Wine Rules That Were Made to Be Broken feat Tyler Balliet

[MUSIC] Well, hello, and welcome to the Wine Access Unfiltered Podcast. You know, the wine world is full of rules, some of which make sense. Like, which greats can legally be planted in certain wine regions. While others are a bit more questionable, like whether or not you can put ice in your wine, a subject of, we'll call it hot debate right now. And then we have the food and wine peering rules, many of which we've talked about on this show, but some that remain a little more murky, like our seafood and red wine truly sworn enemies. We'll see. The truth is, many of these wine rules exist more to intimidate than to guide. And honestly, as you might have already suspected is the case, some of the most fun wines and experiences come from breaking them. Today we're talking about drinking rebelliously, wines that color outside the lines, challenge expectations, and make you rethink what wine can be. From off-the-beaten path grapes to funky regions, you may have never heard of, or maybe you have, we'll explore what it means to sift without fear. We'll also talk about some of these quote-unquote wine rules and whether or not you should adhere or play fast and loose. Will I be commenting on ice and wine? You bet your ass I will be, and willing to bet that my guest will also have thoughts on the matter as well. She's leading the charge and drinking rebelliously with her James Feared Award-nominated book Rebels School of Wine, Part Guide, Part Manifesto, and for anyone tired of the rules and ready to just have fun with wine, which hopefully is all of you guys. As an educator and an author, her career has been all about questioning the status quo, championing overlooked wines and showing that wine doesn't have to be intimidating. It should be adventurous, exciting, and yes, a little rebellious. So pour yourself a glass, lean in, and get ready to taste outside the lines because today we're celebrating the wines and the people who dare to break the rules. Please welcome to the show, Tyler Valleye. Did I say that right? I should have asked you for this. Let's say that right. Yeah, nobody says that right. Yay! It's so good to be here. I'm really excited. Good. I'm so happy to have you here. Is Valleyee French an origin? Did I just pull up French 101? Yeah, it's French, but I'm not French, so the name is I'm not. Not being French, presumably being American, where and when did wine enter your life then? Yeah, so I did not grow up in a wine drinking house. I grew up in Wisconsin and everybody drank Miller High Life. That was what everybody drank. And so I didn't really have any experience with wine until I went to college. I went to college in Olympia, Washington, and I didn't have any money. So I didn't really drink that much wine. But I got to experience some Washington state wines in the early 2000s, which I thought was really interesting. But it wasn't until I moved to France after college, and I moved. I had a girlfriend and she got an English teaching position, and I was like, "I'll go to France," and we ended up in the middle of nowhere, like the Nebraska of France. And it was close to Lovalle, you know? And so I got to drink a lot of wine, and back then it was super cheap, so I didn't really ever spend more than five euros. And I got to learn the culture, but then it wasn't until I moved to Boston of all places. I'd never really been there, but I moved to Boston after France. And I started working at a wine store across the street for my apartment, because, well, I didn't have any friends, and I could work there two nights, so we can get a discount on wine, and that's kind of where I fell in love with the industry, you know? That's how you make friends. That is how I made friends. I mean, when you're the person, like, brings the wine to the party, because it's easy and because it's your job, like all of a sudden, it's like some of those social barriers start to follow. But as someone that also didn't grow up with a lot of friends, I found wine is like a great way to sort of break the ice. But would you, as the author of Rebel School of Wine, would you call yourself a rebellious person? Oh, like 1 million percent, yeah. Yeah. Like, my whole career has been very rebellious. I mean, I like briefly had a job, and then I just use entrepreneurship. I threw wine tasting festivals called Wine Riot. For eight years, we sold 150,000 tickets. Wow. And then Rosé Manchin was the New York Times were a whole article about how we sucked at Rosé Manchin. And they basically were just like having fun is meaningless. And that article sold us more tickets than anything. And in one year, we sold 225,000 tickets to this giant pink wine amusement park in Midtown Manhattan. Yeah, I think it had been rebellious. It is interesting, as we're talking about, the topic of the show is like rebelliousness of wine, right? But the reality is, like, this isn't rebellion. It's just like if wine is such an inclusive industry, why is it rebellion if it's supposed to be an inclusive industry, right? What I found was that if you look at the total number of consumers that just regularly buy and drink wine, the wine industry and the way it, and their rules are really only even like notice by like 10 or 15% of those people. And those are the highest. They usually spend the most money. But I decided 20 years ago at the beginning of my career that I was just going to ignore those 10 or 15% of people. There's tons of people talking to them. Nobody is talking to the other 90%. That other 90% of consumers is just left flopping around. Yeah. And they want information. But they want it to be fun because they're like my wine events wine right, we do 6,000 people on a weekend in New York. And these were Friday and Saturday nights. They didn't come for a, like a seminar to be like scolded about notes of chocolate and berries or whatever. They wanted to have fun. And we needed to wrap the information and fun. But on the flip side, I got my certain Boston, right? Like I started doing 30, 40 person events and six people have PhDs and some sort of like science and 15 people have MBAs. Everybody has an advanced degree. So you're dealing with incredibly smart people. You can't dumb anything down. Right. And I found this style of talking about wine that was more about culture, history, science, politics, economics, and ultimately about people, you know. And what I found was that if you can understand people and if you can understand culture, then you can understand the wine. I'm so happy about this. Our conversation can be cheers a little bit. Yes, please. Yes, I'm sorry to keep you from drinking on this. Friday before a Labor Day weekend, it has officially commenced. This is really nice. Do you see lovely goodness? Okay, so I will just I'll put my hand up and I'll tell you candidly I had never heard of this wine before it was brought to me as a potential for the wine club. So for those of you who are members of the podcast wine club, if you look to this wine, you're like, nope, zero familiarity. I don't know anything on this label. I was right there with you. I had to do my own research. I had to talk to people who were bringing this wine in. And that's kind of the beauty of wine. It's like I'm more than 10 years into this industry. There are still things that I'm learning and we can learn a long way. This is not like a, you know, you'll learn a couple things and then you're done. It's a continuous process. So let's talk. I should ask you, Tyler, is there something that you are familiar with? No, not at all. I you sent me this. I got the sheet and I was like, okay, cool. But these are my favorite kinds of wines. I prefer to drink things that I've never seen or heard before. That's like my favorite. It's the best. I think this is like this is the way that we, you know, first of all, it's like a great way to usually get a good value wine. Because like it's, it's these kinds of things that generally are priced excessively. And then it's just fun to explore new things. Like who doesn't want to open things up a little bit. Um, so the wine that we are drinking, we will, we'll reveal it to you. Is this 2023 viola franconia previnencia. Everybody clear on what that means? Great. This is a wine that breaks a lot of rules or at least challenges them. So we'll start by like sort of breaking down the label. So viola is or viola is me, the name of the winery. Then we go into this trevinazzi, which is the region. And this is a very large region that encompasses frioli vienazia, julia, centino alto adije, and specifically the province of centino and the Venato. So a very broad region in the north of Italy. Generally a place, and this is sort of why it's a rebellious wine, generally a place that we think of, we think of white wine. We think of like crisp pinogrigios and subangones. We think of sparkling wines. We think of like Prosecco. Occasionally we think of red wine. But if we do that, we're generally thinking of a wine like emorone. That is not this wine. The grape in this wine is called franconia. You see that on the back of the label. Some of you may not be familiar with this grape. This grape has a lot of different names, though, so maybe some other names might be familiar. Lael Frankish is another name for this grape where you'll, you'll hear that name in like Austria and Germany. And for those of you who are wine taste staying in the US, maybe in your own backyards in like New York and Michigan, Pennsylvania, maybe even Wisconsin, where Tyler grew up, you will know it as Lemberger. This was initially thought to be a clone of gamma, and you can kind of see why they may have thought that, but they are not related. And this is a wine I think that breaks a lot of the boundaries in terms of what we think red wine is. I think when we think of red wine, a lot of times we think like cold and opulent and big. And then, you know, and usually served at room temp, God forbid. But then you have wines like this that can be chillable and lovely. And sort of is this white wine masquerading as a red and like can kind of play a lot of different roles in whatever orchestra you want that to be. So it's a lovely little chillable thing. If you don't have a chilled, no worries, you can do what you want. But I thought maybe we would start with there. Your opinion of chilling red wines. How do we how do we feel? Yeah, go for it. I mean, I don't think it works for everything. And I think it meets the flavors, right? Like, like I always give the example of like the beer where the label turns blue and it's cold. That's because it tastes bad. And if it's really cold, you can't taste it. So don't get it too cold. - Yes. - You know, mine is a little chilled 'cause I just pulled it out of the wine fridge and I like to keep my wine fridge pretty cold. I am not that picky about wine, but the thing that really drives me crazy is temperature, right? You go to a nice bottle of wine and you touch it and you're like, this is like 80 degrees out. That's like what temperature is. And I always ask for ice bucket for the reds, you know, because like it gets, that's the one thing I think that in a real wine glass are the two things that anybody can do immediately to dramatically improve their wine game. - How do we feel about putting ice in our wine? - Why not? Do it. I mean, okay. Okay, there's a couple ways to look at this, right? It's holiday weekend. You got a red solo cop. You put some ice in it. You put some eight dollar white wine in it that you don't even know what it is, 'cause you don't care. Perfect. That's lovely. If you're gonna like get a nice bottle of wine, spend 30, 40, 50 bucks on it, you put ice in it. All you're doing is just like diluting all those expensive flavors that you paid a lot of money for, right? So don't do that if, 'cause you're just wasting money and you're wasting the wine, right? But cheap wine, backyard, plastic cup all day. - Totally. Yeah, I mean, like you wouldn't wear an expensive cocktail dress to a campground unless you wanted to get a dirty, right? I think the same could be said about putting ice in your wine. There's a time and a place for it. And so the reason I bring this up for those of you who're like, "Why should you keep talking about ice in your mind?" I made a video for one of the easiest that has gone viral to a degree about putting Asian dialects in your head. It has gone viral and I'm putting ice in a glass of rose and I talk about the fact that like this concept that I wouldn't see originated in France, but has historical precedence, so to speak in France. And they call it Loppysine. It's a, you know, in the South of France, if you go to like, you know, go to the beach, you know, one of the beach towns in the South of France, you will likely be served if you want it a Loppysine, which is wine over ice. And the way that they do it, if they put lots of ice in it, it's like a big, big, big, big, and so I talked about this in the video and the comments were just like a dumpster fire of opinions on whether you should or should not do this. And so it brought up a lot of feelings, I think, for people around when is it appropriate, when is it not appropriate? Some people felt like it was never appropriate. I feel like there's a time and a place for it. I feel like if it's hot and it's rosé, and as Tyler said, you're not spending a fortune on this wine. I think it's a great opportunity to do it. I will also mention, and I'm so sorry, James, if you're offended that I save us, but my friend James Teddwell, who's a master's only, he runs Texam. I brought it up at Texam and he was like, if you're in Texas and it's hot, like it is mandatory that you serve your wine with ice in it 'cause it will just, you know, it will be boiling by the time you're 15 minutes in. So I felt validated in some ways, you know, as people told me that I was full of baloney on Instagram. This is also a wine that is done in like Amphora concrete, so there's no oak on it. And I do think that's been like a trend that I'm sure you've seen more of in the last 20 years, like really moving towards un-oaked reds and lighter, brighter styles. So how do we feel about that in terms of like, where are we moving in the wine world and is that rebellious or is, are we just kind of going back to the way maybe wine used to be made? - Two things to unpack there. One, it wasn't-- - It was a pack at all. That was a lot. - Okay. - Tradition in wine doesn't exist, right? This idea of, well, wine used to be made this way, yeah, but they didn't taste that way, right? It's like the idea of tradition and food when Yelp first came out and like restaurant reviews, everyone's like, well, this Thai restaurant is not traditional. There's no such thing as traditional. And if you want traditional American food, then enjoy your, you know, like canned ham in a jelly mold, right? 'Cause that's technically traditional. And so computers made wine exceptionally better than it's ever been ever in human history. And that only happened the last 40 years. If you took a wine maker, if you had a time machine and you went back, you took wines, 100 wines from today, you went back in time, 100 years, they wouldn't recognize them, right? And like, that's not what traditional wine tasted like. And so I think that the style of light and bright is really great because now we can actually taste the fruit. I think we went through this whole fruit bomb era. And like, no, hey, I love a really big bold intense malback. I love passive rubles like Zen. It's like one of my favorites. But I think there's a way to do it in a way that's like, when you just over extract all of the everything in the fruit, then you just end up with nothing. It kind of tastes like blah. And that's a problem when you're buying bottles for 40, 50 bucks, right? Yeah. And so I like this movement towards light and bright. I like that you can taste the fruit. I like that people are caring about it. I also think it's a pendulum swing away from high cost wines. I thought that it was really interesting because this process, I like economics. My book is a secret business book. So if you want to know how like the business of wine works, it's all kind of hidden in there. But I also think that it's a pendulum swing away from expensive processes. There's a famous horror movie movie studio. They read scripts. And if there's a car chase, they don't do that script. If there's expensive scenes, they just don't do it. And I feel like that's what's going on with wine right now is they're removing the oak barrels. Those are very expensive. They can add up to like $6 or $8 per bottle just for the oak barrel, right? They're removing a lot of the high labor processes. They're removing a lot of the high aging and they're making these lighter brighter. Like fruit. Also harvesting earlier, since that's not the trend for like the bulk wineries and the big wineries, you have more access to labor. And it's actually cheaper to harvest earlier. So you can keep the prices down and make a style of wine that people are more interested in. So I think it's more of like a trend, you know? Yeah. I think those are all incredibly great points. Like I could go back and spend an entire episode on everything you just said because you're right. Like tradition doesn't always equal good, right? Tradition is just tradition. You cannot assign an adjective to that in that way. I think you're right. Like if people did go back and taste some of these quote-unquote traditional wines and be like, this tastes like garbage, that's not necessarily a good thing. They didn't have the technology that we have today. And I think you're right. I think we're moving, you know, if we want wine to be a little bit more egalitarian, if we want it to be more affordable, as prices continue, you know, for raw materials, for the things that it takes to make good wine, we have to find weeds to make it delicious that aren't synthetic. And I think that you're right, the way that people are finding, are doing that, are by eliminating oak barrels and kind of going back to this more minimalist approach to why making, which is, I think for me, what I really love, I'm with you, I like a big wine, but there's a time and a place for it. And I also know that I'm going to be paying more for it. I'm happy to pay more for better wine making or more expensive wine making, I should say. Other favorite rule-breaking wines that you think more people should know about. Obviously, this is, you know, this is one example. I think like, abodule, right? For example, like a crew abodule, it might be another example of a wine that, you know, it's in Burgundy where you think of like, very expensive ground-crupe peonos and char days. And yet you have this little, like, this little region that makes wines that are less expensive and sometimes using carbonic masseration, which is a cheaper way to go about things. So are there other, like, rule-breaking wines that you think people should be more excited about or familiar with? Yeah, they're all over the place, right? Like, you can start with this one, right? That we're drinking right now. You think about, like, why is this a rule-breaking wine? And then you have to look back into the history of the region, right? Like, the history of this region in Italy, actually, it isn't technically fully part of Italy. When Italy became a country, and like, I think it was around like 1918, 'cause Italy's not that old, right? Italy's like maybe a hundred-year-old. So, yeah. And after World War I, this region, kind of like, was its own independent area. And they're like, "We'll come with, but not really." So they technically have their own independent government, and they never really became part of Italy. And I mean, that's like kind of like the definition of being a rebel, right? They're like, "Screw you. We're gonna do things our way. You can't control us, right?" And so then they can kind of do whatever they want. And you'll find those places all over the world, you know? And France is tough, you know? France, there's a lot of rules in France. Oh, but wait, did you just see what happened though? This is really interesting as we're talking about rebels. So, that's all the floor. And Pomerol, did you see this headline that came out like a few days ago? - Oh, right. - Yeah. - They're not classifying, they're basically going to like, you know, not IDT status, but they're declassifying, right? They're not gonna put Pomerol in the label. I don't even know, I think they're going full Vandafrance. I don't even think they're putting Bordeaux in the label. - I think it just has France. - Yeah, which is super interesting because it, I mean, to unpack that is to unpack this idea of like, being rebellious for the sake of moving forward. And I think if you're a social floor and you're looking at different ways to be economical, different ways to make wine when there's, you know, climate change involved and you've got such vintage variation, you know, you basically have to say, I can no longer subscribe to the channel. to the rules that UIs have because they don't make sense for me as a business. And so they're basically saying, "Screw you from our old screw you, Wardo. We're going to do our own thing. We think we have enough brand equity to make that a viable business decision." So, do you know how all these rules got started? Did you ever really kind of look into this? So okay, the AOC system, how it got started was Algeria, it was the number four largest wine producing country in the world right before World War I. And it was all French people making wine in Algeria. Yeah, it has a long history of why making goes back to the Roman times, right? And so all these French people and they were making wine in Algeria and they were bringing it in France, calling it Shobli. They were calling it Wardo. And there was a glut of wine after World War I believe it was like after World War I, there was a glut of wine. There was also a glut after World War II because they just overproduced and they weren't able to export it, but they were still producing a lot of it. And so supply and demand, right? The price had to go down, right? And the government had to get involved a little bit, but you had all these super wealthy wine, like winery owners started in their own valley and they just drew lines around their property, lobbied the politicians that they were friends with and said, we're calling this their own valley now. They didn't do a single soil sample, they didn't do a single, like any analysis. It was just rich people drawing lines around their property and saying, I get this name now. And I actually think the system works really well because you can choose to follow it or you can choose not to follow it. In France, particularly we're seeing it in the Languadoc where it's just a free for all, like anybody can kind of do anything and you're seeing a lot of interesting innovation, but it's not super reliable when you buy a wine from the Languadoc, you don't know what you're going to get, you know? And so that's the push and the pull with it. It's like the system we have here in the US is it's not an like our AVA system is not an indication of quality. It's just an indication for where the grapes came from, whereas in France it became a bit of an indication of quality and in Portugal, I know that they, you know, like the boards will taste the wines each year and if they're not up to status, they'll pull their ability to use the name and stuff like that. And so I don't know, I don't think it's a bad system at all because you can choose not to participate if you don't want, you know? Yeah, it's true. I mean, maybe that's a good place to like dive in just a moment deeper is like, I love that you brought up the history of this of the rules in general because I think if you are talking about breaking the rules, you have to understand why they were put in place and maybe to back up for a second, you know, we've talked perhaps at Nazi and both on this podcast and elsewhere about this idea that you can't call something champagne on this. It's made in the region of champagne in the ways that champagne is organized. I think that's probably the most famous example of it and from Wayne's world. And so, you know, you, you have this system that's great that protects champagne and of course, there's exceptions around the world. And the reason that people pay the money that they pay for champagne has a lot to do with the brand equity that they've established within that region. But to your point, like, there are regions like the Languadoc that have decided to play by those rules, but also kind of like play by their own rules. And I think as a result, they have a little bit more leeway and perhaps the wine's aren't as expensive, but they're more recognizable. And I don't know, I don't know if there's a good or a bad to that, but I think that's just, maybe helpful to understand that as American consumers, because we live in a place where we don't have rules like that. We don't have governments that come in and say, you can only plant your vines, you know, X feet apart. You can only make your wines in this way if you want that word champagne or that word bordo on your label. We don't have that in the US. And so that's a big reason why you see a lot of French and Italian wine makers come to the US because they have a little bit more leeway. They can have a playground to kind of get dirty in, which is kind of exciting. Well, but there's a really key important piece to that that we don't talk about in wine is that the reason why the governments have these rules is so they can market and sell those wines. Yes. French wine is the best in the world because the French government spends a billion dollars every 10 years on marketing and advertising French wine specifically. They spend a hundred million dollars a year on marketing. In order to market a product, they need to know that the quality is set. And so the other piece of this rules is that it's so the government can spend a ton of money marketing this. And the French government gets all kinds of things from it, you know, like they get much larger in just like luxury goods industries which are worth way more than the wine industry. It's like how Thailand sponsors and pays for all the Thai restaurants in the United States. It's more marketing. Yo, yeah, you got to look into it. I didn't know that. How you're wondering why every Thai restaurant has the exact same menu and the foods all cook the exact same. I have literally never wondered this, but you're not. All the sponsor by the Thai government. And it was a brilliant campaign that started in the, I think the 1980s as a marketing for tourism. And so if you look at the amount of like the Thai population in the United States compared to the number of Thai restaurants, it's wildly disproportionally the number of Indian restaurants in the Indian population in the United States. It is not even close because it's all sponsored by the Thai government. And they train you to the way it's done. That's you. They help you pick the name. They help you. I think they fund it too. And so this is marketing for the country, right? Wine in France is marketing for other French products that are worth way more money. It's worth tourism. It's worth everything. If you think French wine is the best, which it's become because they make so much money, they can reinvest it, right? And you're going to buy other things that's going to help with diplomacy. It really helps out. Whereas in America, the federal government last year and every year has spent zero dollars on marketing wine. Yeah. No, it's so true. And when people ask like, you know, why can I get European wines so much less expensive than why is American wine so much more expensive than European wine? A lot of it has to do with these government subsidies. A lot of it has to do with the fact that they're getting support from their regions and from their countries to do what it is they're doing. California doesn't get that. They're, you know, if anything, it's the opposite of that. And, you know, not to get into like a deeply political conversation, but that is incredibly problematic when you have a wine industry as expansive and as viable and economical, economically important as you have with the wine industry in the US. And so it's something that I hope to see change, but you know, especially as we're talking about tariffs and that whole expansive conversation, you know, there is a very big reason why we're in the situation that we're in right now. And a lot of it has to do with rules. That is so interesting about the typhoon. I love typhoon. And I've never, I've never even thought to question why they all kind of have a similar menu. But, you know, like there's governments that invest in certain industries like in America, we invest in all kinds of industries. They're just, you know, not wine. Once you start digging into it, and that's what I did, it's like I was running this space for as I mentioned. I had like, you know, we were selling 8,000 tickets a week. It was this amazing, wonderful place. And we just raised venture capital money. And I had like leases on my desk. We were going to expand to Chicago and LA. And then the pandemic hit like three months later. And I got wiped, we got wiped out live event spaces. And then I just didn't work. And so I sat around for two and a half years researching and writing this book. >> I'm kind of going back to this conversation around like some other rebellious wines. >> Yeah. >> Maybe one thing that people don't realize is like not only, you know, in, like, so some of these EU countries, right? So, Portugal, Italy, France, Spain, they have all of these rules around obviously what you can do and what you can't do. And as a result, you have, you know, very, this is a good thing as we've described, right? This is a good thing in the sense that like if you buy a bottle of real Ha, you effectively know what you're getting into. If you buy a bottle of County Classico, you effectively know what you're getting into. But then you have these people that are a little bit rebellious who maybe don't want to make wines in the exact style of that region. Maybe they want to make County Classico, but instead of making, making it 100 percent, or maybe in the region of County Classico, instead of making it 100 percent San Jose, they want to make something that has Merlot. Or they want to make something that has Cabernet Saving on it. You cannot do that and call it County Classico. And so what you have, as a result of that, are wines that are labeled as I GT, which is what this is labeled here. So, if you're looking at it back of this wine here, it says Indicatiana Egeografica, Tepica, right? This is I GT. And that's a really good key indicator if you're trying to find some of the rebels in these, in these Italian regions. I GT is generally code for like, "Ham rebel" and do things the way that, you know, the specific region that I wanted to be in is doing it. Any other like, you know, rebel markers, do you feel like in wine? Look for weird places that you're like, "Wait, they make wine there?" Like, I love regional wine in the United States. I try to drink and find wine from, I think I have wine from like 12 different states in my house at the current moment. That's fun. Yeah, there's really, really, really cool wines all over the place. You're being made everywhere and, you know, living in New York, you go to all these restaurants and 80% of the menu is French, 15% is Italian and then maybe you can find some Spanish and Portuguese. But I'm like, "Where?" And there's some more New York wines. You can find the New York state wines here, but I've had really cool wine from Arizona. I've had really cool wine from New Mexico. I've had really cool wine from Wisconsin, how I buy wine and how I think most consumers in the advice that I give is like, "You don't have to be an expert. You can build your wine team. right? You find your retailer that you trust. You find influencers that you trust that you want to learn from. You find a couple wine bars or one wine bar or a restaurant where they'll let you try things and you can learn from them. And then you don't really have to learn that much. But it's about picking people who are curious. It's really easy, if you want to go into business of wine and the economics of wine, it's really easy to put wines on the shelf that look familiar to people. Right? Like as a wine buyer, add a retail shop or whatever, like you're going to buy the thing that you know is going to sell. Right? That's an easy thing. What is not easy is to bring in wines that are not familiar. Wines that have labels that are difficult to pronounce. Wines that are from grape varieties that no one's ever heard of. Wines from wine regions that no one's ever heard of or in styles that might be unfamiliar. And in order to make that happen, there has to be a level of quality associated with it. And generally there has to be an economic incentive. And so I think to your point, when you see those wines on the shelf, that should be like a very clear indicator to you that there was a lot of work that went into putting this wine in the shelf and it wasn't because the wine was bad. It started with the wine had to be good where it was produced. It had to be imported generally by someone who thought, "Hey, this is like a good business decision." Then it generally had to go through a distributor who also had to agree with that business decision. And then it had to be bought by the person who was eventually going to sell it to you. So it went to four layers of vetting before it eventually makes it to you, which means, if you see an $18 bottle of red wine, which is what this is here, if you see that and it's something that's completely unfamiliar to you and it has made its way all the way to the United States, I want to hear about it. I want to know exactly how we made that happen and why you chose to go through the hoops you had to go through. My trick at restaurants, if the restaurant has a psalm, I ask the same question every time it took me 15 years to develop this question. What is the best wine on the menu that nobody orders? Ooh. Always. It's always probably the cheapest. It's something that they bought that they just fell in love with that they can't ever sell because it's just like weird. It's not, yes. A grape in you was heard of or a region that you was heard of and like, maybe it's a little oxidized white wine or something. It's always exceptional. Like the psalm is always super excited and it's almost always the cheapest wine on the list. Especially when you go to the restaurants with a big huge stick book. And then you're going to drink a dope wine and it's not going to cost that much and you get to learn something. No, it's so true. I mean, a love of medicine park is not going to stake the reputation on a wine they hate, even if it's only $50 as compared to 500. They're not, it's just not going to go on the list. Yeah, so many people go these nice restaurants and they're like, "Oh, I don't want to owe a little cheapest bottle." Like order the cheapest bottle. It's good. Everything is good. You know? Yeah, at least a good restaurant. If it's like a shitty wine list, that's like maybe not the way to go, but like. Yeah, don't do that in Applebee. Don't do it in Applebee's. I want to do like a little bit of rabbit fire of wine rules that are maybe meant to be broken. We talked about icing your wine, which you're like pro with some caveats. White wine with red meat, yes or no? Yeah, do it. Do it and in what context? Okay, I have to admit something. I've been a vegetarian for 25 years. Okay. I'm a president. I eat seafood. But I found that like I can get really, really, really close. Like I've never actually had wine to meet together. Okay. But I found that it's not that hard to kind of get really close. Like obviously at a one-star Michelin restaurant, they're going to do an exceptional job making sure that this thing exactly fits with this. Sure. But I really think that if you get food that you like and if you get wine that you like and you put it together, the absolute worst possible case scenario is that you get full in your drunk and like that's the baseline and you're like, "Oh, we get better from there." Right? Since you're not a meat eater, I'll jump in here and mention that like an oaky shard may and a very fatty kind of meat is like it's heaven. And it has to do with the fact that like, you know, usually these fatty or cuts of meat have such a high percentage of fat content that they want like a little bit of acidity. They also need some like tanin to brine with a protein. And so you have an oaky shard may, you're going to naturally have tanin coming from that oak, which really works with the protein side of it. So it's really beautiful. We actually just talked about it at TechSom as oaky shard may, whistique in like that specific type of steak. So like, you know, some sort of like a five wagyu. That is a great pairing even over something like red wine. Red wine will overwhelm meat in that context. Maybe flipping it all that's head since you are a pescatarian. Red wine with fish. Yeah. I mean, I think that like again, it kind of like, am I asterisk on this one? Is that you, if you paid a lot of money for the fish, you don't want to overpower it with the wine, right? Because you paid money for those flavors. So you want to like try to match like the weights, you know? But otherwise, light red wine and fish, I mean, with, you know, going to college in the Pacific Northwest, like Oregon, Pino with salmon. There's nothing better. There is nothing better in the world. Like that's like a, you know, like last meal kind of thing. Yeah, agreed. Never drink wine outside a wine glass. Don't fuck caveat. If it's cheap, right? Like I hate going to these restaurants and they like, give you like the tumblers like, oh, this is like in Italy. I'm like, in Italy, they charge me a euro for this. You charge me a dollar for this glass of wine. I'll drink it out of whatever glass you want me to. But if you're going to charge me $14, give me a real wine glass, right? Oh, I paid money for those flavors. I want to taste them. We're going to be on a boat later. And I will not bring a wine glass in a boat, but I will bring wine on a boat. It will be something like a tumbler that's like a wine tumbler, right? Like there's, to me, like there's ways to kind of, you know, navigate this. But I'm also like, you want a drink that is so low-cup and that's all you got. Or a mason jar or whatever, like, do you? Yeah. Like again, these wine rules are meant to be broken. Yeah, I made a video about the kind of like blew up on TikTok that was about how Pino Grigio is just the cheap beer of Italy. Like don't think about it. Just drink a lot of it with your friends. That's what it's meant to do. Just that's, it's not supposed to be thought about. It's supposed to just be drink out of a plastic cup outside with your friends. It's great. And it's perfect for that. Yes. And maybe to expand on that, going back to what you were talking about temperature before, like getting things really cold. The reason that we like Pino Grigio, most Pino Grigio, there's some really great ones. Most Pino Grigio, really cold, is that it is kind of like the cheap beer of Italy, right? We want it to be, we don't want it to taste like anything. And the colder that you get a wine, the less it's going to taste. It's like shaking a martini, right? You shake a martini because you don't want to get those harshbacca flavors. So you get it really nice and cold. And all of those, that bitterness that harshness goes away because cold, moods flavors. And so if you're going to be drinking it out of a tumbler, out of something where like the enjoyment factor isn't necessarily tied to the quality of the wine. That's maybe a nice way of putting it. Get it as cold as you possibly can if you're going to drink it out of a mason jar. I feel like I know your answer to this, but only drink sparkling wine on special occasions. No, every day, every day popcorn is my favorite food in the world. And yes, everyone in popcorn is like the best. Yes, the best. Yes, very. So very mixing styles of wine and one meal. Should you do like and like the order of things? Can you mix it up? Like some people think that you, you know, you have to go sparkling to white to red. Do you feel like you can mix things up? Yeah, I think so. I like mixing it up. I think that when I'm like professionally power tasting things, I like sparkling wine and high acid wines kind of in the middle peppered in because it kind of like breaks up the whole process, right? I think your palate resets, right? Like I don't think that your palate is like, it doesn't have a memory, right? Like you can, you can move in different orders. You know, I think that the sweetness factor always plays a little bit of a role because I think maybe your brain sort of expects that at the end of a meal. And to me, like when I start to introduce sweets, sometimes that's a key that like, hey, we're maybe finished, but also going back to Thai food. If you gave me some spicy Thai and some recently, like an off-dry reason, that has a little residual sugar like, um, I'm in and I, you know, I can move lots of different directions after that. Yeah, I have a 90 minute stage show I'm working on, the more on the book. And it's called the history of wine in America. And I go chronologically. So we start with Madera. And so you just like mess up everything and go from there. And it's really fun. Finishing the bottle is it okay to save the rest for tomorrow or the next day? Or do you feel like you got to like once you open it, you had to drink it? The joke I always made for years was like, I don't know. I guess there's people that do that. I wouldn't know. But um, you know, it's going to change, right? And like oxygen's going to like start, you know, like doing its thing. I tend to throw them in the fridge. If I go to a wine bar and I'm like, it's like, I get there at five and they open to five. And I see them pulling stuff out from the day before. I'm really hesitant to spend 15 or $18 on a glass for that. I'm like, no, just like I get that you have margins, but I am paying the same amount. Like give it to me cheaper and I'm here, right? Some wines are better than next day, but I don't really, those are expensive, you know, I'm not going to know that. It's like these expensive Italian wines that are better than next day. Yeah, I mean, I think wine preservation has gotten so much better than it was 20 or 30 years ago. So like, I think there's ways to preserve it, but to your point, it's never going to be exactly the same. It's also not going to be exactly the same, you know, the may that you open it as it was five, 10, 15 minutes later. Like wine is constantly evolving, even in the bottle after the quirk has been pulled. So just understanding that if you are going to save your wine for the next day, don't expect it to taste the same in the same way that like, If you made dinner and you're having leftovers, it's going to taste different. It's not going to be exactly the same, right? Oxidation, we cannot necessarily completely control oxidation. It is a naturally occurring thing in biology. I'll keep that bottle as my fridge for a week and open them and pour them later. Then you have to drink those ones cold because you kind of ruined a lot of the flavors, but they work. You know what I've also thought? I opened a bottle of white burgundy, like an expensive bottle of white burgundy, and I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to drink it and then something happened and I couldn't, I was like, "Shit, this is, it was like a hundred-fifty-lifed bottle." And I use the Coravine Pivot. It's not the one where the needle goes through. It's the one where you remove the cork and then you put whatever thing. I went back to it two weeks later and it was still really fresh. I don't know that it necessarily is great for all lines, but I do think that more expensive wines kind of like hold together better. I don't know, that's not universally true, but. Or at least when they do diminish, they're still really great even at half. Yes, I think that's maybe what it is. Swirling and, you know, smelling and doing like all the fancy things that you see Psalms do, like, is that always necessary to do when you're tasting wine or do you feel like we, as consumers, can be like, "Mm, let's drink it." I mean, I think that like not all wine is the same, right? Like, it's like, you have like Chanel and you have H&M and they're both clothing, but they're not in the same business. They don't do the same thing, right? If you are going to, again, spend a lot of money on a nice wine, you're going to want to take a minute and like appreciate it. But like, if you're out with friends, I go to a lot of business dinners that are not wine business, right? Because like, I run companies and like, you know, investors and money and whatever. And so like, you can't just be like, "Okay, everybody stop. I know that we got a nice wine." No, you just like, shut up and drink it, right? And so cheap wine, you don't have to do that with, but when I'm at home and I kind of like the geeky part of this, I kind of want to go through that part, you know? I just don't make other people do it if they don't want to. It's like, it's all about opting in, I think. I think that like, if you're interested in doing this, make everybody else opt in because they probably, a lot of people might not want to also, they don't have to, you know? Don't force everybody to do it. Yeah, I think it's a classic example of like, it's not wrong, but it's not universally right for you all the time. Like, you would never be wrong to like smell and swirl your wine, right? No one should ever get angry for that. But they'd mean not be situationally appropriate at the time. You know what I mean? And like, I think that's a personal thing. What are some of your favorite rules that are meant to be broken that maybe we haven't touched on today? Decanting is really interesting, right? I like, one, I like buying fun decanters. I also just recently bought a lead testing kit and the amount of things, like vintage old stuff that have lead in it, so get a lead testing kit. That's all I'm going to say. But I like using fun different styles of decanters. The canting doesn't, the canting doesn't add oxygen. It really doesn't. It evaporates alcohol and that's why the flavors change, right? And so the canting, do it, don't do it. For the sediment thing, yeah. I do think this is one of those things that people think of as something that you do just for fancy wines. And I think that's wrong for so many reasons. One, there's so many wines that don't want to be decanted. Like, I would argue there's a lot of benefits to decanting, but mostly we're doing it too much. And I think to me, the beauty of enjoyment of wine is this is a decanter. This is a version of decanting. When you put it in your wine glass and all of a sudden things start to happen chemically, that is a version of decanting wine. And so you don't have to do it. You can, but I always feel like less is more when it comes to decanting. Sweet wine with your meal. Drink sweet wine with your meal if that makes you happy, right? I have an entire section of my book all about the genetics and the diet and how people have a DNA and a certain sensitivity to bitter flavors and how we don't necessarily know, but somewhere around 50, 60% of women in America are too sensitive to bitter flavors to drink dry wine, right? That's over how to market. And so you go to fancy restaurants and you have to go to the dessert list to find the sweet wines, even though that's what people need if they're going to drink wine. It's that or a cocktail. So we need to normalize large sweet wine, list and high quality sweet wines. Good ones made by small independent producers. And if anybody kind of gives you any crap, just I have a whole chapter of my book all about how you can basically drop a bunch of science, explain it. And then if they're still being dicks, just, you know, walk away because they're being a dick. I think you're so spot on with that. Sweet has become this really weird bad word in the wine world. It's become indicative of a lesser quality palette and a lesser quality wine. And when you think of like the great food flavor, like if you want to take it back to like to Thai food and Asian flavors in general, most of your Asian cuisines have a little bit of sweetness because it's balanced, right? Because it's it brings in that last sort of flavor piece of it. I think we have no issue with sweetness in so many other aspects of our lives, whether it's food, whether it's cocktails, whether it's soda, right? Like who doesn't love like, you know, a little bucket of KFC and a Coke that's delicious. We have no issue with it there. Yeah, burger and a Coke totally fine. Like steak and fancy sweet wine, not okay. Like come on. It's just it's weird to me that the wine industry has gotten so that they become so anti-sweet and I don't know when it became a bad word. I do. You have a theory? No, I know why. So basically what happened was in the 1930s prohibition ended, right? 33. And all of the wine talent in America left during prohibition. 13 years they couldn't make wine. Anybody who knew how to make wine left, right? And so you had this desire to rebuild the industry. I can never pronounce his last name. Andre Chuchekov. Tell a chef. Tell a chef. Yeah. There's a really good documentary all about him. But he was like, I want to build a wine industry that's as good as France. And I know we can do it. And he got hired to do that. And the biggest thing he did is he trained people and he brought in anybody. It didn't matter if you had any like background and wine or anything. He was going to train you if you were willing to work hard. But in order to tell consumers in America, the difference between good wine and bad wine. Because at the time, the only wines being made were these sweet wines. And they made them sweet because they literally put them in oil tanker train cars and ship them to the East Coast. They had to survive that. And so like they needed a preservative and sugar is a preservative, right? So they started saying dry wines, our quality, sweet wines are not. But it wasn't meant to like say sweet wine sucked because at the time, all sweet wine did suck in America. And so you had this battle that hit in the 60s, the 70s. And they won it in the 80s. In the 80s, California won the battle. Judgement of Paris, 1976, they started making wines on par with France. But they forgot why they were demonizing sweet wines, right? It was this battle to become no, we can make good quality dry wines. And they won the battle and they just kept going. And the biggest reason is because it's an industry run predominantly by men and men, especially white men that come from areas of colder climate are the least sensitive to bitter flavors. So you have this DNA in them that doesn't allow them to sense this bitterness. So when a woman who are genetically predisposed to be more sensitive to bitter flavors, or if your DNA comes from a warm climate, you're way more sensitive. And so they can't taste the same thing. So they're like, well, I don't get why you don't like this wine. And you're like, well, because you can't taste it. You literally can't taste it because that's how like genetics and our brains work and hormones work. Because like I'm a transgender woman, right? And I started transitioning and my flavors changed. I can't drink black coffee anymore. I have to put milk and sugar in it. And so interesting. Yeah. And that's only having the last year. So like until my flavors and the ability to taste wine has gone up, like probably 20%. I can smell things I could never smell before. I can taste things I could never taste before. And so if the people running this whole thing still hate sweet wine for no reason and they don't taste the difference, then they're not going to, you know, sweet wine versus dry wine and pitting those two against each other is an easy way to distinguish quality makes perfect sense, right? Especially at that time when obviously we're not sharing information and the way that we're sharing it today. And so there's this this your unintended consequence that I never considered before, but kind of going back to what you're saying about like women and hormones and the way that we're tasting wine isn't necessarily the same as like another gender or just like another person, right? Like we all taste a little differently. I have experience with GLP ones and we're noticing that as soon as you start taking GLP ones, your taste starts to change. You start to notice that you prefer certain flavors over another and so I've noticed that like my preference for certain wines and certain flavors has changed and it's maybe really rethink a lot of things where it's like I'm just, you know, I was biologically wired to taste a certain way, but now I'm chemically altered to taste a different way. And it's so interesting to think that like we have control over what we like versus what we don't like. We have no control. So if what you like is different than what someone else is like, that's perfectly fine. That's who you are and that's who you're wired to be. Yeah. And taste is an idea that our brain creates, right? Yes. And smell, so our ability to smell before it gets to the part of conscious thought. It goes through your emotions part of your brain and your memories. And the thought was that if you're sleeping and you smell smoke, you don't think, hey, is that smoke? You just feel fear and that keeps you alive. And that was an evolutionary thing to me. Yes. So if you are in a bad mood, if you're stressed out, your body, because smell is what allows us to, it makes us hungry. And so if you're stressed out, if you're mad, if you're angry, your body will just shut off your ability to smell because it's like, we don't have time to eat right now. And then your memories play such a role. Like drinking wine is honestly just drinking flavors or it's just drinking emotions and memories. It's so, so strong. And so if you're trained as a sommelier, you have these memories ingrained in your brain. That's what it tastes like. But that's because that's what your brain is telling you because all of this happens before it becomes conscious thought. So you can't reverse do it, right? Exactly. Yeah. There is a lot. It's so much more complicated than I think people realize it is. And I think when you obviously, when you taste for living, what did you call it before? Professionally powerhouse tasting? I love it. I think there should be a picture for that. Power tasting. Yeah. That's a professional power tasting. You know, when you do it for living, you start to like find little patterns for yourself. But then again, I think going back to this, the GOP once has been like a fascinating experience because it just, it makes you rethink everything that you thought. And like, I thought I had control over what I liked versus what I don't like. And that's just not the case. I actually had no control. It's a really, really long way of saying, just drink whatever you like and know what you like because they're not you and they don't know. It's like, it's like listening to music, you know, like I can love a song. You can hate a song. We're both right. And it's not about being right. It's doing what makes you happy. At the end of the day, like all of these rules are meant to be broken because someone made the rule and decided that's what they wanted. It doesn't mean that's what you have to want. You can want, we can all one different things. And hopefully at the end of the day, we can all get along and share a bottle of wine. That would be my hope. That's what it's there for. I don't know if that's going to happen. It's what it's here for. Speaking of sharing, can you plug your book for us? Your delightful book that just looks like the most fun Dr. Seuss cover ever. Rebel School of Wine. There's 450 custom illustrations. So every page has like a ton of illustrations and my partner Morgan and I who've been working together for 18 years, she are directed it and we worked with a really cool illustrator. But it's a book about politics and science and history and economics and ultimately culture. And I think that if you want to understand wine, you should understand people. And if you can understand the people, then it all makes sense, right? And that's what this is. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It is filled with all kinds of stuff that is not in any other book because I stopped reading wine books. And I started reading history books and science books and matching the dates up and you're like, oh, so that's what actually happened. And yeah, you can buy it on my website. You can buy it in stores. It's like, I think it's in like six or seven hundred different book stores around the country. I got nominated for a James Beard Award. Only wine books. Huge. Huge. Only wine book in any category nominated this year. I think it's wonderful. I think, you know, the James Beard Awards are obviously for those who don't know sort of like the Oscars are right for the FNB world, FNB world, and not notoriously inclusive of the wine world, not notoriously, you know, a place where you see a lot of wine stuff. So I was thrilled to see that you were nominated. That's very, very exciting. Congratulations on the book. Thank you for the book. I think this is, you know, something about the industry and more importantly, the consumers really needed. I love that it's sort of a love letter to 20 years ago when you first started in wine. And all of the research, you know, it's clear that you've done so much research beyond what the normal scope of wine research is. And I'm so appreciative of that. Where can people find each other? The book is at rebelschoolwine.com. I am on Instagram, Rebel School of Wine. I'm on TikTok, Rebel School of Wine. And you can find me personally. My name is Tyler Ballet. I'm on Instagram. If you message any of these accounts, I'm the one messaging you back. So you could just like, I love feedback. I love talking to people. I love meeting new people. It's my favorite thing in the entire world. And I'm in New York and I'm all over the place. And I don't know, you've probably bump into me at some point. Amazing. I look forward to bumping into you at some point. For those of you who want to learn a little more about Tyler, I'm going to put up to you and what she will be up to. You can find everything you need in the podcast description below. You can also find everything you need to jump into the wine club. So if you are not a member of the wine access and filtered podcast wine club, and you wanted to be drinking the wine with us today, this is a great opportunity to sign up, because this was the last of this particular shipment. We'll be sending out the next one in the next few weeks. So you can sign up and get a head start on that. And if you are not connected with us on the socials on Instagram and otherwise, please do that. If you're listening to this, this is fully available on YouTube in video formats. So you can hang out with us there. We try to be everywhere the people are. Hopefully we're succeeding. And I love that that Tyler is too. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun and so enlightening and so helpful. This was so much fun. I love talking about all this and you're so much fun to talk with. Okay, thank you. Well, I hope to see you in New York soon and congrats on the book again. We'll talk soon. Cheers. Thank you, cheers.