326: Good Drinking with Jon Bonné, Alice Feiring, Jancis Robinson, Talia Baiocchi

27:41You could talk about single kind of villages. They're not quite villages, but, you know, the different terroirs of Muscadet, it drinks like great Chablis. It drinks, you know, it's not like cheap oyster wine, which is what it was a decade 15 years ago. Beaujolais, same thing. It's basically the new Burgundy now that nobody can actually afford Burgundy. And that's an economic choice. And we've all benefited from these producers have actually gotten their shit together. And the wines are great in some of these regions. Yeah, and so you think about, like, you went into a wine shop 20 years ago. You wanted Beaujolais.

28:15Like, maybe there was some Deboeuf. Maybe there was, you know. The nouveau releases. I guess everyone was into that stuff in November. And so you look at the way that, like, completely got thrown out the window. And now people are talking about specificity, single parcels, the extraordinary quality of producers. They're talking about Beaujolais the way that people talked about Burgundy in the 80s. Why do we see Morgana everywhere? I feel like I'm, like, on Instagram. I've been drinking Morgane when I used to drink back in the day, but man, why? If you want to know the reason that the Jules Chauffet chapter is in the book, that helps to explain it.

28:47You know, it's where, you know, a number of pioneers in Beaujolais who really, A, created a quality change there, but B, also where some of the progenitors of natural wine came from. So, yeah, it's everywhere. But so it's, you know, it's not even France. Like, you know, you could look at Galicia. You could look at Verdicchio from the Marquet or Austria. Like you could look at the way that we talk about champagne today in terms of individual vignerons and individual villages and sites. We didn't have these conversations 10 years ago. Even champagne 10 years ago, like you were lucky if people were talking about grower champagne.

29:24And maybe there was – you knew Cedric Bouchard and you knew that he had a few different parcels. And grower means you just know where – you actually know. It's someone who's growing the grapes and making the wine versus, let's say, Dom Perignon where they're buying a ton of grapes and crafting it. All right. Well, I mean, not bad product. I love John. This is so great to see your face. Because I'm like, I mean. Which you don't get with a podcast. I'm so out of the game and I'm just like Dom's drinks well and you just like absolutely. You know, Dom is a perfectly decent commercial champagne. Whether you think it is at the level that it is marketed at, I leave.

30:04I'm throwing taste as the beholder, you know, in the eye of the beholder. What I love about your writing, like, you will go Lester Banks, and then you will go John Pirelli's. Like, you'll go both ways. I love it so much. You, like, will be, you'll burn shit down, but then you're very kind and even, like John. Sorry. Music references. You mentioned, you hinted the word natural wine when we talk about Morgane, and I just, Talia and I talked about this, I'll link to this in the show notes. Great conversation with her about it. We could certainly have a long conversation, but why are we so obsessed with this phrase, this terminology of natural wine?

30:42I wish I knew, to be honest. I mean, it took a long, long time to figure out where natural wine should show up in this book. And it shows up all over because I, at this point, have visited more, quote-unquote, natural producers than most people have. Never with the intent of I'm going to go write a book about natural wine or whatever. And I would get a question every single time like, oh, your book's going to be about Van Natura. It's like, well, not entirely. But where I landed was in trying to find an analogy, and I went through many of them. I went through many of them with Talia trying to find where my head was at.

31:22And the analogy that's in the book, and I'm truly going to shorthand this because everyone should go read it in the book, clearly. No doubt. No, for real. You should pick up the book. No, like for real. Like you hear John talk like this. He's an incredible writer. Not boring. It's not boring. So just to break in. Which is good. They may think it's boring after the analogy I'm about to throw down. Okay, great. Finish it. But my analogy was really to the birth of modern art and the Salon des Refusés in 1863. And this was, you know, there was the Academy and there was the Refusés, and the Refusés were not admitted by the jury to the official Paris Salon.

31:59So Napoleon III allowed them to have their own off-salon, which everyone thought would sort of, you know, mock and humiliate them. Kind of in the Bushwick of Paris at the time, like kind of like off the grid? Well, that's what I thought, but as it turned out, they were basically in the same place. Oh, wow. It was like, you know, you could go to like, you know, you could go to the official wing or you could go to like, you know. It was like Freeze and it was like a pop-up like off the corner of Freeze, but still in a pretty good spot. Right, yeah. So it's, I mean, and it's funny because now like so much of the art world has modeled itself in a way after that.

32:28Yeah. But the analogy being that this was, this was, this was the establishment trying to cast out something that was different, which of course, I mean, I asked the question in the book, well, who won? You're like, well, if you look at the trajectory of modern art, Manet, Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, on straight through to Richter and everyone else today, you know, it's safe to say that progress won and William Adolphe Bougereau, who was sort of the great Academy painter with his, you know, with his, well, yeah, with the nymph orgies and everything else, like, you know, they faded away into obscurity because taste evolved.

33:10And so I think natural wine is simply a very belated response to people seeing the need to move beyond the traditional. Just going to give you a little applause there because it's as close as it's gotten for me. So thank you. That was really smart and it makes sense. And I'm hearing, you know, it's not a movement. It's not a moment. It's just the future that wine is made. In its way, I would say that the elements of natural wine are the future. People now understand so much more about asking questions about viticulture and farming. They know more about asking questions, sometimes the wrong questions, like, you know, why is there sulfur in this wine?

33:55Let me tell you. but the fact that people are now asking questions about this in the way that again maybe 20 or 30 years ago if that people were starting to do about food and farm to table came up, all of this but the fact that there is now this sense of expectation to understand all the steps of wine where it comes from that is what natural to me has brought yeah, just like transparency and education and asking the right questions Yeah. So which is I mean, which is hilarious now when, you know, you go and you see, oh, we have a wine list full of natural wines. I'm like, but but do you? Yeah. And not even like because I'm like, well, that's conventional.

34:33That's conventional. But just like, you know, like what what what's the thought process? What you know, when and I get it. You know, this is as everything in gastronomy is cursed to do. Like it goes from a good idea to marketing term about three years. but it's you know even if people have a very fuzzy and often bad understanding I think that they're what is going to come out of it is this remarkable growth and maturing of the wine industry yet the Salad Composé has not taken off and it is quite the beautiful idea we'll get to that at the end but I have a few more wine questions because you're here and I just want to know in general how can we be better wine drinkers how can we be, and better meaning drinking better, but also just better citizens.

35:20Sure. By the way, there were about, you know, a thousand people that logged off the moment you said salad composé. I know, salad composé, and linking to that in the show notes, I know, right. It's really, the salad composé book will come out. We'll get there. We'll get there. My next project. But yeah, the better wine drinking. Being a better wine drinker. I mean, I actually don't think it's hard. You know, there's a million pieces of advice about, you know, take this class, study this book. Great book called The New Wine Rules. Highly recommend. Tells you everything you need to know. Wonderful book.

35:51Yeah. Sorry. You can put it in your backpack and not like feel like you're doing like a Stairmaster. Yeah. You know? Well, versus the new book. Of course, I'm saying versus the new book, which is a bit of a doorstop in the best way. But really what it comes down to is being curious and being a curious consumer. And I suspect that that sounds trite, but it's just – it's like, you know, try to understand specifics, interrogate yourself, ask why you drink the things that you have drunk. Maybe you drink right now. Are you – like where do your beliefs about wine come from? And poke at them. And it's interesting.

36:31I – you know, there's – you were mentioning millennials and I would say it probably goes beyond that as well. But, you know, one of the things about where we've landed in the media landscape and the social media landscape in particular is, you know, we – everything is now a totem. Everything is meant to have a little moment of fetish around it and – which isn't bad necessarily. Like, you know, there's value to that. But at the same time, there really has been a diminishment of curiosity. Yeah. Probably because every one of us now has literally the world of information at our fingertips. Some of it correct.

37:11It's dulled us for sure. I mean, it's dulled our interest in things when we can have everything at the same time, right? Yeah. But I think, so, you know, how to be a better wine drinker, just, you know, like buy different things, ask lots of questions, ask why you like things, ask why you don't like things. I mean, I, you know, I again had this weird osmotic, you know, sort of education in wine. But all it was when I started to get interested was just asking questions. And everyone's like, oh, well, you're a sommelier. No, I'm not a sommelier. Like, you know, did you take the W set or, you know, study to, you know, get a certification, whatever.

37:47I'm like, no, like, I just like drinking wine. And I'm, you know, and I'm sort of nosy. Yeah, and you have an inquisitive kind of background in your career, like running the home page at MSNBC. I mean, so so it's like I don't want to I don't want to I don't want to sound like reductivist, but it's not more complicated than that. I mean, I think interrogating yourself is like the number one thing I just took away. I mean, I think being curious is great, too. But like thinking like, why do I like that? Gamay or why do I like that? You know, Verde, why do I like or is it a matter? Why do I like the number that's on the screen when I'm checking out?

38:18Yeah, because that's another thing you have to keep in mind. Like somebody's wine drinking is like I like value. That's what I like. And it's – you know, I have gone through the full arc of ranting about why industrial wine sucks and I'm like – I mean it's all still there. Like it's – I wouldn't say I've necessarily moved away from any of that but I'm also just like – when wine people sort of get up in themselves, I tend to like to remind folks that what we should be thinking about is white cloth. because, you know, if you want people to like wine, you're going to have to provide a context because if they just want to drink, like hard seltzer is there for them now.

39:04RTD is there for them now. Like, you know, you can pop open a Mai Tai in a can, you know, have at it. So, you know, none of which, like, you know, again, like none of which is necessarily bad. All those jumpers say NA too is there. Yeah, NA. Sure. If you want to love wine, then this is like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Like if you want to love wine, then you just have to love wine. And in order to do that in a healthy relationship, you have to ask yourself questions. Love that. You were JetBlue's wine consultant. Absolutely fascinating role. What do we what like what give us some like information about drinking on a plane?

39:44Like, what did you learn when you started working with an airline about behavior, about what people like, what you need to serve? I, you know, I wish that I had, I wish that I had been handed a deep stack of market research, which you would think, given the risk averse places that airlines are, with good reason, that, you know, that we would play it safe. But honestly, my mandate there was to not play it safe. And originally it was to build a program around the new California. And then we expanded it. But, you know, in the end it was basically, look, this was especially for Mint, which is their business class.

40:23Like this is supposed to be a different business class. We want a different wine program. And, you know, there's lots of things about your taste is dulled and, you know, this is that. That's why the food is salty. It's why I like never get on a plane without packets of hot sauce. All kind of true. Yeah. But really, it was just a matter of I want to put really good quality wine on here. Our costs were exponentially more than pretty much any other domestic airline because we were often buying direct from producers. And so it wasn't like, you know, can I get it for$2.50 a bottle? It was, you know, these were bottles that would be$30 to$80 bottles retail.

41:03And we were buying them at wholesale and sometimes at a discount. But, you know, but this program cost JetBlue money. It was like a lost leader, it sounds like. Yeah, but it was also, you know, we're going to put Turley's Infindel on board. And there's, you know, there's a lot of people who seeing that wine, which they think they can only get in a restaurant, that sends a very specific message. We were the first people to put a rosé on board, which wasn't like wasn't even a huge thing. I was just I would think it was literally like sitting around talking being like, well, what if we like it's spring?

41:33It'll be summer. Like, what if we put a rosé on board? And it was like, well, sure. And now, of course, it's funny because everyone has rosé on board. And they're in cans now. Right. And I mean, you know, so it's actually interesting now because you can drink much better only because, yeah, because cans and RTD have made it much easier. But like, you know, it was just it was literally just looking at what had become very much a bottom line dollars and cents approach to that type of service and saying, what if we did it differently? Do you think you'll get back in that game? Never know. Yeah. Phone lines are open.

42:10Yeah, exactly. All right, let's talk about Rezi. You're a managing editor there. Rezi, we know, is the app that gets us into restaurants or doesn't get us into restaurants. It just depends on the day and the mood. But what is your goal as running editorial? I love it. We share a lot of writers. I think the work is excellent. It's very, like, of the moment, obviously rooted in restaurant culture. But tell me a little bit more about how content works on this thing that we think just gives us reservations. Of course. And I should say, to be clear, I do not speak for Resi, capital R Resi. I speak for myself.

42:47Wow, this is like those gambling ads on podcasts. Yeah. And we have a remarkable editorial team, including an amazing editorial director. Who's that? Let's give this a shout out. Paolo Lucchese. Yeah, Paolo, right on. Former colleague at The Chronicle. Chronicle is our great pipeline. It sounds like it. Yeah, a little biased there. And Ben Leventhal has been on the show. He was a founder. I don't think he's with the company anymore, but he's... And Ben, who also founded Eater, is a large part of the reason that editorial is baked into Resi's DNA. Definitely, definitely. So it's funny you mention the app because the app is a part of the Resi experience, but the website is actually a big part of the Resi experience.

43:25Same booking capability, but the website is really infused all over the place with editorial. including one of the things that I oversee, which is the monthly hit list, which we have in 19 markets, 20 markets. And that's, you know, each month, 10 restaurants, some on Resi, some not on Resi. And that's always been that way. Love that. I did not know that, actually. So it's actually very important. And it's, again, like it's, you know, I'm on the ramparts basically every month just being like, you know, and sometimes even to our writers being like, you know, I get it. Like, you know, you know who signs your paycheck.

44:05Fair enough. But some of it in terms of really building a robust and legitimate editorial program there was saying, like, we have to acknowledge that there is a bigger world. And the goal of Resi, you know, ultimately is to connect people with restaurants they love. Yeah. And so some of that is going to be curation and recommendations. And even when we, you know, like our premium sort of membership tier, which is global dining access, like we do the same thing. You know, sometimes things will be easier to get into than others. But it's also saying this is, you know, we're here to get you to a restaurant you love.

44:45Yeah. And this is really important. This isn't about fine dining. It's about great dining. Yeah. I mean, that's what the resi ethic is. if you're a user or power user, you're definitely not only getting, you know, three star or whatever we want to call it, like higher end, whatever the fuck you call it. But some of this is literally just like, look, it could be a taco truck. It could be a pop up. It could be, you know, it could be a bakery. But, you know, there's great, great things that you are going to love in all forms. Most of them, honestly, and to the point about Paris and the HLA and versus East Paris, like West versus East Paris, like great dining today is not fancy.

45:27No. It's just, it's evolved. It could be higher than the number you want to pay. We'll get it. That's all we've talked about a lot. If you want, if you're, if you are a fan of Bromacase, the world is your oyster. I love it. Let's talk about booking though. And you are speaking for yourself as a longtime restaurant goer and an expert in the field. It feels like it's really, really, really hard to book a table right now. How do we do that? How do we actually make it easier on ourselves? Sure. So there's, I mean, we spend a lot of time asking that question. We have a series called The One Who Keeps the Book, which is literally talking to the person who is managing the book at the front of the house.

46:10The 950 in the wait list for some restaurants. Yeah, exactly. Well, and so, you know, some of it is very straightforward. You know, the notify tool, which is part of Resi, is valuable. and you have to, I swear, you just have to trust in it at some point. It's so fire. I mean, let's get real. It's the best thing about Rezzy is the notify button. It's just truly the best. Don't tell Alison Roman. She doesn't like it. She is a skeptic. We did talk about that. And I think you're right that there is definitely a skepticism when you don't hit the four or five times you hit notify, but I think you're going to hit more times than not.

46:47Yeah. And so, you know, if I if I take a step back from that, like my real advice is, you know, restaurants are in a weird place. We've come out of three years of a pandemic labor. You know, the labor the labor shortage is real. The supply chain is real. It's just, you know, we all want to get back out and live the 20s of the 21st century. So, like, it's not hard. You know, you need to be flexible. You need to probably be okay with going early, maybe sitting at the bar. And, like, do you need, like, I'm going to have a table because I'm having a birthday, mom's in town, whatever. Or are you just like, whatever, I really want to go eat at Sema.

47:30So how am I going to make that happen? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sema's dope. And candidly, like, I wish I could say that this was a new thing. But I think back to when I was in San Francisco in the late aughts and Nopa was my favorite restaurant in the world. And I would have to do the same thing. Like if I wanted a seat, I had to go at 4.48 and get in line to like grab a bar at the – grab a seat at the bar at 5. And like that was my thing. So I'm like, you know, none of this is reinventing the wheel. I remember being in college and Latois was the restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin. And I remember waiting on the sidewalk to get in for that later that night to get a book.

48:10Yeah. To get in the book. Yeah. And the one other thing, and this is a, just to bring it back to France, of course. Sure. This is a lesson that you learn by actually being in Paris for more than kind of a week when you start to get used to the rhythms of life there is the notion of being a regular is the single most valuable thing that you can do in terms of creating a relationship with dining. And I know, you know, we all have zero attention spans. We want to, like, go out, see what's new, see, like, you know, see what's grammable that particular second. But, like, creating that relationship, and especially now, is going to pay endless dividends.

48:54And I would say, you know, the thrill of constantly dashing to the new place at some point becomes a little bit less thrilling. And you like having a sustained relationship with a great restaurant. And it's just a matter of building it. And I would say with a very small number of exceptions, like almost every restaurant wants to create that. Because they want to know when you walk through the door. They want to know that you are going to keep supporting them and that you're there and that you like what they do and you are going to support them. This all seems, again, like totally redundant, but it's true.

49:38Like the rules, even now, even in, you know, everyone has to write the no one can get a reservation story. Like even in 2023, the rules haven't changed. Yeah, it's true. Good point. Can't forget about France. Can't forget about the Salad Composite. There we go. You're right. Once, what the French call the salad composé, the composed salad, was an essential part of any restaurant or dinner party menu and a foundational pillar in any French chef's oeuvre. Okay, have we lost the plot on the salad composé, Jean Bonnet? I don't think so. I actually... Yes, you won. Your story has netted results. Exactly, yeah.

50:15My taste essay... On 2018, 2019, whatever? Clearly pivoted the entire culinary world to go back to salad. So honestly, to just keep pulling all the old ones out of the closet, we are in the salad days. Which is to say, if you look at where most new American cooking is, could be red sauce Italian. Like the chopped salad is having a moment and I'm here for it. But it could be, you know, you look at like the, you know, lentils and roast vegetables and, you know, and labneh or even the fact that Middle Eastern is so hot right now. And like you, the expectation. Sell the team. Yeah. Like laser wolves sell the team.

51:05Exactly. Huge. So, I mean, it's really fascinating. And you take that, you take like tin fish. The way I was describing it last night to someone is that now is the true glory days of the Gardemanger. Yeah. To talk about the old French system. This was like the person who had to do the cold station. Cold apps. Yeah. And like it's amazing because, you know, there's so much of cooking right now. Again, labor costs, like, you know, post-pandemic. Maybe having a cold kitchen. Maybe like our new regulation where gas is going to be banned in New York. Right. So it's – I mean, you know, people are eating tons of this stuff in all sorts of forms across cultural references, across types of cuisine, you know, all of it.

51:49And so it's fascinating because what was my point in the essay, which was that, you know, this great sort of cold part of the meal, which was extraordinary and was a very important part of the progression and went away during the kind of, you know, fancified dining of the mid-century, is now back in like a somewhat different context. Although someone I'm sure will bring back, you know, all of his scoffiers great recipes. But it could be, you know, could be Vietnamese. It could be Thai. It could be, like I said, you know, Italian chopped salad, whatever it is. You see that it is now back to being an intrinsic part of dining in 2023 to say nothing of, which was again in the essay, to say nothing of sweet green.

52:32Which I think everyone thought was going to kind of come up and down and, you know, everyone was sitting at home in their sweatpants and no one's going to eat sweet green. Sweet green is killing itself. Yeah. And so, you know, I I think it's different from like the 90s when salad was a health thing and really a fad. Like I think people have made peace with salad for dinner, salad for dinner. Like this this is this is this is a really fun part of dining. Yeah. And I think like the salad books that have come out in the past couple of years have been really nice, too. And I feel like we're going to maybe revisit that topic.

53:04I don't think you can write for taste because of your role at Resi. I would ask you probably write for taste. Okay, well, let's get a part two of that. The question is, do I have time for it? No, I know you don't have time now. I can't let you go without giving us three restaurants we should go to. This is just off the dome, places that you think we, I know you're giving me a face of how the, why are you asking me that? This is the question I actually needed to prepare. I know, John, and I did not give you this in the prep, but I just, off, like you say, SEMA, that came out of your dome, give us just three names that are popping around.

53:34Let's just focus on New York City. We have a lot of our listeners are visiting the city this spring and summer. So where should they go? Yeah. I mean, Sema slash Damaka, remarkable, like, transformational Indian cooking. Masala Walla and Sons as well, which is in my neighborhood. Yeah. Talk about Rezi. You can't get out of that one. And if anyone thinks that I have, you know, some special magic, let me assure you I am in the fight along with the rest of y 'all. Great place. Um, but, um, I would put, you know, any of, uh, any of unapologetics, um, restaurants on that list. Um, I would put Red Hook Tavern, which I.

54:12Wow, an oldie. Yeah. Relative oldie. Um, you know, and it's just like, I, I love that they are so focused on exactly what they do. Yeah. Um. Which is make a very good hamburger. Very good hamburger, like favorite shrimp cocktail ever, I think. and remarkable wine list. And it's just like, you know, I love that they've sort of doubled down in the Alaska cocktail, which is a very specific choice. And with that, I'd actually sort of draw a dotted line to Gus's Chop House, which I put in a similar range. I've not made it out to my old neighborhood. I have not made it to Gus. It is fantastically good.

54:47This is the folks who have Popina, which is also great. But like doing a quote unquote Chop House, which is not a steakhouse, but is I think their view of what like, you know, a meat forward-ish restaurant. Can you give us one in Manhattan? Can you just do it? Well, there was Sema. Oh, yeah, Sema. Yeah, right. Because the one other I was going to mention was St. Jules Verre, which I truly like I love what Alex and team are doing there. A little bit more fish focused. But Manhattan. I'm like you because I definitely would always say places in my neighborhood we your name in Spotsamil neighborhood but it's just how we dine you know so this will not be a huge surprise and I feel like I'm preaching to the choir in suggesting that anyone go to K-Town which is still a pretty remarkable place and I truly love the way that Korean food has has evolved and come up in New York in the past five five, eight years.

55:48And so I will give sort of two as, as not even counterpoints, but like they do similar things in slightly different ways. One is Attaboy, which JP and Elia are remarkable. And, you know, they've been transformational. And I think getting people to understand the depth of Korean cooking and Jua, which similar place, a little bit more, a little bit more focused in its concept, but both, again, sort of pursuing this neo-Korean concept, K-Town adjacent. But truly, I think, you know, if you come to New York to see where food is at its best, where the future is, those are restaurants along, like I said, with Sema and the unapologetic posse.

56:36Like, I think those so encapsulate the future of American food. I love that. Definitely a thesis in our upcoming book, Korea World. I must say. Yeah. Korean food in New York. I want to hear about your next one. Yeah, no, but let's get to that question. We ask all guests on Tate's podcast. If you could write a cookbook or food culture book without the burden of time, meaning you have no deadline or the burden of budget, meaning you have all the money in the world to travel, to drink wine, to maybe not drink wine, to make salad. What would that book be, John? Didn't I just do that? I mean. The book that never ends?

57:08I think it's true. You had a budget, though. My budget was I'm just going to keep spending money and go deeply into debt. It was like six-figure – I mean beyond. I do not recommend it. Let's just say that the advance has been spent. Yeah, and you're getting a few more checks at some point and those are priorities. So it's funny. The dream wine book that I've wanted to do for a long time, which will not happen and I've pitched it, whatever, is the new Australian wine. and mostly because like everything that's interesting in wine is happening there and it's happening in a different context. It's 8 ,000 miles away from anything else.

57:46But there's a deep narrative there that I would love to explore, but, you know, I live in a commercial world and I can accept where sales of Australian wine are now. There's a part of me that would love to immerse myself in Japan. I know I would never come out again. And I'm not sure what book is in that. And so where I kind of land and I am clearly insane for saying this is there's a part of me that wants to go back and do for French food what I just did with wine, which is to say everything that I've said about how France is transforming and how France as a as a as an anchor of cuisine in the world is is is crucial.

58:37I really want to explore that. And I got to do some of that for the book, but ultimately you actually have to write about the thing you're supposed to write about. And there's so much there. If you read Lauren Collins' New Yorker piece on the French tacos, there's so much that I have yet to see someone really get their hands into. That said, probably the only truism that's more true than never get involved in a land war in Asia is never right about France. And I know that now. John Bonet, thank you so much for joining the Taste Podcast. That was really fun.

59:52Alice Firing, welcome to the Taste Podcast. She's, every day is a different story, but she's fine. Thank you. Oh, gosh. I'm pulling for your mom after reading it. She's a handful. What inspired the book? What inspired the book was in the middle of the, well, at the very beginning of the pandemic, I wrote a story for New York Magazine, an essay about drinking alone during the pandemic. And after it was published, my agent wrote to me and said, I want a book of essays. And I said, I've always wanted a book of essays, but who's going to publish them? and she said oh just shut up and do it so i said okay you know nothing else to do except do what i want to do so i gave it a shot that's what inspired it i love it we share an agent angela miller shout out to her so angela to say like i want a book of essays let's just do it i love it these essays the way they unfold though it's not in my opinion it's a there is a narrative narrative and and you're you're following threads in your life yeah there was a narrative so the thing is, you know, I actually haven't read a lot of memoir and essays, even though I understand it's kind of a thing right now.

1:01:01But I don't view my life, I guess it's all in the telling, right? But my life is being completely fascinating. And as people always say, oh, write your memoir as a wine word. I said, well, that's not, what's that interesting. But so I've had some interesting episodes in my life that I think would be fascinating to anybody. And they were extremely formative. So the notion was to take key episodes of my life, string them together into a life narrative of how basically I became me, which how this short red haired Jewish girl from an orthodox background became probably, well, to say you're a controversial wine writer is a paradox in itself because who is a controversial, what is controversial about wine writing?

1:02:00So it's basically what made me the person who attracted a lot of trouble in my life. I'd say fearless is the word I'd say. Well, thank you. Fearless wine writer because you do so controversy and And that's a good thing. You create dialoguing. And spoiler, there is a serial killer in the narrative. Yeah, a serial killer alert. Yeah. A serial killer alert. I don't want to actually get into that because there's a lot more to cover, but there is a serial killer and your interaction with the serial killer in 1969 or eight. But it was really, I was going to say not to make it about me, but this is about me.

1:02:31It is about you. Stop it. It's just, having been extremely painfully shy, it is really strange that I found myself in this position. And that is what I found to be the story, the interesting part of the story. Alice, what gets you out of bed every morning to start writing? Because clearly you're prolific. Fear. What do you mean? Well, if I don't write, who am I? I think a lot of writers might have that. Needing to make a living. Not having a safety net. But also I think it's mostly about my identity. Writing is who I am. And so that's what does it. And you write every day? I write every day. And The Firing Line is your newsletter.

1:03:18And you've published it well before there was a thing called Substack. Right. Well before. In fact, people have been saying you should go over to Substack. And I actually thought about it. And I'm like, why am I trading one paid platform for another? So I actually am using Substack as a way for people to discover me. And then I feed them over to the firing line. I love that you're also a digital entrepreneur. You've been writing for yourself since 2013 in that way, in the firing line. In the firing line, well, it started blogging. Oh, my God. Do you remember that? In 2004. Sure. I was goaded into that.

1:03:51Then I was goaded into going onto Twitter. The same thing. I've been dragged onto social media platforms. But I started this version of the newsletter, the paid version, Hurricane Sandy. Yeah. And you write about going to fetch your mom during Hurricane Sandy. And I love that your mom worked in the Diamond District on the Bowery. Yes. I bought my engagement ring in that market. Which address? Do you remember? It was the one right off the canal, like just a block up north of the canal. Mm-hmm. So was it 72 Bowery? Yeah, 72. That's it. Right? I probably know the person you bought it from. Susan from KMS?

1:04:32Yes. I know everybody down there. Because basically it's funny because I live about five blocks away from there. You're right about that. Right. And it is like my personal terroir. Even though I was born in Brooklyn, raised in Baldwin, Long Island, my aunt and uncle had a place at 66 Bowery. And we were always in the city. And that is really those are my memories of going growing up, not really Long Island. So I want this conversation to we will dive into wine and some questions I have about about wine and natural wine. And but I also I really want to get into your journalism and your writing because that really is the way I see you.

1:05:09I see you as a writer, not a wine writer, capital W. Let's talk about your travel, because, you know, before the pandemic or maybe even now, you're traveling like 80 to 120 days a year. Yeah. And I feel pandemic pre pandemic. I'm working up to it now, but still, that's that has been that was what it should be. When you hit the road to cover wine or cover food or wherever you're writing about, what are you what are you searching for? Well, story. I have an idea of what. Obviously, here are people who are experts in Burgundy, Bordeaux, I could care less about. I'm sorry, Bordeaux. shots fired but basically there are enough people covering that and I am looking for wine for the people I am looking for stories of the people I'm not looking for necessarily I hate doing wine recommendations in fact that's why I started the newsletter just because I hate it and if people want recommendations from me they're going to have to pay for it sorry guys and you know I'm good at it I'm good in, but it's so I'm looking for people doing really interesting things, beautiful work, beautiful agriculture, and something that has maybe a bit of a different hook.

1:06:27So when I started writing about natural wine, the world was open. Everything was a story. And now it's not that new. No, it's hashtag natty wine. Exactly. Which is a whole thing. And so when I found Georgia, it was like, oh, my God. so you go you have an idea you have a list of people who are doing new stuff interesting one thing leads to another I sometimes I go with a specific story especially I try to give myself that assignment yeah like last time I was in Burgundy because I do go to Burgundy and I find what's happening in Burgundy extremely interesting but I went there to find out why would anybody want to make wine here which may sound like a strange question and that's coming up in the next newsletter.

1:07:13But if you're starting out, why does anybody in their right mind, if they don't have money, go to Burgundy to make wine? It's crazy. So things like that. You write extensively about Georgian wine over your career. I was hanging out with a four and a half year old and looking at a map and how do you pronounce the capital of Georgia? Tbilisi. Tbilisi. Sorry, thank you. I just had to ask that right away because I just... Or if like, or Bliisi. Bliisi. So no T in there. Okay. You've been called the Patti Smith or the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of natural wine. I have to laugh and ask you, what does that mean?

1:07:43I have to laugh too. I don't know. But I guess Patti Smith being rock and roll. Sure. And being, and I think for both of those people, not afraid to be outspoken. I agree. And I think that's what I read from it too. I also read that there is immense creativity in your writing. They're both writers. And I think that's what the connective tissue is between those two references. Pretty cool though, right? Very cool. Did you get to meet either of them? No, I haven't. Oh, man. But Patti Smith is a wonderful writer. Yeah, I like her first. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just kids. Just kids. Well, I mean, you were in New York in the late 70s?

1:08:25Yeah, just about to head up to Boston. I left for Boston in 77. But I lived in New York trying to find the door between 76 and 77 in Manhattan. And I just could not figure out how I keep on thinking, where is the door? Where's the door to New York? Even though you were born here and you had family. Even though I had no connections. I wasn't going to go in the jewelry business and I certainly wasn't going to be a lawyer. Right. But you worked in healthcare over the course of your career. I did because I was a dancer. Yeah. And so I got my master's in dance therapy up in Boston. And what happened there, oddly enough, when I was writing my master's thesis is when I went back to writing and I just didn't stop.

1:09:14Didn't stop. And it took about six years to get the nerve to decide to come back to New York. And then it took four years to figure out how. Speaking of Boston, you write in your book about an evening spent with Nina Simone. Yes. And serving her, bringing a bottle of sparkling wine. You can talk about what you brought for her. But I have to ask a little bit about that episode. And also, who have you also shared glasses with? Not a whole lot of famous people. Or just interesting people. It doesn't be super famous. Oh, in the wine world. I mean, it's just, it's mostly in the wine world. Like people like Pierre Auvenoir, like who gave me a book party, was probably the one of the most exquisite evenings of my life.

1:09:55You know, it's like kind of legends like that. Marcel LaPierre. some of the original people in natural wine movement, like Jacques Néoport, who lives in a tiny little village on the Ardache, and that was an epic 10-hour afternoon. So people like that, I don't really do the celeb world a lot. But back to Nina, because that seems like it was a moment in your life where you're just starting to think about wine as the power of wine, engaging with bringing a bottle. You brought a bottle to a concert she held, which seemed to go kind of poorly. Well, I kind of knew there would be an after party, so that's why.

1:10:40But yes, the concert was a little bit of a disaster, so it was basically a first date. Actually, going back, Aaron Ziskin, the photographer Aaron Ziskin, I also spent time with. he was fabulous. But so this was a first date of photographer who had been old friends with Nina. And I thought, okay, so we go to her, well, her hotel suite. And she starts to, you know, like, decide not to go to the concert. And her producer's on the phone to Nina. There's 2 ,200 people waiting. There are 2 ,200 people waiting for her and we're an hour and a half late. And I finally take out my mental health toolkit and kind of encourage her to go.

1:11:33So that story is in there. and uh yeah so that was it was thrilling because at that that was the point where i had decided that i i had to be a writer there was a very i was going to go back to new york the following year i was going to figure out a way to do it and meeting her was being near an artist like that who lived her life fully for her art and also social justice had a great effect and you write about the after party and having an interaction with another jazz legend. Yeah. Freddie Hubbard. Freddie Hubbard. Yeah. You write about an incident. It seems quite traumatic. It wasn't traumatic.

1:12:13It was just because I got out of it, but it was more like, it was, uh, here is where, uh, generation probably is different. And my generation, if somebody's coming after me, like trying to like kiss me. Like it's, and I get out, it's like, oh my God, Freddie Hubbard just tried to like really like come on to me in a very persuasive way, like me in the bathroom. But, um, I know there was no force involved. I hear you. And I hear what you're saying. It is a generational moment. And certainly, uh, there's the way you cover it is, is just the way this book flows. And it's just so effortless. Uh, The stories that you have.

1:12:58And I just love the way you write. And it goes also back to Robert Parker. I wanted to segue to that because I think in 2008, you took on Robert Parker. You were the Robert Parker Slayer of sorts. I love that. Yeah, the way you said that, the Robert Parker Slayer. For our audience, I'd like to set some context because I would like for you to say in 2008, what book did you write? And how did it change the way we kind of write about wine? Okay, so for the listeners who don't remember who Robert Parker is, he was and still might be in a certain world the world's most famous wine critic for about 20 years.

1:13:36He did a lot to, well, people used to say democratize the wine world, which is kind of funny. But he developed a newsletter, The Wine Advocate, that became immensely popular. and if he scored a wine like 95 to 100 it would immediately sell out so he had amazing economic power this power greatly influenced my ability or affected my ability to get a wine that i wanted to drink because most winemakers in the world most regions in the world were trying to manipulate their wine into a wine that he liked, which quite frankly was big, powerful, and oaky, the antithesis of an Alice wine. So I had already written, well, it was one book, but I wanted a book.

1:14:28And I thought I would write a book about natural wine. And I remember going to, looking for an agent who threw me out basically, and I can't sell this book. And it's like, nobody wants to read this. This isn't the book you want to write. And she thought she knew what I wanted to write. But she was right. This was not the book I wanted to write. I felt nobody would listen to me if I wrote this book in my own voice. I was going to write it as a reported book. And so I probably, I just, do I remember going to ballet class, leaving half through the class because I knew exactly I had the name of the book, The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World from Parkerization.

1:15:10I love that title. And this was the book of how the Robert Parker effect was wiping out the wines that I felt were the most important ones in the world. And I was going to write it memoir-like. Yeah, that's your style. And that book is, it covers the power that you speak of. And then this gradual switch away from those bold wines. And to this day, now into the current era, we've kind of reversed our taste. So I have to follow it up because now in 2022, you know, there is a cult of Alice and I have, you're very understated and you're very modest in this interview, but you really have your fans and you have a lot of power.

1:15:55Your newsletter is well read. So now after taking on Robert Parker, how do you feel about this dichotomy now that there's you, the cult of Alice firing and you, you are a version of Robert Parker, not the same style. Nor do I have the same power and, uh, which is a very good thing. Yeah. Which is because, because it was getting so close to one world, one taste and now there's much more diversity. So yes, I have my fans though, you know, especially in the past two years, I haven't seen much of them. So it's hard. It's easy to forget that they're out there, but every time somebody signs stuff for the newsletter.

1:16:35I go, wow, great. It's like, ding. How many subscribers do you have? It's not earth shattering, but 800. Oh, that's good. I mean, it's great. It's influential people in the industry. It's great. You know, it does have power and, and it has, you know, just normal readers, a lot of industry, a lot of people looking for good leads. So there's a lot of travel stuff in there, travel food. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've reviewed restaurants and your food writing. I'd love to collaborate with you on a story one day. That'd be great. It'd be really great to work on some food writing. Let's shift to wine.

1:17:15For our listeners, there's a lot of context to provide and a lot of nuggets that you can gain from reading the book. You say you don't really give bottle picks in your articles, but you have some bottle picks. Yeah, it's a staple. I do a lot. I do a lot. I have over like 1 ,500 wine recommendations at this point. Wonderful. And so let's talk about Americans. Americans are conditioned to buy the grape, right? Oh, yeah. Which, you know, is such a disservice, right? Ooh. I know, right? Ooh. And I'm kind of similar. I write about coffee quite a bit, and I think buying the country is quite the same, kind of the same idea.

1:17:50It's like you buy the grape. Like, you know, people want to buy a Merlot or people want to buy – I mean, you could name the grape, Savion Blanc in particular, Malbec. But like, why is that wrong? It's wrong because it doesn't tell you anything about the wine that you're going to get. Not a clue. In fact, if somebody comes in and they order by the grape, if you order Chardonnay, you expect something oaky and fat and low acid. If you order a Malbec, you are ordering something from Argentina, even if you don't know. if I gave somebody ordered a Malbec something from Cahor which was the same grape they'd be shocked and it's also completely it has no curiosity it's and so maybe it's fine to order by the grape for a person who wants to know exactly that person is not necessarily going to be interested in a wine with a lot of expression they're interested in a beverage they're interested a Coke, a Pepsi.

1:18:54And that should be fine, except if that person really is curious. And this happens a lot. And they go, wow, you mean the home of Malbec really originated in Southwest France? Honestly? Like, what is that like? I'll tell you this, it's not a fruit bomb. Yeah. And wait, Chardonnay from the Girard? Yes, I think Chardonnay from the Girard is probably the most extremely beautiful expression. Really, what is it like? It's kind of like lean and angular and it sparks and it's kind of salty. And like, no kidding. Which is not what you're going to get in California, obviously. Same grape. No, so it just, it limits you to as if you, it's all the same, but it's not.

1:19:39I love speaking of Jura, you talk about your introduction to those wines and just beautiful wines and how everyone wasn't drinking Jura, but now they are. It's such a cool moment. It is a cool moment for them. Tell me how then, well, first off, I like how you delineate. You say some people just want to drink and it's okay. Like you're very clear about that. And I like that kind of like levels it out. It makes it not feel like there's any kind of like right or wrong. Sometimes you just want a Malbec from Argentina and you're at the airport lounge and that's what you want. You get and you want. And more power to them because I can't do that.

1:20:12That's when I order martini. Right. If it's only one Malbec from Argentina. Right, no. But I am curious. I am. But I don't know anything because I'm very scared. I'm scared about doing the wrong thing. I'm scared about, I guess, paying too much maybe. I don't know. How do you treat that? You know, it's a philosophical question that I'm always asking myself about why is wine so intimidating and what can be done to make it less intimidating without being simple? the money factor is a big deal I think the fact that there's so much elite marketing around wine is a disservice if people really viewed it as an agricultural product where one gets one shot if one really one shot at this magical thing I think that would spark a certain curiosity and a sense of exploration where perhaps it's less intimidating.

1:21:12If people understood that they don't have to spend a fortune. Right now, though, it is really hard to get a bottle of wine to drink that you want to drink at under$15, and that is a pity. That's truly difficult. Up to$18, but still for a lot of people, they're going to say, who are interested in wine, yeah, I can do that. Is it because of taxes? Is it because of costs of the world, everything in the world? Why can't we get great wines for under$15? It is the cost of production. Yeah. It is the cost of production, especially a local wine. United States real estate is really expensive. That's actually one reason people are going to Vermont.

1:21:53It's a little bit less expensive there. It's easier from the old world, the so-called old world. It's easier from Georgia where land is not that expensive. So go where land is not expensive and you can do better. But even in Burgundy where, you know, go to this old lesson that my first mentor called the young wine collector, who's not so young anymore, told me just go, especially in Burgundy, buy at least the wine you can afford the most from a great producer. Smart. You mentioned Vermont because you kind of say a lot of great things about wine in Vermont and you're such a fan. you have less kind things to say about wine in Long Island, which I love.

1:22:39These are real takes, right? Tell me about Vermont wine. Vermont is truly exciting to me because it is, in the memoir, I talk about it as a local wine done right. So it very much annoys me what Long Island did, and I think they are still trying to work out of it. They try to imitate Bordeaux. They thought they were Bordeaux because they're in the same longitude. And they're not Bordeaux. And because they were out in the Atlantic. But they picked a style and tried to emulate it. What Vermont is doing is they're growing grapes that should be able to grow in Vermont. They're hybrids. They're not vinifera like Merlot and Pinot Noir.

1:23:22Not name brand grapes they're going to sell themselves. Exactly. Yeah, they have names like Brianna or Marquette. And they're making wine simply with no oak influence. And a lot of them are made in glass, even glass or food grade plastic, some in old oak and just allowed to be simply what they are. There's a lot of people farming beautifully and that makes a difference to me, too. Yeah, absolutely. The agriculture and the farming is so paramount. And when you go to a winery that, you know, grows around grapes, you're seeing the vastness of the agriculture. A couple of Vermont wines that we could search out.

1:24:02Yeah, Ellison Estate, which is about to go a little bit national. La Garagista, of course. There is a new cooperative called Calche and they're giving their first release. They're basically a co-op in Socialist Co-op and what they're going to be doing is super interesting up there. if you can find the wines of Max Rose under the name, under the label Chertok. And how am I buying these wines? Am I going to Astra Center to name one of many retailers? La Gargista is pretty widely available. I think the best thing to do is go on, just search. Yeah, and you'll find your e-commerce retailer. I think about walking vineyards and, you know, I grew up in West Michigan.

1:24:52and there's plenty of vineyards there, and there's a burgeoning wine scene there. But I think about the vastness of these vineyards, and I think about the climate change. And I want to just get your take. Right. Well, that's one reason Vermont is so great. And I tell my friends in California, time to think of Vermont. Interesting. You're going to be safe from fires for at least a while. Fires is in particular something that can affect a wine-growing region, right? Well, yeah. You can get your vines going up in flame. So that's kind of bad. And even if they're not going up in flames, smoke taint is a real thing.

1:25:28So if the fires happen while the frita is still on the vine, you will have to handle those grapes very carefully. And you get a wide range of bacon-y char. You really have to get it off the skins as soon as possible. And so there is something you can do. But is climate change really going to change the way we drink wine? Without a doubt. It's terrifying. right now in France to take a look at a lot of the grapes that are sunburned and reducing, it will be reducing yields. It will lower the acidity. It will at some point, at some point to go back to Burgundy, they're not going to be able to grow a Pinot Noir there.

1:26:10It's too sensitive. It's not a hot weather grape. So what are they doing? What are the producers, are they replanting? What is their firewall punting against destroying? Well, all over Europe, there is a lot of experimentation with hybrid grapes. They call them Peaveys. They're not sold on whether they're going to be pulling out, especially when you have paid like$2 million an acre. It's kind of difficult to just pull out all of your old vine Pinot. But there's a lot of really good work being done with changing farming, raising the canopy. And here we're getting into maybe geeky stuff that maybe not everybody wants to hear.

1:26:57But there's a lot of stuff you can do in the way you farm that vine that can affect and give it protection from the sun and the heat. Before, they were struggling to ripen it. And now they have to prune it and get a canopy over the grape so they keep it in an umbrella. That will help a lot. So much more labor, though, doing it that way. So much more, yeah. You write about your Jewish background and identity throughout the book. You grew up in a modern Orthodox household. Modern Orthodox, something that I don't think exists anymore. Yeah, it is pretty... It's everything that's polarized. Yeah, polarized is the word.

1:27:29But I do want to talk about, you kind of talk about like the idea of the junket and how you'll, you know, take press trips only when necessary. You're very independent. But you did write about a press trip that you took to Poland for the company Belvedere and this junket and you end up freezing your ass off at Birkenau. Yeah. This, I mean, it's just absurd to say it out loud that you're on a press trip and you end up at Birkenau. But I feel, I've taken junkets myself, but you, as a reporter, you find the story. Talk about that scene in the book when you're at Birkenau. The reason that I was persuaded to go on this press trip was because my friend, we traveled a lot together, was she really wanted to go to Auschwitz.

1:28:17And I googled to see what was going on in Auschwitz these days, and it looked like a fancy museum that I wanted no part of. And I said, please, please, please, when will we go if we're not going? Okay, fine. So only if we go to Birkenau. So at this point, we had separated from the press trip. The press trip was up in Warsaw, and we all did go down to Krakow. For a citrus-flavored Belvedere. Yes, for the citrus-flavored. And, you know, we took the day off, and we hired a car, and we went to the camps. And Auschwitz was exactly what I expected. And the barrack that was dedicated to the Jews that perished was closed.

1:29:05was it was it was still when i think about it i still shake my head so we went to burkenau and it started to snow we were the only people there which was perfect that was what i wanted it was this amazing i mean you get to walk through a concentration camp with no one there in the snow with the barracks um and the the chimney from the crematory just stuck in the snow because it had been bombed out. It was just chilling. But at one point, we went through the barracks. We see all the scribblings, the graffiti. I was trying to summon like I could read some Yiddish. It was, anyways, go out and we start walking.

1:29:47I cannot find a way out. We absolutely cannot. Trapped in a concentration camp. There was barbed wire all over the place and there's one way out and we could not find a way out. There was no one there. It was getting dark. It was getting very dark, but not, it was the middle of the day, but because it was starting to snow and the sky was really getting black. So our taxi driver was there, but he, you know, he's sleeping in the car. So it was just this moment of, of terror where, you know, it's unrealistic, but you feel like you're trapped in some sort of somebody else's film and you were going to die.

1:30:26We were getting really, really cold. So, I mean, actually. The irony. The irony of all. Being on a citrus-flavored vodka press trip and dying at Burkinaw. Right. I came back and I wrote about it immediately. And a lot of the stories in the memoir come from pieces that I never published. It's obvious that you have a lot of other stories outside of these ones, but these ones are the ones you've held for a while. Yeah. Did you find those stories percolating? just through the pandemic, being in isolation? Was that part of the catharsis that you give? Because again, this book I read in two days, it's just so compelling, your stories.

1:31:05Every time I finish a book, I don't know how I wrote it. I don't know how that happened. It's, I don't know whether you have that experience, But I didn't even know. I had one story. I don't write from an outline, but of course I had to do an outline to write the proposal. I can't really explain how I did it. But I knew that one part about writing about this story was that I had helped to write my cousin's memoir of surviving Meydanik in and out of the Warsaw ghetto. And I wanted to write this particular one for her and my relationship to her. And that's one reason. Yeah, and you write so colorfully about that escape and some of the terrible realities that your family experienced.

1:32:10Your father is an interesting character in the acknowledgments. You acknowledge that maybe you didn't give him the full time he deserved and maybe you will at a future time, but he's such a character. He is such a character. My favorite essay is Dad's Last Gift, which involves you breaking into his filing cabinet after he had passed away. But I want to ask you about, to be honest, I want to ask you about Burns Steakhouse. Because in Tampa, Florida, I've always wanted to visit Burns Steakhouse. And anyone, I looked at the PDF of the wine list last night because I was just like, this wine list is special and odd to me, just the way it's laid out.

1:32:51But tell us about Burns Steakhouse. Actually, I should go back to, I should look at, see what they have left. Yeah. Burns Steakhouse is a legendary steakhouse with one of the most incredible wine lists in the country. And for listeners who've gone to San Sebastian and ever gone to Recondo, it's kind of the Recondo of the United States. It is deep. It is old. It is shockingly packed with bargains. Now, this is a place that Robert Parker used to go all the time and buy, you know, like have these, as they would call them, big whale, you know, like big investor kind of people are going in and spending a lot of money.

1:33:31But I'm with my brother who doesn't really get what I do. And I know, you know, when I'm probably buying, even though he's a cardiologist and, you know, and it's going to be have to be in a budget. But besides that, there is, so I look in someplace like that, I look for something old and something curious. from a good vineyard. And of course, this was in 2004, but for$32, there was this bottle of 1982 Clothalbert. That was shocking. And it was probably going to be all too old, and it was. Yeah. You said that it was too old and didn't quite land the way you wanted it. But I looked at the list and there's like burgundy from the nineties and on below a hundred bucks.

1:34:16Right. And there's, I'd be curious to see if there's anything still there between under 50. Yeah. It probably is. There might be old Rieslings like cabinet, not very fancy things, but there's always, if you know what you're looking for, and today it's easy, you pull out your phone and you Google it. That is my tip. Yeah. You know, and see ageable, ageable cabinet, like what could, you know, something like that. But if it is from a good producer, it probably can at least give you some information. And if a wine is cheap enough, it's worth it to check it out. And it's in Tampa, Florida of all places.

1:34:56And it's Tampa. It's got to be some tax dodge or something. That's why it's there. I don't know. I might be just really discounting it. No, it's been there forever. It was just a wine lover. And it's cavernous. I mean, they roast their own coffee there. I remember the food not being really good. Yeah, it's always on like some of the men's mags lists and there's always some kind of narrative around it. But let's talk about the absence of natural wine from this memoir. Because it's there, but it's kind of in the margins. Because you wrote a book about natural wine for Ten Speed Press. like and that you wrote that book but this I feel like natural wine as a topic is not covered um but I want to know about natural wine right now because the hashtag nattyization and I joke because that's basically like how people respond to natural wine now it's like a meme you know in the mainstream my question simply is is that a good thing or is that not a good thing the fact that, you know, influencers of all types know about natural wine now?

1:36:02I'm going to take this as a two-part question. So I don't talk about natural wine in it because it's, yeah, it's a wine book, but it's not a wine book. And I've covered how I got into it. And it's there about how I got into wine is basically how I got into natural wine. I don't need to beat that. It's no longer new, but all of the wines or practically all the wines recommended in the book are natural. I just feel I don't have to talk about it. They're all just great wines. Now, as about new influencer natural wine, it's about going back to, it might as well, hmm, I don't want to get into too much trouble here.

1:36:40Please. Please get into trouble. I mean, not trouble, but like, you know, it's going, it's what's old is new again. And natural wine is being reduced to a style, to producers putting their wines into clear bottles so they could show off the colors. It's like the F words, fizzy, funk. Yeah. And that is a beverage that's fun. That's fine. But that's not the kind of wine that moves me. And so I don't like natty wine. Thank you for saying that. and I just think, I had hoped that by 2022, we would be at a point where natural wine is just wine, and it has had its effect. There's a lot more wine moving over to natural without saying it, just by going native ferment, taking their foot off the gas of sulfur, not using additives, a lot more like that.

1:37:43But the whole natural wine scene, it's being pushed as we're at the party with the party movement and like, okay, fine, you know, but it's not White Claw. It isn't. I would say from my point of view, and I'm not a, I don't drink, but as a net positive, just talking about wine is a good thing, right? I mean, as opposed to not talking about wine, talking about White Claw. So hashtag Natty Wine might get, it might be a gateway. Push back, please. Maybe. Well, actually, it could be the same way if I order a Chardonnay. It's the same thing. If you don't have the curiosity to know exactly what natural wine is or to go back to the farming, because natural wine for me is very much about farming, then you'll never know.

1:38:32You know, I don't necessarily believe that you get into... great wine by starting out in crap wine. I just, in fact, sometimes you get so used to crap wine. If you're given something that's really energetic and lively, you don't know how to deal with it. Some people can jump. Yeah. Some of those fish can jump out of the pond, you know, by themselves. I, I think about, I was brought up at the modern Orthodox Jewish home. My mother was a 1950s housewife. Um, um, who, you know, was a shtetl cook. It was crappy. I mean, she actually was good, but - Was there some kohlend in your household? No, no, no.

1:39:14We didn't have any kohlend because I don't know why, thank God, but I stopped eating meat when I was 16. So that really helped. But the first time I had Indian food out of a house that had absolutely no spice in it, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I remember being at the India Sweet House in Inman Square in Massachusetts, Somerville, and just what is this fabulous thing? Now, I didn't know how to seek that out. And so some people are going to do that with wine. Yeah. What makes crap wine? What makes crap wine is crap viticulture and then making wine to a style. Yes. So certainly technical stuff.

1:39:55And for the natural wine, sloppy stuff. There's a lot of stuff that's quick into the bottle and I don't care what kind of one to use people who I say, no, natural wine isn't a bacterial swamp. But now, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that are bacterial swamps and they're being passed off as natural wine. Well, that's enough to turn anybody off, except some people thinking if it's natural, it's good. We'll like it. Oh, there's always like that drinker that they're searching for that this bacterial swamp might actually. Right. Not saying there isn't room for some flaw, that it doesn't have to be perfection.

1:40:30But there are some things that would never have been put in a bottle 15 years ago. As a non-drinker, I wonder, is there a future for non-alcoholic wine? Because I think on the beer side, I love Athletic. I like what they're doing with the NA beers and there is a real flavor profile. Is there a future with alcohol-free wine? I think that beer is in a different category. I think that some of those, because, you know it is something that can be made um weekly you know and it is a beverage um there's a lot people do drink for a certain flavor profile um not necessarily the story are they doing any sour beers that they are there's some there's some ipas and there's are some sours are those as successful i mean probably not i haven't done the research but i would imagine that the I'd imagine not.

1:41:17The like minor IPAs are probably the most popular NA beers. But the wine is de-alcoholized. So it's going through a real extreme process to get that alcohol out. Some people tell me there's a future. I guess there is. You know, you want to be sociable. You want a glass of wine with people. You can't drink, but you want, you know, there probably are some non-alcoholic, Actually, I'm just thinking about this right now. Some non-alcoholic aperitif wines. I think that one can do a vermouth. Is there any non-alcoholic, is there vermouth out there? I think that, hey, that's a great idea. I think there's any, like that Phony Negroni is a product that I really like personally.

1:42:07So there's definitely some vermouth happening in there. But for wine that is really about exploring where it is, I'm afraid there's, all we can hope for is really low alcohol wine. Yeah, it's a great answer because it is a different product from beer. And I appreciate the way you've laid it out without judgment because I think you are talking about the viticulture and the aging and the production in your appreciation of wine. It's not simply what's in the glass. So it makes sense why you would be like, maybe not to my question. Right, but I think mocktails or whatever we're going to call them, I don't know, could probably do better than mocktails.

1:42:44but um those are pretty good those can be tasty there's something about the acidity of like a chablis or even a cabinet an old cabinet reasoning to me um that can be that's you know for me that was interesting it's just the way that that yeah but then you know there's that evolution the evolution of what happens to that fruit but yet the acidity is always going to be there so it comes out even more in a way so that's not going to be able to happen so i'm sorry no it's It's probably going to be, the code will be cracked. I want to close. We ask all guests on the Taste Podcast, if you could write a book without the burden of time, meaning there would be no deadline, or budget, meaning you would have unlimited funds to produce this book, what would that book be, Alice?

1:43:29Do I only get one? You can do two. Okay. Well, no, I'm going to do three. Well, the book that I didn't just because I didn't have the money and the one that will always be very sad to me is the history of the dairy restaurant. Now, Ben Katcher did it and, you know, is a graphic book, but I really wanted to do that. So I think a lot of the people I wanted to interview are dead now. I don't read Yiddish. These are the kosher restaurants of the early 20th century, going back further, maybe? Yeah, I'd like to know when they started. Yeah. But also the heyday in the 60s and the 70s. Yeah, I guess they're all gone by the early 90s.

1:44:13as a piece of New York culture that is gone. And I just want people to know about them. Let's see. I would like to get to work on the screenplay of this memoir. Yeah. Okay. That's what I want to do. So, uh, so. Is there going to be one? Uh, well, I think it may be up to me to pitch and I would like to develop it. I've been thinking a lot about how I would do it and wondering whether I had the time to do it. So I don't know. And the other thing is, you know, it's always as a writer, I have one novel that is in the drawer that needs its 15th rewrite, but I just started a new novel that I need time and money for to at least.

1:45:03So fiction is definitely on your mind. So fiction, yeah. Alice Firing, thank you for joining the Taste Podcast. Thanks so much for having me.

1:45:20Jancis Robinson, thank you for joining the Taste Podcast. It's a huge pleasure. Thank you. I've followed your writing for a long time. The big caveat here is I'm not a wine drinker. I don't drink. It's been many years, but I certainly write about wine and spirits, and I have tremendous respect for it. But I also want to get a little bit, I want to like poke some holes in some myths with this conversation. I think you've done such a great job at your website and writing for the Financial Times doing so. But first, to get into it, I wanted to get a sense of your history and just like your background of getting exposed to wine, maybe air quotes serious wine, while you're studying at Oxford.

1:46:00How did you get the wine bug? How did it bite you? I wasn't brought up with wine, which was typical of people of my generation. but there was and I think this is true for so many people who end up spending their lives devoted to wine there was one wine that lit the flame and it was a red burgundy it was a 1959 Chambol Mousigny Les Amoureurs and it was just I was lucky because I had a boyfriend whose father gave him a bit too much money and some of that was spent on me and it just tasted so much better than Student Plonk And I just realized, because I loved food and wine generally, but I just realized that here was a liquid that contained so many different elements, you know, like kind of history and geography and psychology probably.

1:46:53And it delivered a huge amount of sensual pleasure, but I could tell that it would keep the brain alive and interested as well. You know, lots and lots of intellectual stuff, too. Well, you write that wine, you're drawn to wine because it's a huge sensual pleasure with real intellectual stimulation, the merging of the two, which I think is such a sharp observation. and you're not really you're not getting that with like broccoli or ice cream or other foods that we canonize a bit in food writing but you're not getting that blend of intellectual and just interesting flavors. I suppose what distinguishes wine to a certain extent is its ability to age and evolve not just to last but to evolve in a really interesting way over time so that with good wine it will taste completely different after, say, 10 years in the bottle.

1:47:44But also, when you look at a wine label, almost uniquely, it can tell you exactly which spot on the globe grew it and when it was made. And that really adds enormously to how interesting it can be because an awful lot of foodstuffs, they're just kind of plonked on the shelf or the plate. And I mean, certainly it's getting better that retailers and particularly restaurateurs more and more are naming the grower or exactly where it came from. But they won't usually have that specificity. No, we live in a world of metadata. I mean, metadata drives our universe. And for a long time, I mean, now to your point, like food is certainly not traceable in the way that certain government regulated products like wine are required by law to put a number of bullet points on the label.

1:48:44Although, jumping in here on a little tangent, until now, wine has escaped legislation that requires producers to list every ingredient, unlike foods. But I really don't like that, and I've been campaigning against it. I wouldn't say it's anything to do with me, but the EU are bringing in requirement that wine producers do list the ingredients on the labels, or if not explicitly on the label, that the back label will have a QR code that you can access. Chances, what are, okay, like me speaking just generally, like I'm like grapes and like what else is in wine? Like, let's just get there, go there.

1:49:26Sure. Well, it all depends, of course, how artisanal the wine is. And there are wines that literally are just grape juice and sunshine. Yeah, time, sunshine. But it's true that grape juice can deteriorate quite rapidly, like all fresh fruit juices and a lot of fruits. So since Roman times, a little bit of sulfur dioxide has been added. It's like a kind of antioxidant and antibacterial, you know, all that kind of thing. It's not evil, even though wine labels say it contains sulfites. That's a kind of slight misconception. So it can have a little bit of that, a little bit of sulfide oxide or sulfites.

1:50:19In cool years or climates in the old days before global warming, sugar was quite often added to the fermentation vat to give the Bintner something more to ferment, get the yeast, give it more to work on. It didn't remain in the finished wine as sweetness, but it just slightly increased the alcohol content. That has become rare, although last year, 21, was so cool that quite a lot of French vignerons were added sugar. What's the word for that when you add sugar? Chaptalization. Chaptalization, right. I love that word. Yes, after a French government minister called Chaptal. In hotter climates, it's very, very common to add acidity to make the wine kind of fresher, crisper tasting.

1:51:04And in some really warm climates, some producers have added water because the naturally fermented wine is just too strong. And actually there have been very, very few. And then there are additives, you know, the sort of additives that you see on your food labels, sort of fresheners and yeast and enzymes and all, you know, treatments kind of things. Oh, and some producers add coloring matter, which is crazy in a way. Well, if you look at some of the wines, you get like, this is not naturally occurring. Yeah, sort of strange purple. Yeah, what's up with this hue? It's like Welch's grape. Yeah, exactly.

1:51:43It's like weird. Yeah, yeah. So I'm really looking forward to sort of the more industrial wine producers having to specify on their labels exactly what they've done, what they've added. But I admire the people who add as little as possible and we'll be able to identify them in future. Yeah, it's a smart position to have. The more transparency, the better. I love your BBC television work, your BBC4 show, The Wine Program. I caught a bunch of clips on YouTube. I found one from 1983 or the mid-'80s about Merlot that I'm going to link to in the show notes. You had helicopters. You had a budget there.

1:52:22That was a great program. It was fun to do, and I think it was the world's first TV series about wine. And I keep saying that and no one's challenged me. So I think it must be true. Keep saying it'll be true. It was quite groundbreaking because, you know, for instance, the BBC wouldn't touch wine for a while because they thought they'd get a whole load of temperance campaigners. Interesting. Yeah. Really? But that changed. In fact, I did quite a big series for the BBC in the 90s. And I've just actually hosted an online wine course for BBC, BBC Maestro. My question with this is how do you get a wide audience, like a general, like a public television audience into wine through like a program?

1:53:11It's really, really difficult. Yeah, it's hard. Visually, because so little moves with wine. I used to wonder why when I was traveling with a film crew, the cameraman got so excited when he saw a bottling line. because for us wine writers, it's the most boring thing in the world. But it's because it moves. There's a bit of action. And apart from the wind blowing a vine and people making a barrel, yes, you could film people tasting. But as you know from food, it is so difficult. You never want to see anybody swirling a glass in there. That just makes you feel uncomfortable. It's not a spectator sport, is it?

1:53:46You might see some cows in Burgundy or Bordeaux just in the field. Yes, yeah. So, in fact, I think the television series, we did two of them that I'm most proud of, was called Vintner's Tales. And they were just little short 10-minute vignettes about really amazing characters in wine. Our informal title for the series was Weirdos in the Wine Trade. But they weren't all weird, but they were idiosyncratic. Sure. And they were funny. And, you know, it's people. I mean, people stories are visual, aren't they? Absolutely. It's a real art to wine writing is adding the people element. Stories. Stories.

1:54:26I worked on Punch for years with those guys when we were working with them closely. And just trying to get people into the pages is so important for the general audience. I agree with you fully. And I think, you know, I'm often asked about certain regions and countries. How can we get our wines better known? And it's really often a function of the characters and the people. And if people with big personalities are prepared to travel and talk to people, I mean, think about the late, much lamented Jim Clendenin of Au Bon Climat. He was a giant character. He traveled all over the world and he did so much, not just for his Southern California winery, but for the California wine in general.

1:55:06Let's talk about the Queen, HRH, you can call her. We're segueing from Jim Clendenin to the Queen. That's an interesting one. I'm trying to capture the kind of size of your audience in the UK and in the US. But you served on – you're a member of the Royal House of the Wine Committee, which advises the Queen's cellar, which is interesting because, yes, I do watch The Crown and I do think they drink a little bit of wine up in Buckingham Palace and all the various – Windsor Castle and all those places. So what's this mean? Were you actually doing tastings for the royal family? Oh, it's ongoing. Of course, COVID brought a bit of tasting to a halt.

1:55:46But normally, three or four times a year, myself and the other four members of the committee, four or five, who are in the trade, we go into the cellars at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle in response to a tender that's been put out. So we're blind taste a whole load of wines that people want to sell to the royal cellar and decide among ourselves which ones to buy. But they're chiefly for entertaining rather than the royal family individuals. General consumption, right? Yeah. So a lot of it is for giant receptions. You know, there could be 250 people. And if we choose something that's too expensive, then we get, you know, the press saying this is shocking.

1:56:26Yes. Very interesting because, you know, a state dinner here in the States would – everything is political. Like every choice, every chef, every item on that menu is publicized. But what you're saying is kind of the opposite. You're saying you go in and taste blind. You pick the wines that you think taste great and then you serve them to 500 people at a reception. So how does it not become political if you're picking like a wine from like a region that maybe isn't – I don't know, represented by the queen? Well, these big receptions tend to be, you know, it could be everyone in the restaurant business, for instance.

1:57:04And the wines chosen for them won't be widely reported. The ones that are widely reported are for the state banquets. I was lucky enough to go to one at Windsor Castle for Carla Bruni. And I always remember her name before. Sarkozy. Sarkozy, the old president. She's cooler. Just on the record. Yeah, much cooler. Yeah. Party guest. And they do report, the press scrutinizes minutely the wines served at those banquets. But funnily enough, they are not chosen by us. They're chosen by the foreign office's cellar. Got it. So what's your interaction with the Queen? I mean, have you had an audience? Have you met her?

1:57:46I say this because I think our audience is obviously fascinated. It's like an endless well of content for a marriage. She is pretty amazing, isn't she? She's incredible. What a show. Oh, the crown and her history. Yeah. Well, yes. I don't think the crown is identical to the Queen's life. I would put that on the record. Fair enough. I certainly respect that take. But yes, she gave me my honour, my OBE, in 2003. Then I joined the Royal House of the Wine Committee in 2005. And then there was one time when we went to taste at Windsor when her aquari, I think, approached us just before we were going in to taste and said, the Queen's in residence and she wonders whether you'd like to have lunch with her.

1:58:31And so we kind of said, shall we, shall we? Twist my arm, yeah. Yeah, no, we didn't. That was fun. There were about 12 people around the table or something. But that's the only time. And yes, I've been to a reception or two, but much bigger. Wonderful. And a state banquet. Thanks for those memories. I really, I hope she's around forever. I mean, really, it's the hope. Let's talk about a Janssys Robinson tasting, you know, be it an Anderson Valley, Pino or White Burgundy. How are you running a tasting? I think that's some part of the mystery of what you do is this tasting. And how do you decide which wine is better than the other?

1:59:12Well, I participate in so many different sorts of taste. And sadly, the royal household ones are some of the few that I can do blind. I love blind tasting, but blind tasting requires a and other or others to set it up for you and, you know, number the bottles and unmask them and all that and serve you and all that sort of thing. So that's quite rare. Normally, I mean, London is a fabulous place as a wine writer because we're at a bit of a crossroads of the world of wine. Exporters tend to come to us. You could go to four tastings a day in the sort of height of the season, really, in London. So I try and go to as many interesting tastings, trade tastings as there are, but they're very, very rarely blind.

1:59:59Then during lockdown, of course, I couldn't go to the wine. So the wine came to me and I was tasting masses of wine at home, which was nice because it meant I could linger over the wine. I could see what it was like with food, visit it the next day. You know, you can't do that at a crowded trade tasting. What else do I do? Sometimes people will organize a blind tasting. And then, of course, going to the regions and then tasting with a producer in situ. In situ and on the scene. And I think, you know, when you get to speak with a producer and do a portfolio tasting in a region like Rioja or like Vina Verde or wherever, California.

2:00:40California that's got to give you an extra level of excitement. It's great I mean it is as I discovered during lockdown difficult to write about a region if you haven't visited it and you know that's why for instance these great big wine fairs aren't really of interest to wine writers because you need to see the producers in situ but I think as long as you've been to a region once it it makes a huge difference and now that travel or recently has travel has been more difficult. I felt quite confident about writing about wines I was tasting at home, but from a region that I had visited or from someone that I spoke to or, you know, was communicating with.

2:01:23Isn't there's like nothing better when a winemaker makes you lunch? I mean, they kind of like, I know you're a professional so you can't be like clouded by this, but when like, you're like outside at a wood table. Oh, outside. Come on. I mean, we Brits love eating outside. Oh my gosh. Under a vine-shaded terrace is the perfect. It's truly the magic of going to a winery and having some food. Or it could be in a big setting, too. It doesn't have to be outside in a little winery. It could be in a large place in Napa. But it's still having the wine with food. My question is, in terms of your travels, is there a region that you think the wine and the food lives in harmony?

2:02:02In the best way? This is a tough question. Yeah, well, I think generally over time the food has evolved to be a natural partner for the local wine. Although I think I would highlight Piemonte perhaps as just having fabulous, fabulous food and fabulous, fabulous wines that do go together. And I suppose there are sort of classics, you know, like the sort of soft goat's cheese and Sancerre and things like that. Mendoza, the big hearty Malbecs with a kind of, you know, an asado. The beef grilled out in the... And I've never, ever, I've yet to have a chimichurri sauce that's as good as anything you can get in Argentina.

2:02:46I don't know what the magic ingredient is. Probably beef fat. Maybe. I think you put beef fat into it. I don't know, because it's kind of herbs and vinegar, I think. I think there is that little bit of, they put something in this. I've never been to Argentina, but I think they put a little, because those herbs grow great around the world. Maybe the vinegar from the wine. I don't know. I love that you went all over the globe. I guess, is there a region that you think is emerging in terms of the food and the wine coming together that you wanted to marinate on a little bit? I think Greece would be an obvious example.

2:03:27and because great, really great wines and very, very particular food there. And of course, because the climate is so dry, the flavors tend to be very strong, very strongly accentuated. Great call. I want to know for, you know, our listeners, we're all home cooks here and we're all entertainers in some way. We might not entertain a lot, but at least once a year we're entertaining. And I wanted to know, you know, what, you know, I've got these bottles of wine. I've got like a couple wines. I'm not even going to say what type of wine. I'm just going to say I have a couple wines to serve. What is a great dish that you can serve that won't blow out your palate and that will let the wine speak.

2:04:10So you've spent a little bit of money on this wine, but you want to serve it with some food. I think a big mistake we make is we add flavors to the canapes or the first course that just absolutely destroy us. So is there some way to get us to enjoy the wine and have a nice bite too? Is your scenario people aren't yet at the table? Yes, good question. Like course correction. We're going to call these canapes or appetizers or derves or wherever you're from or whatever you call them. Right. Right. Well, it sounds very boring, but if they're good enough quality, and I think maybe I'm being too picky, but, you know, if you're handing around, you know, there's four different kinds of cheese plus some charcuterie plus some olive.

2:04:51It's very fiddly. And maybe in an early part of an evening, you actually just want people to relax a bit and put something in their mouth. So really, really high quality nuts, sort of spiced nuts, not too heavily spiced nuts, but sort of salted nuts or little cheese biscuits. Sally Clark is a sort of Alice Waters protégé with the lovely Clark's restaurant in London. And she makes these just gorgeously rich cheese shortbreads, you know, that slightly, slightly crumble in the mouth, but not in hand. She has a tendency to make them too spicy for wine. In fact, we had a big party quite recently, and I ordered a whole load of those cheese shortbreads, specifically asking Sally not to put too much spice in them, and she didn't get the memo.

2:05:40She didn't get the draft, and she's got Jances Robinson bringing over wines, and she's going to bring some curry powder in there and blow out her. I love that pick because I think we have Parmesan shortbread on taste. I'll link to a recipe in our show notes. Oh, good. That sounds perfect. I think that's a really, really smart decision. I do agree that when you have like four cheeses and they're beautiful cheeses and maybe some saprasada, it gets too fiddly to quote you. Let's talk about a flavor, a wonderful flavor, potentially the best flavor, but a flavor to absolutely avoid when trying to accentuate wine.

2:06:15I think most, there aren't that many things that really kill wine, but too much chili just kind of heat. heat you know your palate is on fire and just can't taste anything so that would be a problem and um globe artichokes there's this funny thing happens in your mouth that you're not really tasting things as you should uh immediately after eating a globe artichoke leaf those are uh in good choices i mean i like that i might my two are black pepper i think when you like if If you're trying to pair wine with Cacio Pepe, to me, that is so impossible. It just blows me out, my palate. That's funny because Tim Hanai, who's a fellow master of wine, who researched quite a lot of the whole such taste thing, he, for a long time, positively advocated adding black pepper to, I think he said if he had something that had a lot of tannin in it, the chewy thing in young red wine, it made it less obvious, I think that was it.

2:07:21But I know that... You said Tim's his name? Tim Hanai, H-A-N-N-I. I'm not going to dispute Tim. I feel Tim knows what he's talking about. I'm just a guy and I respect him. Well, he, interestingly, he no longer drinks at all. Yeah, yeah. But he did do a lot of research. That's all I'm saying. My other one is citrus. I think citrus, like if you're doing a citrus salad, it's just so hard. It is, especially, yes, citrus acidity. I think vinegar is not as much of a problem. Vinegar is less. I mean, a nice vinegar. I mean, salad and a white crisp wine. So great together. I'm going to go a little lightning round here because I know we could marinate for a while on these topics.

2:08:02But, I mean, I can't believe I wrote this down. Is the most underrated wine region, Jansis? I mentioned Greece. I think Portugal is a very obvious candidate. it. It's having trouble getting the prices it deserves. And what I love about both Greece and Portugal is that they have this massive array of indigenous grape varieties, each of which have strong characters and provide us with so many different tastes from the usual diet of Cabernet Merlot, Chardonnay, Sauvignon. And Portugal also has a range of amazing terroirs as well. So Portugal should be high on everybody's list, along with Greece. South Africa is wildly underappreciated here in the US, not so much in the UK, but there is this new wave of wonderfully competent winemakers discovering old vines, doing their best to coax really interesting wines out of them that are, again, unlike the kind of, you know, norm, if you like.

2:09:05So I would pick those, what am I mentioned, three, yeah, as my leading places. Back to Portugal, are we talking like Douro Red? Yeah, and Douro Whites now. Because they're getting very good at identifying the best bits of the Douro for white wine. You know, higher elevations and things like that. And they've got lovely, great varieties. Alan Tejo is doing some great stuff. Dung. Cool pronunciation. Dung. Yeah. And Bino Vag. No, honestly, you... And Portugal makes some stunningly good value wine. Oh, my God. Vino Verde. I had a producer called Afros once that was insanely crisp and just felt like a Vino Verde is like too cheap.

2:09:54Yeah, ridiculous. And, you know, initially we were taught it's called green wine and it's for drinking very, very young. Right. But actually some of them now are aging beautifully. Yeah, I love those regions. I want to know then, okay, let's go the other side of the coin. Is there an overrated region that you're maybe spending? There's a little bit of a tax because, like, are we talking like Napa? I'm just like, I'm not leading the witness, but I'm like, are there overpriced, overpiped wines from certain regions? There are hundreds of overpriced wines, but they're the ones that billionaires are chasing.

2:10:27Yeah. I think the Burgundians can't believe what's happened to their prices. Thanks to this, you know, each wine produced is only produced in small quantities. The number of billionaires is rising rapidly. The proportion of them getting into wine is also rising. So there's just a kind of inflationary spiral there. And the same is true of the really top Bordeaux's as well. Those two regions, I mean, it is the crashing of commerce and just like millennial billionaires. Literally, there are hundreds of them out there who are finally getting into wine. And a lot of Asian, there's a lot of Asian interest in wine, people with very deep pockets there too.

2:11:05Deep pockets. Yeah. You know, is there one producer? I say this for our audience because it's tough to go shallow with you in the audience, but I appreciate this. Is there a producer that we should seek out that just is a great value or just an interesting producer? I would say, not leaving South Africa behind, the leading member of the South African New Wave producers is called Eben Sadi, S for sugar, A-D-I-E. and his label is Sadi Family. And he's admirable. He's just the sort of person I was talking about earlier who travels and inspires people and makes people think South Africa is a great wine producer.

2:11:50Always evolving, really worried about climate change. So he's gone through the huge hoops of getting new grape varieties through quarantine and planting them because he realizes is that he's got to have Mediterranean grape varieties that can withstand really hot, dry summers. Because things are changing in Cape Town. Because things are changing everywhere. Cape Town's had terrible drought. And he has two top wines, a white called Palladius, beginning with P for Peter, and a red called Columella, sort of, you know, classical names. And they're both blends, which change every year, and really serious wine made with a huge amount of integrity.

2:12:32They're not discoveries in the sense that, you know, they're not$100 a bottle, but they're$70 or something like that. It can be north of$50, which is a price point for some. But still, it's Sardi's, you said? Sardi family. Great, Sardi family. So we've gone a while and I haven't brought up natural wine. Although we nearly got there when we were talking about additives. We did. And like this low intervention wine movement, we were talking about additives and I had a little restraint. I was like, let's not go there. Chances, I mean, this is the number one topic that I think our listeners are interested in hearing about is like the idea of the natural wine movement.

2:13:09So I'm not going to even lead and say like, I'm not going to give you a specific question. I'm going to say, tell us what we should know about natural wine right now. Can I tell you what I think about natural wine right now? I think that's what I'm trying to say. What do you think about natural wine? Can't believe I asked that.

2:13:29Obviously, I'm from kind of more, you know, I've been writing about wine for 45 years or more. So I'm from the kind of traditional, what they would call conventional wine world. And what's distressed me is that quite a lot of my peers tasted one or two of the early natural wines, which a lot of them were faulty, technically faulty. And they just sort of use that as an excuse to write off the whole natural wine movement. And now I'm never going to drink natural wine. Then the other thing that distresses me is going to a certain sort of Paris wine bar, especially in the northeast of Paris. And you can't get a glass of wine without being subjected to a sermon, a lecture about how evil all non-natural wine is.

2:14:18And I don't like the polarization that the natural wine movement has engendered, even though it didn't intend to do so. So you're saying like a place like Vervolle that specializes natural wine, Canal Saint-Martin, you're going to get a lecture about we're the only way to go. Yeah, yeah. So what I – and yet over time I'm finding more and more good – the proportion of good natural wine is increasing. So all these people who are just writing it off, I think, are cutting off their own noses to spite their faces sort of thing. And also there's an awful lot of wine that doesn't sell itself on the basis of being natural, but actually is.

2:14:58But it has qualities sufficient to sell itself without leaning on the natural. I mean, I'm thinking of something even like Chateau Latour in Bordeaux. Very famous, very expensive wine. So famous, yeah. But to all intents and purposes, it's pretty much a natural wine. But they'd never say we're part of the kind of sandal-wearing bearded movement. So I think it's exciting that the conventional wine world has been challenged and that a whole slew of potential new wine drinkers is much more interested in natural wine than conventional wine. It's like Dan Barber saying he has an organic vegetable on his menu.

2:15:43It's like Chateau Latour saying they're just not going to say it. They're just going to let it present itself. Yeah, yeah. So I think in my ideal world, the conventional camp is definitely using fewer and fewer additives every year. There's no doubt about that. The proportion of organically grown wine and biodynamically grown wine is increasing. So they're moving more to a kind of natural position. And I would love to see the two camps kind of in the it's not going to happen overnight, but the coinciding more. So we don't have these two camps that are inimical. I love that point of view. And I think one last question about natural wine.

2:16:28There's this perception from like the lay wine drink that there's like a flavor profile for natural wines. Like you drink a dirty and rowdy bottle and it's like turnt. I mean, whatever. I'm not a wine guy, but I've had some bottles that are like, wow, this is not just like wine. How do you respond to like people writing that there's a flavor profile that's like somehow like a little off or turnt or I don't know, effervescent. I don't know what the word is, but. I suppose I would then maybe give them, say, why don't you have a lovely La Pierre Beaujolais that will taste mainstream to you, but will actually be natural.

2:17:07Great response. I mean, it's exactly like it is a great wine that happens to be a natural wine. I have a few more questions. I wanted to hear a little bit about, we talk about food media here. we have journalists and writers and editors on often. And I wanted to hear about your website. You've recently sold the website. And I know that probably took a lot of mixed emotions. But how do you do that? Like your name is like a dot com with your name. JazzesRobinson.com. There you go. Let's plug it. Yes, yeah. So what does that mean when you sell it? And how do we enjoy what you're doing right now online?

2:17:43Well, I'm still very, very much there. I hope so. I'm working my fingers to the bone, doing far too much on it still. And so I had five reasons to sell. One was that I wanted more people to know about it, and I haven't got a marketing bone in my body, so I needed a kind of nice big company that could do that. And I also felt that the US was the obvious place to find a new owner because we're pretty saturated in the UK and we only had about a third of members who are American and I'm sure it could be a higher. It's a membership program? It's about a third of the articles are free, but the two-thirds, you have to be a member, behind the paywall if you like.

2:18:29So it's a subscription-only website. I wanted a future for it that would allow me to concentrate on what I enjoy doing, which is writing and tasting and not be hassling with the kind of EU VAT forms and things like that. And I wanted to sort of keep its values and all that kind of thing. So, and tech, I mean, you know, you need a big, this is a tech, it's a digital publisher, Recurrent Ventures. And they have, I don't know, 27 or something, various websites, including Savur, in fact, the website of the old print food magazine. And so it just seemed like a great fit, really. Smart. It's great to partner with a larger publisher that can work on the tech.

2:19:21And you've hired Elaine Shukin-Brown, I hope I pronounced that correctly. And she's your top North American editor. And she comes from a digital background. She's Alaskan. Alaskan. I think that that point I wanted to ask you about is really important. And I think, you know, we're trying to hire with diversity in mind and get really a variety of point of view. So what's her work like? And maybe we'll have her on the podcast. Yeah, you should. Absolutely. She's very, very articulate. And obviously she's there to develop the American coverage because it's not so easy to do that from London, really.

2:19:57You need that when we've also got Samantha Cole Johnson. She's specializing in the Pacific Northwest. She's an Oregonian. So we are very much beefing up the coverage of American wine. And both Elaine and I have really taken quite a stand on the whole diversity. When I think back to not very many years, how irredeemably white the whole wine world was. And it is moving. It is changing. It is widening. But we've got to keep at it and, you know, make sure that it's not just a short term thing that we run these competitions and we give these scholarships and all the rest. But the more it is, it's going in the right direction.

2:20:41I agree. I have to give a plug to punchdrink.com. My former colleague and friend Talia Bayoki and what she's doing there with a diversity in mind. She's got incredible writers from that, not from that white male, mostly male point of view. Because it was also a boys club too, right? For years? It was, although, to be honest, I just, you know, got on with it. Yeah, sure. But no, I suppose it was. Actually, in Britain, I was by no means the first female wine writer. We always had quite a lot of female wine writers. But we have, last week, there's one nice little new ring development. I went to the London premiere of a lovely new film called Blind Ambition, which is about these four Zimbabwean refugees who crossed into South Africa and were gardeners and things like that.

2:21:28And they rose, they were all male, I'm afraid, but they all rose to be the sommeliers of the four top Cape Town restaurants and then put a Zimbabwean team into the World Wine Tasting Championships. Wow. So that's a great story. Yeah. And I knew it was a great story. So I emailed everyone I could think of who might film it. And finally, an Australian team who'd already made one good film about the Chinese falling in love with wine. And I think its first debut was at the Tribeca Film Festival here. I saw it mentioned for Tribeca. Yeah, and it was the audience favorite of the festival. It's called Blind Ambition.

2:22:06We'll link to that. Two more questions. First off, I want to get your take. If you're giving the keynote at the CIA, Culinary Institute of America, to a bunch of wine professionals, you know the next generation of wine professionals these are the the wine the sommeliers the uh the wine managers the uh the buyers of these restaurants and maybe even wine shops what are you what's the message for the next generation of wine professional i would say develop your own taste and stick to it follow it don't look at what other people think taste has to be subjective and carve your own way and be true to yourself.

2:22:44That's great words. I think we do, in food and in wine, we follow. We feel like we have to fit into a mold. Trends. Trends are just like we have to write in a certain way and speak in a certain way. But certainly that's not the case. That's not how you operated your life as a writer. No, certainly not. And I'm thinking here of Jamie Oliver, for instance. It was quite funny when he started off, And it was a huge success in the UK, you know, initially called The Naked Chef. Oh, yeah. We had him on the podcast maybe six months ago. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, everyone was going around at that stage saying, who's the Jamie Oliver of wine?

2:23:23But it's crazy. You shouldn't be the X in a copy of somebody else. You've got to be yourself. You're in person. We ask all guests in the Taste podcast, if there was a dream book project that you could work on without the burden of time, meaning you'd have unlimited, no deadline, unlimited time, or the burden of budget, meaning you'd have unlimited funds. What would that book project be? I know exactly. Way back, was it about 89? Can't remember. I published, I wrote a book called Vintage Time Charts. A publisher asked me to chart how different vintages of very famous wines, sort of archetypal wines evolved.

2:24:10And so it was literally a series of graphs, a line for each vintage of La Tache, for instance, or whatever. I'd love to do that again at my own pace. At your own pace. No deadline. So you could be like a 20-year project. Yeah. Oh, I love that. I hope you can do that. Jancis Robinson, thank you for joining the Taste Podcast. Thank you.

2:24:38Talia Bayoki, welcome to the Taste Podcast. Thank you. Glad to be here. I'm so happy to see you. My God, we worked together for several years. You brought me back in the building. It's been since 2019. So that lobby has not changed. Maybe some books have changed, but the lobby looks the same. It's nice and comforting. Oh, the books have probably not changed either. I wanted to have you on just to talk about Punch and all the great work you've been doing there and just in general your career in cookbooks and just in media. We were friends well before we worked together. at Punch, and I just love your taste.

2:25:07You have a great view of the food world. Thank you. That's really nice. And one big part of working with you is just coming in in the morning and talking about what we cooked or where we ate the night before. It was just such a joy to hear you and Chloe and Lizzie and Anna and Tatiana, all of us came together and were chit-chatting about what we did. So I have to start. Where have you been recently, restaurant-wise? In New York City, you're such a voracious restaurant goer. I know you could be a restaurant critic if you wanted to, if you ever wanted to enter that because you just have great taste.

2:25:37What's been good? What's been not good? Well, in the spirit of the old office chatter play where I was last night, which is at Raul's, which I've actually been to twice in the last two weeks. And, you know, it's always like a wait. If you don't have a reservation, it's tough to get a reservation. You got to like get online at midnight two weeks out. But it's like one of those restaurants that is just so perfectly New York that you really couldn't imagine anywhere else. And like the food is better than it needs to be. I actually think it's the best. If you're ever craving like steak au poivre, it's the place to be.

2:26:09They make a great non-pretentious martini. Like pretty much any classic that you order there, like everything is free poured. No one's jiggering anything. But like the drink arrives, it's the right temperature. It's delicious. It's the playlist is always like perfectly like Gen X. I'm not even Gen X, but like I appreciate it. And the scene is always just this like perfect mix of New Yorkers. it feels just like that place couldn't exist anywhere else. So I was there last night, sat at the bar, had a steak au poivre, ran into a couple of people I haven't seen in a long time. It's like always that industry spot.

2:26:39Is that Village or West Village? What do you call it? West Village. Yeah, it's definitely West Village. It's on Prince, like toward Sixth Avenue. Always like neighborhood restaurant. It's always been like locals hanging out there. Like the last time I was there two weeks ago, Cyndi Lauper was there. It's like that kind of place. Nice. So I love Raul's. Lately, I've really loved Plaza de Fete. I think it's the kind of restaurant that New York has proved to do really well. Like it's in the same vein as like Four Horsemen, Estella, where it's just like really beautiful high acid cooking and great wine and great cocktails, great vibe.

2:27:12And focused on seafood and they do it really well. I love Al-Badawi. Went there recently with a group and really loved it. Last week I went to Avall, which is in Bushwick. Really great Persian restaurant. One of the original chefs from Sofray. I don't know if you've been there. Oh, yeah, Sofret. So it's not a Sofret restaurant, but it's a chef from Sofret. Exactly. Yeah, I went and opened his own place and really, like, delicious food. This is, like, back in Punch's sort of old stomping grounds off the Morgan stop. What a great office. Great. I mean, that office was awesome. I, like, still, I miss that bodega across the street.

2:27:49Like, they had great tripe stew that everybody would get when they came in, and they were just a little bit worse for wear in the morning. A little bit, and break, say, coffee up the street. Yeah. It's a good spot, yeah. Totally. So I've been loving those spots recently. I've loved – I've always loved Dame. I like Lourdes. I had a great meal at Casa Mono. I hadn't been there in like probably five years. And like it's still just like reliable, delicious. One of the most tourist-centric restaurants in New York, I feel, Casa Mono. It's always – it's been in guidebooks for like 20 years. But still great.

2:28:22I went there maybe two years. I think during the pandemic I went there actually. So it was really solid. Great list. Yeah. So that's kind of where I've been recently. Thank you for coming to play. Talia came to play. Another part about like these morning catch-ups or Slack channels if we weren't in the office was like cooking because, you know, we collaborated on Taste. You were an editor at Taste and we collaborated on so many great stories. But I just loved getting your take on home cooking. I loved talking about fish cooking. You are just like the most passionate fish cook. Love to cook fish, yeah.

2:28:53I mean, what's your new passion? I haven't caught up with you in a while. Is there something that you're making right now that you just love that you feel like is a sign of you? Well, you know, I've been making – I'm like in a – very much in like a stew zone, which is generally where I get like sort of around this time of year. But I've been making a lot – I've been cooking a lot of Mexican food, got a tortilla press, been kind of doing that. And I do a lot of chili verde, chicken and pork chili verde. Nice. Chili Colorado, chili con carne, chicken tinga, stuff like that. You're just making tortillas from fresh moth.

2:29:26Yeah, yeah. How are you doing? Just water. It's just like masa harina and water. And it's super easy and quick and been loving that and just freezing tons of it. So I've just been like in a bulk cooking mode and I'm just loading myself up for the sort of dead of winter. And I've been doing a lot of that. I've been making a lot of citrus salads lately, too, and some of it inspired almost every time I go to Zuni in San Francisco. I like sort of walk away with like some way to incorporate winter citrus or winter fruit into a salad. And I'm not a big fruit eater. And like having a way to eat fruit in a savory sort of through a savory lens is like always fun for me.

2:30:07So I've been doing like some persimmon, burrata, pomegranate stuff. I like that. Yeah. So burrata is kind of bringing in the creamy savory element. Is it like low acid or high acid in the vinaigrette? Pretty high acid, especially with like getting the pomegranate in there and then really good olive oil. There was a salad I had at Zuni maybe two years ago that was just winter citrus, brown butter, and toasted hazelnuts. Like that is it. Just cut really thin. And it's perfect. And I find myself like going back to that as well. But a lot of stews, still eating a lot of fish, still cooking a lot of fish.

2:30:40Still cooking a lot of fish. The occasional whole rabbit gets roasted. Oh, that's right. You had a rabbit phase for a while. Big rabbit phase. That's like, you know, you can do a whole rabbit. Underrated protein for home. Totally. it's pretty easy to break down. Like there's a lot on YouTube and then whatever you don't eat, you turn it into ragu. Yeah. What is it about rabbit meat? Because it is quite clean. It doesn't have like too much game in it. But why do you like cooking with it? You know what? Part of it is this I love rabbit ribs. So when you cook a whole rabbit, and this is something, this goes back to like a dish I had like forever ago in a place called Paco Morago in Barcelona.

2:31:14Oh, Paco Morago, that egg. Yep. That fermented egg. Yeah, so good. And they do this, they had this little like, you know, terracotta, like a sizzling sort of, almost the way they do like gamba sayijo. Yeah. But they did just rabbit ribs that were basically like French rabbit ribs that then had like a little medallion at the end of it. And I literally went back there and ordered two orders two times when I was there. And I love eating rabbit ribs. So even when you roast a whole rabbit, there's just so much flavor contained in that bit, even those like sort of, those like the flaps that kind of go over the ribs, really flavorful.

2:31:51To me, it's like it's hard to cook because it is so lean, but there's a ton of flavor packed into that. It's true. And it's versatile. And you can buy it pretty easily. Takes to marinades well. Like it's a great protein. Yeah, rabbit. The egg carpaccio at Paco Morago. Think about that dish. Pretty sustainable. Oh, yeah. Rabbit. You know? Absolutely. You had a Finsta or maybe not quite a Finsta, but like a semi-anonymous Furtada Finsta. Yeah. What is it about the Furtada that made you create an account back in the day? and I will link to it in the show notes most certainly. Honestly, like the versatility of the frittata and the way it allows you, it's like fridge clean out.

2:32:29Yeah. The things that I have put into frittatas, some of it works, some of it doesn't. But to me, it's always just been like my go-to. I don't have too much time. I have a lot of random stuff in my fridge. I'm going to put it into a frittata. Yeah. And so, yeah, I sort of like fell in love with making them and like testing the limits of the frittata, which is what that Instagram account was all about. It was really cute, and I will link to it. Is it a cast iron? Is it a stainless steel? What's the pan for a frittata? Oh, well, I kind of have gone down a lot of different paths with the frittata, but I'm really into now nonstick.

2:33:04I just go straight nonstick. But the satisfaction of sliding a whole frittata out of a pan and onto a plate is unhappled. You've got to use nonstick for eggs. For eggs. I mean, you're just like, you know, causing a lot of pain in your life if you're using the cast iron for eggs. Yeah. I mean, look, I would love to be that person, but my cast irons are never seasoned properly. Never. And so like it's no matter what I do, like it's sticking. We did a sheet pan for Tata Story. I remember we worked on that that one time. Loved that. Done a few of those in my day. Also does stick a little bit. It does.

2:33:33So you really got to go for the like the nonstick. Nonstick always. Yeah. All right. I want to talk about Punch and it's such a joy to read. And first, familiarize our audience, you know, what Punch does and strives for. And also the second part is now that you're like linked up with Eater, a sister publication, you just put out this amazing package about where to drink in 2023. So but first off, what is Punch? Well, it's funny because like it's been almost 10 years. It's going to be Punch's 10-year anniversary coming up in October of 2023. Oh, my gosh. You sent those zines out. Yeah. You know, maybe that's on the horizon as well, like a zine redux.

2:34:09A 10-year anniversary handwritten handstone zine. Yeah, no. But the thing about like sort of an impending anniversary is like that you start to think about what it is that it was originally and how close is it to the thing that it was originally. And I think we've stayed pretty true to the mission, which is really like telling great stories about drinks and drinking culture, helping people drink smarter, but also like, you know, coming at it in a way that is both like sort of, you know, not scholarly, but we're always trying to like answer the bigger question. But like there is no topic that is sort of beneath us.

2:34:48So like even when it comes to like, I don't know, the blowjob shot, we're not above telling a story about that. We're just going to ask a question that's like the unlikely question about it. And there's always like a bigger story there. So for us, it's like sort of trying to capture like the joy and also the thing that's culturally important about going out and grabbing a drink. Yeah. I mean, it is the center of many folks' lives. And drinker or not, you still are aware of, you know, the beer and wine scene or the cocktail scene. And what I always liked about Punch as a reader and as a former staff member was that you were absolutely allergic to the fratty nature of drinks content, which at the time was pretty much all drinks content before you launched.

2:35:29It was like all about, you know, bar games and lots of where to drink like X amount of drinks in an hour. But you were allergic to that. And I want to like get into – it's almost like 90s music, right? This is a comparison I draw. Like you are covering the cocktail scene in a way that similar to like journalists were covering like music in the 90s. There's like this like subculture within drinks that you love to cover so rigorously. Well, I think too like we – Punch came up at a time where like craft beer and craft cocktails were still kind of like not yet even peaking. And both of those cultures did feel very male-dominated I think at the outset.

2:36:12the cocktail renaissance being like when you think of that you think of this sort of like dark moody speakeasy a bartender and suspenders like all of these like cliches that we now realize are outdated but at that time those were still sort of some of the dominant tropes in drinking culture craft beer obviously being sort of the and we did a story about kind of the evolution of the ipa as a way to look at like the evolution of beer culture as a whole and at that time it It was still very much like at the tail end of this like West Coast IPA, like the IBU wars and this kind of like very like metalhead, like skull crusher, like that kind of vibe and drinks.

2:36:51And so for us, like we really wanted to take a left turn and be able to cover that, but cover that in a way that felt more inclusive. And also to, you know, say that this isn't the only sort of aesthetic in drinking and things were changing really rapidly. all of these drink, these, you know, beer, wine, spirits, cocktails, those were all things that were typically covered separately. And you had like specialists, like the whiskey advocate that would be covering whiskey, you know, and, you know, craft beer specialists. And our sort of, our mission in the beginning was to say, well, these things are actually like more connected than we think they are and more connected than most publications are giving them credit for being.

2:37:31And if we can kind of look at these things all together, what can we learn about them that we wouldn't be able to if we just looked at them separately. Yeah. Back to that package you just published with Eater in concert with Eater's where to eat in 2023. You had a where to drink. And I feel like you and your staff made some calls, like you made some really interesting choices. So for our audience, where are you suggesting we drink in terms of the cities in the world? This was so hard. And this is such a great, this is such great fun for us because we got to take an existing sort of rubric that Eater had established and had done so well and like do it actually for us on a smaller scale.

2:38:09So we even made it, you know, Eater did 11 cities. We said, okay, let's do five. Can we do five? So we went out to like a big group of writers and we asked them, hey, like what about your city do you think should be on this? Like what makes this city relevant? Why should we go there in 23, not just in general? So we got a lot of compelling answers back. And for us, like we zeroed in on these five cities because all of them told a story that feels very much of this moment coming out of the pandemic. Cities that really felt like they were in transition in a way. Oh, cool. That was a real like moment, like the transition, like growth or change within these cities.

2:38:47Yeah. Yeah. And that feeling of being able to go to a place and kind of feel that it is not fixed, that it is sort of like a little bit frenetic, a little bit like, you know, there's some tension there between old and new. And so all of these places sort of have that. One that I was most excited about that I think that is near and dear to you is Madison, Wisconsin, which is a place that like, you know, when you look at the entire U.S., there are a lot of places that feel obvious that you could say like that would be great places to drink right now. Yeah, Houston, San Francisco, always on the list.

2:39:17Sure. All of that. Like New Orleans, like, you know, Charleston, like all these places that people shout out as drinking cities. But Madison is a great example of a place that is this collision of old and new, this place that is a college drinking town, has all these old, you know, Midwestern traditions, these supper clubs, ice cream cocktails, you know, the Wisconsin old fashioned, like this tradition of taking Angostura shots, like all of these really cool things that feel very much of that place. And then this influx of talent that is from Madison, went out, went and worked on all these big markets, came back and is sort of reimagining some of these things through a more global or national lens.

2:39:56Yeah. I mean, Jim Meehan, who's not even in the package, he started his career there. But you've got like Brian Bartels. You've got like wonderful dives or old man drinking bars and great talent there. I love that. What's another city you pointed out? For me, it's like hard because everyone's like, OK, of those five cities, like what are the two? Like what's the top of your list? I know. I know. Like just give me one other one. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, Madison is definitely at the top of my list. Buenos Aires, like really cool city. So much going on. Obviously, all of this sort of European drinking traditions, aperitivo culture, and then the way in which that place has made those traditions its own.

2:40:33And some homegrown cool cocktails, the Chlorito, this, you know, Buenos Aires' martini, the Buenos Aires style, old fashioned, like a lot, the wine culture there. part of what's interesting to me is like Argentina and South America sort of lagged behind Chile, for instance, in its natural wine movement. Interesting. That's all happening there now. And a lot of those wines aren't even getting to us yet. So like you go to Buenos Aires and you can go to these natural wine bars and drink these wines from, you know, in and around Buenos Aires. Speaking of natural wine, you are such an astute observer of the wine industry.

2:41:07You came up as a wine professional before your journalism career. And I wanted to, I'll link to this in show notes. Jordan Michaelman wrote a cool piece for BA and had him on the show to talk about it. And I wanted to get your take on natural wine. Is it losing its cool? I have some thoughts on the piece, but I wanted you to start about the natural wine movement right now. The challenges it may be facing, especially with like public perception. Hashtag Natty Wine is a real movement, but it kind of undersells what's really happening. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is like such a familiar, being a music geek, like this is such a familiar story.

2:41:40is like, you know, the band that you want people to pay attention to and is finally everyone pays attention and understands why they're good. And then everyone's upset that like the band is successful. Right. And so this is sort of this moment in natural wine, but it's really complicated because I think that most people that you would talk to that were champions, early champions of natural wine, like the whole reason they wanted these wines to become bigger than they were. They wanted these wines to become more mainstream because it was about great farming. It was what what was good for the planet.

2:42:11It was about what was making wines that were actually more reflective of their place that didn't really before have like a big market share. And so then, you know, those wines get their market share. And there are some things that are disappointing about that because you see like abuses of the natural wine moniker. You start to see people who see that this is big business, that this is culturally relevant, and that are making wines that don't necessarily, that don't deserve to be called natural, but they're sort of imitators. So that's a natural thing that ends up happening when someone realizes the commercial value of a thing.

2:42:45So I think that's this tension in natural wine right now where it's like you want these wines to be more culturally relevant because that's good for the planet. It's good for wine. It's good for the things that all of us care about. But then there's the other side of this is we live in a capitalist society. And they're going to take like just a little bit of a marketing point or a bullet point and just push it out in ways that feel super uncomfortable. And I think like the way the moniker has been, you know, scandalized really through the industry, it's bad. Well, and it's hard to then be like promoting and then trying to protect the thing at the same time.

2:43:26And then what that ends up looking like a lot of times is gatekeeping. and you're saying, okay, well, I know you might like this wine because you saw, like there's then becomes you have to like qualify yourself as being worthy of like drinking the wines and knowing enough about them. So then that starts to happen, right? And so I think we're starting to see a lot of that natural wine is sort of dealing with some of this issues of class and access that it was originally rebelling against becoming part of its own culture and then trying to figure out how to grapple with that. It's really interesting.

2:43:58It's really interesting. It's hard to like articulate it in a single conversation. I'll point to Alice Firing and Jansis Robinson had them both on the show. We talked about it a lot. How are we how can we be a better wine drinker? I mean, I want to I want to ask you this. I don't drink myself, but I certainly have wine drinkers in my my life. And it feels like sometimes a blank slate when you're walking into a bottle shop. What should I don't mean like what is the best wine to drink? But how do we how we just do we drink better? Yeah, I think it's like what's happening to natural wine. It's like, you know, it's not asking what's cool.

2:44:30It's like looking for what's good and then understanding what is good to you, you know. And that's like I think this goes back to developing relationships. This is always what like in the early days when I was learning about wine, like I needed people who knew more than me to help me. And so finding like your wine retailer that you click with that like isn't going to talk down to you that like is has the patience to explain these things. And then developing your own taste. Like I think it takes work. Like it isn't easy to learn about wine. Like it's confusing. It changes really fast. Like even me, like I'm not in it in the way that I was originally.

2:45:05I'm not going to all the tastings. I'm not constantly staying up on every vintage. And so like even I feel like really out of the loop and I have spent, you know, whatever, 15 years drinking wine and reading about it and loving it. So I think it's just like figuring out the way in which you want to have wine in your life and have and look for meaning in that. Yeah. Like I love that you say it takes work because it's so true about a lot of elements in food culture. It's not just going to be given to you. You have to read. You have to read articles on Punch and just kind of put in the time to educate yourself and then make those educated decisions.

2:45:41Or you don't and you can still enjoy wine. Right. So it's just like I think it's like getting over this like what's cool, what's not. Am I drinking the right thing? Am I drinking the wrong thing? You know, and I think people can get caught in that and then focus on the wrong stuff. I want to talk to you about N.A. It's been really interesting to follow the industry of it. And I think I had John DeBerry on recently, and I'll link to that. Great conversation about the struggles and the kind of failure of launching an N.A. brand, a spirits brand. But N.A. beer, we've talked about a lot on the show.

2:46:10It's like really just getting interesting at this moment. What are you seeing right now with N.A.? Oh, my God. It is like it's really hard to keep track of everything because it's also a market where like you have like you have like the seed lips, for instance, that are trying to actually be something that is used in a cocktail that like is mimicking in some ways like what you might find in terms of flavor profile. I can't with seed lip. I just I can't. That stuff I've been gifted. I just can't with it. But it's like one one lane. Right. Or you have like liars where it's like here's non-alcoholic whiskey or here's non-alcoholic gin.

2:46:45And then you have this whole other section of the market where they're like functional beverages where you're like this is adaptogens and CBD. And I'm just like what – and what is the purpose of that? Like I don't – I get lost in the catch-all of N.A. And in what – I think it comes down to like what are you looking for as a drinker from an N.A. beverage? Are you looking to replace a cocktail? Are you just – are you looking for something that is mood-altering but not mood-altering in the way that alcohol is? So, like, it's basically now, like, a market that's trying to serve a lot of different wants.

2:47:25And I'm, like, I don't know what – where – like, how to categorize any of this stuff. And nobody else does. Like, we're doing a story right now that is about a whole, like, emerging category of, like, apres sport beverages. Yeah. That you're like supposed to now drink after you play tennis. And like that is. Like post-workout. Post-workout drinks. But like better post-workout drinks? Yeah. Like it's just like there's like the whole self-optimization lane. There's the like mood-altering lane. And then there's like I'm replacing a cocktail lane, you know. So it's really hard. And some of these things then cross over.

2:47:59And you see that in like the non-alcoholic aperitif category where it's like it's mood-altering. Also, it's a non-alcoholic spirit. so like I think we're at a point right now where like there's a lot that's going to need to sort of like be weeded out they're trying like non-alcoholic spirits are trying to find their audience and talk to people about what they are and so it's a bit of a mess 100 % agree well said Talia thank you for pointing that out because it is hard to categorize it as just NA I mean is there anything that excites you about I'm not going to say NA but like a category that is de-spirited and has a maybe related to spirits or it could be related to beer.

2:48:43Like, I don't know. There's a lot to like. I think the products are getting better and better all the time. I think like a lot of companies that are spirits makers have tended to be best at this. Interesting. Like St. Agrestus, like the Phony Negroni I think is delicious. My number one seed. Just had one last weekend. Yeah. And love it. What I also am really excited about and what is working with our audience is like how there's like there are a lot of – there's a lot of geekery now being applied to NA cocktails. There are techniques that you would use in like clarifying your cocktail, for instance, that are being applied to NA.

2:49:15And I think what that's doing is it's engaging this sort of geek underbelly of cocktail culture and saying that that drink can be as complex and have as much of a back end as your classic cocktail. And it's a project. Absolutely. And that's super fun. The pandemic really, in my observation, really just amplified home cocktail. It just seems like the geekery has never been stronger. And I don't know if I would have thought that like five years ago. Maybe it was waning a bit. But you're seeing, I mean, you're publishing great recipe stories all the time. Yeah. And like even like we're seeing, you know, Death & Company does this like this NA, you know, quote unquote, Mezcal Negroni.

2:49:55And that's one of our like highest performing reels and TikTok videos. And you see that people are really engaged with like really doing doing creating a project for themselves for an N.A. cocktail and having the energy to do that because they still you know that that might be somebody who spent the time to do to make cocktails like that at home and still wants to do that. So I think that's cool. I think like it's getting high concept. Punches at TikTok. Shout out to Caitlin Bray. Shout out to Caitlin Bray. Just had to call her out right now. Yeah, for sure. I love it. That was a long time coming.

2:50:29And we launched our TikTok about, oh, God, it must have been like a couple months ago now. It's really fun. Oh, I love that you're in that world. It's fresh. It makes perfect sense for what you do with the recipe development side of Punch, but also with the reporting side. It's really cool. I want to talk to you about your cookbook work. I mean, your career is awesome. Like, it's just when you started, like, talking about, wow, you've done a lot, Tali, and I really respect what you've done. And, you know, Spritz. Likewise. Oh, thanks. Spritz is a classic. You're well ahead of the curve with the Peritival culture.

2:51:01You did that like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. What is it? Oh, God. That must have been 2016 that came out maybe. Well ahead of the curve. I should probably know that. But yeah, I mean now everyone's like the Spritz is dead. I know. I read that article as well. It had a good run. Had a good run. You know, how about the Negroni? Is it dead? No, I mean, God, the Negroni. Like anytime we've been like, it's like a joke at punch. We're like, let's just put Negroni in this headline. and it's going to perform. It has nothing to do with Negroni. It's so great. I mean, yeah, the Game of Thrones stuff was amazing.

2:51:32But I want to talk about pasta. Pasta. What a great conversation with your co-author, Missy Robbins, and I'll link to that. I loved that book. It was like a special book. Thank you. And what did you learn traveling Italy going to these regions? Missy has her answer, and I'll link to that in the show notes. But, like, what did you learn traveling Italy and learning about pasta? I mean, it's just like an unknowable subject. And I sort of like knew that, obviously. I think like I liken it coming from the wine side to like the unknowability of wine and Italian wine and the story that it can tell. It's like one thing that can be made a bunch of different ways.

2:52:09And each person that makes it makes it a different way. And I like, you know, perhaps naively like getting into this book, it was like, OK, like we're going to make this book. It's going to be part like Missy's story and her point of view and then a reference book. And it's like, what an idiotic, like, what an idiotic thing to try to tackle. Meat on top of meat. It was a lot. A lot to. I was like, it was a lot. Bite off. Yeah. And so I think very quickly, I was so grateful to have Missy's point of view as a guide in this because there is no way, there would have been no other way to sort of narrow this enough to even begin to talk about it.

2:52:48And so like using her story of going from like Italian American classics in New Haven, Connecticut to understanding regional classics for pasta and then having enough information to be able to then go and go home and start cooking your own pasta. Like that felt like a very manageable and logical structure for the book. And thank God we had it because I don't think it would have been doable otherwise. But, you know, all it's the same thing with wine. Like the first trip that I made to Italy right after college when I was really interested in wine and wanted to learn more. I was like, I'm, I'm going to be traveling for this for the rest of my life.

2:53:25And I felt that way about pasta too. I'm going to be going to Italy for the rest of my life to learn about it. Yeah. I mean, I have to ask, I asked Missy this. I mean, is there, is there a go-to pasta that you're making yourself? Um, are you, are you sick of pasta? I mean, you might be sick of it. It's impossible to be sick of pasta. Good, good, good, good answer. Um, it's like even one dish, like we talk about this all the time, even like matriciana, like that is one thing that you could make literally once a week for the rest of your life and you would not get bored of it. And like, it also depends on you.

2:53:54Sometimes you make it well, sometimes you don't. And you could do the same exact thing that you did the day before and it's going to taste different. I have to ask you, we ask many of our cookbook authors about their, the very last recipe in the book. Yours is on page 385. I mean, that's a long book. Roasted squash with hot honey and bread crumbs. So let's give the story behind this recipe that probably didn't get as many eyeballs as some of the other recipes. Yeah. I mean, we, from the very beginning, it was really important to Missy to have vegetables in here because like really it was like her ideal meal and is like really the concept of, of the restaurant Missy is a great bowl of pasta and a really well-considered vegetable.

2:54:39And like, that's kind of all you need. And that was the thinking there. I mean, the squash would thought honey and breadcrumbs is like basically a meal into itself. Yeah. And, you know, and I think Missy really approaches vegetable cookery with the same sort of rigor that she has with anything else that she's done. And like some of these recipes, I even remember like Lorena, there's one sort of a zucchini panzanella dish in the book, more or less not called that. But Lorena was like, this recipe is like two pages and like and it's so detailed because it's not hard it just requires many steps and a lot of techniques so like these to me what's great about these vegetable recipes in the book is like there's a ton of technique in here and there's a lot of learning about how to work with vegetables with the same sort of like attention that you would protein crafting pasta or making pasta.

2:55:31Yeah. Yeah. So I honestly, I forget the story. Yeah. It is the last recipe in the book. So, you know, you might have forgotten. Yeah. But I mean, I love that dish. I've eaten that dish a ton. It's been on the menus at the restaurants. And it is a meal. Like if you want to just skip pasta altogether, just go to page 358 and just make the squash. And hot honey, you know, invented in Brooklyn. People love it. Essentially, you know, people love it. I love that voice. Yeah. I think it was invented. Yeah. I think it might have been invented in Brooklyn. I mean, right in if you.

2:56:00It looks like it could be Jersey, though. I don't know. Oh, it might have been Jersey. I thought it was in one of those, like, large food production spaces from, like, 2006. You know, those, like, Big Brooklyn. He was one of those companies. I don't know. Maybe, but, I mean, the rise of Hot Honey has been kind of. It's cool. Yep. Do you miss going to Paula G's Slice Shop in our old office? I do, although I live in Williamsburg. You do live there. And as New York Magazine recently pointed out, this is effectively the, like, this is mecca for slice pizza in New York. Sliced pizza? Pizza by the slice.

2:56:29I like it. Industry is pretty good, right? I love Lindistry. Yeah. Feeney Pizza is great. Best Pizza is right around the corner from me. I've been a longtime fan. Yeah. You know, Grandma Slice there is great. So I don't want for pizza. Yeah. Pizza's rich in Williamsburg. I love it. Okay. Books, are you—we'll get to the final question, but I want to just know, cookbooks, is there any future cookbook in your plans? God, I'm not anytime soon. Yeah, taking a break. I think, yeah, that was a bit of a beast in those three years. And, you know, I don't have anything that's like in the drink space right now where I'm like dying to kind of go deep on it.

2:57:12I think like having maybe my weekends back feels kind of good. Yeah. Just for a bit. For a bit. Yeah, enjoy your weekends. Yeah, book deadlines are fun. Book deadlines. Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, whatever I do next, I think that it might be something that like is a little bit left field. maybe something I mean it's always been the way in which I've I've been lucky enough to learn so it's like a topic that I might not know a lot about and I use the book to to figure it out and try to write with that kind of point of view as well like yeah Sherry was a topic where I was like there's no way this is so huge and and difficult and um technical and I sort of just went at that I'm like I really like this and I want to learn more and and so I I feel like I have more confidence to be able to perhaps tackle a topic that's outside of food or drink.

2:57:59Outside of food or drink. Well, maybe we'll see that, but I want to ask you. Talia, we asked all guests on the Taste Podcast, if you could write a cookbook or food culture book without the burden of time, meaning you have no deadline, or the burden of budget, meaning you have all the money in the world, Talia, what would that be? Oh, my God. I mean, it would probably be like a comprehensive book on Italian drinks, and I don't mean just like low-key. I mean like wine, beer, spirits, cocktails, like a true sort of magnum opus on Italian drinking and Italian drinking culture. I would – but that would be a years-long project and something that will never happen.

2:58:39Okay. Great, great caveat. Yeah. But I would love to do that. I've also like always been fascinated with alpine drinking culture and eating culture and I love that part of Italy. And that would be supremely fun and also include skiing, which is a nice bonus. Talia Bayoki, thank you for joining the Taste Podcast. Thank you.

2:59:03This is Taste is hosted by Eliza Abarbanel and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things that are happening.