None whatsoever. So the same thing's happening to tequila with blue agave.

And so that's why they have these blights that take out all these plants. Tons of production. That's huge. Yeah. And so in addition to the plant, it was the processing methods have changed. And you are so far from what was originally produced in tequila to get to what they're making today. Hey, I still drink the stuff.

But it's not... If you drink tequila, what do you drink? It's kind of like the Dos Equis guy. I don't drink tequila often, but when I do... I drink a lot of Siete Leguas. What was it called? Siete Leguas. Okay.

They do a great job, I think. Siete, seven? Uh-huh. Leguas? Leguas. Leguas. Yep, L-E-G-U-A-S. Huh.

I like the guys at Tequila Ocho. Actually, I don't know the guys at Tequila Ocho. I like their tequila a lot yeah um and then we make one called astral like astral yeah which is really a deliberate throwback to what was it like before 1860 when they legislated for basically vodka production um so for me mescal is it's the it's the real real thing. It embodies that intellectual value we've been talking about, and it embodies process and place and people and geology and geography and history and cuisine. It's all in there. So that's interesting to me.

And so we've been down there doing this stuff, but it's definitely… What is mezcal for people who haven't had it? So think of it as tequila from the rest of Mexico. But for sure, it's going to be more full flavored. So much like this last scotch you had that, um, where they use peat in the process that gives it that smoky quality. Yeah. It has a very smoky characteristic. So if we just take a step back and you think, okay, well, what is, if mezcal is made from agave, what's agave? Agave is starch and you need yeast to eat sugar to make

alcohol. Yeast don't eat starch. So the way you turn a starch into a sugar is with heat. And today, it's done with steam or even with enzymes in some strange cases, cases I try to avoid personally. But traditionally traditionally it's done with fire. And so in mezcal production, you actually dig a hole in the ground, you build a fire, you put rocks over that fire, and then you put the agave hearts in there and you roast them for two days, buried in the ground. And that heat converts the starch to sugar. It also, much like this last scotch, it imbues it with a smoky flavor.

And so that's why mezcal has that smoky quality. And so think of it like the original tequila plus smoke. And that's based in Mexico? That's based in Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. So almost a very popular- Also famous for mole. Also famous for mole. Great food, amazing people, amazing traditions.

A little unpredictable. Yeah, it's definitely unpredictable. There's so much beauty in so many wonderful things, and you definitely have to watch your step. So what happened with the convoy? So what happened with the convoy, we were there with some friends and business associates, and after being out at our Palenque,

our two cars pulled back on, so it's 17. Palenque is where you distill. And after driving from the distillery in the mountains, 17 kilometers down a dirt road back to the main highway, which is the Pan American, we turned onto the Pan American highway. And two trucks of state police soldiers pulled in front of our two cars and started slowing down. And the guy who was driving the car in front of us didn't understand the clues, which is we were also supposed to slow down and stop with them. Was he Mexican? Yeah, he was. Yeah, he was Oaxacan.

Yeah. He's the son of the guy that was driving our car. Got it. And just didn't know the clues. Didn't pick up on the hint. Which was a little scary because, you know, in half a breath, you had two trucks of soldiers with their rifles pointed at the car, and the guy that works for us down there is an amazing guy. He of soldiers with their rifles pointed at the car. And my,

my, uh, the guy that works for us down there is, is an amazing guy. He's been there forever. He knows the clues and he's like grabbing the kids, stop the car, stop the car. And I would imagine,

I mean, averting disaster and they're stopping the car. I would imagine. I mean, I've had this experience in Panama. I've had it many other places to extract, potentially extract like a more Dita, like a little, have a nice day., like a little have a nice day.

Yeah. Yeah. Have a nice day. Exactly. Yeah. You know, I don't think I've actually been on that road without having been stopped and had the car emptied at one point or another. You know, I'm told from our local friends that it's always better when we're in the car. You know, I wouldn't obviously know the converse situation.

But all in all, everybody's okay, and that's all that matters. I had a scary experience. Well, scary because I'm not accustomed to this happening elsewhere in the United States, but in Panama, where I was driving out from Panama City to, I want to say, Boquete, where I was actually driving to the coast to go to the Coiba Marine Reserve, which is amazing. And I got stopped a million times because I'm just like obvious white dude in a pickup truck driving. And the tip I got before arriving in Panama was get an international driver's license.

Because when they pull you over, they're going to ask you for your passport. And if you hand it over. You won't get it back. Now you won't get it back until you do everything that they ask you to do. But if you have an international driver's license and you say you don't have a passport and then they say, well, we're supposed to fine you, but then you have to go to trial and this place and the other. And then the protocol, the dance is, is there any way I could pay my fine now?

But the price is going to be 10, 20, 100 X if they have your passport as opposed to the international driver's license. Same thing happens in France all the time. In France? The joke used to be with myself and my friends when we were doing a lot of wine work there is that don't let Richard drive right off the plane.

So at some point, first day, getting pulled over, same story, give me your passport. Of course, I'm never giving them my passport. You can have my driver's license. Yeah. Plenty of those. But,

um, same, same story. Oh yeah. Pay the fine right on the side of the road. That's so wild. Yeah. It happens more places than not.

I would say for sure. Brazil's the scariest, but that's another podcast. Yeah. Uh, you can see, uh, what is it trupe the elite squad or elite team there's a movie you can watch that and then you'll know what i'm

talking about now the second one's pretty good as well um so the uh let me let me ask you a couple of rapid fire questions as i nurse this taketsuru. When you think of the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind and why? My folks, both of them equally. My parents. Why? They were able to come from a place that's, I mean, I consider myself successful, but when I look at what they did, I think of their road as having been so much harder, so much harder. I'm super impressed. So is, is success then in the overcoming of obstacles? It's finding your way to happiness. That's what it is. And that doesn't have to be associated with anything material or not. And for them, it was just changing the surroundings and finding a way out when, you know, there was no helping hand. You gotta, you gotta do it yourself.

When do you, so if you had to pick someone besides your parents, pick someone beside my parents. Well, I, you and I share lots of friends, many of whom are successful and it's really anyone that makes their own way. So our buddy, I mean, yeah, he's been on the podcast, extremely successful. He's cut his own way. He's cut his own way. Um, I mean, Obama's cut his own way, you know, so many people, just to be clear, folks, that is not a mutual friend or at least I don't know him on a first name basis. Yeah. But you know what I mean? It's someone that that's, you know, maybe against odds has, has figured out how to do what they love to do. And that's pretty cool. When do you lose track of time?

I lose track of time on airplanes where I spend a lot of time. And I actually, Tim, I really try to take that time for myself. I like getting on the airplane. And there are times like this morning when I, when I flew here, it was like,

you know what? I'm going to fly back this afternoon. I have to work. But 99% of the time when I got in the plane, that's Richard time. And I shut it off and I get in a book and what used to be long flights are over in a minute and, or even just think or anything.

But that's, that's where I actually lose track of time. How many days a year do you fly? I am. I sleep in a hotel more than 300 nights a year. Wow. Yeah. I'll,

I'll do 170, 180,000 miles this year. What book are you currently reading? Um, what it's the, um, L please don't be mad when I get the title wrong. Should and Must, The Intersection of Should and Must.

Absolutely. I have it right over there in the corner. Exactly. Yeah, L Luna. Check it out, guys. I actually bought 2,000 plus copies of that to mail out with this quarterly mailing that I send out to people. That's amazing. Yeah, it's a really, really excellent book.

What book, so speaking of gifting, what book do you gift? Have you gifted most often to other people? For sure. It's my favorite book ever. It's called a fan's notes, a fan's notes, a fan's notes by Fred Exley. What is that? Um, I don't know. It's probably 50 years on since it was written. And, um, Fred's amazing. Super smart. For me, me there's this is like first second and third place in terms of best book oh wow okay this is a strong endorsement it's a brilliant guy who keeps messing up his life over and over again is this autobiographical uh he says he says that certain events may resemble his own life but of course it's considered a novel. Yes, it is. Got it. Yes, it is. Yeah. And it's, um, it's painful and I'm, I'm not, I don't see sad movies. I don't read overtly sad things. Um, but this is, it's neither of those things, but man,

it's such a lesson. It's, it's really, really special. What are, and it's funny and it's literary and it's, it's nuts. What what is one of the what do you get from it when you when you read it so i take it you've read it more than once i'm probably on it's actually i'm about a third through again it's next to next to my bed and i'm probably on my 12th or 13th reading what do you get from it resolve resolve resolve oh that's good yeah it's huge that's everything i i mean i'd be a liar if i didn't say i'm not totally motivated by many factors including uh fear of failure it's i i would like to say that that's not true but i'm supremely motivated by it what is failure in your mind

and it could be something very specific i mean like whether it's related to business or whatever but like in your mind right now, what is the fear? What is the failure that you're afraid of? Not achieving the things I want to achieve. Like what? Not, uh, well, continuing to work for myself, which is great. That's huge. I mean, time is everything.

I mean, there's, there's nothing in my mind besides time and having your opportunity to decide how to spend it. Yeah. That's because it's going to be over. I don't believe what you want to believe. I believe that we get one swing and that's it. I want to make it great and not having the occasion to decide what I do, not having the occasion to express myself in whatever way I feel like that's

failure. Yeah. Yeah. It's a horrifying thought. Like I physically ill thinking about it. If you, I think you're a spectacularly good teacher. Uh, physically ill thinking about it. If you, I think you're a spectacularly good teacher.

Uh, if you were teaching a ninth grade class, you could teach anything you wanted. Yep. What would the class be? Love yourself. Love yourself. Yeah.

Yeah. You gotta love yourself before you love others. And without it, you, nothing productive is going to happen. I mean, we can all bang our heads on the wall, but unless you really, really come from places like this is who I am. This is what I, I have, which is like a mind

trapped in a physical being trapped in a, in a meat cube. Yeah. Trapped in a meat cube. Like you have to like acknowledge that and then make the most of it. I mean, really appreciate yourself. And especially ninth grade, that was like, I mean, my daughter actually just entered 10th grade, but that's like such a tough time on kids. I remember what a tough time I had, and it's very easy to lose your bearings. Like, are they doing it right? Are they doing it right?

Am I doing it wrong? Like all that. It's just like, you know, love yourself. I always thought I was going to be like a teacher and specifically want to teach ninth grade because that's the fork in so many paths, you know what I mean? Totally. But what, so how would you help someone cultivate loving themselves? So I'll be honest, I have trouble with that. I beat the shit out of myself all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I think, um,

helping someone cultivate that, I think, well, it's probably... I'm starting to feel this taketsuru. Yeah, it's good. I would say it probably comes with context again, you know? I mean, we're always like grass is always greener. Well, why don't you taste that grass, right? And see what it is and see what it actually feels like. Try it on. Taste it. Put your toes in it. And if there's a way to, again, give people context of other things,

we've done it with our daughter with travel. We just got back from the Galapagos Islands two weeks ago, by far the best place I've ever been. And the Galapagos themselves are really amazing. And then you spend some time in Guayaquil, and that's a real story of have and have-nots, and it's an amazing thing. But just as one example of what is it like to live these other lives.

And everybody struggles, but the happiest people are, you know, that's the real wealth is, is being happy. And if you can show people, you know, give examples of people that, that are happy, you know, regardless of their material circumstances, I think that's, that's a way to share with kids that it's worth loving yourself and making the most of it. When you look at your financially successful friends, both of us know a lot of people who have achieved extraordinary levels of financial success. And we'll exclude Chris from this conversation because I don't want anyone to think that we're referring to him. I think Chris is a case study. I'm very fascinated by him because he's crafted an incredible life for himself.

Absolutely. But of those financially successful people who are unhappy, generally unhappy, what do you think they have in common? Why are they unhappy? Misplaced goals. Misplaced goals. Yeah. And, you know, chasing, chasing the financial award purely for the financial award is not the right way to do it in my esteem. You know, that first chef that gave me that first wine job, he was great. We were, we were overlooked for a couple of things in the

press and I'm, you know, I'm new in this, this world, food and wine world. And he's like, look, Richard, you know, if you work for the awards, you know, you don't, you don't do good work, but if you do good work, the awards will come. And they might not even be the specific press things. But I think that the people that do have that fantastic wealth and are unhappy, um, you know, they, maybe they worked for the wrong thing. Maybe, um, you know, barring things like traumatic loss of a loved one or something like that, you know, all that aside, maybe they don't love themselves. Maybe they don't know how to share. Sharing is a big deal. Like, you know, or maybe you just believe in the wrong thing, you know.

Asking for help is a big deal, too. Yeah, it is a big deal. It's a huge deal. There's a book by Amanda Palmer who's also been on the podcast, partially because I read her book, The Art of Asking. Incredible musician, but just fucking ask for help already. Ask for what you want. Because I grew up as such a bookworm, I constantly try to revert to pro and con lists and writing and research to solve problems. And nine times out of ten, especially after I read that book, I was like, Jesus Christ, Ferris.

You could have just called this friend for that, this friend for that. And they would have been happy to help you. Totally. Another thing I think is a little bit out of left field, but I think that some of those people forget that meat box you said were contained. And you've got to take care of that thing. You see so many people that are unhappy because they don't. Yeah. You know, and, and I, I live in this weird place. Like I make people happy by sharing booze knowledge and accessibility with them too much.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing in that, you know? And so you see a lot of that too. Now you, I mean, you are, you know, a trafficker of, of goodness, but also vices for a lot of people. A hundred percent. Right. I struggle with that actually. Well, no, no, no.

And I'm not saying that in a, in a Q story fashion, cause I've got a, I mean, I have an entire closet a lot of people. A hundred percent. Right? I struggle with that, actually. Well, no, no, no. And I'm not saying that in an accusatory fashion, because I've got an entire closet full of booze behind us. Yeah. But my question for you, I mean, you're in very good shape. You travel 300 days of the year or more. What are some of the keys? Like, what do you... Choose your hotels wisely, as in make sure that

the gym is real. In fact, the best hotels don't have a gym at all, but they have a relationship with a real gym, you know, across the street or down the block or something that, that actually probably guides my hotel choice 10 to one to any other factor. How do you determine that? Well, you know, that's a big thing, part of its experience, right? So like, I love to stay at the standard East village in Manhattan, not the High Line, but the East Village, because they don't have a gym, but they have a relationship with the New York Health Club right across the street. Right. So you just kind of, like, you dig around, you can find that stuff. But, I mean, physical fitness, it's paramount to me.

I know that I think better when I'm healthy. Oh, yeah. I'm a nicer guy when I've exercised, you know. And actually, I really try to me. I know that I think better when I'm healthy. I'm a nicer guy when I've exercised, you know, and, and actually, I actually, I really try to peak. So if I'm at home, I have the most amazing trainer, Erin Carson in Boulder. She's awesome. And we've figured out the schedule. So let's do a real, um, you know, a build over seven or if I'm at home for even 10 days, which is rare, even four days, like let's make it hard, hard, hard, hard, hard. And then I need a rest day when I have to get on the plane.

Travel. That's smart. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you really try to fit him in there. What, uh, what is your week? Let's just say you're traveling for a month at a time. Yep. What is your week of exercise look like? Minimum seven or probably five out of seven days, minimum five. And you know, sometimes that might be work out, try do mornings mornings what time is you know what i have to caffeinate i would be a liar if i didn't say i'm uh i'm fully addicted to caffeine prefer it from tea to coffee but i'll take it however i

can get it what type of tea we drink a lot of oolong a lot of pu-erh um those are the two that matter a lot i have a friend i would i would have considered myself like a coffee geek extraordinaire. Um, everything dialed in the scales and the, you know, the temperature, everything just like perfect. Um, and then I met this guy, Sebastian, who taught me all about tea and I had tried so hard. Like, you know, I read, read something like, oh man, I should really know about tea. Like it appeals to my wine minder.

Sure. And I could never do it. And then I met Sebastian and he just ruined me. Ruined you in a good way. Oh, in a good way. So it's all about in pursuit of tea now. Cool. Yeah, it's the best.

So caffeine and then try to exercise right away. And certainly before you get into the email or your phone or any of that stuff. What time do you wake up when you're on the road or do you try to wake up? I try to get a minimum of eight hours. So the time is a moving target, especially when, you know, I've been in five time zones in the last seven days. And when you have to socialize at night with... It's huge. Now, is the travel to talk to retailers and distributors? Is that primarily, like, what accounts for the bulk of the travel?

You know, it's, I can't, it's a lot of two things making and selling. Right. So the making part, um, is easy. It's easy to, I mean, for me, you dream something up and you go and you create it, you know, and it's a physical thing and you have something it's done. Um, but that takes work. I mean, I make things on three continents today. Which continent? Australia. Wine? Yeah.

So we make wine in Australia. What's it called? It's called Sousette, which is S-U-C-E-T-T-E. First one comes out next month, actually. Oh, that's exciting. So let's put a date on that because people will listen to this for months. Okay, so that's going to be October of 2015. Yeah. Cool. And Sousette means to suckle in old french so it's uh yeah that's a cool one exactly yeah you let your mind run wild with that i wasn't gonna say it yeah so uh the white wine

will be called niche shown and i'll let you look that up um have you smell it? I'll let everybody look at I C H O N. Yeah. You guys can put that together. Yeah. Um, we make some Rose under my essential, uh, brand in the South of France. And of course we make somber mezcal Oaxaca. Um, so what I'm meaning shadow, somber meaning shadow. How did you choose that name? Uh, two ways. First of all, I mean, I think mezcal is a little, even still a little forbidden, a little dangerous. And I believe everybody has a dark side. I'm certain of it. I know I do.

Yeah. Um, and the second is maybe a little bit more, um, historically referential of mezcal very much in the shadow of tequila. Uh, I like that. Yeah. I have a friend who's done a lot of work with, uh, shall we say plant medicine psychedelics? Awesome. And oddly enough, he, that we say, plant medicine psychedelics. Awesome. And oddly enough, that's true, right? The little people.

And sacred mushrooms have been used for millennia in Mexico, of course. And he did not spend time in Mexico, but for whatever reason, he drank all sorts of different alcoholic beverages before this work. And now for whatever reason, he can only drink mezcal. Yeah. No, I believe that. Yeah. I don't know why, but that's, it's the only beverage that he can consume. Uh, he does it very irregularly, but when it comes to alcohol, mezcal is all he can consume. That's amazing. Out of nowhere. Yeah. Wow. Crazy. Really weird, right? It's good for you. Yeah.

Yeah. Apparently so. Well, the other half of that travel question, why so much, is the selling piece. Oh, right. So if you, the listener, want to buy a bottle of Sombra, the first thing I had to do was import it to America. Then you have to sell it thanks to the repeal of prohibition and all the laws that follow that. I have to sell it to a distributor.

So then we have to sell it to a retailer and then the retailer has to sell it to you. So there are all these things. So I can't just assume that you'd make the first sale and then it ends up on your shelf. So where can people find some like for those people listening? Thankfully everywhere. 10 years later,

all across America, everywhere, everywhere. So like if I went to, I'm just making one up here, what is it? K and L here? Am I making absolutely K and L wine or it's not wine, but K and L. I don't know if K and L has it, but we're certainly all over San Francisco. Okay, well you guys can search for it. So, uh, what is the a hundred dollar or less purchase

that comes to mind that has had the biggest impact on your life. That's interesting. I'm not a material guy and having that said, I like nice stuff. It could be something free. Something what? It could be something free. It could be something free. Can it be a donation?

Can it be a donation? Sure. Yeah. I mean, we try to support small things in many ways all the time. So my daughter and I just, um, gave to donors choose and she's amazing. Donor shoes is amazing.

I'm on their advisory board. Oh, that's so cool. I've been doing stuff with donor shoes for like seven years. Yeah. And so to have the occasion to like sit with her and figure out like, Hey, we want to give it to this class near our community. Here's why. I mean, it's enriching because you get to enrich that experience and donors choose, but it's enriching for my daughter and I to have that discussion and it facilitates so much more, you know, and father daughter time and like her education and that's, that's meaningful. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I, um, my parents used to help me. I want to say it was UNICEF, but I could be getting that completely wrong. I think I am, but determining what to donate to someone in a third world country, whether it be

like a number of chickens or a goat or a this or that. And the, the, the conversation, uh, and walking your kid through helping them walk themselves through the decision is, uh, fascinating. I think very valuable. Yeah.

Um, do you have a favorite movie or documentary? Yeah, several. You know, it's funny. Also on the topic of the kid, we watched The Breakfast Club last night. Oh, wow. First time. Glass from the past.

Yeah. So she's just started her sophomore year in high school, new school. And I was like, I remember this being so formative 30 years ago for me. And we watched it and just, you know, shooting tears and laughter and all that. But there are so many great movies like that. I wouldn't say that's my favorite, but for sure that's the most recent in my mind. I love the movie Baraka, which is actually a good one. Yeah.

Very visual. Yeah. And it really reminds me of a lot of things. I mean, one. B-A-R-A-K-A. Exactly, yeah. Baraka, for me, is meaningful because it talks about how amazing our planet is, how fragile our planet is. It reminds me of the geologic timescale.

This is like a profoundly important thing to me at the geologic time scale. When you look at how long it's taken everything and how, I mean, what's San Francisco is going to look like in several hundred years? Well, we're all going to be long gone. In fact, humanity might be gone. Who knows? Who knows what will happen? But that we're just this tiny little blip in time, like we matter not at all. And so it just reminds me to party. Have a great time. You're barely here. Get after it and crush your life. It's awesome. Don't take everything so seriously. Totally. Totally. That's it. With your workouts, if you could only? Burpees. Burpees? Yep. Squats. And intervals. What type? Short intervals, 40 seconds on, 20 seconds off.

Running? Running. Got it. Yeah, that's a good combo. You're ready for the military. You know, Tim, I used to run a lot. The longest I ever ran at once was 82 and a half miles. That's fucking long. Yeah, well, the race was 100, so that was a lot. Um, the longest I ever ran at once was 82 and a half miles. That's fucking long. Yeah. Well, the race was a hundred. So that was a problem. 82 and a half miles is no joke. Yeah. And so can

you just like fuck off at any given moment and just like run 20 miles? Um, I think I could probably get 20 miles done. I don't know if I could run them and that, and I quit. So after that summer, you know, after the 82 and a half, yeah, I, you know, I started running in the year 2000 when I moved to Colorado and it was great and I loved it. And then I started competing and then, you know, as a citizen did pretty well, um, by no means professional, but, uh, I really liked it and it was a way to clear my head. Um, and they say about runners, you're either running from something or to something. And there was for sure an element of that to my running also, which one is, which one was it for you? Uh, for both, I can name both pieces. Um, so, but I found, okay, let's go farther, let's go farther. And then it was, um, you know,

all trail marathons and then hat, you know, 50 mile races and there, and that was great. And then you cross that threshold and, and it becomes really catabolic. Yeah. And I was almost 30 pounds lighter than I am now. And you're not a huge guy. I mean, you're not thin, but you're not like a huge, you don't have 30 pounds to spare. No. And then, but you know, it's about, you know, strength to weight ratio and how quickly you're going to get over that mountain and then over the next mountain, then over the next mountain.

And I wanted to get stronger as things start to break. But as you would get strong in the gym, and then you go start running again, and your body just eats itself. And then it all goes away. And you're like, oh, wow. And then with that comes so much inflammation. And I'm a big believer, at least for me, it's just not. I actually believe for people it's not good to run that long a distance. So feel free not to answer, but what were you

running from and running to? Oh, you know what? I am, um, I think probably not that dissonant to you. I'm also very hard on myself and, you know, when I do something, I want to do it very, very well. And I think everything was really working very, very well for me, except for my marriage. And that wasn't working well at all. In fact, that was brutal. And I was running to a place of candor where, again, part of being hard on yourself is being honest with yourself.

And I treasure candor and the occasion to, to, to just live in it. Right. So, um, running to that place where I was honest about all of it and, you know,

where I was, wasn't that place. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not particularly good at intimate relationships. Yeah. I don't think I'm the worst abusive. I'm not particularly good at intimate relationships. I don't think I'm the worst. I'm not abusive. I'm not a total bastard.

But I shut off a lot in intimate relationships. It's like I don't like the uncontrollable, unpredictable nature of a lot of it. I feel you completely. Do you know what I mean? 100%. Because you're the guy who's had, you're the guy who has like the seven foot stack of notes on wine. Yeah.

And then you win the game. Right. I mean, so to speak. Yeah. We're used to making things better. And it's like, we're, we're sitting for those people who aren't here,

which is everyone. Uh, we're right next to a bookshelf and I have an entire shelf of notebooks. Yeah. Right. And it's like, that's how I can predict the trajectory of fill in the blank. Yep.

But with a relationship, Oh wait, there's another person with their own ideas and feelings and concepts and preconceptions. Just like me. Yep. Free radical. My dog just stretched and kicked the great door open,

but it's not moving. That's hilarious. Still beautifully asleep. Still completely asleep. If you could not moving. That's hilarious. She's still beautifully asleep. Still completely asleep. Yeah. If you could give your, let's see, when you were 25, where were you? When I was 25, I had just finished my graduate thesis and was about to take that first cooking job in Montana.

What advice would you have given yourself at 25? Don't be so fucking shy. Don't be so fucking shy. Yeah. You were shy? Oh, dude. Even really until recently, I can still think of instances, like within the last 24 months, where I'm like,

man, Richard, I wish you had been more forward. I wish you had talked about it. I wish you had asked for X instead of being so subtle and implying it. And I try to go for that subtle, elegant thing, which sounds really nice. I think part of that's actually being shy. Yeah. And I am ferociously competitive with myself, but sometimes the clues that you put outwardly are too subtle to be heard. Or someone's just talking louder than you.

Yeah, exactly. And, and that's, that's actually more and more the case, I think. So, um, I would have told myself to have been much more forward. And what about at 30? So let's, let's put a time mark on that. Where were you at 30? So at 30, um, my daughter had been born four months prior. I had the best wine job in the world.

I was getting fit, living in Aspen, learning a ton. Very, very focused on this master's only exam. And that, what would I do there? I would probably party a little less, which I, you, which I keep coming back to this thing of balance. And so you're an Aspen, and you party like a rock star. Yeah, Aspen's party town. Wow. What that means for me is I also want to be competitive on all these other levels, so you have to balance it with exercising like an Olympian.

And I did that. And so everything was very, very full. It was great. The exercise was crazy. The party was crazy. The sleep wasn't much family time was interesting and wonderful on so many levels, um, and not on others. And then you're working and you're studying for this exam, right? And so if, um, I don't believe in regret, I do not believe in regret. And so I don't want this to come across as that. But if I had that piece to redo, I would dial back some of the party. Not all of it.

I still love, I still party. I love it. But I would take some of that back and then reallocate that time elsewhere. Where would you allocate it? I probably would have started my first business sooner than later. It wasn't that far afterwards. I passed the master's exam and started my first wine company the next day. What did your first company do?

It was called Betts & Scholl. I founded it with an amazing guy, Dennis Scholl. He's really, really special. S-C-H-O-L-L? S-C-H-O-L-L. S-C-H-O-L-L. And Dennis, I mean, Dennis is amazing for a lot of reasons that you guys can look up and you should. He's really very, very, very driven also. We started making wine in Australia. Then we added France.

Then we added Napa Valley. Then we co-founded another company called Scarpetta, making wine in Italy. And in 2009, we sold all of it, Scarpetta, to an investor group and bets and Schultz who a small public company. That was a great day. Um, but yeah, you know, it comes back to that time function. I'm always thinking about, you know, I don't want to beat myself up over something where I see an inefficiency in my past, but I, you know, if you have to do over, I would try to get rid of those

inefficiencies. Hmm. What do you think are things that many people do automatically or well, I'll leave it at that. What are the things that a lot of people do automatically or assume they have to do that they should question. Go to college. Holy shit. Like, I went to college and I learned to, I mean, I went to Occidental. I made the Dean's List. Not the good Dean's List. I made Dean Knauer's Blacklist. What did you do to earn a place on the Blacklist?

Oh, a bunch of D's and F's and I partied. I was just, I mean, I was in LA. I was a long ways from the beach, but, you know, like take a kid from the desert and stick him in the city, and he loves the ocean. I grew up on, you know, also in the ocean almost every weekend in Mexico with my family. So I spent, you know, five days a week riding waves and not in class. So that was fantastic. I wouldn't take that back.

I learned a ton, and I learned it about myself. It wasn't so much like, you know, I don't know a whole lot about Macbeth, and I don't care, and I don't feel bad about it, but I learned a lot about Richard Betts, and that was really, really meaningful. I don't think I need to go to a liberal arts school and spend as much money as I did, which was all alone, so on and so forth.

You pay it back and deal with it. But I don't think that that was necessarily the only path to achieve that whatever level of self-awareness was achieved by spending that time there. If you hadn't gone to college, how do you think your trajectory would have been different? I think I look on the bright side, I'm hopeful that it would be those, um, be more abbreviated. So those inefficiencies in time, I think that some of those would have gone away. Uh, you know, probably would have been useful to go volunteer somewhere and just work, um, you know, for, for good cause and come back and you develop that self-awareness, you'd be thankful for so much. Um, and you would have avoided some of

those distractions. Although I don't know, Tim, like, I don't know if, if the need to like hit the wall is genetic or not. Like I definitely had a need to hit the wall, hit it hard. Hit the wall in what sense? Yeah, just find the guardrails, be it with substances, with grades, with significant others, with physical things, or you could have died.

Yeah. So those finding those guardrails is important, however you find them. Being at a fancy school facilitated a whole lot more fucking off. Yeah. Got it. Which sounds sort of counterintuitive and strange, but you're in this isolated bubble.

Yeah, sure. You're not facing the real world. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, until you get out and you face your loans. But you're really not facing the real world. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, until you get out and you face your loans, but you're really not facing the real world. So I don't think that was super productive. What would you put on a billboard if you could have a billboard anywhere?

Oh, it advertised my ninth grade class, Love Yourself. Yeah. There's a book that helped me quite a bit with that called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. It's got a very scary cover. And he does! Yeah, of this guy with a gun against his head with a heart.

It's by Kamal Ravikant, who is the brother. He has the best hair in the world also. You should look up Google Images. Kamal Ravikant, I wish I had his hair. But his brother was also interviewed on this podcast, Naval. Any other, well, first of all, I want to segue to, obviously, the book that is right here in front of me, The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All. Whiskey with an E, W-H-I-S-K-E-Y.

Given its country of publishing, in this case. Yeah, exactly. And what are people going to find in this book? You know, your booze before you choose. Exactly. You're going to find democracy is essentially it. I think, I think the role of the critic has never been less important.

I really believe that, you know, it's one thing to curate something, but it's another thing to prescribe something. And I'm really interested in helping people enjoy their lives. We don't do it with stuffed shirts, no ascots, no talking down to people, no fancy language, none of that, none of that matters. I mean, it's certainly not inclusive. All those things do is sort of intimidate and make it exclusive. So much like the wine book, um, my co-creators, uh, Crystal English Saka and Wendy McNaughton, and I have tried to, um, apply a methodology to knock whiskey off the pedestal and say, look, this is it. It's not that hard. This is what goes in it. This is what makes it taste

the way it does. And then decide which pieces you like and put those back together to find the drink that's going to make you smile. And that's the key. You have some beautiful, I mean, the format is beautiful. I mean, the layout. You guys are a hell of a team. I mean, Crystal obviously is amazing. Wendy, just an incredible artist. And for instance, there's a two-page spread here.

It's Richard naked laid out on a bear rag. No, I'm kidding. It's the language of the label in the United States and everywhere else. And it's this bottle split in half and it allows you, it shows you in a very graphic way or very visual way how to make sense of labels. And then you have, I haven't explored this yet, but I'm excited to, the map to your whiskey desires. Exactly. So can you explain this? Yeah. So once you've looked like an astrological chart,

but it's not exactly, essentially the book is it's 20 pages, 10 spreads, um, hard cardboard, hard cardboard pages. So it's that kid's book feel except for adults, obviously.

And when you scratch and sniff your way through it, you understand, okay, this is what the different grains smell like. Next, this is what the different wood components smell like. Finally, this is what place smells like. This is what the place where the whiskey is made and how it's aged imparts to the different whiskeys. So you've scratched and sniffed your way through this thing, and now you put them back together. So you start in the middle, and the first question is, do you want it spicy? Okay. Well, I'm guessing you probably don't because you didn't go for this rye. But you do like the malty thing, right?

So then I end up heading outward. This looks like a series of concentric circles. It's kind of like a choose your own adventure map to finding your ideal group of whiskey. Exactly. And as you travel from question to question, from inside to outside, then you end up with your selection of whiskey to start with. And what's really cool, I didn't notice until right now, is they traverse a spectrum from mix slash rocks to sip to sip slow. Exactly. So like this last guy that we had would be in the sip slow category. Slip slow, exactly.

So cool. Yeah. So, so cool. Well, dude, this is fantastic. Thank you. Everybody should check this out. I have given away the scratch and sniff guide that Richard and his co-creators put together for wine many, many times. And I'm very excited about this because as insecure as I was around wine, I could bullshit my way through it. But I could never bullshit my way through whiskey.

And this actually gives you more than bullshit. It gives you a very solid fundamental understanding, not only for yourself, but that you can explain to other people. So you should definitely check that out. Richard Betts, B E T T S. Where can people find you on the interwebs and so on?

At yo bets. Yo bets. Yeah. Yo bets. Y O B E T T S. And that's true for everything. Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram, so on and so forth, Gmail. So people can holler at you and say hello on Twitter. Yep. At YoBets, Y-O-B-E-T-T-S. Is there any ask, recommendation, suggestion that you have for the people listening that is not related to the book? I love that. Well, first of all, I'm psyched you're listening. That's a really big deal my you know i mean i i can only speak from personal experience and that's

uh to be candid that's been the biggest touch point is that you see i'm still struggling with it it's the biggest thing that i've i've really worked on over the last decade. I mean, my whole life. Being candid, meaning being direct. And with each other, with yourself. That's really where it starts. Sure.

Love yourself to love others. But be candid with yourself, then you can be candid with others. But obviously, we're all getting older. I live in a business of excess excess and I want to get old gracefully. So I can't lie to myself and say, Oh, you're in good shape or, Oh, you did the pushups yesterday or whatever, you know, like be honest with yourself. Like, look, dude, get up and do them, you know, or it matters. You have to, um, or Hey, look, you know, maybe you're not being as good a partner as you can be to your partners. Like, you know, wake up and think about how to

be a great partner. Um, which generally means, you know, what's the mission of the partnership? Um, and, and do that or any, you know, there are a million examples in all of our lives if we look around and it's a matter of like, what can we do better? That's it. What can you do better? Be candid with yourself and others. I love it. Richard, this is fantastic. I am feeling this delicious set of adult beverages that you've laid before me. Right on. I've been sipping two of them. And then we had the Take Tsuru, and then this was the Edredaur Tenure. Delicious.

So everybody, check it out. Also visit YoBets everywhere on the interwebs. And you can find the show notes, as always, links to everything that we talked about at four hour workweek.com all spelled out, click on podcast or just four hour workweek.com forward slash podcast. You can also find every other episode and all the show links and shown as associated with those. And as always,

thank you so much for listening until next time. Bye.