Texture and Complexity for Asian Food & Wine w/ Sunny Liao & Philippe Venghiattis, Vinus Club

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The podcast that navigates the business of wine with unique perspectives and insights with your host Robert Vernick and Peter Young. Welcome to this episode of Ex-Shetto. Today we're going to talk about Asian food and wine pairing. And we've got two long time experts in the field if there is such a thing as experts in that. Sunny Laow co-founder and CEO of Venice Club, a retail wine club that does a lot of events with food and wine pairing. And she's also a board member of the Asian Wine Association of America or AWA, which I also am a board member of. And Philippe Vanguetis, a Vigiculture consultant and seller master at Venice Club. Sunny Philippe, welcome to the show. Good evening. Thanks for having us. Yeah, so for those who aren't familiar with AWA, it's a new nonprofit trademark and association that's trying to, in my point of view, bridge wine and Asian cultures together. You know, and that's through Asian owned wineries, it's through food and wine, all that sort of things because I think that there's the potential Asians in general drink less wine than other ethnicities. And so there's the potential to add maybe 100,000 new Asian wine drinkers to the wine drinking population and to up level around 5,000 plus Asian restaurants with better wine list that you know, creates an opportunity for the wine industry as a whole. And so that I think is core to the mission of AWA. But Sunny and Philippe could you give our listeners a brief overview of your backgrounds? Maybe Sunny will start with you? Yeah, sure. So I started to drink wine since I was six. Is that allowed to say? Depends. What was the law in your country, right? I just attaced it. So every single member of my family have their own expertise in different wine and different like whiskey and their alcohol domain. I'll call it that way. So everybody can tell the differences of the alcohol that they prefer kind of train me in the memory pattern that I need to remember the aromas for different liquid. And so that's how I develop my curiosity for wine as a liquid. And then I start to officially learn about wine since I was 18 years old. I was in London doing my college and I drink a lot. So there was one time when one of my classmates came to me and said, "S Sunny, you need to get a qualification about this." I'm like, what? 14 months? I thought they were going to say you need to get out. It's just that qualification for getting drunk that doesn't really sound bad. So I started to officially learn about WSCT and I was so amazed by the whole world behind wine. And I said, "Okay, I'm going to do something about it after I graduate." So I joined a startup at the time in China. A lady penguin, I know many of the people might be aware of the company, which is a great company at the time. We have a great mission to actually to advocate for, I'll say, like, cheaper fine wine in that way, to bring more transparency into Chinese wine industry. That was a great mission. So I joined that venture. And afterwards I moved to California and I do wine trade as well. I joined some wine reseller as a wine distributor and to work with whole foods and different michelin restaurants and help with the wine list. And also did a wine MBA in Sonoma State with Lee's Tosh, MW. That was a wonderful experience for me. Afterwards I founded Venus Club, which is also a very passionate project for myself. And I work with a lot of great friends like Philippe included all of the people who are extremely talented and passionate about the mission that we're working on. So that was 2021. It has been a really fun ride since then and we're still continue the mission. Great. Philippe, what about you? Well, for me, I started early, not drinking too much, but I was offered wine since I was probably three years old. I've started with my son right away from zero. He's not drinking it yet. But in my family, wine is a part of every meal. For both sides of my grandparents, my mother's father drank till he was 103 and he would drink about a bottle and a half a white wine every day. I tried to increase the diversity of the selection of wine and he enjoyed it when I would send him a mixed case. But then he would go right back to his one wine of the decade, basically. At one point it was Makon Nile Shaham and then he switched to Texas Selvignon Blanc from the. I'm from Texas originally, but my father's French. And my other grandfather was the one who became French by being in the French foreign Legion. He was Greek origin and I developed the love of Mediterranean wines with him. Even when I was a kid, we would go to the store and he would take out a case of wine and one bottle of 12 different wines and we would go back to his car and he would open all 12 and try each one of them and then go back and clean out the supply of whichever was the best one or two. He couldn't even want it to make sure he could get them. And so wine really was a part of family and every holiday as a result but also every day and it was always meant to be with food. When I went away to college I started drinking wine more as a social thing but I always wanted to bring it back to food. And as I was graduating from college I typed in wine on New York Times job search just wondering what existed out there. And a little ad came up for New York wine auction house, assistant seller manager. And I said I have no idea what a wine auction is and I don't even know what a seller manager is but I'm interested. So I wrote a letter and I said I just bought Hugh Johnson's World Atlas of wine. I'm drinking Rioja tonight and I saw your ad and I'm curious and be interested in learning more. And 48 hours later I was working for them and with two different MWs. And second day at work I was sitting next to Clive Coats as he was selling his burgundy book while I was helping people register for the auction. It was an amazing introduction to wine and I've never stopped loving it as a profession ever since. So the only change I made was I ended up having my own company for a long time and then we had the downturn in the economy and I decided I wanted to get involved in agricultural side. I wanted to be on the production side and I went to UC Davis and studied viticulture there and I've been working as a vineyard manager and also making my own wines and with my wife making wine and working with Sonny has been a wonderful addition and a new twist combining all of the experience and all of the love and appreciation of wine and fruits. So many interactions that we also know each other from the master wine program which we're both in for a period of time. Exactly. Yeah. The wine world is small. It is indeed. Sonny what exactly is Venice Club for those who aren't familiar and why did you found it? I think the explanation really involved you know so when I found it in this club I basically just couldn't be bothered more by people asking me what is the best bottle that you find last month and can I buy one? I said okay there are too many questions about that so maybe I should like find out wine club and then we just like to put the wines that we like and we just stop asking me questions. And then afterwards I kind of feel I'm actually very amazed by how sincere and how curious and what actually about wine. So then we become very academic. So all the wine sessions that we have wine dinners it's very academic and we really dive deeper into the wheat and understand regions the grapes and sometimes we'll welcome blind tasting and even some debating in the event. Then I turn out to be feel like okay this is too academic. Some of the people they just want to enjoy the flavor of the wine. Maybe just don't drag them into the weeds then we start to do this wine dinner series where people can just drink and taste the food and then just purely enjoy the joy of combining this too. So I'll say my north star of kind of navigate this organization is we really put our heart into the taste of the wine. We'd be impacted or influenced by any sort of label thing rather than the taste itself. So even though you're being too academic, you can pretend that I'm really learning about the wine and how do you know you're not being snobbish by being too knowledge about wine, right? So kind of really just I revise myself and reflect myself every other quarter. I'll say, am I doing the right thing here? So I think the North Star is to come back to the nature of wine and to purely enjoy drinking wine as an activity. I don't know if it's a function of you being Chinese and your network, but my understanding as Venice Club does have a heavy Asian consumer base or customer base. Oh yes, yes, that is true. That's just my friends and my network. Okay, I missed a very important pillar, which is my focused on welcome the wine into our own cuisine culture. So I heavily, of course, I'm having a Asian cuisine lover. So when I worked in the wine industry, so I feel like the languages very bizarre, like kind of no idea what is honeysuckle, what is blackcurrant, what does that even mean? Like, I have no clue about those words, even though I speak the language, I kind of remember the flavors, but it does really resonate with my feelings anyway. So I feel like, okay, I need to describe the flavor in the ingredients that my community are familiar with. So that is why we have, Venice Club have all the wine cards written in Chinese and also written in the language that especially when we describe the flavor, we sometimes will use the ingredients that we're super familiar with, then people will understand what exactly the flavor would smell like or taste like. That's the first attempt. The second attempt is many people feel like, okay, Asian cuisine can't pair with wine because Asian cuisine itself, it's already very, very balanced. It doesn't need anything else. It's good enough, but one can still add really good layers to continue some of the very flavorful thing in the cuisine. So that's something I personally would love to explore. So I have been friends with Philip and Diane for a long time and I know this to basically leave in this philosophy. So and they're doing this like spontaneously every single day in every single meal. So I said, okay, cool, we need to, you know, really do something about it. And so then Philip start to together all this wonderful list for the event and everybody's wowed. Well, and that's kind of the topic we want to focus on today, that pairing with Asian food and wine together and it's not a normal combination or it's not a historic combination, I guess. So maybe Philip, you could tell us what are the biggest tips and guidelines you've discovered in pairing Asian food with wine? Interestingly, one of the first challenges I was given was at UC Davis, we would have the Vitus tasting groups and where you would bring six glasses and you might taste between 12 and 18 wines and then you would go out with some friends for some dinner and we would frequently go to a restaurant called Ching Do style. So it would be spicy hot pot and other classic dishes and the general assumption was you couldn't pair wine with them, which I love a good challenge and that type of challenge is one that I really respond to. Also when people say Clover Joe is not a good vineyard, I love to prove them wrong on that as well. Similar type of thing. What was interesting was I tried, for the first time with that challenge, I tried the same thing I did when pairing with asparagus actually. So aged alzation whites, so like a 15 to 20 year old pino grie from Zimplek to Orr, an older austratag pino blonde, these wines have the texture and the complexity and the mid palate to really balance a wine, to balance a cuisine that is equally balanced and also it has the ability to buffer the spice without detracting from it. It's not that it has sweetness. In general, I prefer to pair wines with this cuisine that have, it has residual sugar but it has a balance of acidity so that the sugar is a background component at most, if not even imperceptible, such as a you know a smahogged, re-sling with a few years, pairs amazingly well with Singaporean cuisine, which has vast array of flavors, but it can buffer that array and that complexity. So we started bringing wines to pair with Xing Du food every week pretty much and that really created a fun game and what we noticed, which is something that works pretty much throughout the Bay Area, is that a lot of Chinese restaurants don't actually even carry wine glasses at the restaurant, but if you show up with six wine glasses and a couple bottles of wine, they have no problem with you serving yourself and adding that to your meal and that's an incredible incentive especially when you're gone back to school again and you're you know you're looking to save money where you can but also enjoy the most amount of wine as possible and within that time we started exploring the different themes and it turned out to be something that we wanted to do every day. I say our biggest challenge right now is that we became used to having three to six glasses in front of us with an equal number of wines at all time and at home that's normal too. So when you go to a restaurant you're pretty lucky if you can get three glasses in front of you at the same time it's it's pretty difficult to get that. For most events we plan on having two glasses at a time and we'll make sure that we have two wines that offer contrasting similarities but contrasting similarities so that you can have a discussion of which one makes more sense to you with which food and it'll often be two different courses at the same time as the two wines and then we use we move on to the next set of wines. The other issue is I usually want to make sure we have at least 12 wines per dinner but sunny says we should do six so we'll have a debate on that and it depends how big a poor we do and how old the wine is so it's some wines take longer to develop and open up we can get into a lot more details this but I would say the easiest thing to fall back on is wine with at least five or six years of age tends to be much more accessible to a wider range of flavors and it can complement spice and it can complement distinct aromas that otherwise might clash with just pure fruit you need some development in order to to create that harmony. Why do you think that is because the fruity flavors sort of die down a bit and it's a little more muted or I think you need a wine with equal complexity so the wines that are typically aged and bottle a little extra time often develop that additional harmony between sugar acid and fruit and develop some secondary character we offered in the club the floor de muga blanco the white which is a mix of fura and granache blanc and maturana blanco and they go through a whole process of a little americano concrete egg leaves and extended aging and then another you know extended aging and bottle and all of that adds a smoothness and a complexity and approachability combined with additional texture and I think that's probably the key is that Asian food is flavor is not more important than texture often the texture is always a focus it is something that as an american i was always surprised by but our food we tend to cut things in preparation to be totally uniform like you slice every piece of vegetable or to be uniform whereas cucumber salad is made by smashing the cucumber so it has a regular texture and different surface so that it has each bite is different than the next same thing with the chicken you cut the whole chicken up with the bones and into different sized pieces and the goal is to have complex complex texture and different tastes of where the meat is mixed into bite size but each bite is different than the other whereas we often go for uniform chicken breast cubes or slices and things like that so that sounds like it would be really challenging though in terms of a restaurant stocking age wines or even bringing as a consumer age wines to you know the dinner the outside of wine collectors the everyday person isn't necessarily going to have access to all that unless you know those are the wines you sell at Venice Club maybe I don't know right and I agreed it is something but there are lots of places that do have late release wines i mean Spain is famous for it Italy this minute by regulation they have to hold on to it and with you know pairing braze duck and burrollo is about one of the easiest things and to do and and that has the extra age already and you can often get late releases that distributors themselves have held on to extra time so we had a 2013 from d'ardie the burrollo from the fantino brothers and then that late release was just magic with the food and the balance of that extra aging is definitely helpful if you don't have that extra skin contact is a great way orange wines could often and help a lot of adding that extra complexity and the extra layers. Volcanic wines typically have more texture and more complex nature, even young. So those are ways to get that from younger wines that are less and less expensive ones potentially. But aging definitely is a wonderful thing if you can, if you can do it, that helps a lot. So there's a lot of different types of Asian food, be it, we talked about Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, right? You talked about Bangladesh, you're something earlier or Burmese, Burmese. Burmese were the Hensky dinner that we played. Right, right. Down amazingly well. And Hensky even have a nebbiolo called the rose grower. And that was magic wine with the savory dishes. So it was a lot, lot of fun. Do you guys have any opinions or data points on which types of food are the toughest to bear with wine and why? I think when I talk about, like when I think about Asian cuisine, when I really just bring out that narrative about four years ago, I know that there are so many different cuisines, right? Japanese cuisine, Chinese cuisine, Chinese cuisine alone. We have three significant different styles, right? And Cantonese, Sichuan and also North and Chinese cuisine. So those are the three major pillar. I think it's significantly different Korean, Vietnamese and Indian. If you count that as Asian as well, the hardest thing actually for me is for Korean cuisine. Because that's the only cuisine that I haven't really touched yet. So any audience that's Korean come to me, DM me, I would have to try one with you. But we tried the Japanese cuisine, like we tried with sushi, which I can't to name Sichuan. That means we haven't tried Indian, right? Yeah, Philip? Not with Vietnamese club yet, but I'd love to. It's liberally kind of avoid Korean at the moment because it kind of don't find a way to effectively pair with it. We can start with barbecue. Yeah, exactly. So I think barbecue is easier because like fermentation plus spice plus grill. I think sort of bubble like rosé, like whites with kind of punchy acid would easily do. But a lot of Korean cuisine, they have like that tiny hint of sweetness. It's so hard to capture. Like it's so hard, like very easy to off balance. That is why I don't touch it. For now, but hopefully we can do something this year. Yeah. It makes me think of one way we offer to the club was the Iterwara, the Gilaan Victoria Pinot Noir. And I had this wonderful, smoky, spicy sweet and sour cherry combination of flavors that right away made it very versatile with umami and sweetness together. So maybe that would be a good place to start. But yeah, and Indian cuisine too because it's so or so so significantly different, right? That is why it's a huge range. Yeah, there are two cuisine that I haven't touched me be in Korean. If that answer your question, Peter, yeah. Philippe, do you have any views on what's tough to pair with? So I think for me, the pairing difficulty, which cuts across most Asian food is that one meal will have an incredibly diverse assortment of food. You'll have ceviche like dishes followed by fresh vegetables and followed by braised dishes, followed by barbecue dishes. I mean, the diversity of flavors in a single meal is astounding. So in that regard, you kind of do need more than one wine per meal. You can't really select one. As a backup, what we do is champagne that has a large percentage of reserve wine is a really good way to fit that diversity. Sparkling wine is always the cheat code for food and white pairing, right? Indeed, it's great. But now you're getting these more adventurous stuff where they do the, they're calling it kind of a salara style aging where you're getting a little more kind of oxidized content into your sparkling, whereas it wasn't there before in that light oxidation actually pairs very well with you, Mommy. And it gives it more versatility. We found that the wines from the Jorah are natural fits from a lot of categories where they have that diversity, whether they're suvoile or or rea that the contrast is often quite fun. We did a tasting where we, we compared it kind of other, that was suvoile and the other. There was rea and it was a lovely comparison. And we were pretty much evenly split as far as who preferred which wine. Some have said that food and wine pairing is more personal versus, like objective. So it's a little bit subjective as well as objective. Is that what you guys found in doing a lot of these dinners and seeing what people like? You want to go first? Or are you going to go first? Well, that's a very interesting question, Peter. So people always ask me a question like, what is your favorite wine? I said, as a wine trader, I'm not answering that question because I am not allowed to have my favorite wine. But that's another way to say if we wanted to really be a host for this very, I was in vast, like vast narrative because of so many different kind of cuisine, we want to be as objective as possible and to trying to have at least the principle of us doing a good job. So for I think Philip and myself and all the team for Venus Club, I think we're very objective. The principle is mainly as says, are the pairing balanced? Is there any pleasant element or component is continued because of the balance, because of the pairing? Those are the thing that we pay a lot of attention to. But in terms of, okay, if you're coming from Sichuan, you'd like food, like from the North and China, I think that's less of the factor when we do our pairing. We're very, very, I'll say, professional in that way. But when it comes down to my personal flavor, I think I would love hot pot pair with a good champagne. That's good enough for me, but I don't dislike anything that I bring out to the table. Does that make sense? Yeah. So how about you? Well, I think that wine preference is by nature personal, but the ability for a wine to pair should be objective. It doesn't mean you're going to like it, but the ability for it to pair, it means it will have that balance, and it will serve as a complementary, integral part of the meal. The goal of having wine in a meal isn't for it to be an alternative to a glass of water. You actually want it to truly enhance your experience and your enjoyment of the food. And a wine that has an appropriate balance and complexity without being over the top that doesn't distract from the food. I think that can be objective. I think you can say, yes, this works. Now, whether it's your preferred style, that's a completely separate question. But one can have more than one drink at the table, too. So there's never that's sometimes a glass of beer is the best thing you can possibly pair with. But there's no reason that you can't have both at the table as well. That's what I personally prefer to do with certain cuisines. So preference is personal and the pairing should be objective, basically, to someone else. So we mentioned earlier that spicy foods are often a challenge with wine. The alcohol sometimes amplifies the spice. How do you think about that? Maybe Philippiola perspective on that? Well, I find that wines with a denser mid-palette that buffer their own alcohol are usually don't cause that the effect of making the alcohols and the spice stand out more. That density usually plays off the spice quite well. What comes to mind for me frequently is Pinot Gris from Alsace or Pinot Blanc. We had an Oster tag Pinot Blanc that had a wonderful balance and harmony while still being a pretty dense wine. It had a serious mid-palette presence and I think that helps a lot. I mentioned both white wines just now. Red wines generally tend to have bigger mid-palettes, but I would think that that also is more challenging with spice because they also have higher alcohol and other things. Is that what you guys have found? Certainly, with that we typically go with the wine that has a bit more bottle age. And that that tends to balance it out. When you start to get leather and mushroom flavors developing, the alcohol is less pronounced at that point in the wine. To me the key with spicy food and red wine is to have wine with a bit of bottle age. I think that the integration of the alcohol into the acid and the fruit, that all coming together in balance allows it to pair with spicy food in a much more harmonious manner. And that gives an uplifting effect and enhances the spice but in a good way as opposed to making the alcohol bird stand the spice stand though. And you know a lot of Asian cultures tend to serve tea with food. What do you think are some of the parallels and differences with drinking tea with a meal of Asian food versus wine? Sonny, do you have thoughts on that? I think only Cantonese people do that. Really? I mean Korean food have like barley tea and like you know, actually we drink ice tea though. Ice tea? Yeah, ice tea. Who drinks ice tea with food? Northern Chinese? I call it hot pot, like Chengdu hot pot, the Liang Cha. Yeah. So I think there's multiple types of tea and the tea that has more similarity to wine is rarely served at dinners, at least not at dinners I've been a part of. That type of tea is saved for a different type of occasion. When you drink tea with most meals, it's just a more of a standard beverage. It's not a, I mean, similar to an iced tea, just hot, but it's not. Yeah, only at the end of the meal, maybe you order a poor tea and then that's saved and then you get more towards a wine type of appreciation. But to me, rarely, it does, within the meal, tea have a comparison to wine. It's a, of course, fine tea with tenons and appreciation of aromas and single origins and traditions and all of that has tremendous similarity to wine. But the manner in which it's used for meals rarely, I've encountered it. Does it actually play that complementary role? I think the key difference is here is actually people don't drink tea for the sake of pairing. Because they just, you know, just need some liquid. But it's just liquid, it could be anything. What is the role of tea in the meal then? I think it's been boiled and it's safe to drink. Well, you know, there are a lot of deem some that have some sort of pairing with poor, or any green tea that, but if it's for a regular meal, I really don't see. There is any philosophy behind of drinking tea together. It's not to cut grease or like, palate cleansing type of function. Maybe, yes, but sometimes my family, she uses it to like clean the table or other things here. There's some of them. I'm telling you, cleansing is not like included in this like pairing culture. I think pairing is mostly is anything continued and is anything amplified, is anything balanced. You know, that's a, it's a different like, afford than cleansing palate. Yeah. So do you guys see a difference in pairing Asian food with wine for people with more Western palettes like American or European versus Eastern palettes? So do people have more Asian origin or born there have a different assessment of pairing Asian food than people of Western origin? I definitely feel the differences. I basically believe that if that person is originally like real-out pink Asia, they basically have different palate. So we are very sensitive to acidity. We are more like, we're very much like care about texture, you know. So those are the little pickles that I think it's very important to pay attention. For example, there's a grape variety called patecira. And it's incredibly good for Chinese people to drink, you know, because the texture is very smooth. Even though they're x-y these things that most of people don't like about their grape, but that's what we pay attention to. And every time when I try a little bit higher acidity, a white or something like sharp acidity wine with people who like, generally from China, they feel very, very offended by the way. I feel like this is what is this, right? So I think with people who grow up eating lemon, that would be less sensitive in that regard. But I definitely spend to some different ways. So I am aware of that. That's a little strange to me because, you know, Australian wine is so big in China and Australia is, Australians tend to like acidify the wine a lot or it is almost, but as it's just. Australia is compensated by the bold body of the wine, does that make sense? Yeah, one of the wines that Sony never forgave me for selecting was am I going to say which one in particular? But it was a European wine that had intolerable acidity, a red. And she had multiple friends calling me like, "What were you thinking?" And to me, it seemed to perfectly normal level of acidity. One that maybe what you would do is decant it for an hour to let it develop more. But nothing too serious. Nothing like agent for many years or decant it for hours. Just open it an hour ahead of time. And that was a big learning experience. So we've been going back and forth at trying to understand what works. And a lot of that is the vocabulary is different. We alluded to that earlier, but there are certain ways of describing things that don't really compare. You know, what the amount of meaning that Hawthorne has to someone from China versus an American is varies tremendously. And then if you tell somebody the sage, then a lot of Chinese won't even know what sage is. And this is just where it's to us. That's just a natural part of our every-dave vocabulary. So in that regard, I think also we're biased to a certain degree by our preconceptions of what pairs with what. We try to challenge that. And that's part of the reason why we like to have multiple glasses at the same time. Yeah, I'll basically control the level that I feel it challenges us. Try to maintain a balance. So in your guys' assessment, what do you think the current state or the knowledge level in a broad sense is of Asian food and wine pairing? Incredibly variable. So as a general rule, I think that I don't want to get too broad here, but when someone from Asian origin decides they want to learn about something, they have a very steep learning curve. They go from knowing nothing to knowing more than you did about something specific in a very short amount of time. It's fascinating. With that comes gaps or with that comes overly focused on a certain area, but the willingness to work and acquire and gain new perspectives is fantastic. And so that's what gives me so much interest and hope to a great degree in this process is that it's a matter of making experiences and knowledge available and sharing a feedback is very it's very enriching for everybody involved. And we'll come back the next time a month later and meet again for a dinner. And the new things that we have to discuss are fantastic and it creates a wonderful setting for learning more. I think it's very difficult to characterize any general level beyond that because it is so very variable. And the same is true with with every ethnicity these days. The French don't drink wine like they used to. Even the Italians are drinking less. And in France, pretty much everyone used to drink at least a bottle of bourgeoisie every week. I mean, that was a minimum. Like it was an absolute that was the person who was basically a T-totaler. So we're the world is changing, but the interest in wine is growing I think, especially in the Bay Area right now. We're getting a lot of people who have wonderful feedback and an earnest desire to learn more and to experiment. So yeah, I still remember four years ago when we started to do this, I'll say now it's five years ago, Jesus Christ. So five years ago, there was no other organizations or communities are doing things we're doing like Asian cuisine, food and my pairing. Now you start to see a lot of think people are doing that in a lot of restaurants are trying that. I think bringing up the narrative, bringing up the awareness is way more important than being knowledgeable, right? So the thing is I think in the end, people care about experience. I don't need to be knowledgeable to have a great experience. Food and wine, it's so intimate and people can feel that and can resonate immediately of what we're trying to put together. I think that's what matters the most. What I'm very excited to see is that I feel like now this is a real trend, this is a real move in the industry. That's something I'm personally very, very happy to see. And there are a lot of wine erasing my opinion. There are even reaching out to those big tech companies and I'm not saying they're doing it right. But those awareness, they start to talk to these kind of audience and trying to educate them about wine and talking in their language. And then there are a lot of great restaurants, Asian restaurants, they start to do those fine wine, fine dye, kind of change the perception that Asian cuisine is cheap and crowded and whatsoever. But I definitely see your lot of things are changing. Well, thank you guys for sharing so much about your experience in Asian food and wine pairing. And as part of AWAA, we're going to be doing a webinar series on each different type of cuisine pairing it with wines and digging into the knowledge base that is out there. And the people who have experienced doing that to try to capture some of that knowledge and spread it out to your point, Sonny, bringing more awareness of that. So if anyone's interested in learning more about that, you can find out more at the website awa wine.org. And yeah, hopefully we'll see even more of that and we'll have options when people go to Asian restaurants without needing to bring your own glasses and your own lines, so there's opportunity there. But we'd like to wrap up each episode on a personal note. And so for each of you, we want to know what has been your most memorable winery visit and why? Fleet, maybe you'll start with you. In Champagne with Diane, we went to visit for J'ai brimault. And we didn't have a reservation, we didn't even call it ahead of time. And it was like an hour before a normal closing, which on a Friday is already closed in France. And it was before holidays of like Christmas holidays. And they were very surprised and they welcomed us. And they poured, I don't know, I think about 15 different wines and even opened new bottles and took us on an amazing tour and met multiple generations. And the spontaneous generosity of it was just magic. And I said I was probably my best winery visit ever. And it gave us a welcoming feeling that unlike anything I've had anywhere else. And really the beautiful thing. And then we went out for a great meal and it was pretty much perfect day. So, Sunny? My was when I was I think, and 2019 years old, I visited Chateau de Can. And before that visit, I can say I basically hated this sweet wine. And I am extremely, extremely vocal about I hate sweet wine because I did my college in London and I drink a lot of pour, you know. And I feel like, okay, gosh, I really want to drink this. It's a sweet wine. But I have never really exposed myself into something that's so balanced, sweet and great acidity and just lifting your mouth. And that's a great experience for me. The reason why it's very memorable for me is that I had a car crash in front of Chateau de Can. And then, oh, there are some people come out and helping me with the car. And they dress like a farmer. I think like, oh my god, this is very nice people out there. I mean, realized that was actually a wine maker. I was trying to dig it. Okay, cool. Nice to meet you. So, he immediately changed. He's like very journey closes at the time. Excuse me if he's listening to this podcast. But put down that like very nice sweet and I feel like cool. This person is very real. Yeah, it's a very educational experience for me. And I always thought about this experience and remind myself, okay, I need to be humble for anything that I don't like. There could be a wine or a wine array to prove me wrong. Well, excellent. Well, thank you both for sharing your deep insight and knowledge in this Asian food and wine pairing space and look forward to raising the awareness in the world as a whole. And hopefully continue that trend of people learning more and more. I had one additional thing. My go to wine when I'm not sure is Kule de Selle from Nicolas Julien. When you put at least say 15 years of age on it, I always find that to be a fun wine to throw at something that's hard to pair. The fun part of it is that every bottle has so much variation. Same vintage, same case. You'll find variation that you never really know what you're going to get. And that's part of the fun with using it as a wine to pair with something. And it has the density, it has the mid-powered, has the acidity obviously with the old vineshaar and blood. But that's a wine that I really enjoy. It's kind of, you know, blindfold throwing a dart at the board. That's what I would use. Thank you for the bonus. All right, thank you both again. 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