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Style, Flavor, Awards: DC's Favorite New Wine Jøyus has a Secret.
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Style, Flavor, Awards: DC’s Favorite New Wine has a Secret

By Joe Winger — 1 year ago

Style, Flavor, Awards: DC’s Favorite New Wine Jøyus non-alcoholic wines has a Secret. Not just for #SoberOctober, but its award-winning tastes help you celebrate all year-long.

Jøyus non-alcoholic wines not only taste like wine, but great wine. With the industry awards to prove it. 

Recently I sat down with Jøyus leader Jessica Selander.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  You can find the full, un-edited conversation on our YouTube page.

 

 

Can you give us a personal story, maybe that includes the celebration of wine, if you have one?

Jessica Selander: The story is very personal and the funny thing is I get so nervous before talking about things because when I started Joyus, I did not originally [think about] doing things like this, being so face forward. 

I thought I would create a product that I was really excited about.  Eventually I came to realize, how do I do that without telling the “why did I do it?”

The whole reason that Joyus exists and it influences everything I do is because I’m sober.  I quit drinking alcohol 17 years ago now, which just feels like a fantastical amount of time.

For me, it’s been very rewarding. I’m very glad about it. But it was definitely something that was really hard and very personal. It wasn’t something I shared about publicly. So that’s also why this is a journey of getting comfortable talking about my sobriety, my recovery.

I like the taste of wine. I like beautiful glasses. I like the smell of wine.  I love the community and people; and hanging out and celebrating.  It literally says ’let’s celebrate’ on our bottles.  How great sparkling is for summer, but sparkling is such a happy thing.

You know what I mean? Something good happens in your life and people are like, let’s celebrate. Let’s pop some bottles. New Year’s Eve is such a beautiful idea of let’s start over. Whatever happened last year, whatever terrible things went down, there’s a brand new year.

It’s a new idea that we can celebrate either that past year that was good or celebrate the potential of a new year. That’s going to be better and that’s sparkling. 

And for me, I didn’t have any options. 

I started Joyus nine years ago. People ask me how long the company’s been around and we launched about two years ago. So it took me a very long time to figure it out, to save up the money to do it because as you can imagine, nine years ago, people thought it was crazy.

They’re like, ‘That’s a terrible idea. Nobody wants that’. And I’m like ’I want it’.

Having quit drinking, I had a lot of friends that also didn’t drink. I had a lot of people in my life too, who were just light drinkers – could give or take alcohol.  Then I have two kids and there’s a huge percent of the population that quits drinking for nine months [because they’re pregnant], sometimes even longer.

You can get into medications, you’re not supposed to drink on it. Anxiety medication, not supposed to drink on it. Heart medication, cancer treatments. There’s a lot of medical stuff too, that you could go down the list.

So I get a lot of people now who are like, ‘Oh, it’s not alcoholic. It’s trending.’ And that’s a thing now. 

Early on in my sobriety, I actually used to drink a lot of soda pop out of glass bottles, and then eventually discovered non alcoholic beer.

Non alcoholic beer is definitely having a really cool movement right now. There’s so many different options for non alcoholic beer, but the beer has always been around. 

I was like, this exists and it tastes like beer. What’s up with non-alcoholic wine?

There was one sparkling [non-alcoholic wine] in the entire country and that’s all you could find. There was one white and there was one red and that was it.

For me these options were really sweet. They were very affordable, which is nice, but they didn’t have the complete experience that I was going for. I wanted non alcoholic wine that tastes like wine. 

I wanted something that I could bring to a gathering and bring to a get together and have it feel appropriate and look appropriate and just look like everybody else’s [alcoholic] bottles.  Smell like everyone else’s bottles that you just wouldn’t even know that it was non alcoholic until you saw it on the label. And that’s what I did.

So after trying to find it for forever, eventually I was like, I’m going to do it myself. And I had no idea that this whole sober curious, non alcoholic world would take off like it has at exactly the right time.

So part of me is very frustrated that it took so long. But part of that too, it was like saving up the money to start the company.

This is a bootstrap company.  I like making my own decisions. A side effect after getting to this point is I’m 100% in control of all the decisions, which also means that I can control the quality because [it] is incredibly expensive to make.

 

Let’s talk about your sober story.  What it means to you, how you got there, what your mission is, how that helps others.

 

Jessica Selander: So for me, I can’t drink alcohol. What happens when I put alcohol in my body is that I make decisions I don’t want to be making.  

I tried a lot of things. I tried cutting back and it didn’t work. I tried replacing [the drinks and that didn’t work].

My life became pretty chaotic. 

I stopped drinking and once I get my life in order, then everything will be fine. I can drink again. 

Then after not drinking for a period of time, I was like, Oh, you know what?  There’s actually something to this and it’s something deeper and it’s probably the best thing I ever did, honestly, in my life. 

I would not be the person I am today on the inside if I had kept drinking.

I have a wonderful spouse and I’ve got amazing kids and I’m able to be a parent and be a person and do that clear eyed and there’s a lot of my upbringing was not the most positive. 

Sober curious, it’s a hashtag now. 

I’m not saying alcohol shouldn’t exist. I’m not that kind of person whatsoever. 

On a personal level it is so exciting to see other brands pop up. The first time I tried non-alcoholic tequila, it blew my mind. It was amazing. The spirits are interesting because some people build it up from science and some people are de-alkalizing; taking the alcohol out.

So that’s the really interesting thing about this. Normally spirits are completely separate from wine, which are very separate from beer, but in non-alcoholic, we’re all in the same swimming pool and everybody’s doing it differently and everybody’s got their own take and you can try one non-alcoholic whiskey and it’s incredibly different from another one.

Community not competition is one of our core values.  Normalizing non drinking is a big one. It’s not necessarily replacing alcohol either. I’ve talked to people in the wine industry who are very offended by the idea of non alcoholic wine.  I’m like no, it’s backwards. You’ve got it backwards. Non-alcoholic wine is a love letter to wine. You love wine so much that you still want to have it. You just can’t have this one piece that’s in it [the alcohol], but I want everything else. 

I want to cheers that glass with other people. I want to drink that red with a really strong stinky cheese. I want to pop that celebratory cork. I want to Rose all day. I just can’t.

I think that wine is very important culturally. It’s so interesting historically. The process is this fascinating mix of art and science.  I love everything about it. Getting deeper and deeper into it too, because I want Joyus to be around for forever and I want to make the best possible non-alcoholic wine.

There’s so much stuff to perfect that I could spend the next 50 years just working on non-alcoholic red – period.

 

You mentioned you’re seeing other competitors in the marketplace. How many different ways are there to make non-alcoholic wine?  Are some ways higher quality than others?

 

Jessica Selander: I can give tips. Our wine is a dealcoholized or alcohol removed wine, which means it’s gone through the whole winemaking process.

It’s aged, it’s fermented, and then we have removed the alcohol from it. Our bottles also say it’s non alcoholic. Sometimes you’ll see a bottle in the store and it just says non alcoholic on it. It doesn’t say dealcoholized or alcohol removed. They’re interchangeable. That means it wasn’t fermented.

So if you’re looking for a wine that is really going to taste like wine or have that fermented taste, look for dealcoholized or alcohol removed.

[Look at the label on the bottle] look for dealcoholized or alcohol removed, because it could say that it’s a non alcoholic red or a non-alcoholic grape [varietal] and it might just be a juice, that hasn’t been fermented or ages but comes in a wine bottle.

 

What are your goals in the present moment and in the near future to help your company continue to be a leader in the industry?

 

Jessica Selander: I think goals are accessibility. Normalizing sober drinking.  Making [non-alcoholic bottles] easy to find.  We do ship off our website, which is great. We’re shipping from Seattle. We ship everything ourselves.  If you’re out East, it’s going to take four or five days to get to you. 

Also starting to talk to restaurants, getting into more restaurants is a big one.  I’ve had anniversary dinners with my spouse and I’m drinking an Arnold Palmer.

I’m calling restaurants and I’m calling grocery stores and they’re still really skeptical that it can be good and that people want it.

 

Do you think it’s just audience reaching out? Is there a tipping point?

 

Jessica Selander: Yes, that really helps having people being in a restaurant and saying, “Hey, what do you have that’s an alcoholic?” Because restaurants are saying nobody’s asking for it. 

Here I am double digit sober and I had never gone into a restaurant and asked for it.

I would look at the [menu’s] non alcoholic section, which is always juice, soda pop, iced tea and stuff. If it’s not on the menu, I would never ask them for anything. Here I am for over a decade, not telling them that I want this thing. So we started doing more education on social media and online.

If you walk into a restaurant, ask them “What do you have that’s not alcoholic?”

Just pregnant people alone. There’s a large percentage of the population.

Is there science that says a pregnant woman can drink this and have zero concerns?

 

Jessica Selander: Yes. So this is super interesting. In the United States we’re the most strict in terms of alcohol. If you go to the UK, they have different, actually higher limits for how much alcohol can be in something. The US’s rules come from prohibition when you can’t sell, make, transport alcohol.

The government said once it gets under 0.5%, it’s not alcohol anymore. So that’s where that number comes from and sometimes people see it and say, “Oh, there’s a little bit of alcohol in this.” 

There was a study done in Germany where they tested a lot of grocery store items.  What they found was there’s a lot of stuff in our grocery stores that had a little bit of alcohol in it. Very ripe bananas, which we feed to toddlers have some alcohol in them. Orange juice is another one.

American hamburger buns. But it also makes sense, bread, yeast and we have more sugar in our products, right? Bread actually has more alcohol than people realize. 

Let’s talk about your wine’s flavors and aromas and the winemaking process to get there.

Jessica Selander: I knew what I wanted and I was incredibly picky about it. 

We launched with the sparkling white and the sparkling Rose’ and people were asking for a Rose’ with no bubbles.

I thought it would be easy.  It was not easy. 

Stills are very different from sparkling. I’m a balance of “I know what I want. I’m going for this thing and very focused”, but then I’m also balanced with listening. So we do a lot of focus groups. I do want feedback.  I do want opinions. 

We were working on it.  Everyone’s saying it’s good, it’s great.  But I didn’t think it was good enough. We were supposed to launch it in summer and I pushed everything back.  Back to the drawing board. 

What if we did this? What if that?  Talking to people, reading science and chemistry books

Was it like working for the right blend?

Jessica Selander: It’s tweaking so many different things and pieces in the blend. But it doesn’t always work out.  If you tweak a blend, sometimes other notes will come forward that you’re not expecting, or sometimes you’ve diminished things that you didn’t intend to diminish.

The still Rose is a great example, it didn’t have that click and so I just kept working on it. And that’s the one that won Double Gold and Best in Class in the San Francisco International Wine Competition, which is one of the biggest and oldest blind tastings in the world and the biggest and oldest blind tasting in the U.S.

 

Can you share any details and lessons you learned taking on the world of winemaking?

 

Jessica Selander: There’s so many things.  We’re not just making wine.  We’re wholesale, we’re distributing, we’re direct to consumer. We have so many different facets. 

I could talk for hours about how our wines are very low in sugar and they don’t have the alcohol in them. So our [bottles] probably freeze easier than anything else on the market. So shipping during the winter.

I’ve had conversations with other non alcoholic people too.  Everybody’s doing it differently and that’s the hard part too, where I feel like there’s a solution for every problem.

We’ve gotten better and better at winter shipping, but it’s not quite there yet.  Figuring out what can we ship in that’s going to have thermal protection, but isn’t going to contribute a ton of garbage. We’ve got the most eco-friendly, innovative winter shippers.  They’re made of corn. 

They’re expensive as hell, but it’s better than styrofoam. We have to keep everything under 50 pounds for UPS and 12 bottles of sparkling is 51 pounds in these corn shippers.

That thermal protection is still not enough, so we added heat packs. 

Let’s talk about your wines.

 

Jessica Selander: We have four varietals.  We’ve got our sparkling white, a sparkling Rosé. Still Rosé, a Cabernet Sauvignon. I love our red a lot. The reds are hard. They’re the most complicated; red wine has the highest alcohol content to begin with.

What flavor notes should we be looking for?

 

Jessica Selander: It’s definitely an American Cab. More fruit forward. It’s not grape juice. It’s fermented, it’s aged in American oak so you’ll get some green-ness to, like forest floor.  The longer it’s been open the more tasting notes you’ll get. I like it more and more throughout the week because the fruit notes settle down. Black currant, cherry, some leather 

The still rosé, watermelon, a nice floral to it. 

Sparkling rosé. Slightly floral.  Some orange blossom to it.  Blackberry, but some people say raspberry. Some people say strawberry.  They’re very summery

I think sometimes tasting notes feel in excess because we all taste things very differently. 

Our audience is foodies. Let’s talk a little bit about some of your favorite meals that you think would pair that your favorite pairings with your wines

 

Jessica Selander: I bake. I come from a big family, so I can pretty much cook anything. 

I heard someone say one time that baking was more science. And cooking was more art and I do agree with that. 

Let’s talk about the wine competitions. How you see them, what the experience has been like, and of course, what their results have been.

Jessica Selander: I did not know that competition was as big of a deal as it is [which was a blessing].  So what happened was I was beating my head against the wall being like, “They taste like wine!”  And my brother said, nobody believes you. You have to enter them into wine competitions. You need to prove to them in their own landscape that you belong there. 

So, here’s this competition. The first one, the sparkling rosé won gold and sparkling white won bronze.

Then I looked deeper into what the competition was [and realized it was the acclaimed San Francisco International Wine Competition & World Spirits Competition ]. It was a blessing because I think I would have been scared to do it. Then [next year] I do it with the Still Rose and the Cab.  Then hearing back, you’ve got the highest a non-alcoholic has ever gotten and you’re Still Rose is the best non-alcoholic wine of any varietal entered from all over the world. 

I was only wondering if it was even going to place, and here it ends up winning the best.

I was at a grocery store [today] I’ve been trying to get into for two years where the head buyer won’t even try it. So it’s [frustrating] but the more of these awards that we stack up, at some point in time they have to not ignore it. They’ll be like, Oh, this is a real thing.

We haven’t [hit that goal], it’s not normalized yet. We’re in over 300 stores and in almost in every state.

 

If you want more non-alcoholic near you at a restaurant and grocery store, what are the step-by-step, simple direction

Jessica Selander: This is super easy for people.

So if there’s a grocery store or a local market that you shop at already, you just go into the wine department and say, “Hey, what non-alcoholic wine do you have?”  And let them know you want it.  Verbally say it

It’s the same thing in restaurants. I do it myself now too, where I get the menu and I’m not seeing what the stuff on it. And I just ask and say, Hey, what non alcoholic stuff do you have?” 

 

Tell us how we can learn more about Joyus.  Shopping and following on social media.

 

Jessica Selander: So all of our social media stuff, our website is DrinkJoyus.com. Our Facebook, our Instagram, our TikTok are all DrinkJoyus

And on the website, there is this Find Joyus store finder map. So you can look on there and find us closest to you and working hard to add new stores pretty much weekly and email, email us. There’s a contact form on the website. Email. If you’re like, Hey, there’s a store by me. I want them to carry you. Email us. And we will call them and we will try, we’ll do our best and we’ll call them again three months later and we’ll call them again.

 

Worth the train ride: New York Wine Studio starts classes this October in NYC, with Wine Expert Alan Tardi
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Worth the train ride: New York Wine Studio starts classes this October in NYC, with Wine Expert Alan Tardi

By Contributor — 1 year ago

New York Wine Studio starts classes this October in NYC, Wine Expert Alan Tardi reveals why you need to Enroll

He’s worked as a chef, a restaurateur, a sommelier, a consultant to some of New York City’s biggest and best fine dining restaurants.  He’s also written for magazines and publications, such as Wine Spectator, Wine and Spirits, Decanter, of course, the New York Times.

Today Wine Expert Alan Tardi visits us for a conversation about NYC, restaurants, Italian wine and his new classes starting this fall (October) at New York Wine Studio.

 

 

As a get to know you question for everyone out there who loves food and wine and spirits, but they don’t necessarily know your background so much.

You’ve been in the wine world, the hospitality world, the restaurant world for many years. Tell us about a celebration in your life that inspired you to join these industries?

 

Alan: Sure. First I should say that, when you introduced me, you said I was a chef and a restaurateur and all that’s true. But before I was a chef, I was a cook. And actually before I was a cook, I was a dishwasher.  I took a little bit of a break from college and went to Europe and traveled around and then came back and wanted to come visit my sister in New York City.

And so I did. And I ended up staying. And at a certain point, I thought okay, I’m going to go back and finish my undergraduate degree, but I also want to get a job. So I walked into a place that could have been a shoe store or whatever. A gas station.  But it happened to be a restaurant. 

One of the new, the first restaurants in this area called Tribeca, when it was just starting to take shape and walked in there and said, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a job.’

The person who was in the back that they sent me back to talk to in the kitchen was washing the dishes. And he said, Yeah, I’m the owner. You want to wash dishes? Yeah, sure. 

So I started washing dishes there in this restaurant. And then after a while I would, I became a bus boy on the floor.  Then when I would come into work, oftentimes the kitchen was a little bit behind. So I would help them out. I ended up going to the kitchen while I was going to school at the same time. 

For me, it was a job and while I was going to college in the village after my classes in the evening, I found this tiny little restaurant on Greenwich Avenue in the village called Chez Brigitte.

It was like a counter basically, they had two little tables on the side, but there was a counter there with maybe eight seats. And there was this French woman named Brigitte who was cooking food back there. I started to go there, so I didn’t go home by myself and have supper.

I started to get half bottles of wine from a nearby wine shop and took it to this place, Chez Brigitte. I spoke French. I was talking to the woman cooking there.That was a celebration for me, and I was there all by myself. I would go there after, after my schooling before I went back home.

So that was like a celebration. I would go there two or three times a week. And that was my own sort of really like dining. But it was very casual. It was an open kitchen.  But that was my celebration factor. And then after I finished my degree I thought I’m actually into cooking.

I was cooking in this restaurant in Tribeca. And so I went and knocked on the door of a little restaurant in Soho, which was called Chanterelle. It was a legendary restaurant for about 25 years. And the woman, the manager, the wife of the chef, Karen Weltuck, and David Weltuck was a chef.

She hired me. I was the third person. Before that, there were two people in the kitchen. I became the third person in the kitchen doing Garde Manger. Then after six or nine months, I was promoted to he sous chef. So I went from a Garde Manger to the sous chef in this really legendary restaurant.

So that was my celebration.

 

The fact that you grew up behind the scenes in the back of the house makes me curious.

For a couple – whether it’s a date night, an anniversary or a business dinner,

do you have any tips for how to take that fine dining experience and make it really truly memorable

Alan: First of all, we talk about fine dining. To me, sometimes you have the best experiences in a very simple, very unpretentious place. When I was working at Chanterelle, I was there for a little over three years. Every August, the restaurant would close for the month and most of the staff would go off on a gastronomic tour. 

I went with some of my colleagues to France two years in a row. We would go through all the three star Michelin restaurants. At that time, you had to write a letter in French asking for a reservation at a certain time.

You had to reserve ahead of time because you had three star Michelin restaurants, highly sought after. Three or four days a week we would be eating in these fancy restaurants, sometimes lunch and dinner. It’s crazy. But there would be the down days too, right?

When you’re just traveling somewhere, you’re going to a different part. Some of these meals were amazing, that it was a whole new world for me. You get the menu, all the service and the cheese and the wines and everything. It was a great experience.

On the off days, you would just find a place to eat. And sometimes we would go to a little aubergine. I remember one in Normandy, walking into this place. It was just a few doors down from where we were staying overnight, waiting for our next kind of big meal. We went to this little aubergine and they had the most banal dish, trout almondine, right?

Trout almondine. It was in Normandy, however.  There were women in the kitchen, not men, and usually in these three star restaurants, it was all male at that point. 

I realized that some of those down meal nights and simple places, they had no stars at all. You had amazing food.

The meals were on the same par as some of the best three Michelin restaurants I had. So that was an important distinction for me to make. When you’re talking about how to really create – whether it’s in a very simple environment or kind of more fancy –  how to really make it special. I think it has genuinity.

Just being what you are and trying to take care of your guests as best as you possibly can. That can really make it very special. You need to have good food, you need to have good wine, you need to have good service. All of those factors play in. But the most important thing is really trying to take care of your customer.

And I think you can do the same thing at home, your customers, whoever’s coming to your home and you’re going to offer them something and you want to try to make it as special as you can, even if it’s just hamburgers, but that can be really great and memorable.

 

We’re going to stick with the restaurant for a second, but move toward the wine list.

What are some tips for someone who wants to have a nice bottle out at dinner and they just don’t even know where to start?

 

Alan: That’s a great question. When I had my restaurant I decided to take a certain approach to the wine program, which was to find the best regional wines that would really best accompany the food.

Many of them were wines that people were unfamiliar with, they were just not among the top 10 that people would go to automatically. This is some years ago when a lot of the wine lists in the restaurant were the most famous ones you see all over the place because people are comfortable with that. So sometimes it threw people off and they would ask questions. What is that? Don’t you have this other one that’s very popular and all over the place? 

No, but we have this and – we didn’t always say this – but it’s actually much better and it costs less.

So people would try it.  They would take a leap of faith and for the most part they always loved the wines, and they went very well with their food.  Not only was I the chef and the owner but I was also the sommelier as well. 

We tried to train the staff very well about the wines and inform them. We had monthly tastings with them so they could taste the wines.

If people were really interested, I would come out of the kitchen and explain, make a suggestion based on what they said they liked. Sometimes it’s very difficult for people to explain what they want, so you have to read into that a little bit, but it’s something that really worked.

 

I know you love Italian wine, you’re an expert in Italian wine. Are there some Italian wine regions that deserve more attention?

 

Alan: Absolutely. I love wine from all over the place. Initially I spent time in France, delving into the wine regions there and they’re amazing and superb. When I was working at Chanterelle after the two first years going to France and the three Michelin restaurants, the third year I said maybe I’ll go to Italy and just try that out.

When I actually went there, it totally blew my mind. We rented a little house outside of Siena and explored the area. We went to a fantastic restaurant and it’s still in existence, La Chiusa, in a tiny little village called Montefollonico.

That really blew my mind completely. Because it was in an old olive oil mill, outside of this tiny little village up in the hills. The food was both very traditional and also very kind of cutting edge. They were trying to expand a little bit, but there was a really great balance of that. I actually went back there to do a stage, a summer stage working in the kitchen.

What really blew my mind was the fact that everything there was local. It was right, very close to Montepulciano and I would go walk in the vineyards.  A lot of the food they got was made from grapes in the vineyards outside the restaurant. And the cheese was the pecorino.

The cheeses in Tuscany were made locally and everything was from that particular area. This was long before farm to table. 

So it was a tremendous experience and that was just the beginning because Italy has 20 different regions, each one of them very different.

We think of Italy’s being old, the ancient Romans and the Etruscans. That’s true. But Italy is a country just a little bit more than a hundred years old. 150 years old. It was formed in 1861 bringing together the Italy that was once where it was fragmented after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Up until that point, you had all these different city states that had their own language, their own identity, their own cuisine, their own architecture. And while it’s been now collected into one country, each region is very independent and different from one another.

It’s changing a little bit now.  At one point the dialects were very strong. When I moved to Piemonte. In the village where I lived for over 12 years, when I moved there in 2003, most of the people – who are over 50 years old, spoke Piedmontese as their first language. They had gone to school, so they learned Italian, but they spoke Piedmontese whenever they could.

In Italy there’s an incredible diversity of different places within the country. And it goes into the wine. The wines are very different. The grape variety, there are more grape varieties in Italy than most any other place. 

 

I appreciate how you fit all these areas together: the wine, the food, the identity of the people themselves. When people Google you, they can find a lot.  Your videos, your books, your webinars.

What do you think is a  tip to being a great speaker when it comes to food, wine, travel, these types of genres?

 

Alan: I feel like I’m very humble, especially when you’re talking about wine, there’s always something new to learn and it never really stops. So I’m learning too, as I go along..

I approach it as I want to learn about something myself. Then I want to explain it and talk about it to other people and fill them in on it as well, because it’s exciting for me it might be also interesting and exciting for other people. 

The other thing is really trying to share that information in a meaningful way. I’m not trying to be an expert. I just want to share that excitement that I’ve felt myself.

Tell me how your background and the learning we’re talking about informed your  decision to launch the New York Wine studio?

Alan: As you alluded to, I’ve been teaching for quite a while. All these things just happened almost organically. I didn’t say I’m going to become a restaurateur or a chef. I just started. From there, I really got interested in wine because there’s a very strong correlation between wine and food.

I got really interested in wine.  I was doing a lot of panel tasting with Wine and Spirits magazine, whose office was very close to my restaurant. Josh Green, the editor there and a friend of mine for quite a while.  At one point he said, Hey, do you want to write an article? I said, sure. So I started writing for them a lot and it just went into other venues as well. 

Teaching is the same thing. I started giving presentations at wine conferences like Society of Wine Educators annual conference  I started teaching around 2015 for the Wine Scholar Guild. I was teaching for about six years.

I’ve been doing it in many different forms. Italian Wine Scholar. French Wine Scholar and Spanish Wine Scholar as well.

I thought maybe it would be a good idea to offer this program, the IWS, Italian Wine Scholar program, in New York City. No one is doing it here. Why? Why is that? So rather than doing it online, I thought it would be really great to do it in person. Where you can actually interact with the students that are there rather than just having them in the background on a computer from many different places in the world.

So I wanted to offer that along with wine because that’s a very important component. Obviously, if you’re talking about wine and explaining different Appalachians and different growing areas and different winemaking traditions, it’s good to be tasting the wines while you’re learning about that.

I came across a place that was willing to host these presentations, a beautiful wine tasting area, right in midtown Manhattan, close to Grand Central.

In addition to the Italian Wine Scholar Program, to start things up, do four individual classes that are theme oriented.

Is it fall and spring, or what’s the schedule?

 

Alan:  Right now we’re going to be starting this fall beginning in October,  I want to ease into it. I’m not loading up an entire schedule of things, but I’m going to be offering part one of the Italian Wine Scholar program, because There are two parts to this certification program.

The first part of the Italian Wine Scholar program will be this fall. Six 3-hour sessions live in-person with wine once a week during October and November.

Then to add something else, in the evenings, we’ll be doing four courses.  One in October, two in November, and one in December.  Two hour courses with wine, as well, and they’re not regionally driven, they’re thematically driven.

The first theme class is going to be: the many faces of Sangiovese because Sangiovese is a grape variety, Italy’s most widely planted grape variety, and of course it’s very closely tied to Tuscany, where there are at least five major appalachians that really focus on that grape variety.So we’ll be showcasing 10 different San Gervasio based wines. Five of them from Tuscany and then other San Gervasio based wines from other regions that, that really featured that like Umbria and Marche and even up in the north, Romagna, which is part of the Emilia Romagna region.  Emilia and Romagna are completely different places.

There will also be individual classes on volcanic wines, Appassimento wines, which are wines that are made from grapes that have undergone this drying process. 

Then also sparkling wines, which I’m a big fan of.  My second book was about champagne and I’m really deeply into champagne.  It’s going to involve sparkling wines from three different countries.

It sounds like this might be the most in-depth Italian class you can find in Manhattan.

 

Alan: To be careful, I would say it is “one of”, the most comprehensive program in Italian wine anywhere.

This program has not, has never been offered in New York City. It’s kind of a first time for that. It’s very comprehensive. It covers all 20 regions, all of the significant Appalachians and there are many of them.

All of the significant diverse grape varieties and I say significant because it might even be a little bit more now in the Italian National Register of Grape Varieties. Many people think that there are more than 2,000 different grape varieties. They just haven’t been genetically defined before.

Because it’s so deep with knowledge, it’s great for trade. New York City is a huge foodie and restaurant dining scene.

Alan: If you want to have all these post nominal certifications, that’s good. Nothing wrong with that. The most important thing, however, of course is knowledge and understanding. that you can use if you’re in the trade.

The understanding, the awareness of wine that you can then transmit to your customers in a restaurant or to your customers in a wine shop where you’re selling to.

It’s a very comprehensive program, but you don’t have to be in the trade to do it.  There are a lot of people who are just really fascinated and interested in wine. This is certainly a great comprehensive program for people who just are really fascinated by Italian wine and they want to learn more about it.

What are the goals for the New York Wine Studio? What’s the future for you? What’s the future for the studio itself?

 

Alan: For me, it’s this and I’m very excited about it. I like this sort of counterpoint between the really focused credential certification course with an exam at the end, and then the other ones that are more mixing it up and comparing /  contrasting these different wine regions.

Next spring I plan to do Italian Wine Scholar Part Two. There’s also an introductory course, used to be called Italian Prep, now I think it’s called Italian Essentials. It is for people who aren’t ready to jump into a whole certification program with all that detail, but it’s an introduction to Italian wine.

I would also love to do the French Wine Scholar, along with some additional classes in the evening.

Tell us where we can find more.  Websites?  Social Media?

 

Alan: Check out the website www.NewYorkWineStudio.com. It talks about the programs, the IWS program with the schedule mapped out and the four individual classes. 

There’s also an email there, info@NewYorkWineStudio.

 

For DC, it's a Rose' Summer! NBA Hall of Famer Tony Parker shares his Dinner Party Secrets and future of Rose’
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For DC, it’s a Rose’ Summer! NBA Hall of Famer Tony Parker shares his Dinner Party Secrets and future of Rose’

By Joe Winger — 1 year ago

NBA Hall of Famer Tony Parker shares his dinner party secrets, favorite french summer escapes and the future of the Rose’ Revolution.

In his incredible basketball career, Tony Parker earned four NBA Championships with the San Antonio Spurs, was selected for six All-Star teams and named MVP of the 2007 Finals.

But these days, his passion for food and wine is keeping him even more inspired.

Starting as a boy growing up in France, the memorable dinner parties he hosted during his NBA days, his summer escapes to French Vineyards during the off-season. 

It’s no surprise that now he diving into the French wine world, buying Château La Mascaronne in Provence with legendary business partner Michel Reybier.

A magnificent adventure for the next vintage of his life’s journey.

Château La Mascaronne Rose' COURTESY OF CHÂTEAU LA MASCARONNE

Château La Mascaronne Rose’ COURTESY OF CHÂTEAU LA MASCARONNE

Today I sat down with Tony Parker (over audio-only speakerphone) for a conversation about dinner parties, french vacation, getting busy in vineyards, and the future of Rose’ wine. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  The full conversation can be found on our YouTube channel.

Also, the podcast version is here:

 

 

You’ve been diving into the world of winemaking with Michel Reybier and his team. Can you talk a little bit about the adventure, any surprises or lessons?

 

It’s been amazing. I always wanted to invest in a project like that. The first time I tried wine was when I was 17 years old. I wanted to keep learning about it and get my knowledge better around the wine world. And so when I was 19, I finally made enough money to afford all those great wines.

I was lucky enough to play for a coach who loved wine, had a huge collection, was reading wine magazines every trip. And so that’s how we bonded. As I got better, in my knowledge of wine, I started to invite all the best [people] in San Antonio to come to do a nice dinner at my house with Coach Popovich, and then the next day I would invite them to a Spurs game.

Château La Mascaronne COURTESY OF CHÂTEAU LA MASCARONNE

Château La Mascaronne COURTESY OF CHÂTEAU LA MASCARONNE

Then during the summer I started making trips to the vineyard. I started to know them better. Because in the wine world, obviously, you have great families. They’re super passionate. And that’s how I started; working on my allocation and the good bottles, the Reserves. 

Tony Parker and Michel Reybier - SEBASTIEN CLAVEL

Tony Parker and Michel Reybier – SEBASTIEN CLAVEL

When I retired I wanted to be more involved. But it’s very hard to invest in the wine business because it’s either in the family for generations and generations.  Those big companies buy everything. And so I was very lucky, through mutual friends I met Mr. Reybier and after talking for six or eight months, we decided to become partners. Now I’m a proud Owner / Ambassador / Everything.

 

You mentioned the wine dinners you had in San Antonio. Just for us massive foodies, can you help us fantasize for a moment?

What kind of food was served? What kind of wines were poured? Can you take us back to those nights?

 

I had a private chef. My private chef would work with the vineyard. We tell them who’s coming, how many people, which bottles and what year they will send us. 

Then they will work with my staff to make sure we make a menu accordingly, to make sure that everything is matched with what we are drinking.

So when the [dinner party] came to my house, we tried [the vintages] 1969, 1982, 2000 and 2009. It was unbelievable. Great bottles, great vintages. 

And for me, I’m very lucky too because I’m born in 1982 and it’s one of the best years for wine, especially in Bordeaux. So every time I visit a castle in Bordeaux, the employees are always super happy because it’s a good opportunity for them, as the owner, to open an ‘82 [vintage]. 

Most of the time, they’ll come and say thank you to me, saying it’s [their] first time trying an ‘82 [vintage]. Because nowadays, they don’t open those 82’s a lot.

 

 

You’ve hinted at your sports background, obviously you have become a master. Is there any lesson that you mastered in sports that you’ve brought into the wine world with you?

 

The passion and the work ethic. Obviously in the wine world I will never try to be and talk like a Sommelier, they studied for that. Even if I have good knowledge and I’ve been working with vineyards.  And I’m learning all the time, especially since I’ve been owning vineyards. I did Harvest. I did the assemblage.  Which is when you try all the possible [options], and you decide what the wine is going to be.

Tony Parker and Michel Reybier - SEBASTIEN CLAVEL

Tony Parker and Michel Reybier – SEBASTIEN CLAVEL

I’ve been working with great directors.  Our director is unbelievable. The director at La Mascaronne, she’s great too. And so for me, it’s been great knowledge, and a great learning process to learn even more about wine.

What inspired you to choose the partner with Chateau La Mascaronne?

 

When I met him, I knew he was huge in the wine business and obviously it brings a lot of credibility when you work with somebody like Michel Reybier because he’s been at this for so long and he’s the owner of one of the best wines in the world with Château Cos d’Estournel.

That’s how I knew him and that was big time. When he talked about La Mascaronne, he bought it from Tom Bove.

Back in 2006, when I started going on vacation every summer, I started drinking Rose’ with my brothers and my friends. We love rose’ in the summer. 

That’s when Miraval took off.  Brad Pitt bought it with Angelina [Jolie]. He bought Miraval from Tom Bove.

Tony Parker at Château La Mascaronne COURTESY OF CHÂTEAU LA MASCARONNE

Tony Parker at Château La Mascaronne COURTESY OF CHÂTEAU LA MASCARONNE

So [I thought] if Tom Bove hit that property perfectly with Miraval, for sure [it can happen] with La Mascaronne, it’s just a matter of time before we can do something amazing.

What’s next for you as far as the wine world goes?

 

Our premium rosé just came out from La Mascaronne.  Only 3,000 bottles.

We’re working on more premium one’s now.  I think that’s where things are going with rose’s.  All these big companies and all the knowledge that they get from the red wines is coming into the Rosé world, where the Rosé is going to get better and better.

For more information on Tony Parker and La Mascaronne:

La Mascaronne’s website

La Mascaronne’s Instagram

Tony Parker’s Instagram

ABFF Ventures, rebranded as Nice Crowd, expands its annual events to include comedy, health & wellness, food, and fine art events.
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Nice Crowd, formerly known as ABFF Ventures, expands its annual events to include comedy, health & wellness, food, and fine art events

By Contributor — 1 year ago

ABFF Ventures, rebranded as Nice Crowd, expands events to include comedy, health & wellness, food, and fine art events.

ABFF Ventures – the company led by Jeff and Nicole Friday – that created the American Black Film Festival, now in its 27th year, and the acclaimed annual event, the ABFF Honors, today announced that ABFF Ventures will be rebranded as Nice Crowd, and will expand its annual event offerings to include comedy, health & wellness, food, and fine art events.

The first new event under the Nice Crowd banner will be Because They’re Funny (BTF), a new comedy festival showcasing comedic talent within BIPOC communities, which is set to launch in Washington, D.C. in October 2023, and was announced together with Angie Gates, CEO of Events DC Sports and Convention Authority.

Dedicated to highlighting BIPOC culture and achievements, the entertainment event and tourism company’s new name, Nice Crowd, emphasizes the power of gathering.

ABFF Ventures has been the leading events entertainment company specializing in live experiences that showcase BIPOC culture and achievement. Nice Crowd founder and CEO Jeff Friday and President Nicole Friday made today’s announcement ahead of the opening night of the 2023 American Black Film Festival (ABFF) in Miami Beach.

“We are so thrilled to announce our new comedy festival, Because They’re Funny,

which launches in Washington, DC, the hometown of many of today’s most beloved comedians of color,”

said Nice Crowd founder and CEO Jeff Friday and President Nicole Friday. 

 

“While we proudly reflect on this festival and the company’s many accomplishments over the years, we look forward to an even brighter future, with even more incredible event offerings, as Nice Crowd.”

“I am excited to partner with Nice Crowd to bring the inaugural Because They’re Funny Comedy Festival to Washington, DC,” said Events DC President and CEO Angie M. Gates.

“Not only will the festival bring new, emerging and fantastic talent by people of color to our city, but it will support our local creatives, our theaters and performance spaces, their employees and the nation’s capital as a whole. We love welcoming visitors to our diverse and inclusive city while celebrating creativity and having a great time.”

“The Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau extends a heartfelt congratulations to ABFF Ventures on the remarkable newly expanded rebrand ‘Nice Crowd,” said Connie Kinnard, Senior Vice President of Multicultural Tourism & Development for the GMCVB.  “This momentous occasion not only signifies growth and innovation for the organization but also highlights the immense inspiration ABFF has had on Greater Miami’s multicultural programming such as the Art of Black Miami. We welcome ABFF’s unwavering dedication in fostering meaningful connections and shining a spotlight on diverse talent. ABFF Ventures’ transformative impact to Greater Miami’s tourism landscape is truly remarkable and anything that grows their audience is also beneficial to the Miami and Miami Beach community.”

Since its inception in 1997, the American Black Film Festival (ABFF) has become a cornerstone for diversity and inclusion in Hollywood. It premiered the work and supported the careers of many of today’s most successful filmmakers, actors, writers and stand-up comedians and is recognized as a standard-bearer of excellence for Black creativity. Along with the Nice Crowd rebranding announcement, the opening night of the American Black Film Festival (ABFF) included a screening of the upcoming Netflix satirical conspiracy caper film They Cloned Tyrone, which stars Golden Globe winner John Boyega (Small Axe, Attack the Block, Star Wars), Teyonah Parris (The Marvels, WandaVision) and Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx. Emmy®-winning writer, producer and actor Lena Waithe is ABFF’s 2023 Festival Ambassador.

Led by the power couple of Jeff Friday and Nicole Friday, Nice Crowd’s curated and culturally impactful events include the American Black Film Festival (ABFF) as well as the ABFF Honors, an awards gala saluting excellence in Hollywood. Nice Crowd is expanding event offerings this year to include events elevating comedy and food from BIPOC communities and individuals.

New and returning Nice Crowd events in 2023/2024 include:

           

ABFF GLOBAL FILM SERIES

September 1-3, 2023, London

An international screening series promoting the universal appeal of Black content while encouraging collaboration between artists throughout the African Diaspora. Each year, the series visits a major cultural hub around the world. The 2023 event, in partnership with S.O.U.L Fest, will take place at the British Film Institute in the UK.

BECAUSE THEY’RE FUNNY

October 6-8, 2023, Washington, D.C.

 

Because They’re Funny (BTF), is a new comedy festival showcasing comedic talent within BIPOC communities. The festival’s mission is to celebrate the diversity that exists within the comedy arena and help propel a new generation of Black and Brown standup comics to success in Hollywood.

Curated for industry insiders and casual fans alike, the BTF lineup will feature headline acts, new comic showcases, industry workshops, panels, film screenings, networking events and exclusive parties. The inaugural event will take place at the Anthem Theater and other premier venues along The Wharf, a popular entertainment hub on Washington, DC’s southwest waterfront, from October 6-8, 2023. BTW is presented in partnership with Events DC, the official convention and sports authority for the District of Columbia. Cadillac is the festival’s presenting sponsor and exclusive automotive partner.

ABFF HONORS

March 2024, Los Angeles, CA

 

The annual ABFF Honors celebrates acclaimed artists alongside rising stars, creating a spirit of mutual appreciation amongst multigenerational talent in Hollywood, honoring Black artists who have made significant contributions to American entertainment through their work as well as those who champion diversity and inclusion in Hollywood.

Going into in its sixth year, the ABFF Honors’ list of celebrated award recipients include Denzel Washington, Ava DuVernay, Regina King, Tiffany Haddish, Ryan Coogler, Don Cheadle, Will Packer, Queen Latifah, Lena Waithe, Terrence Howard, F. Gary Gray, Billy Dee Williams, Issa Rae, Omari Hardwick, Louis Gossett, Jr., the late Diahann Carroll, Janelle Monáe, Kerry Washington, and the cast of classic films and television shows including Martin, The Wire, Hollywood Shuffle, Eve’s Bayou,  and Love Jones.

Cadillac is the ceremony’s presenting sponsor and exclusive automotive partner.

ADDITIONAL EVENTS CELEBRATING FOOD, FITNESS, ART & MORE

Coming in 2024, Locations To Be Announced

 

Events include: a gathering of food enthusiasts, a festival centered on exercise and wellness and a multi-day gallery dedicated to showcasing contemporary Black art.

About Nice Crowd

Nice Crowd, formerly ABFF Ventures, is a leading entertainment company in the event tourism

arena. Nice Crowd specializes in the development and marketing of festivals and other live experiences that showcase BIPOC culture and achievement while promoting travel to leading destinations around the world. To learn more about Nice Crowd events, visit www.nicecrowd.com.

Oregon Wine's Incredible new vintage Re-Invents the Rules with Winemaker Aaron Lieberman from Iris Vineyards
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Oregon Wine’s Incredible new vintage Re-Invents the Rules with Winemaker Aaron Lieberman from Iris Vineyards

By Joe Wehinger — 1 year ago

Oregon Wine shares incredible new vintage with Winemaker Aaron Lieberman from Iris Vineyards

Sure, Oregon Wine is world-famous for its Pinot Noir.  And rightly so, as the area produces incredible expressions of the varietal.  But that’s not all they can do. 

Award-winning winemaker Aaron Lieberman wants the world to taste and discover all of the incredible wines from the area including Iris Vineyards’s new Pinot Gris which has won acclaim several years in a row.

Oregon Wine

 

Today, Winemaker Aaron Lieberman from Iris Vineyards sits down over zoom to talk about his inspirations, his favorite wines, food pairings and what’s next for Oregon Wine.

 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  Find the whole conversation on our YouTube channel.

 

There’s so much to go over with you because you’re in a great area of Oregon.

Last year we had the privilege of covering the 2022 McMinnville Wine Classic, your Pinot Gris won Best in Show and Best White varietal.

 

According to press announcements it’s the first time ever for a Pinot Gris. What was it about that bottle and that year that brought you so much acclaim?

 

The vintage we won that on was the 2020, and I think our Pinot Gris is fairly consistent. So I actually personally felt that the 2021 vintage was better than the 2020. What I think is going on there is that in our growing area Southwest of Eugene we have our vineyard in what’s called the Lorane Valley. We’re a relatively high elevation vineyard compared to the rest of the Willamette Valley. We get a lot more hang time on our Pinot Gris, which allows more flavor development and preservation of acidity, as well as slower and lower accumulation of sugar.

So we ended up with a higher acid, lower alcohol wine that’s very expressive in terms of fruit flavors.

 

I wanna let our audience know a little bit about your background and what brought you to where you are today. Your education in soil and winemaking, but I hope you’ll touch on your Peace Corps time, and your work in Guatemala with soil education.

 

As I was finishing up my Bachelor’s Degree at Oregon State University, I became involved with a couple of different grad students, helping them with their research projects, basically. At the beginning of my junior year [I had already] switched my major from Pre-Vet to Crop and Soil Science.

So the projects I was working on with these grad students involved soil research. One of these grad students had been in the Peace Corps and talked about it frequently and also had a professor who had been in the Peace Corps. They both inspired me to look into it and do it.

I ended up going to Guatemala. The project I worked on was called Corn and Bean Seed Improvement and Post Harvest Management. We were trying to counteract the invasion of commercial corn seed into Guatemala and Latin America. It’s replacing the land raise varietals or the traditional varietals of corn. We were working with those traditional varietals to improve their performance in the field by selecting the plants that were growing well and were the most disease resistant.

The program started four years before I got to Guatemala, so I was the third volunteer and we were really showing some really good results.

 

Something I love about winemaking is such a mix of science and magic, or science and artistry. And it sounds like science is very strong with your background and the magic that you bring to the bottle.

 

Yes, I would agree with that.

 

 

So let’s switch back from Guatemala. You’ve got some great soil types. Let’s talk about how you use the soils in your region to bring such delicious flavor, characteristics and aromas.

 

In our vineyard, we do have some Jory soils, and I think most people who know about the Willamette Valley know that Jory is the preferred soil in the region particularly for Pinot Noir.

Our vineyard is dominated by Bellpine soil. Bellpine is kind of an analog of Jory, but it’s formed in sedimentary rock rather than basaltic rock or volcanic rock. So there’s some significant differences in the chemical makeup of the soil that contributes to the flavor difference in our Pinot Gris compared to some others.

 

The last time I visited, what I heard overwhelmingly from the winemakers is you have to be okay with inconsistency year after year.

 

I want my wines to represent the area that they’re from and the varietal from which they’re made and different weather during each growing season as part of that representation.

So based on the weather and the level of ripeness of the fruit and what we’re tasting in the grapes before we bring them in, we will make some adjustments to how we do the vinification to try to push it in one direction or another, to be at least somewhat consistent.

 

 

Let’s talk about the wines themselves. 

 

Let’s start with the Pinot Gris. The comment I hear the most is white peach. That’s new. I usually hear pear, red apple peel, quite a bit of citrus.

iris vineyards

 

Commonly I get stone fruit comments on our Chardonnay. Whether it’s our still Chardonnay or our Blanc de Blanc.

 

Then there’s the Brut Rose, the Pinot Noir 2021, the House Red Blend. A lot of people will remember 2020 and how that vintage went for us. I refer to that year as the worst year of my life.

 

Let’s talk a little bit about what made it such a bad year.

 

We had beautiful weather during bloom. I started to feel like it was going to be a really great vintage. We’re seeing a really modest crop load and smallish berries, which leads to more fruit forward. Right around Labor Day, the major fires started. Smoke came into the valley for about two weeks which was extremely disheartening.

 

In the Willamette Valley that was really our first experience with that level of damage to the fruit. So a lot of people were scrambling, worried, and ultimately didn’t produce Pinot Noir in 2020.

We made less than we had planned. We applied some techniques to mitigate the smoke effect.

 

Can we talk about what you did to mitigate?

 

Well, there are two things that helped the most. One, we sent some grapes to California to go through a process called flash.  It’s a kind of thermovinification method where the must is heated to 80 degrees celsius and then pumped into a vacuum chamber that boils at a much lower temperature. The water and the skins of the grapes “flashes” to steam in the the vacuum chamber. That steam carries away a lot of bad things. Those things are responsible for the bulk of the smoke effect that you might find in a wine.

 

Then following vintage and some aging, we did some reverse osmosis to remove the smoke effect from the rest of our wine.

 

At the tail end of vintage, I had surgery for appendicitis. As I was about recovered from that, I got covid right at the end of 2020.

 

Fortunately ’21 and ’22 were very similar to 2020 and how the vintage started and ended up, we had some really beautiful fruit and beautiful wines. I’m really excited about ’22 based on what we have in barrel right now.

 

Some people approach wine from a food and wine pairing point of view. I’m not sure if you are a chef or a home cook, but do you have any suggestions for great food pairings for some of your bottles?

I think with our Pinot Gris, I really enjoy seafood.

It’s really good with salad. Brut Rose, I always say if you’re making a dinner and you’re not quite sure what wine to serve with your dinners sparkling wine is always a a crowd pleaser. It’ll go with dishes from salad to steak or pizza. The acidity of sparkling wines makes them really versatile in any kind of food. Fatty foods in particular pair well with more acidic wines, kind of a palette cleansing.

For our Pinot Noir, traditional pairings like salmon and chicken.

 

When you’re going through a year, from growth to harvest, what are the traits or elements that get you excited saying it’s gonna be a good year?

 

Last spring we had a couple of fairly severe frosts after bud break and it was an interesting year because of that. We ended up, to everyone’s surprise, with a vintage that was quite nice and yields that were not really affected by the frost. The vines bounced back with their secondary and tertiary buds set fruit, set a really good crop. We got a nice batch of wine out of it.

If we get into harvest in the rainy season, sometimes your hand is forced and the grapes start to get ripe, the skin softens an they become more susceptible to botrytis and other bad things that you don’t want.

 

But ’22 was nice. We weren’t really forced right up until the end. Around October 20, we had the first big rainstorm come in. 20% of our fruit still hanging. We brought most of it in before that big rain.

But I think we had really good ripeness even at that point.

You’ve been doing in-person and zoom wine tastings, do you have a favorite part of that wine tasting process?

 

My favorite part, without a doubt, is just when I see somebody tasting my wine and the look on their face shows me that they’re really enjoying it. That’s a big reason why I’m in this industry, what we do makes people happy.

 

Do you have a certain memory of including either your wine or someone else’s wine in a great celebration?

 

Several memories. My father and I had a wine business of our own from 2002 to 2015. [A few years in] we had a celebration at a steakhouse in Portland. I ordered a Puligny Montrachet off the menu. I still remember that wine quite vividly and how impressive it was. That changed my mind about chardonnay in some ways.

 

In Oregon, there’s a lot more chardonnay coming out of the Willamette Valley now is a good thing, but it’s still been an uphill battle for producers to get that chardonnay wine passed the gatekeepers, the distributors.

You go to a distributor and they’re like, “Everybody drinks California Chardonnay or white burgundy. They don’t know about Oregon Chardonnay. And when you say Willamette Valley, everybody thinks Pinot Noir, which is great. But we’ve kind of pigeonholed ourselves with that. There are a lot of other nice things that can come out of this valley like Pinot Gris and Chardonnay. So we have some work to do on the marketing and publicity to let people know.

 

Any lessons your winemaking team has learned this past vintage that you can share?

 

 I think that happens every year. Let’s not assume that I know everything because I learn stuff every year as well.

One of the things that I really stress with people who are working for me during harvest, is the importance of fermentation temperature.

 

It’s with white wine, with aromatic whites in particular. You really have to keep the temperature under control. Yeast likes to get hot and ferment fast, so you have to keep those ferments cool, whatever the method is if you’re in stainless with jacketed tanks or if you’re in barrel and you’re taking the barrels outside at night or wetting them down to keep the temperature down. It’s super, super important.

 

With the white wines, you get a temperature or a fermentation that’s too hot and you end up with a wine that’s like generic white wine. It doesn’t have varietal character left in it, that’s something I stress a lot.

 

Then when you talk about red wines, the style of red wine that you’re making is so dependent on a lot of things, but temperature is a big thing. So if you do a cool ferment on a red wine, you’re going to have a red wine that’s fruit forward and aromatic, but it’s not going to be very extracted. It’s not gonna have a big tannic backbone to it. In that way it would be out of balance.

 

Like with our Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, we do a couple of different fermentation methods that end up having different peak fermentation temperatures and then we blend them together to get a wine that is crowd pleasing, easy balanced. So one of my big things is temperature.

 

Are there any topics in winemaking that you wish got more attention? 

 

The fact that I don’t do this alone. If I didn’t have a team behind me doing the right thing and supporting production in the winery, starting with our vineyard and our vineyard manager, who is amazing, grows amazing fruit, all the way through to the marketing team selling the wine or promoting the wine and the sales team selling the wine. I think it’s really important for people to understand that it’s really a team effort. I’m the winemaker, I get the publicity, I get the recognition but there’s no way I could do it by myself.

 

I’m sure you talk to young winemakers all the time. Is there one huge piece of advice you would give a young winemaker from all your experience?

 

A big thing would be, and I’ve made this mistake when I was a young winemaker, if you’re about to do something to a wine and you think you know what you’re doing, but you’ve never done it before, make a phone call.

 

Ask another winemaker that maybe has had the experience and has done that. You’ve got a 5,000 gallon tank of wine and you’re gonna do some kind of adjustment that you’ve never done before. Get some information first.

Building network, building community, reaching out to those with either more experience or more diverse experience.

 

Yes. And in most wine regions, it is a community and people are happy to share their information to help the next guy out. Because ultimately, if we’re all making really good wine in the Willamette Valley, that enhances our reputation as a region. So I think it would be a big mistake for us not to share information.

 

Let’s talk about where people can find more information. 

 

On Iris Vineyards website and social media. Our website is IrisVineyards.com and our handle on every social site is @IrisVineyards.

So thank you again for your time, and it was, it was great to have this conversation. 

Thank you, Joe. I really appreciate your time.

1000s of Great White Wines to taste, Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen's new book White Wine Book, available on Amazon now.
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1000s of Great White Wines to taste, Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen’s new book White Wine Book, available on Amazon now.

By Joe Winger — 1 year ago

1000s of Great White Wines to taste, Wine Pro’s Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen’s new book White Wine Book, available on Amazon now.

Summertime is hot weather, light meals and adventures outside.  All of which pair incredibly well with white wines.

That’s why Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen decided to write a book featuring 1000s of white wine grapes that wine lovers should try.  Some are very common, some are very obscure. But they’re all worth a taste – seriously.

Mike DeSimone, Jeff Jenssen's new book White Wine Book

Mike DeSimone, Jeff Jenssen’s new book White Wine Book

 

Today Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen sat down (over zoom) for a conversation about wine, travel, food and more!

Note: the below interview has been edited for length and clarity.  The full interview is available on YouTube, with clips in this article.

We’re talking about your new book “White Wine” today, available now on Amazon and we have a lot of questions. But first, welcome to the conversation and thank you both for being here.

Thank you. Thank you. We’re thrilled to be here.

For anyone who’s new to wine, these two are absolute wine GOATs. They’re the experts. They’ve written some great books in the past, and their new book is absolutely amazing. Over the past week I’ve had the chance to show it to a lot of people in my life and what I’ve loved about it is everybody from the wine geek all the way down to people who are barely wine drinkers, have all found really interesting reasons to love the book.

In the book you mention the word “invitation” several times. You include casual tasting instructions, the food pairing index, the white wine checklist. You do such a good job of making the wine approachable.

 

 

How important was it when you were building this book, the idea of making it approachable?

 

Wine always is very mysterious to people. And it doesn’t have to be. We really believe it. It’s kind of like our mantra. Open up a bottle of wine, sit around a table together, and there’s some conviviality and communal, you know, and, and communality in that bottle. So when you sit down in a circle and you’re having a glass of wine together, all of a sudden, we’re not so different.

So one of the things that we really wanted to speak to is to make wine approachable. One of things I really appreciate what you just said, is that people from all levels, from wine geeks to wine novices, we specifically set out to write this book with enough information that the geek will be really happy and enough information to intrigue the novice to wanna learn more.

We’ve always said this is the kind of book that you would buy for your Dad who happens to like wine, or you would buy it for yourself or buy it for a girlfriend or a buddy that wants to learn more about wine.

But I will tell you that we’ve been honored; our last book, Red Wine (amazon.com), was actually suggested reading list for people who were studying to become Masters of Wine. So we wrote this book with that idea in mind because we’d like this book to be a reference for Master of Wine students.

 

 

I think a lot of people may not realize just how much wine you might taste in an average year.

When we are tasting wine, whether it’s for a book like this and we’re trying to decide what gets include, or when we’re writing our articles, it’s very easy for us to open up 30 bottles in a day.

But there’s also traveling, going to wine regions, and walking into a winery and visiting four wineries a day where people can pour you anywhere between 3 or 4, up to 20 glasses.

One of the things that we have to make a distinction is how much wine do we taste and how much wine do we drink.

Because when we taste wine, we may open 30 bottles, but you just have a sip, you swirl it around your mouth, you get your impression, and then you spit it out. So you can actually taste 30 or 40 wines in one sitting. The alcohol that you actually absorb in your mouth is probably equal to one glass of wine.

We really have to maintain our wits about us when we’re writing books and tasting notes. And then out of those 30 wines, we’ll choose one or two to put in the fridge and drink with dinner.

So the difference between drinking the wine and tasting the wine is a big difference. Our neighbors absolutely love us because we have these bottles with [2 inches] out of it and put the cork back in and give it to them. So they’re very, very happy. But I think one of the things that we had to do for this book is taste.

There’s about 2,000 recommended wines. I’m gonna say we we tasted close to 5,000 [wines]. Not everything made the cut.

 

 

That’s incredible. So speaking of those 5,000, how do we prevent palette fatigue?

 

One thing for both of us is we both drink sparkling water.

Also, we eat very simple things just to clear the palette, wipe some of the tannins from it. We’ll eat sliced baguette or plain water crackers. That kind of thing. Also, try to break it up. Don’t drink the same style of wine over and over, because you’ll stop noticing the subtleties between them.

It’s training too. I can’t run a marathon tomorrow because I haven’t trained for a marathon, but I can taste 30 wines or 40 wines tomorrow because I’ve trained my palette to discern the differences. So it’s kind of like an athlete, it has to do with training to prevent fatigue.

 

 

So staying on the idea of tasting for a second, how do we talk to a winemaker? Any tips for a less-experienced wine drinker?

 

One of the first, and an easy question to ask, is how much did you make of this wine? Because that actually gives you an indication of how special the wine is, right? If somebody says, ‘Oh, we make a million bottles of this every year.’ Maybe it’s not so special.

If they say, ‘Oh, we only made 2,000 bottles of this and it comes from one special vineyard, that sometimes opens up the question of how special it is.

Another question is, if it’s a blend, if it doesn’t say on the bottle that it’s Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio, and you just know that it’s a white wine, you can ask what grapes are in this.

But people who visit wineries should ask questions. Take that as an opportunity to learn. Read the book White Wine, get some knowledge, and then you go to a winery, go out to California, go to New York State, go wherever you go, and visit a winery and talk to the winemaker and talk to the people who are responsible for making the wine. They’re very generous with their time. They want you to be informed and they want you to enjoy their wine. So do your homework and then learn some more in person, and then go back and read our book again, because you’ll learn a little bit more.

 

Your White Wine book is a mammoth undertaking. There’s a lot of information in there. How did you create all of this?

 

I think actually we were lucky in that we’d already written Red Wine. We worked with our publisher. We actually walked in, knowing that some of our prior books were a little bit text heavy, and said, ‘Hey, we want to do some graphics. For the flavor profile, there might be a picture of a peach and a rose and a lemon. For the food pairing, you’ll see a little plate of pasta and a pig and a steak.’

We worked with the same editor again. We had the structure already so that was a blessing.

When our editor came to us and said we want to publish this book, we were so excited. But then we looked at each other and said, we don’t have a lot of time to write this book. Let’s let, how, how are we gonna do this? You know? So we divided and conquered.

If you love wine, you’re gonna love this book, whether you’re a novice or above.

 

 

My old boss used to tease me because back then I enjoyed white more than red. Why doesn’t white get the respect that red does?

 

You know, you’re very right. We had to fight for this book.

I’m an equal opportunity white wine and red wine drinker and rose, because there are wines for different occasions. Sometimes when you’re having a big heavy steak, you want a red wine, but a lot of times we’re trying to eat lighter, more vegetables, lighter cuisine. It’s summertime now.  Lighter white wines really go with those foods.

 

There’s so many grapes in this book. Is there one lesser-known grape that you want the world to know about because it’s an amazing discovery?

 

We have a holiday coming up this weekend. By the time this is posted, it will just have passed. This coming Sunday is International Pošip Day, and Pošip is a wine from coastal Croatia. It grows in Dalmatia and on some of the islands. It’s this wonderful, delightful, fresh, crisp, citrusy white grape from Croatia that we don’t see a lot of in the US. It’s in more major urban markets. It’d really worthy of attention.

Were there any unexpected surprises as you created this book?

 

When we did Red Wine, we did single varieties and regional blend styles, like Rioja which can have three or four different grapes in a bottle and Bordeaux can be up to six different grapes. That actually includes sparkling wine we covered in Red wine.

We covered only nine regional blend styles and 41 single varieties in White Wine. I just did account. I believe we have 14 regional right grape styles. So things like White Bordeaux, White Rioja fall under a style that’s not necessarily one grape.

Is there a message that you haven’t been asked that you would love to share with a wine loving audience?

 

You can always learn something. Keep learning, keep asking questions.

Sometimes there are some really interesting questions that people come up with.

We are wine experts, we’re authors of six wine books now. We write for different publications. We’re mast head at two different magazines, so we really kind of know what we’re talking about, but we don’t know everything.

So, being able to understand that and admit that, wine is a continuous, ongoing journey and learning about wine is what makes it very exciting. So I’m really happy to have been on the journey so far and I hope have a lot more years on this journey to learn more about wines I’ve never tried.

So thank you so much for your time. Tell us where to find you, where to follow you, your social media websites.

 

We are on Facebook and on Instagram as World Wine Guys. We have a website, www.WorldWineGuys.com for a lot of our articles and videos we’ve done over the last 13 -14 years.

Go to www amazon.com and put in three words, white wine book, it’ll pop up.

And then as you scroll down under, ‘Usually bought together.’ It’s our white wine book and our Red Wine book.

We have some friends that have written some great books, Wine Folly, Jancis Robinson.

We’re not the beginning and the end of wine knowledge. There are so many of our colleagues that we respect deeply. So there’s a lot to learn from everybody.

All I can say is that’s what we’d like for people to learn more, enjoy wine, open a bottle of wine with your family and friends and you know, we kind of drop all of our guards, we drop all of our pretenses and the world will be a lot better place.

Post Alone Returns to DC Area with the ‘If Y’all Weren’t Here, I’d Be Crying’ Tour
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Post Malone Returns to DC Area July 26 with the ‘If Y’all Weren’t Here, I’d Be Crying’ Tour

By Contributor — 2 years ago

Post Malone Returns to DC Area July 26 with the ‘If Y’all Weren’t Here, I’d Be Crying’ Tour

GRAMMY® Award-nominated 8x diamond-certified global superstar Post Malone unveiled his anxiously awaited fifth full-length offering and one of the most anticipated albums of 2023, Austin, will arrive on July 28th, 2023. You can pre-order/pre-save—HERE.

Additionally, Post will release his next single entitled “Mourning” this coming Friday May 19, 2023 via Mercury Records/Republic Records.

Post also announced his return to North America with the ‘If Y’all Weren’t Here, I’d Be Crying’ Tour following his highly successful trek across the US and Canada last year and Europe this year for his long awaited ‘Twelve Carat Tour’.

The 2023 North America run will give fans his signature exhilarating performance with music from his upcoming album as well as fan-favorites in a completely reimagined show.  Produced by Live Nation, the 24-date run kicks off on July 8 at Nobelsville’s Ruoff Music Center, making stops in Detroit, Toronto, Charlotte, Tampa, Atlanta, Dallas and more before wrapping up at San Bernardino’s Glen Helen Amphitheater on August 19.

“I love y’all so very much and I’m so excited to get out and do some more shows for y’all. Help me put a baby through college and come on out. Some cool new production, new songs, and a very very handsome man up on stage. Sending love to you and yours.” Says Post

TICKETS: Tickets will be available starting with a Citi presale (details below) beginning Wednesday, May 17 at 10am local time. Additional presales will run throughout the week ahead of the general onsale beginning Friday, May 19 at 10am local time on livenation.com

PRESALE: Citi is the official card of the Post Malone tour. Citi cardmembers will have access to presale tickets beginning Wednesday, May 17 at 10am local time until Thursday, May 18 at 11:59pm local time through the Citi Entertainment program. For complete presale details visit www.citientertainment.com.

VIP:  The tour will also offer a variety of different VIP packages and experiences for fans to take their concert experience to the next level. Packages vary but include premium tickets, access to the World Pong League VIP Lounge, exclusive VIP gift items and more. For more information, visit vipnation.com.

IF Y’ALL WEREN’T HERE, I’D BE CRYING 2023 TOUR DATES:

Sat Jul 08 – Noblesville, IN – Ruoff Music Center

Sun Jul 09 – Cincinnati, OH – Riverbend Music Center

Tue Jul 11 – Detroit, MI – Pine Knob Music Theatre

Wed Jul 12 – Burgettstown, PA – The Pavilion at Star Lake

Fri Jul 14 – St. Louis, MO – Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre

Sat Jul 15 – East Troy, WI – Alpine Valley Music Theatre

Mon Jul 17 – Buffalo, NY – Darien Lake Amphitheater

Wed Jul 19 – Toronto, ON – Budweiser Stage

Sat Jul 22 – Mansfield, MA – Xfinity Center

Sun Jul 23 – Hartford, CT– XFINITY Theatre

Tue Jul 25 – Camden, NJ – Freedom Mortgage Pavilion

Wed Jul 26 – Bristow, VA – Jiffy Lube Live

Sat Jul 29 – Charlotte, NC – PNC Music Pavilion

Mon Jul 31 – West Palm Beach, FL – iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre

Tue Aug 01 – Tampa, FL – MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheatre

Thu Aug 03 – Atlanta, GA – Lakewood Amphitheatre

Sat Aug 05 – Dallas, TX – Dos Equis Pavilion

Tue Aug 08 – Houston, TX – The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion

Thu Aug 10 – Albuquerque, NM – Isleta Amphitheater

Sat Aug 12 – Phoenix, AZ – Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre

Sun Aug 13 – San Diego, CA – North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre

Tue Aug 15 – Wheatland, CA – Toyota Amphitheatre

Wed Aug 16 – Mountain View, CA – Shoreline Amphitheatre

Sat Aug 19 – San Bernardino, CA – Glen Helen Amphitheater

 

GRAMMY Award-nominated phenomenon Post Malone

 

A 8x diamond-certified GRAMMY® Award-nominated phenomenon, Dallas, TX artist Post Malone regularly rewrites history, blurs boundaries, and incites internet-breaking conversation with every move.

Emerging in 2015 with a genre-less brew that inspired a movement, he delivered the diamond-selling “Congratulations” [feat. Quavo], achieved back-to-back #1 debuts on the Billboard Top 200, received countless multi-Platinum certifications around the world, and smashed one record after another with his Hot 100-topping hits. In 2022, he pushed boundaries again with his fourth full-length offering, Twelve Carat Toothache, which marked his fourth consecutive Top 5 bow on the Top 200.

It also paved the way for his biggest headliner to date, The Twelve Carat Toothache Tour, taking over arenas for multiple dates in major cities throughout the year. He even scored “the highest-certified single in RIAA history” with the 17x-platinum “Sunflower (Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse)” [feat. Swae Lee], netting the biggest single of his generation.

In 2023, he garnered a GRAMMY® Award nod in the category of “Best Pop Duo/Group Performance” for “I Like You (A Happier Song)” [with Doja Cat], marking his tenth career nomination in six years.

Three years prior, his 2019 third full-length, Hollywood’s Bleeding [Republic Records], represented an audience and critical high watermark.

Not only did it arrive at platinum status and eventually go triple-platinum, but it also reigned at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 for four weeks and returned to the chart for a fifth week, making for the longest run atop the chart of 2019 and the first release to do so in over a year.

The quadruple-platinum lead single “Circles” seized #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks. It notably occupied a spot on the chart for a record 39 weeks in total. Speaking of making history, he performed a massively popular Nirvana tribute concert on YouTube, raising over $10,000,000 for the World Health Organization in the fight against COVID-19. Hollywood’s Bleeding followed the immense success of the triple-Platinum beerbongs & Bentleys, which also landed at #1 a year prior.

In the wake of beerbongs & bentleys, Post crushed a record in place for 54 years. He charted nine songs in the Top 20 of the Hot 100, notching “the most songs in the Top 20 of the Hot 100 ever.” Moreover, he also trounced the record for most simultaneous Top 40 Hot 100 hits with 14.

As of 2023, his catalog comprises the GRAMMY®  Award-nominated “rockstar” [feat. 21 Savage” (Diamond), “Sunflower (Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse)” [feat. Swae Lee] (Diamond), “I Fall Apart” (5x-platinum), “Psycho” [feat. Ty Dolla $ign] (5x-platinum), “White Iverson” (5x-platinum), “Better Now” (4x-platinum), and more. Not to mention, he sold out numerous arena tours and hosted and curated his own mega-popular Posty Fest in 2018 and 2019. It all started with his quintuple-platinum influential 2016 debut, Stoney. With records under his belt that will likely never be surpassed and a generation of artists and audiences worldwide under his spell, Post Malone simply doesn’t stop.

DC Foodies: Manhattan’s La Grande Boucherie Chef Maxime Kien Reveals the ‘Simple Secret’ to a Great Dish
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DC Foodies: Manhattan’s La Grande Boucherie Chef Maxime Kien Reveals the ‘Simple Secret’ to a Great Dish

By Joe Winger — 2 years ago

Manhattan’s La Grande Boucherie Chef Maxime Kien Reveals the ‘Simple Secret’ to a Great Dish

 

Chef Maxime Kien is the new Executive Chef of NYC’s The Group, responsible for La Grande Boucherie, Boucherie Union Square, Boucherie West Village, Petite Boucherie and more.  And by the end of 2023, they’re launching even more restaurants.  

 

But today’s conversation is about bringing the most flavor out of a plate’s ingredients

 

 

Chef Maxime Kien explains:

 

To me, the simpler the food on the plate, the harder it is to make. The food we see in some restaurants right now is over-complicated. 

 

Too many ingredients, too much mixing of flavors and sauce and garnishes. [Instead,] try to stay true to what you’re trying to achieve.

 

Executive Chef Maxime Kien

Executive Chef Maxime Kien

Let’s say you’re doing a scallop. Cook the scallop properly, season it properly, don’t try to hide the flavor of the scallop with something which is gonna be overpowering and then you’re gonna be left eating something and not being able to recognize what you have in front of you. 

 

Not looking at it and saying, ”What is that?” 

 

Everybody thinks cooking fish is easy. No, it’s actually really technical because the second you over-cook it, the fish is worse. 

 

The key is being able to take something nice, season it properly, cook it properly and make it the star of the dish, with something that is going to complement it. 

 

A nice sauce is as simple as that. That’s what we are trying to achieve here, not try to be too complicated.

 

La Grande Boucherie is the number one booked restaurant in New York City. I think we’re in the top five in the USA as far as the volume that we do.

 

There are some items, like I will not put a tomato salad on the menu in December, even if we can find them.  I want to make sure that I follow the seasons and follow nature. So tomatoes will come for summer. 

 

In spring, you’re gonna have spring pie and try to stay true to the roots and try to stay true to seasonal things. 

 

I wouldn’t put whole vegetable bread in the midst of summer because that’s something that you serve as food with venison in fall and winter. Mushroom season is mushroom season. Don’t try to do things ’out of season’ because the product is not gonna be the best. So if the product is not good, I don’t want to serve it. I’d rather not put something on the menu rather than put something on the menu that’s not gonna be to our standard. I don’t wanna do that.

 

 

 

Tell us about the next steps of NYC’s The Group launching several restaurants throughout the United States

 

The company [The Group NYC] started about 11 years ago with the vision of Emil Stefkov, the owner. He opened the first restaurant and the company grew pretty quickly after that. 

 

The company almost quadrupled its size within a few years. Then because of Covid, everything was touch and go. But now we have a few projects coming up. We have Miami, Washington DC and Chicago. We’re gonna add another eight restaurants to the portfolio. We’re gonna double the size of the company within a short amount of time.

 

Well, there’s a lot of moving parts between developing the kitchen and having a look at the plans — we need to do this, this is where the pantry needs to be here. You know, and they’re talking about many developments and research and the staffing. There’s so many components. It’s not only like ‘We’re gonna open the restaurant.’  There is so much work behind that. You’re looking at the location. You have to think back to seasonal and local [ingredients and menu]. 

 

It’s all different food scenes. Even if you have core items from the menu, because they’re your identity, you have to look at every single location as an almost separate entity and be able to say, ‘This dish might not work over there, but it’s gonna work right here.’ So develop all of that and being thoughtful about everything.

 

 

DC Foodies want to know, what does Plant-based Honey Pair Well With?
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DC Foodies want to know, what Foods and Drinks does Plant-based Honey Pair Well With?

By Joe Winger — 2 years ago

DC Foodies want to know, what does Plant-based Honey Pair Well With?

You keep reading about plant-based honey. The environmental story, the nutrition.  But how does it taste?  What can you pair it with?  Let’s find out in an exclusive interview with Mellody Food’s Darko Mandich.

Darko Mandich is a food entrepreneur in San Francisco. After spending almost a decade in the European honey industry as a business executive, Darko committed to reimagining the honey industry to become sustainable. Darko immigrated from Europe to California to launch Mellody, the world’s first plant-based honey brand. Darko is an advocate of saving the bees and wild pollinators.

Mellody Food's Darko Mandich

Mellody Food’s Darko Mandich

 

Recently, I had a chance to talk with Darko.

 

You said you are a foodie. What are some incredible food pairings that you recommend with this honey?

 

When I like to talk about food, I always like to join food and beverage.

What does Plant-based Honey Pair Well With?

What does Plant-based Honey Pair Well With?

 

I’ll start with beverages first. I think this honey is perfect for mocktails and cocktails. It gives just enough of sweetness that someone is looking for in their alcoholic cocktail or non-alcoholic cocktail.

 

Will Plant-based Honey pair well With baklava

Will Plant-based Honey pair well With baklava

 

In terms of food, I would split it into savory and sweet. Sweet applications are my favorite, I just have a sweet tooth. My favorite dessert is Baklava because it comes from the part of the world where I come from. My wife, who’s a home chef, [used our honey to make] baklava and it was amazing.

 

We did an amazing collaboration with an upscale Italian plant-based restaurant in San Francisco Baia. They created this amazing, vegan panna cotta with our honey on top. It was culinary mastery developed by Chef Joshua Yap, who started working with Chef Matthew Kenny, who is also a well-known, plant-based chef.

 

Will plant-based honey pair well with a burger

Will plant-based honey pair well with a burger

In terms of savory applications, that opens a whole new world of opportunities. How we interact with stuff like pizza and honey, burgers and honey. Obviously honey and vinaigrette and olive oil, used as a dressing for salads, honey mustard, just name it.

 

What’s next for Mellody? What are the next steps out there for you?

 

Getting into as many restaurants as possible in this country. People are inquiring about the standalone product [separate from the speciality box] get it very soon at Eleven Madison Home.

Working on getting this product to as many people as possible, and just to invite everybody to participate in this mission of creating the sustainable future of honey.

I’m just excited about every tiny step in this journey until melody becomes the word for honey.

 

Eleven Madison Home's The Specialty Tea and Honey Box featuring Mellody Honey

Eleven Madison Home’s The Specialty Tea and Honey Box featuring Mellody Honey

 

Is the honey currently available at Eleven Madison Home?

 

Yeah, the honey is currently available. The Specialty Tea and Honey Box launched for the Mother’s Day collection and Earth Month.

It’s a specially curated box of artisanal teas coming from different parts of the world with honey and also amazing, shortbread cookies. All plant-based, also made with our honey. That’s available right now

Sometime very soon a standalone jar [of honey] will also be available to Eleven Madison Home.

Eleven Madison Home's The Specialty Tea and Honey Box featuring Mellody Honey

Eleven Madison Home’s The Specialty Tea and Honey Box featuring Mellody Honey

 

Tell us again what’s available, how to find it; and how to follow you and support you.

 

Yeah, follow us on Instagram and TikTok at MellodyFoods

In terms of purchasing, head to ElevenMadisonHome.com and you can purchase it there.

Saving the bees is learning more about them. Learning more about pollinators and you can do that on our social media.

And finally, if you’re equally passionate about bees and plants as we are, ask your favorite restaurant to reach out to us to offer Mellody in your favorite restaurant. It can be a vegan restaurant on non-vegan.

We are gonna work with all the restaurants that reach out to us where people ask to see our product offered, either on the menu, either within a meal, or just if you order a cup of tea and you want a side of Mellody.

 

Springtime at Manhattan’s La Grande Boucherie Offers a New Springtime Menu led by Executive Chef Maxime Kien
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Springtime at Manhattan’s La Grande Boucherie Offers a New Menu led by Executive Chef Maxime Kien

By Joe Winger — 2 years ago

It’s springtime in the city and Manhattan’s La Grande Boucherie Offers an inspired New Springtime Menu led by Executive Chef Maxime Kien.

Starting March 15, La Grande Boucherie is offering a new menu for Spring time. In addition to its best-selling current menu, the new items led by Executive Chef Maxime Kien promises dishes you won’t find on any other Manhattan menu, such as the refreshing Salad De Poireaux.

The goal of the menu under Executive Chef Maxime Kien’s leadership is to keep the plates simple and express the food’s pure expression, not to distract with too many flavors, but rather to be true to one specific flavor and present it in its best form.

Manhattan’s La Grande Boucherie

Manhattan’s La Grande Boucherie

Manhattanites and foodies already find the name La Grande Boucherie very familiar as it’s the most-booked restaurant in the city and the other NYC restaurants within the company include Boucherie Union Square, Boucherie West Village, Petite Boucherie.

Executive Chef Maxime Kien is a world-renowned chef with more than two decades of experience in fine dining. Growing up in the Côte D’azur region of Southern France, Maxime developed a deep appreciation for natural ingredients Southern France has to offer.

 

 

He has worked in several esteemed establishments around the country. The Hilton in Cleveland and Cincinnati, the only AAA Five Diamond recipient in Ohio and one out of 68 in the United States.  His most recent position was Resort Executive Chef at Nemacolin Woodland Resort, a 5 Star 5 Diamond property in Pennsylvania.

Over the next several months, The Group NYC is launching restaurants in major cities throughout North America and Executive Chef Maxime Kien is a leader in that revolution.

Today we walk through a decadent and delicious multi-course meal. 

 

Executive Chef Maxime Kien explains:

 

Tonight you’re gonna be tasting all the new dishes that started two nights ago. The idea would be to transition from what was done in the past and now with me coming in and bringing a different vibe.

 

People think about French food and they think about heavy food, a lot of butter, a lot of cream, strong flavors, but sometimes it’s depending on which part of France you come from, it’s gonna be something completely different.  If you drive for 30 minutes, it may feel like it’s the same region, but no, it’s gonna be different aromas, different flavors, different techniques. 

So tonight is going to be some dishes that we just started that are going to be a little bit more on the lighter version as we approach spring and summer.

I believe a good idea would be to start with the leek salad. It’s very light. The idea of taking a simple product [such] as a leek and then making it as your starter dish. I’m not trying to be pretentious. You can go anywhere in the city and you will not find a leek salad on any other menu besides us. I did that menu for my tasting for Emil (Stefkov), the owner, and he absolutely loved it.

And that, to me, was good recognition to put that on the menu because it’s simple it’s rustic, but it’s very flavorful; and you’re not gonna find it anywhere else. 

After that, the scallops. That’s another dish that I did for Emil and everybody loved it. And so we’ll be able to see dishes that have just gotten started.

 

I explain to Chef Max that I always look for a “story” within the courses, from starter to entree to dessert and more.  Is he telling a story with his courses? 

 

My story is: simplicity is best. I don’t try to do an overly-complicated dish that you’re not gonna be able to understand. So simplicity.  Taking a beautiful product as simple as a leek, [deciding what’s] gonna complement it, and it’s gonna give you a chance to be able to taste something that hopefully you’ve never tasted before, or not in that fashion at least. Being able to say, ‘Oh, you know what? That leek salad was so simple that it was beautiful. That’s what I’m trying to accomplish. That’s the whole story.’

Boucherie Old Fashioned Buffalo Trace Bourbon, Espolon Anejo, Lavender, Plum

Boucherie Old Fashioned Buffalo Trace Bourbon, Espolon Anejo, Lavender, Plum

 

Boucherie Old Fashioned

Buffalo Trace Bourbon, Espolon Anejo, Lavender, Plum

An excellent rendition of the Classic Old Fashioned. The lavender adds dimension to the nose. The Espolon Anejo added spice to the mouth. 

 

Chef Maxime Chien La Grande Boucherie Salad De Poireaux

Chef Maxime Chien La Grande Boucherie Salad De Poireaux

 

Salad De Poireaux

Braised leeks and smashed eggs vinaigrette topped with roasted hazelnuts.

This is a meal by itself.  Refreshing, but providing an earthy note.  An excellent palate cleanser.  But surprisingly filling starter dish.

 

Chef Maxine Kien's La Grande Boucherie Les St Jacques Roties

Chef Maxine Kien’s La Grande Boucherie Les St Jacques Roties

 

Les St Jacques Roties

Roasted scallops, thyme polenta, and herb salad

This was presented exactly as I could have wished for.  Per Chef Max’s suggestion, it was a simple dish, delivered incredibly well.  It was heaven to look at, smell and taste.  By my third bite, I still wanted more. 

 

 

Branzino

Pan-Seared Mediterranean Branzino, topped with Olive Oil vinaigrette and watercrest salad.

A perfect combination of flavors.  The white fish was tender and flavorful.  The carrot, onion side was a partner without ever overwhelming the star of the plate.  Highly recommend.

Chef Maxime Kien's La Grande Bouchiere Flan Parisien

Chef Maxime Kien’s La Grande Bouchiere Flan Parisien

 

Flan Parisien

Vanilla Malagasy custard with gianduja heart

Pushing your spoon into the crust as it bursts creates a sensual triumph.  The flan’s crumbly, biscuit-like texture allows your spoon to ease in and pull out the most delicious Vanilla Malagasy.  You might promise yourself you’re only going to have one bite.  But this plate deserves more attention leaving you craving a second or third spoon visit.  And honestly, you’ll be dreaming about it again tonight.

 

Chef Max fulfills his promise.  Not only are the new menu items light, Spring and Summer-oriented, but they’re unique to Manhattan.

 

If you’re a passionate foodie who craves new and invented plated, full of original flavors, presented simply, but powerfully, you need to visit La Grande Boucherie. 

 

 

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