“What is something you love and why?”

“I have a deep love for wine because it’s so unique. All of the elements are at play when you create wine. You have earth, you have wind, you have water, hopefully not fire. All of them combine to produce what you end up drinking in that particular vintage and you won’t be able to reproduce that  exactly because invariably things change. Even rotting or some kind of disease will sometimes enhance wine and sometimes hurt wine and that varies from year to year. Viticulturists and farm managers do their best to mitigate those problems but sometimes it works well for the wine and you end up enjoying that unexpected surprise.

It’s an amazing thing. It’s temporal, and fleeting, and it makes you think about it, if you know to think about it. It makes you feel connected to the earth in ways you may never have even thought of.”

“So since each bottle of wine is so unique, wouldn’t every one be appreciated for what it is and not judged on an objective level or comparatively to other wines?”

“Totally! It is so subjective. Even the best wine makers will tell you that what works for their palette may be different among their group, and especially for the average consumer. It doesn’t mean anyone is right, it just mean whatever your tongue likes. It may be sweet wine or dry wine, or certain varietals. Remember in the movie Sideways when Paul Giamatti’s characters screams, ‘I am not drinking Merlot!’ he was just expressing his opinion but the Merlot industry really plummeted worldwide as a result of that.”

“It’s amazing how much power art has. It seems like the best way to figure out what you like in the wine world, or the world in general, is just to try things for yourself and develop your own preferences.”

“I totally agree. I’ve developed a deep personal relationship with wine because I see it as the perfect culmination of science, art, dedication, a little bit of luck, and maybe spirituality if you want to go that far. And that’s why people are so passionate about their wines because they’re artists at their craft. They’re also agrarians and scientists. It’s almost like Socrates and Plato because one has to command such a breadth of different fields in order to be a master wine maker. Probably one of the reasons the Greeks appreciated it so much is that it involves a lot of domains of expertise." 

"That’s beautiful. It’s nice to hear you passion.”