Memorable Wine Experiences and Stories

Oh hey, it's the tic tac that you dropped on the sidewalk that you're afraid someone might mistake for drugs and then be disappointed. Allie Ward and welcome to the world of wine. So analogy. It can be spelled with an O before the E or not. We're not in Britain. We're not gonna pretend we are, so we're dropping the O. That's how you spell it in the country that I'm in. But either way, it comes from the Greek for wine and an anal ogist. It's fully something you can major in and become degreed in is schooled in the science of wines or the study of the nature or qualities or varieties of wine. So we are serving up two glasses of it this episode with a world renowned semmelier and winemaker. And then next week we're going to talk to a pair of married winemakers and ethnologists who cover more of the behind the scenes of what it's like to run a winery. So consider this first one kind of a how-to on enjoying and understanding and appreciating wine and reading labels and faking your way through a wine list or not, and add a chill or not chill with your wines. So this allogist is someone I've been eyeing for so long, and their schedule is bonkers, but it was so worth the wait. At the very start of their career as a Sammelier or a wine steward, they were named Best Young Sammelier. They began working with the chef Thomas Keller, becoming his head , Sammelier. We'll talk about why that's a huge deal. They founded their own mouton noir wines, meaning black sheep, but later rebranded to Maison Noir. We'll talk about that too. And they're an author of the book, 99 Bottles, a Black Sheep's Guide to Life Changing Wines. So we will get to that way of life in just a moment, but first just a quick thank you to patrons at Patreon.com slash ologies who support the show for as little as a dollar a month and submit questions for the olistds. Thank you to everyone spreading the word about our kid-friendly spin-off called SMLOGES, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, which are shorter and classroom-friendly, G-rated versions of Ollogies episodes. Uh, we won't be having one for this one, obviously, but thanks to everyone supporting our merch from OllieGesMerch.com and tagging Ollogies Merch Ollogies Merch on Instagram so we can repost you and thanks as always to folks who leave reviews for all the cheese, which help us so much. I read them all. I was so touched to see your responses to last week's Oops All Secrets wall-to-wall uh confessional episode. Thanks for listening. So glad we just got to hang out. Well, we've finished this episode. 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We'll chat about red versus rose versus orange versus white wines, food pairings, wine glasses, how to open a bottle without a corkscrew, how your favorite wine got its name, judging a wine by its label: wine snobbery, aeration, decanting, to chill or not to chill, and what those legs are, with author, winemaker, Sammelier, and Enologist Andre Houston Mack. Oh . Um hi. First time . I'm so glad you're here. Hey. I'm excited to be here. Hold on, I gotta pour up. I just got off the plane. Oh man. You know, so we got a little sorry. You know, I'm not rude. I would offer you some, but I have a watered down diet Dr. Pepper, which sucks. There you go . Comparatively. Drink 'em if you got 'em. Mm-hmm . What are you drinking? A little bit of um Shinin Blanc uh tank sample from one of the venues we work with. You work with seven, thirteen, how many vineyards do you work with? Uh we work with like quite a few. On an average here, maybe sixteen, seventeen. It just depends. We get our choice to pick between both of them. But yeah, we make quite a bit of wine. So you're a Psalm and a winemaker. You know, I mean I got into wine, so I was somewhere and then that next transition for me was really wanting to continue to learn about wine outside of the full walls of the restaurant. And I felt like if I could make my own wine, I could continue to learn, but also I could be an entrepreneur. And so yeah, I started this company back in 2007. And this is Maison Noir. Maison Noir wine. We've been through some name changes. The alcohol business is pretty litigious. And if your wine brand even remotely sounds like another wine brand by accident, you can expect multi-generationally wealthy vineyards to lawyer up. But his name is now secure. And Andre isn't a stranger to the cutthroat world of business and rich people. He worked in the financial sector for a while, fielding calls about stock prices, but cubicle life was not for him. I think the moment that was just lost for me was when just more like I'd love to interaction with people physically like you know being able to like talk to them, read body language, walk up to a group of strangers. And that part right there was the part that kind of made me think, ah, it's time to go. Like maybe I want to do something else. And then when the gigantic bank he worked for merged with another, a door opened or an escape hatch padded with a little extra money. So they didn't need our department anymore. we So could reapply or we could take severance and leave. And that felt like the right opportunity for me. Maybe this is totally off course, but were you drawn to some of the storytelling with each wine? I feel like every wine has like a personality and a history and who loves it and where it's going. Like was that constant learning part of it for you? Yeah, I mean, well it's the whole idea of um you know, it's history , biology, chemistry. And then the new part was telling the stories about what made these wines great. The local people made the local wines to go with the local food. And so hence you hear me say lots of times, you know, if it grows together, it goes together. Oh, I love that. It was just such a fascinating time. Like learning something new, being able to dive into it, giving it your everything, every waking moment, and then being able to go to work, go to a restaurant and apply those things that you learned. You mentioned personalities for so many years as a sawman, like an expert. Do you ever see like different personalities gravitating toward different wines? Can you clock someone where you're like this is gonna be like a thick bodied red or this person's definitely a rose early see I'm I'm gonna still clear that okay . Yes. Okay. And what I was saying is mainly is because we knew them, but there were definitely types. No, that's what's great about wine. It's like um wine was about the moment. You know, this is what I tell people. I said, your relationship with wine is not about monogamy. Well, it shouldn't be. Mine isn't. Mine's about exploring and tasting everything. And then not define a soulmate. It's just to define different wines that you like for different occasions. Mm-hmm. You know, it's like, oh, so I'm going to this restaurant. I like to have this with this. Oh, well, you know, well, we're going to an Italian steakhouse. You know, I want Brunello, right? It's Italian steak wine. You know, I'm gonna choose a different wine that I would choose if I was going to the beach and we were having oysters, right? That to me is the fun part about wine. It's like dressing up. It's like an accessory that you bring, right? You go to the beach, you wear a certain attire, you bring certain things. You might bring certain things to eat on the beach. So all of those things to me, what's always just fascinating because it was like it's it's how you tell a story. I could tell you more about a situation, less about the people coming in and like looking at their shoes, their watch, their clothes, whether they had a dress shirt on with a with a fleece on top, right? With dress pants on, right? But more I like to look at like, oh, we're going to this place. So this is what we should bring. I like this for a backyard barbecue. Depending on who's there. You know what? Let's bring a larger format. You know, maybe not as expensive, just you know, bigger bottles show more festivity in that way. And it's about sharing. So I don't know. I just like the idea of uh the social aspect of wine too, right? It is the conduit. It's the gel that brings us all together. Yeah. Wine should be, you know, like 20%. It's the it's in the background. It sets the mood, the theme . Any more than that, you know, then it becomes a wine tasting or a wine dinner or somewhat obnoxious. I'm not against any of those things. I've been in those rooms. I like to be in those rooms. But I think, you know, most of the time when we're talking about wine and outings, you know, wine's there to set the mood. You know, you've been a psalm at French Laundry, Thomas Keller's restaurant, which is I've never even been, I've I've known like three people who have gone. It's such a destination, like a bucket list restaurant. So Chef Thomas Keller is behind New York's per se and Northern California's the French laundry, which is a confusing name for a food establishment. But the building outside of Napa was a closed cleaning business in ye olden times. But both the French laundry and per se have been opened three Michelin stars and various James Beard Awards. Thomas Keller's like uh Meryl Streep level of honors uh in the restaurant business. A meal, for example, will set you back at minimum five hundred dollars a person. And getting a table has been described by restaurant goers, I looked on Reddit as Taylor Swift Era's tour levels of difficulty. That is verbatim. Just refreshing a web page crossing your fingers on the first of the month for the following month at promptly 10 a.m. You can try for a spot at the French laundry. But diners recommend that you alert your credit card company that an unusually large purchase may be coming through. If you're like, hell no, never. Gas is seven dollars a gallon. You can check out Thomas Keller's cookbooks from the library for free. And his roasted chicken recipe is like the gold standard for poultry. But yes, imagine. Just imagine being the person who knows and recommends wine to diners there. My intestines buckle. Just imag ining the stress. What's the training like to become a sommelier like at that high a level? Uh it's really intense. Yeah. I think a lot of people you stay there long enough. But people say a common thing you heard, it's like they made me into the person that I am. And a lot of those experiences, they're young people. I was young, uh, you know. It's interesting to say that, but like somewhat your values, what you should value or not, or or just the mentality. But this is a place that offers you discipline that's intense. You know, I up until that point, I had always associated hard work with like your back having to hurt. Uhhuh. You know what I mean? It was like back breaking work. Now it's that too, but like what also what you realize is that it's like the mental uh load was heavy. That part was intense. Uh where hyper alert, like just making sure that everything went well. Like you're supposed to be on alert, so the guests experience is uh seamless. But it was intense. I mean, for like New York, I mean they hired a famous retired ballerina that teaches how to walk with grace through the dining room. Wow. Wow. Or like you know, passing feathers and doing the mignonette um and training. And so, you know, it was a lot of that, like a lot of information, understanding things, but we don't need to know why. Why does that work well here? Why does the farmer do it that way? And hindstein, it was it's funny because you're saying it was like one of the most memorable experiences I ever had. But then it's also like , yeah, there's a little, I wouldn't say trauma in that way. It's just kind of like basic training. When you go through something some training, things that are that are hard and they're supposed to be, right? They're supposed to be uncomfortable because the standard is so high. You know, they used to have the saying there, and it's like work to impress the person that you work side by side with because there's nobody in the world that's in it like you are and any guest that walks through the front door will be blown away if you can blow your peer away. And it was kind of that thing. Not a competition in that sense, but more of a a bond to say that that we're gonna push each other each day to be the best and push our way to perfection, which is something that y is unachievable. I mean, that's the Ivy Leaks, you know, you don't get much higher in America, especially. But when it comes to global wines too, you worked in Nap a as well, you've got a lot of wineries that you work with and you're a venture, you know, a lot of places in Oregon. Can you explain a little bit? And I know this is like a huge question, but imagine that you have never tasted wine or you're a kind of person that like opens up a wine list and like starts sweating. Can you explain a little bit of what to look for in California versus French, maybe versus Spanish wines. What's some broad strokes? If you know nothing. Yeah. I guess kind of the easiest way to do it is just uh break it. Like in the wine world, we talk about new world versus old world. Okay. Oldld Wor is you know, Western Europe. So you look at Western Europe, the traditional wine grown regions and Spain. Uh UK would be included in that. And then you look at what New World is. So New World is North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand. Okay. Old world leaves with not fruit, but what more with like what they call tiroir, more of the taste of the land. So it's more you know, earthy kind of flavors and those kind of things that you taste first, and then there's fruit. And New World leads with fruit. So generally, if you put your nose in the glass, it's gonna be fruit. So thinking about New World, New World is a lot warmer. The warmer the grape-grown region is, the hotter it gets, hotter it gets , the riper it gets, more sugars can be translated into alcohol. Right. So there's that that kind of pendulum, like the higher sugar levels will give you more alcohol. So you have ripe grapes and then you introduce yeast. Yeast eat the sugar, kind of have that Pac-Man, and then they poop out alcohol, right? So you see that little trail. And so you have more more sugar means you have more potential for alcohol. More potential for alcohol means more weight and body on the palate is how it's transcribed. Like the how you feel it. So O where wines tend to be lower in alcohol, more acidic, right? They have acid. So acid is an amplifier, right? You um accentuate acidity on the sides of your tongue. So if your sides of your tongue start to tingle or you start to salivate, that means the wine is high in acid. So what you have in old world wines is they leave with acid, new world wines lead with fruit and ripeness, which some people perceive as sweetness, but not sweet. Okay. So when you divide it that way, that's how you know you can say, okay, if I'm looking at wines from California or from South America, Chile, Argentina, those are ty wines are going to tend to be more fruity and more ripe and more alco Old world wines, France, Germany, Italy, those wines are from cooler climates which don't have as much sun, so they have lower potential alcohol, so lower alcohol, more acidity, and then they tend to have a little bit more nuances in the flavor. So you're thinking about mushroom, you're thinking about like mineral, gravel, like all those things you hear people say, those tend to lead in old world wines versus in new world wines, even though you find them in both. But that's the generality that I find that really kind of helps people break down such the vast world of wine. And if you need just a quick primer about how wine got into your body and how long it took, you can think at least 8,000 years, according to UPenn biomolecular archaeologist, Dr. Patrick McGovern, who has been called the Indiana Jones of ancient alcohol. The whole process is sort of mag ical, is what he told National Geographic in 2011, saying you could even call fermentation the first biotechnology. And sadly, Dr. McGovern, I just looked him up. He passed away last August at the age of eighty, but not before securing like hero status among fellow fermentation scholars who, according to his New York Times obituary, refer to themselves as drinkologists I'm sorry, as an old geologist, uh, drinkologist sucks shit. And I'm sure they wouldn't mind me rebranding them to paleoenologists. Just change your business cards. Forget drinkology ever happened. But if you're hungry and you want to break bread with your wines of antiquity, we have a gastroegyptology episode on making sourdough bread using ancient yeast from Egyptian tombs. We also have a zymology episode about brewing beer. But if you want to start with alcohol drinking ologies, you may want to listen to our melatology episode about bees. Since the first hooch that was ever cultivated may have been mead or like fermented honey water. And is it actually honey wine? Because sometimes it's called honey wine. Nope. No grapes. So honey wine is a misnomer. Wine by definition is fermented grape juice. And most wines are made from this species called Vitas vinifera. And wine making grapes are small, thick skinned, and really tart. They look like dusty blueberries compared to a big thinner skinned table grape that you would eat. But both are typically from the same species, which can have up to 10,000 different cultivars. Also, you can't just plant a wine grape seed and then become a ventor in a few years. Them things are sliced, they're frankinfined onto hardier rootstock. So they gotta just keep like sowing limbs on essentially because the rootstock that they use is more bug resistant. And this is just like the secret truth behind apple trees from our pom ology episodes. And also, we got a lot of episodes. If you're curious about cider, we have a whole ciderology episode. But cider is not wine. So pardonnez-moi. And then you can go in and break into your nuances of you know, French red wines are different because of the different regions, so Bordeaux or kind of more, you know, brooding, more power in that sense. You know, more gravel, more like oak, barrel and aging. And then you look at something like further south in Burgundy, like Pinot Noir, it's a little bit more elegant. Pinot Noir is a thin skin, great. It evolves in the glass. So lots of different styles, even just in one country. But generally speaking, the overall rule is that new world wines tend to be a little bit more on the fruit spectrum and more alcohol, whereas European wines tend to be a little less alcohol, more nuanced So to recap. So when it comes to like types of wines, generally speaking, and this was news to me, I didn't know. Old world wines are named for the region that the grapes were grown in. Like think burgundy or Chianti or Chablis, which is actually a Chardonnay grape, and famously champagne, which legally must be grown in the region of Champagne, France. And this is even written in the Treaty of Versailles. And also just Champagne, Illinois, we're not talking about you. Although there is a place named Champagne in Switzerland and they got away with calling their wine Champagne. They're like dee people won't know but the EU gave them a wrist slap and they conceded that it was tricky of them and that they'd phase it out even though their sales when they did that dropped by 75% and you know people working at those companies were sweating, but what can you do? France wins. So old world wines, you can look for them by region. And different regions tend to produce grapes and wines with different characteristics. Now new world wines like from America, Chile , Argentina, Australia, they tend to be named by the grape variety like Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, which is very popular red wine, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, and again, these tend to be more fruit forward with higher sugar in the grape and then higher alcohol content. Generally speaking, there are variations. I love you, but don't email me. What's with the swir ling in the glass looking for legs? Is that sugar content? It's alcoholic content. But what's interesting is it's less of that. So swirling the the glass here, like you see me doing, this is more about aeration. Oh so the wine has been in the bottle for you know maybe eighteen months or something like that. So you want to pour the wine in the glass and this helps with helping the wine open up. Right. So the glass is serves as a like a mini decanter that you can drink from. And so you pour the wine in and you swirl. And you see me doing this. A lot of times it's more of a nervous uh tip, right, than anything else. But this is like uh, you know, so it's just aeration, letting air get into the wine. So oxygen is the enemy to wine, right? Wine is a living, breathing thing. And as soon as the cork is pulled or the top is open, air starts to attack the wine. It starts to break down the wine and start to soften the wine. But to a certain point, the wine will deteriorate and become vinegar depending on how long it's left out. And so vinegar, you can note the vine, even in the word, which I never clocked before, means wine turned sour. And that's because it involves a double fermentation. Like in wine , yeast gobbles up the sugars and uh spits out alcohol, but the second fermentation happens when bacteria gobble up the alcohol and make acetic acid. And oxygenation in general can enhance or it can damage a wine, depending on the wine and the amount of exposure to oxygen. So oxidation can happen in the winemaking process, and we'll talk about that more next week. It can also happen in the bottle. It can happen once the bottle is open, and certainly after a bottle's been opened, enjoyed, and rec orked if you didn't finish it. So some people close up uh half empty or half full bottle, depending on how you look at it, with a vacuum pump, sometimes with mixed results. And there are even gadgets to replace the oxygen in the bottle with an inert gas like argon to keep it fresher. But let's go back to what happens when you uncork or unscrew a bottle and pour it into a decanter, which is like a serving pitcher for wine , or just straight into your glass. And then you swirl around uh feeling very fancy. And so what you see too, what you can see now here is you see what people call the legs. And you start to see how it looks like tears are forming. Right. But what it is, is it's alcohol. It's alcohol is it's evaporation. So what you have is the alcohol is being evaporated. So the overflow is the alcohol coming up, pushing up being evaporated and on either side of that is the tears that fall down. So what that really tells you, people are like, look at those legs. Generally what you're looking for is how fast or slow they fall versus if they are any or not, or they look good. So the legs that you're seeing dripping down the inside of the glass are actually arms of alcohol reaching up, if you will . And when it comes to how much alcohol is in the wine, you can swirl it around, you can think about it, you can deliberate mentally, but you can also just look at the label for ABV or alcohol by volume. There's just numbers, which it feels less like being a cool witch looking at tinctures, but some people like math. So that's the whole idea. And what that tells you is the slower they fall, the more alcohol. Got it. It's one of those things too where you can just pick up the bottle and look at it the back. Right. You know what I mean? But it's just one of the things in mine that I find to be, you know, trivial, but like fun. I think I have a fun time with a lot of those kind of things just in the business too, you know, the small snippets of what they know about wine. And they can be fun moments to really kind of educate and let people understand like, oh, this is the reason why it's that way. And you know, some of it's folklore, some of it isn't. But here's the real kind of truth behind it. I feel like I see red wine decanted to breathe more than I see white. What's up with that? Yeah, so that's true. Um this is a great segue. You're good. You're good. I like this. Thank you. So we were just right now we were talking about the evaporation and we were talking about alcohol and we're talking about how oxygen starts to eat away at wine and make it deteriorate, soften it up, right? And it's the tannin. So what you have is in red wine. So let's back up a little bit. You have white wine and you have red wine. So the color actually comes from the skin, but not the juice inside. Okay. And so what you do is it's you soak most red wine grapes to extract the color, you soak the juice on the skins, right? So you just crush it and it's called like a you know do cold soak and you're extracting color. And while you're extracting color from the skins, you're also uh extracting tannin. So tannin is like uh the compound that sucks the moisture out of your mouth. So people who enjoy black tea understands that, you know, that dryness that you get in the inside of your mouth from tea. That's the same thing. And that's a preservative in wine. And those can be bitter, you know, they're rough. And when you decan a red wine, there's a couple of reasons why you decan a wine, but normally what you're talking about is you're decanning a red wine to let it breathe, right? And so let it breathe, but also you're helping break down the wine slowly. So it could be a young wine, a youthful wine that needs a little time in in a a decanter to kind of just um soften the edges if you will makes the wine a little bit more palatable uh less tannic and so what you're doing is you're allowing the oxygen to come in and generally you do it on a a wide surface. So you know a decanner that has a wide surface. And so yeah, a decanter is something from which you decant. Something you pour from. It's a pitcher, but with expensive grape juice. You can picture one of those science chem lab flasks. The Erlin Meyer is a flask that you would see in clip art to mean like science. And it has a flat, wide bottom and a skinny rim. Rumor has it that even one of the world's most esteemed wine critics, the late John Michael Broadbent, enjoyed an Erlenmeyer flask as a decanter. But heads up, if you're like, we got some of those at work, don't do not smuggle one out of the lab. You do not know what it's been used for. And Dawn dish soap may work on oily birds, but it's not enough to save you if you got a weird flask with some crazy stuff in it. So get a new one or just go to home goods and find a wine decanter on sale. So something like this. You see how that has a broad? Yeah. You want more surface to air ratio so the wine can be exposed and be softened. Another reason why you decant red wine is generally because it's an old wine. You would decan it in a smaller decanter, more narrow. And what you're doing here is you're removing the sediment as a wine ages, some of the pigment of the color and particles start to fall out of the wine and it's it produces this fine kind of sediment on the bottom of the bottle. It's not that it will hurt you, just kind of interrupts the the experience of drinking wine. Right. Cause it can get grainy or gritty. For me, like I can't drink orange juice with pulp in it. You know what I mean? Like it's like I don't know if I'm supposed to swallow or chew. You know, those kind of things. It's weird. So basically you're decanning the wine just to remove the particles and the sediment from the bottle into a drinking vessel that you can pour when the wine throws sediment is what they call it. Normally when they have that, the wine is old. So at this point, air is definitely detrimental to this wine. And it can have a shorter period of time that it can be exposed to oxygen. And you want to be able to drink the wine in that window, depending on how old. Sometimes it could be 45 minutes. So for younger wine, you'd pour from the bottle into that decanter or pitcher that has a nice w ide base so it has some air contact and then some of the alcohol and those edges get aerated away. Now for an older wine you'd use a more narrow decanter. So it didn't have as much air contact, but it would help you pour off the sediment stays at the bottom. But okay, so decanting is just for red wines, right? And then you see some people decant white wine. You know what I'm saying? And generally when you see people decanning white wine, it could be to help break down the wine. Maybe there's a little bit of skin contact. But generally you see some white wines being decanted for temperature control. So maybe the wine came straight out of the, you know, your refrigerator or your Eurocov or whatever, and you want to pour that bottle into a decanter, get more surface to air ratio to help cool the wine down and get it to the right temperature. Just a side note, a Euro cave is one of those huge, nice wine fridges. I don't have one. And temperature-wise, storage-wise, obviously red wines served lower than room temperature, but white wines tend to be cooler. Is there a reason for that? I'm sure there is. Possibly be any logic. Well, I mean that has really been a you know somewhat of an epidemic in this country, I would say is that a lot of the red wines are being served too hot and the white wine's too cold . So in a white wine when it's served too cold, there's no nuance. It's like a numbing effect. You know, I remember going when I was in college when I discovered that if you put tequila, you would put like the shitty tequila in the freezer and you put it in the freezer and it and it would it would never freeze. Yeah. Right. So how you know if your roommate was drinking it and fill it with water, you'd put it in the freezer and the bottle would crack, right? So we had we've seen that happen a couple of times. But so it takes the bite off. So when you drink tequila that's been in the freezer, it numbs it. So you don't taste anything. It just goes down, which is very dangerous. Um might add. Right. But you don't want to make it too easy for Jose. Oh my god. Yeah. And then and then you have it and you're like, okay, but there's no nuance. You don't get the pepper and all the things that you taste in tequila or any spirit or any wine. So it numbs it. So the fact that you might have paid $200 for that, you know, to have that great white burgundy experience. But if it's served too cold, then you don't even get to pick up on the different nuances that actually tell that story of that wine and set it apart and the reason why you paid that amount of money for it. And as the temperature hits closer to the sixty degree Fahrenheit mark, we can taste more of the wine. And for more on that, we have a whole goostedology episode that goes into way greater detail on how aroma influences the taste of things and yeah, how your whole taste receptor system functions. Also, this just a heads up, drinking an iced beverage with your meal means that your food tastes less flavorful. And I am an ice queen. This is news to me. So do not over chill your white wines. 43 degrees works well for a sparkling white wine, but on the other end of the white wines, like a Chardonnay, some experts say is best around fifty degrees Fahrenheit or ten Celsius. But your refrigerator is probably set to around thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. So let it sit on the counter a few minutes. Like let it uh de chill. A white wine should not be icy, Andre says. And so with red wine, what you have is when red wine is served too warm, and so we had this notion when we said room temperature. Well, that was room temperature, really meaning cellar temperature maybe 40, 50 years ago. So not to get anybody upset here, you can call it what you want. But the earth is a lot warmer place than it used to be. And so room temperature.nyone who gets pissed at that is like, are you kidding me? Don't worry. It's a science podcast. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm just checking. I'm just checking. I ain't trying to mess nobody's audience up. You know what I mean? That should not be controversial, dude. It should not be. It's a fact. So while the ideal wine cellar is fifty-five degrees or twelve, thirteen degrees Celsius, the temperatures of cellars, yes, they're rising. I fact check this. So that being said, room temperature is a lot different than it used to be. Red wine should be served somewhere around 66. I would say sixty five to sixty six, you know, under seventy for sure, is how I like to drink them. And it's funny because a lot of people are like, Wow, it's really have a chillin'. It's like, no, that's how you're supposed to drink it. When a red wine or any wine is too hot, especially red wine, it is situ ates the alcohol. So all you get is this burning effect of the wine tasting like it has way much too much alcohol. So it amplifies the alcohol and that doesn't allow for a great wine drinking experience. Ah. Well, you know, that reminds me that the thing that's gonna hit your nose is gonna be what is kind of emanating off and when it comes to glasses, when it comes to like the glass you're drinking of has a wider base and a more narrow nose to it. I always think of uh did you ever watch oh my god Olivia Pope? What was that show? Oh yeah, yeah. Um why can't I remember it right now? Oh shit. We did a whole thing. Scandal, scandal, scandal. Scandal, scandal. Scandal. Yes. Yes. It's handled. Olivia Pope had like a goldfish bowl on a stem. And also red wine, she always had like the best white cashmere coats. And I'm like, the fact that she could keep that stuff clean. I was like, good on her. I couldn't. But you know, I think about those big globe glasses and red wine and these narrower glasses. I'm sure you've seen the meme of like a heavy stemware that if you are at a restaurant and you get a glass of wine and like heavy stemware, you know it's gonna be garbage. Like if the glass is not absolutely like a Faberget egg level of fragility. It's gonna be a shitty glass of wine. But where does the stemware come in and the experience of what you're drinking it in? You know, that was really funny because um that was definitely kind of the mentality that I took when I I opened a a little wine bar here in my neighborhood back in twenty twenty. And I remember I think I was talking to my mother and I was like, no, no, no, you want to set the tone right at the beginning. So they might look at the wine by the glass page. But I just want people to know when they touch the glass, they'll understand why we don't serve nine dollar glasses of wine. Right? You know what I mean? It's like, oh no, it is on, right? Right. Even though, even, even though the the glass might cost more than the bottle of wine you just bought, but that's okay because it's a tool . A wine glass is a tool, right? Yeah. So you want like to have the most seamless transition from the wine in the glass to your palate. And so what you want is a very thin rim glass that comes to the mouth. Uh these are some of my favorite hair. And he's drinking a Chenon Blanc. And the glass he's holding, it's very fetching. It's this angular stemmed one. It's elegant. It's modern. Think of like a tall triangle on a stick with a very thin stem held so that the wine doesn't warm in your hand, which is nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And sure, there were really nice glasses like this for I checked like $16 on sale at CB2, where a higher quality one can cost around 50 bucks just for one. There are so many wine glasses. Some purists stick to very specific bowl shapes, like wide round ones, but say a champagne flute, those are tall and narrow to prevent the bubbles from fizzing off too quickly. But old champagne glasses were wider, that's because they had a hollow stem, which were a real bitch to clean, which is why people don't use them anymore. But like in the sixties, seventies, whatever, they'd have this hollow stem where the bubbles would keep going up, but they had a wider open face. Anyway, there's physics behind each glass, which is fun to deconstruct. Like evolutionary traits, like what's the why? There's almost always a why. And then you have a wide base. So you have a wide base, so you have more surface to air ratio, and then you have a more narrow top, right? And that's almost kind of like cone or that narrowing really helps direct the wine on the palate, but for as far as aroma, it's helping really direct it into your nose. You know, you want to inhale through your nose and then you want to exhale through your mouth, right? So you want to open up your olfactory sensors. So inhaling through your nose, blowing out through your mouth, not like this. You know, sometimes I say that people are like, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Andre takes like a good whiff. You know. And then you can constantly smell. You know, eighty percent of taste is uh actually smell. You know, I learned that through uh eating Brussels sprouts growing up as a kid. Um that was the magic trick. To plug up the the plug hole. And glasses can get really expensive. And to me, they matter and so they don't. So hey, I got this great bottle of wine. If I don't have anything else to drink it out of, it'll be a plastic cup or the bottle. Right. Ultimately, what the experience, ultimately is enjoying the wine. And that's contradictory in some ways because people will say, oh, well, if you drink it out of a shitty cup, it's not but ultimately the wine is supposed to deliver the pleasure. The tools and the things that you have around you are supposed to make those things easier to enjoy. And that's kind of how we looked at glassware. I even though like I'm a glassware fanatic, I like I have a whole bunch right here, but like I don't bring my own glassware to the restaurant. I'm not that kind of girl. Do some people do that? Do they open up like a briefcase like in pulpitchin and it's got like a special glass? It's handcuffed to the wrist. Yeah, they do. And in certain occasions, I understand it. You know, so in New York City, if you ever want to watch Sommelier's in the wild, yeah, yeah, you can go to this place, call it Wu's Wonton. And generally speaking, they're generally the people the table that's not all Asian, right? And there's huge tables with blazing Susan. The food is amazing. And then basically it's where we go and like we meet and hang out. You order this amazing food and everybody brings wine. So there'll be boxes of wine and then some people will bring their own glassware. And I feel like that is the okay occasion to do that. Right. That's a tool of the trade. And that's among peers. And uh you want to have the best experience with it. But speaking of tools of the tra de, I'm so curious. I can't even imagine how many bottles you've uncorked. What do you use to open them? Do you use a simple wine key? Are you one of those things where you know the the ones that look like hairy armpits that go or are you like an electronic wine opener? Like what's the gold standard? Okay, we'll work backwards. Electronic, absolutely not. Okay. There was a thing called the rabbit, but actually I think that term got taken over by another industry. when I say rabbit, I'm like they're confused. There's some confusion here. That's a different electronic. No, you can't open a bottle of wine with that one. Different episode. Different one. And I will say, use the corkscrew that fits you best. I know friends who use electric ones because their hands need some extra help. That's fine, of course. This is just some pretty inside baseball for Som s. And yes, the rabbit corkscrew looks kind of like if a garlic press had a curly proboscis. And the corkscrew that looks like um a head on top with two arms that have hairy armpits, that's called a wing corkscrew, where you screw the curly worm into the cork and then you jazz size the arms or the wings down to leverage out the cork. What does Andre think about those? So the jazzer size ones? Those absolutely not. Those are the ones that you always get in the Airbnb and you're like, fuck, and then you end up breaking one off. You know what I mean? Yeah. I call it the jazzer side job. And you're like, what's happening? Then then the also , which I love. And I have some stuff over there. Hold on a second. Hold on. So Andre is looking around his desk right now for a wine key that's like two pieces nestled together. A short handle with this two pronged fork. It looks kind of like a miniature roast carving fork with a corkscrew between those two tines. I'm back. Nice. We got it here. Okay. All right. So here, this is called the Duran. So this is a special key. Right. You see it here, right? And oh nice. All right. And so what's interesting about this one is that it's two wine tools in one. Uh and so what you might have seen before is something that looks like this. Oh yeah. It's like a two-pronged, yeah.ah Ye, it's like wolverine. Yeah, you definitely could kill someone, yeah, with that. And so this was called a uh butler's corkscrew. And they would take it and you wedge it between the the side of the cork and the bottle. And then you turn and turn and eventually you pull it out. So you see these all the time. Inexpensive. Kind of looks old school. Yeah. And my notion would be to sink it in like rattlesnake fangs, and that is not correct. You do not stab the cork, right? Yeah you do not Okay. You do not do that. And what makes this device different called the Duran is that it's the second piece. You screw it down in the cork and then you turn it all together. So when you use this, this keeps the cork intact. So you see a lot of these I fancy restaurants that have you know a really killer wine selection. Because that literal two pronged approach is helpful for long and old corks, which you know likely you're not gonna find it a TJI Friday happy hour. 'Cause time and place for everything, folks. But the most common wine opener, of course. And then generally speaking, what people use is what's called a waiter's corkscrew. Things that you've seen so many times before. You know, this one is called the pull tab. You know, you've seen these. You might see some people in restaurants. And then you might have seen something like this. And Andre pulls out what looks like a lovely little simplified Swiss Army knife with a corkscrew nestled between these two outfolding levers. This right here is Craig Hill and Andre Mack. Oh, I don't know that. This is yeah, this is the best wine key. Hell yeah. So I designed this with my friends down in um and Greenpoint and we design what we have thought as one of the best wine keys. So it's like the other wine key, but it it looks like half a pliers on one side. So yeah, so it it has that this ratchet system. Cool. I've never seen one of these. This is amazing. Just the small details in it that make it the best wine cake. Oh, it's beautiful. Let's say that you are on a beach, you're uh camping, someone has brought a bottle of wine, no one brought a corkscrew. What do you do in a pinch? Okay. So generally speaking, you know, I've seen some where they people take their shoe off and they put the wine, the base of the wine in the shoe, and then they kind of hammer it up against a tree or hard place. My thing when in doubt, push it in. Okay. Just push it in. Push it real good. So I've been in a hotel where I was trying to get into a bottle of wine. I just took the back end of my toothbrush and pushed it in. Nice. Right. Yeah. Get a stick. Yeah. Get a stick and just push it in. You know, see I've seen some people where they will maybe drill a screw in and then try to pull it from that or you know all kinds of different stuff. But ultimately I think on the beach, I feel like you're not enjoying you know an old bottle of wine. You know what I mean? It's like like when we remember earlier we talked about having a wine that kind of fits the activity. Yeah, yeah. So if it's not a screw cap and it has a cork in it, generally I would say just push it in. That cork is not really going to do anything to the wine. And you go ahead and you start to enjoy the wine. As one of the world's finest psalms, how do you feel about screw caps? I love them. Screw caps to me are just all about getting the party started it tells you what the wine is meant for you know a lot of those are like you know they're meant to be aged two to five years maybe that some of them can go longer but generally speaking screw caps are just a sign of like this wine is accessible and like um let's get with it. Awesome. Let's get the party going. Let's not slam this against a tree in our shoe. If you've forgotten. Yes, let's not do that. Okay. I have great questions from listeners uh who submitted approximately one million, but we'll ask you just a couple. All right. Next week we're gonna dive into more about caps versus corks and the whole backstory of how you make w ine and how it goes from the vine onto a shelf into your glass. But first let's donate to a cause of his choosing. And this week it's Food Bank for New York City, which is New York City's largest hunger relief organization. They also serve New Yorkers with SNAP assistance, personal finance support, connections to health support, and more to build self-sufficiency and create a lasting stability. So that again was Food Bank New York, and thank you to Andre for the heads up on them and the sponsors of the show who make these donations every week possible. Oh Mooncat. What are they? Selenology? Phel anology? Cellophelenology? I guess that would be the study of Mooncat. What is it? It's a nail lacquer collection. And if you're not familiar with Mooncat, all of their nail lacquers, they're essentially nail art in a bottle. They have a new collection, Deadly by Nature. Spring 2026. They have shades inspired by some of nature's most deadly and misunderstood flora and fauna, like the black widow spider, deadly nightshade, the inland Taip an, which is a deadly snake. They also have solar nail lacquers, which change color when exposed to sunlight, and all of their lacquers are vegan, cruelty-free, and 1-free. Also, I love anything science inspired or creepy because it makes me feel powerful. It's like magic on my fingers. They got a color called Werewolf's Bane and Death's Trumpet. Snake Venom, Bloodbender. I can't handle how cool they are. Mooncat, Deadly by Nature, you have my whole heart and all twenty of my phalanges. Oh, and you can discover the full collection now and you can shop Mooncat's semi-annual sale for twenty percent off at Mooncat.com. Sell a philanology. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Oligies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. 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Some events from history still don't have answers, and Dr. Harini Bot is a clinical pharmacist obsessed with the ones nobody can explain. Every Monday on the podcast Hidden History, she investigates medical oddities, vanished civilizations, mass hysterias, which are some of my favorite, and phenomena that keep repeating across centuries. So she digs into the evidence, she tells you exactly what she thinks happened, and she asks, what if it happened today? So follow Hidden History with Dr. Har iniBot wherever you listen to podcasts. So you never miss a mystery. Here's what I like: I like to think less and look better. Who doesn't want that? That's why every single time I record an ad for Quince, I'm like, guess what I'm wearing right now? You guessed it, I've got a quince sweater on. Why, Allie? Because everything looks nice, it's classic, it's high quality, I feel good, and I look put together. And Quince uses premium materials like 100% European linen, organic cotton, ultra soft denim. They have great linen pants, they have dresses and tops. They start at $30. They're just effortless. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories. They cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality and good craftsmanship, not brand markup. Every time I go on their website, I say, oop, that's something I could use. Also, great for gifts. So refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quince.com slash ologies for free shipping on your first order and 3 65 day returns. Now available in Canada too. So that's QUINCE dot com slash ologies for free shipping and three hundred sixty five day returns. Quince dot com slash olegies. Okay, so to submit questions for the ology just ahead of time, you can join via patreon.com slash ologies for as little as a dollar an episode and help support the show. And you can also see what ologies we're cooking up. But let's stick our nose into the mailbag . Let's savor your questions. They had some great ones and I feel like you are the person to answer them. Okay. Mish the fish, Cameron, Neen, Emily Stoffer, Ellen Durnal, Evan Davis, Orin Stanforth, Mary DeVoe, eating dog hair for a living, all want to know. Mish the fish asks, are wine food pairings bullshit? Cameron, why do some wines taste terrible with food, but great alone? Vice versa. Okay. So are they bullshit? I would say no. Like wine is there to make the food taste better. That's what have always looked at it. That's why you order the food first and then the wine. Oh. But to me, it's all about resetting your palate back to zero. Right. So you're having the wine. So for each bite tastes just like the first bite. Right. So you know we talk about palate fatigue. I guess the best way to do it is is um so you're eating a steak and the first bite is tremendous. Third bite, fourth bite, fifth bite, and now you're slowing down and you're like, uh, and now you put it in your mouth, it doesn't pop with the same flavor. It's not the same. And so you're like, okay, but you finish it anyway. And so what's interesting is what you realize is that if you look at a crude example, chewing a piece of gum. Chew a piece of gum, 30 minutes, start to lose flavor. You know, maybe the 10 minutes, your jaw is hurting, but it's lost all favor. Uh-huh. Maybe you put it on the side of your plate, and somehow, miraculously, 15 to 20 minutes later, that piece of gum ends up back in your mouth. That's nothing wrong with that. But it's like chewing already chewed gum that you chewed is okay. That's fine. That someone else has chewed, may maybe, maybe not, right? But but depends on how much you like 'em. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally totally totally but when you start to chew that gum at the beginning it has more flavor than it did when you took it out yeah meaning that there you experienced palate fatigue and that you the flavor was starting to dawn because it was fatigue and, then you put it back in, and not to say it has the same strength of flavor, but it does have some flavor in it. And so that's when you talk talk about eating. So introducing wine that helps your palate wash clean, it really helps set up the next bite. And so, how do you do that? You do that by comparing like flavors. You match like with like. So if you have a rich sauce with pasta or a rich cream sauce, you want to use you can do two different ways. So you can compare like with like. So you can go with a rich, creamy Chardonnay. So those two things balance yourself out and you stay at this high level of creaminess. Or you can do something that has a little bit more acid and a little bit more linear, right? So maybe an Austrian Riesling, right, that's angular and sharp that has tons of acid . So that acid's going to cut through the richness and the creaminess of that. And so there's a different style that's a contrasting. So you're contrasting to both of them are to neutralize the palate. So when you take another bite, it's the same So yes, sips of wine serve like uh putting your gum on the plate, taking a little break from one flavor to experience anew for the next bite. Also, if the gum thing, if that's freaking you out, you can listen to our disgustology episode about revulsion. And if you have contamination anxiety, you may enjoy our O C D episode for some strategies from one of the world's experts on that. Now, that might be a lot to think about when people are like, Well, shit, I just want to have a burger and a glass of cab. Well, you can do that too. And what's awesome about it is that it's an experience, much like enjoying art. Like you get to choose the art and like you get to explore looking at a painting and what it means. And I think that, you know, food and wine pairing is a is an art and pairing it together is an art form. So I think sometimes it's hard for other people that are new to it to kind of understand it. And it's interesting because when I first got into business, I was so confused by it. It was like the way those people talk about it, food and wine parenting, it's like the skies parted and cherubs came out and played trumpets, you know what I mean? Yeah. And so that has never happened to me. And so this is the way that I had always explained it to the staff. We had a whole episode on cheese with Kira from Own Your Funk, who's also I think she's New York based. She was great. We talked all about cheese and uh touched on wine pairings, but there's a lot lot of cheeses and a lot of wines. But okay, another type of wine we haven't talked about yet, but um Carlos Baracal, Greg Wallach, Kat Angeles, and Carol Young, and Yasmin Alu wanted to know about biodynamic. Carlos asked, what are biodynamic wine? Are they how wine was made a hundred years ago? I have two friends who are very, very into wine. One will not touch biodynamic wine. The other, it's her favorite thing on earth. And it's just so interesting. They're both kind of wine snobs in totally different ways. So I take their advice either way. But yeah, what's up with biodynamic? So when people talked about was it the way that wine was made back in the day? Some of it, right? So the whole idea is like when you talk about biodynamics, it's more about like letting the vineyard speak for itself, even if it stutters. Right. So you get where I'm going, right? So it's about lower intervention, regenerative farming , a really kind of hands off approach to making wine. So that's natural yeast. And sometimes when you use natural yeast to inoculate, meaning just the ambient yeast, sometimes they can get stuck. You know, there's lots of different things. But that is how wine was made back in the day. Whereas the traditional way is we're gonna help sure that it sings every single time the same way. Meaning that you lose some of the nuance to have consistency. Oh, got it. And that's what the traditional winemakers play with, and that kind of margin of how much do you get it to to be perfect every time the exact same way, no matter what vintage, and where to be hands off at. So the wine has those nuances and those things that you love in wine. Biodynamics is just you know it's a more holistic approach in that way, right? There's lots of faults with both things. So like in traditional, we'll use chemicals to farm because we want that cons istency. Where in biodynamics they don't use any kind of chemicals in that way. It's all about taking care of the vineyard, uh replenishing nutrients and fertilizing the soil in the way that you can really amplify what the vineyard is trying to say. Two different methods. I think biodynamic is you know what people are like, oh it's kind of funky. It's kind of weird. Like I think that's the first thing that people notice that's off-putting. But you know, I always say it's like beer. When you first had your first sip of beer, nobody's like, that was great. That was amazing. No. Yeah. You come through the back door typically when you start drinking coffee or you know, or alcohol, and then you start going, oh, okay. Just a side note. I went to Spain with my husband's family recently and natural wine not as popular there as it is in, say, California. One server said that they call the kind of funky, scrumpy aroma of natural wines, monkey's ass . All right, if you'd like to hear also more about scrump, you can see our cider ology episode. I myself enjoy notes of monkey's ass. But Gigi Nose wanted to know if you like drinking it, natural wine. And Timmy H said, is natural wine really that girl or is it just a trend? Natural wine is wine on the spectrum. On a spectrum from amazing too. And there's different levels, but like but when I say that, you know, obviously in all fun with that, but like and that sense is, you know, natural wine. We talk about it's a living, breathing thing. And that's when we say, even if it starts, it's like the natural part of it is how it's supposed to come out. You know, so like this is the thing. It's like I drink natural wine, but I don't drink the bad natural wines. So you see what I'm saying? That's the difference I think people don't understand. There's shitty wine within traditional, there's great wine and there's mediocre wine. And natural wine. There's shitty wine, there's mediocre, and there's great. Uh-huh. But both categories, I try to stay away from the shitty wines. So yeah, um, is natural wine that girl? I'm sure that you can find some girls. And if they're for you, you know? And some people, yeah, of course, people buy organic stuff because they think it's better for them, but some people buy it because it it's more of a way of life. It was a way that makes them feel. And so I think in in both those things, natural wine is just kind of new. So you thought maybe there's just red and white wines, right? No, there's more. There's so much more orange wine. I always wondered this is made from w white grapes and it keeps the sk ins in contact with the grape juice for a little longer than white wine. Red wine comes from red grapes that has a long period of skin contact. White wine, again, is from white grapes that have short skin contact and rose is from red grapes that have short skin contact. Also, I just want to take a moment. It's I want to acknowledge white Zinfandel. This is made from red grapes. Usually they would be turned into a Zinfandel red, but the skins have really short contact with the juice. And so white Zinfandel is actually technically a rose. It was made by accident at the Napa Sutter home winery in the 1970s. It's a sweet rose with fruity notes, not super expensive. It was all the rage for decades after its 1975 introduction. However, certain persons that I know have been shamed from enjoying a crisp chilled glass of white zin because they've been told it's passe . And I need those people who are listening, some of whom are named Fancy Nancy Ward, to know that their beloved White Zin is a rose and rose is again all the rage. Please enjoy what you enjoy. The coolest thing a person can do is like what they like and not care about trends of the moment. So if your name is my mom, have it the wh ites in. They didn't have the term orange wine back in like oh four. Yeah. In order for it to become a movement, it took people. And now I feel like it's settling into like, you know, it's not a trend. So it's clearly here to stay. You know, so everybody settling, and I think that 's great. So yes, it could be that girl, depending on I don't know. Depending on the one. Is she wearing shoes? I don't know. Yeah. But how's she treating it? Yeah, yeah, totally. How do you feel around her? There you go. Um I love f uh funky wine. I actually love it. But I like kombucha, so you know it's so funny because you know the American palette was all about sweet. And then slowly it changed with kombucha, sour beer, which I feel like both of those are kind of the gateway into something like natural wine in that way. I find it fascinating to look at and talk about. And obviously I'd like to enjoy wine. Yeah. Whether it's traditional or biodynamic or natural, if it's good, I want to drink it. I like a little scrump. I've I think it's tasty. Two more questions if that's okay from listeners. No worries. Yep. You mentioned a shitty bottle of wine, good bottle of wine, Dawson Chandler, Hester Dingle, Ehrlich Brammelkin, Gene Pompeo, Rye of the Tiger, Linia the Farmer, Carol Young, and Mag Zaroni. All these people want to know in Dawson Chandler's words, what makes a bottle of wine good in the eyes of wine enthusiasts, Hester asks, What makes a good wine? And do the price points actually increase with quality? Especially if let's say you're on a date and you're like, do I want to order the second most expensive wine? Do I want to cheap out? Where does the price point come in? Price point, like I like to say in mind, you you're supposed to get what you pay for. Okay. So then you're like, so what does that mean? Yeah. So generally speaking, you pay for what you get for like meaning that sometimes like everybody thinks some it's marketing. It's part of that, but part of it not, right? If it costs a million dollars an acre to buy that land, then that's gonna be you know another thirty-five thousand dollars to plant it. Then you gotta figure that for three years, you get fruit, but you can't use it for anything. So it's not until that fourth leaf that you actually so you already had it for four years. And then it's just the quality of the grapes. So generally with something like that, you're gonna get better quality. And what does that mean? Better quality means more nuanced, better fruit from how it's being grown. So if you want to know, okay, this bottle of wine is 20 bucks and this bottle of wine is 100 bucks, what's gonna be the difference is land cost, right? How much it costs? Does it spend time in oak barrows? Are they new? Oak barrows new, twelve hundred dollars. Whoa. Right? They stayed two years in there. They stayed two years in there. The shortcut that this bottle, the ten dollar bottle might do is wooden staves inside of a stainless steel. Some of them might teabag it with sawdust , right? Like right. I didn't even know that was possible. Yes. Wow. Okay. So there's lots of different things that give the flavor of it, but generally speaking, the quality of a high quality wine is that they're not going to use sawdust. They're going to use real barrels. And they're going to use re-or barrels each day each year. They're using the finest scrapes. Um, they're doing a lot of stuff, uh, regenerative farming and great things in the vineyard. The site that they chose from is a lot better site, just maybe based on them drilling down and taking samples about what grows best there. So there's lots of different things that count towards that. Now, ordering a wine in a restaurant, I think it's not second expensive, is there's no cheat code in that way. Yeah. Right? Like if they're you're working at a place with a waiter or a sommelier, generally you can say, I'm picking, I'm choosing between these two. What do you think? Got it. Or if you want to sound realisti sophcated, you're like, hey, what do which one of these two you think will go better with the food we order? Because remember, a contrast or a complement will make your food taste even better and reduce that palate fatigue in a good meal. Or you can say I generally like these types of wines. What do you have on this list that tastes similar to what I you know what I like to drink? The key for pricing is always don't say it out loud, just point. So you can say, you're going to say, hey, you know, uh whatever you think that would go great with this mill and and then you find a bottle on there and he's like, And I could like to stay around here. Mm-hmm. Okay. Oh, that's smart. And then point to the price. Right, yeah. So like you can let uh generally if there's a sommelier, let the same way do his job. Or her or them. Yeah. And then you're like, oh send them on their way. That's such a good move. And the idea that we love that. It allows us to do the job. It allows the samo yer to bring you something that they could be excited about. And when they're excited about it, then that's you know that it goes a long way and and it's infectious. And then when they come back to the table, they might tell you a story about where it came from. It's a way to engage. They're not there to talk down to you. Yeah. Like go do your job. Yeah. Your job isn't to stand over to make make me feel bad. Yeah. Or something. Like, no. And I think the anxiety comes from some people the first part is price. I think after that, if it's not good. So you eliminate the the first one easy by saying, Yeah, we'd like to, you know, do something like this. And you know, I think back to some of my favorite meals and like at Bestia, we had an amazing psalm with a pairing. Uh at Animal, I don't know Animal. Helen was the psalm there. Yeah, I went to Animal. Yeah. I loved it. Yeah, yeah. Remember Helen? Helen was amazing. This is Helen Johanneson, who is a celebrated Sommelier who has opened up a series of shops in LA called Helen's W ine. She's great. That dinner I had was 13 years ago. And I still remember how lovely she was and how great her stories and the wine pairings were. 13 years ago. Also part of it was just lovely company. Uh it was a dinner with Jarrett when we first met and I met his best pal, this chef in LA named Miles, who ended up officiating our wedding. He's the best. My friend, I don't know if you know. Do you know who Miles Thompson is? He's a chef out here in LA. He opened Baby Bistro. I know Baby Bistro. Yep. Yep. So Andy is a Psalm there. They're mostly all natural wines and it really adds so much to the meal especially if you're excited about it. I feel like Psalms geek out about it a little bit and they'll tell you like you know this has a minerality to it. This was grown near the ocean, you know, and you're like, oh, I got story time with it, and I appreciate it more. No, but that's the whole idea. There's like letting them do their job. You know, they travel, travel is part of their job where they go to these regions and learn from the winemakers and see it and smell the air, taste the dirt. Uh, and then they get to come back to baby bistro. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's so good. That's why I just tell people like, let them recommend something for you, you know, that turns the tables, right? It it it takes the pressure off you. There's less anxiety. And they're excited because it's their job. Assamoye is a tour guide. Yeah. They're more akin to a tour guide. Totally. You know what's funny, my friend who loves biodynamic wine. She asked for a little sam ples to try a couple. She's like, Can I try this one and this one? Does that I wonder if that pisses Psalms off or not? Yeah it does. It does . I'm just like you know it's like a thirteen dollar It just it just depends on where it's at. I was just messing with I was messing with your friend. Sorry. I I get embarrassed. I'm like just goodness. Well if the restaurant is busy, they're pissed. If they're busy, they're pissed. They are super pissed. I'm gonna call her out. No. No , and if it's not so if it's if it's not that busy, yeah. I'm sure they would go the extra mile to do that. But yeah. But I'm like, this isn't gelato counter. Um, but you did mention obviously, like uh someeliers are there to be a tour guide, but if you would do not have someone like you nearby, last listener question, which I love and I think this is a you're the perfect person for this question. Matthew Cowley, Stephanie Taup Berman, Red Toke or in Sanfirth, Jay Shea asked, Matthew said, I'm a sucker for the art on contemporary wine labels. Stephanie says I find myself buying the wine with the cutest labels. Red Toked 2 wine labels actually help wine generate better sales. And you have designed a lot of wines under your label and they're fucking great. Thank you. And they're very modern. They're very monochromatic. It's usually black on and white with these bold letters and this very like fresh modern almost like curated art on the labels. And they're so striking. Thank you. No, they're amazing. And I read that it part of that came out of the fact that a designer was gonna charge you tens of thousands of dollars. You were like, no, dude. And as a result, You've got amazing, really, really like signature labels. Graphically, they're bold and stark with big block letters. They look like a sharpie on paper. When it comes to labels, I imagine that's gotta be what a lot of people are picking off of. And how do how does a winemaker decide other than, you know, cost? Well, it becomes art. I think, you know, it's an extension of their art. Like what do they want it to look like? And there's the thing is everything is marketing. If I decided not to put a label on it, it's marketing. If I decided to put it in a brown paper bag, it's marketing. Anything that you do to it is marketing. Even if you want it to be anti-marketing, right? Uh-huh. So what I always look at it is it's like it's um, you know, it's really up to the art the artist, like what do they want to put on. You know, some people are drawn to music, and maybe you know it's a a painting off an album cover from an artist that they like. But here's the deal: I think if that's how you buy wine, then that's how you buy wine. But also know or leave room or space that sometimes it's not built on the label. And so my artwork that I put on there is to do the opposite. Like my whole thing is is that I dumbed down the labels. My labels were inspired when I was a child, and we'd go shopping. We would do we go shopping once a month. And so I hated it. And you would go down every single aisle. Every single owl. While your mom pulled out her coupon book and he bought everything. Yeah. And sometimes you might have to get a second card. You turn down these awesome, and every time you turn down the aisle, it'd be like a mosaic sea of colors. And then you would drown this one and turn the corner and it was stark white. And this was called the generic aisle. I don't know how it was. I remember this. And you would be in the generic aisle. It was all black and white. God, I missed that. Or sometimes it was yellow and white. And that was so stark. I wish we had that. So Google the words generic aisle. Or if you're Canadian, like our lead editor Mercedes, check out the no name brand in the grocery train no frills. It's literally art and blessedly a bar gain. So that's that was the idea for the labels. Oh that's genius. So the back bar, like the mosaic of colors, and then you come to this stark label. Just black and white. And then you know, to me, it's just all stripped down. It's kind of like, you know, I was on somebody like my brand is kind of like Mike Tyson. When he came to the ring, it's just like no bullshit. He came to the ring, no shirt on, no robe, right? He just had his shorts on, he had his shoes on , no socks, right? You know, this came just ready. Stood on business. Like no frills. Yeah. Right? It's like this it's like there's no need, there's no need for all that. You know, the fight will be over before longer than it would, you know, well take the be taking off the robe would last longer than the fight. You know what I mean? And so that's how I look at it, where it's just stripped down where it's like, let's just let the wine speak for themselves. Uh-huh. And for the labels, I wanted the labels to be that. There's, you know, they're just black and white. And they're not named after me, right? Because and some people have that, you know, where maybe they're thinking more legacy and it's like that say Mac of States. Or maybe I would just, you know, had a tad bit of narcissism and I'd just say Andre Mack Sellers, right? Yeah. But when I think about both those names and to somebody who's new to wine, what does it mean? Yeah. Who the fuck is Andre Mack? Yeah, yeah. Even though they have their phone in their pocket, you there still has to be the will to want to know who it is to look it up. And so that was it for me. I wanted things that resonated with people or meant something to them or that would lead down a train of thought we have a wine called Love Drunk.. Mm-hmm I'm sure right now you're like, well, what does that mean? But you know what both those words mean and then you're trying to figure out this thing. And they get to interpret, you know, have a moment of how they interpret it. We have a wine called OPP, other people's penal. Like we just like to have fun. We like to have so much fun with it. In a way that like it fits the whole idea of my life in a lot of ways, is that you can't judge a book by its cover. And I say to people all the time, without the label, doesn't matter, like drink the wine. If I had to spend more money on the labels than the wine, then I would have to charge more for the wine. That that's the whole thing. It's the packaging is the packaging, but ultimately it's about what's inside the bottle. Uh and you're right. And and the bottle and the label are tools to market. Yeah. And my last question, uh best glass of wine you've ever had. I know that you've had a lot of them, but what is one that like that ratatouille's you. Ratatoues me. Um 8 5 Reyas, Shatanov to Pop. And when I taste that wine, I've only tasted it twice after the initial experience I had uh when i tasted that wine it was a day that per se caught on fire on its first day of service no and um i just remember it was surreal like a movie people are being bustled like to the restaurant, the whole building's getting evacuated. You know, the firemen coming in, rushing into the dining room, hitting the wall with an axe, realizing that's where the fire was, flames burst out. Um