▷S3E2 Shift Drink: Michele Thomas on Writing Wine & Working Retail
Michele Thomas is a writer, sommelier and the manager and buyer at a neighborhood wine shop in Brooklyn. RT and Michele are old friends from RT's wine rep days. They get together to dish about the purpose of tasting notes, the art of wine writing, and how to welcome new drinkers into the world of wine.
Also: pairing Italian wine with jerk chicken, wine as a second or third act career, Cynar and tonic with a lime as the perfect "shift drink" after a day of retail hospitality.
In a special segment, Michele reads an excerpt of her creative memoir essay, "Under Construction," bringing together her memories of growing up in East New York and working at the International Culinary Center.
Michele reads the whole essay in a subscriber-only bonus episode. www.patreon.com/mododibere to join.
Recording this episode together helped RT and Michele remember how much they love talking about drinks and language. RT has since launched Modo di Bere Magazine with Michele as the editor! Modo di Bere Magazine is also the home of Michele's new monthly column, Bed Stuy Somm. Subscribe for weekly essays below!
Subscribe to the newsletter!
Follow Michele on Instagram @bedstuysomm
Read her piece in the New Yorker: The Christmas Wreath
Winemakers mentioned in the episode:
Frecciarossa
Punset
Andre Mack
B Stuyvesant Champagne
Pierre Richard
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This episode features strong drinks as well as strong language. My approach to writing tasting notes has always been three point. I want to tell you what the wine is, where it comes from, what you'll experience, and what you can do with it. Because I think that's what people want to know. If you don't do that in a wine tasting note, you're doing your customers dirty. [music] Welcome to Modo di Bere, the podcast about local drinks and local sayings. I'm your host, Rose Thomas Bannister. Today, I'm so pleased to welcome to the show Michelle Thomas. No relation. Michelle Thomas, yes. Yeah. I mean, Thomas is my middle name, but yes, we do have that in common. Michelle is a writer, writing instructor, and the longtime manager of Brooklyn's Green Grape Wine Shop. She has an MFA in creative writing from St. Joseph's College, where she's also now an instructor. She had attended and previously worked for many years with the wine program at the International Culinary Center. Before I met Michelle, I fell in love with her tasting notes, the written descriptions of the wines that she had put up around the shop. And we enjoyed tasting together for many years when I was working as a wine rep, and I'm so pleased to have her on the show today to talk about writing and drinks and writing about drinks and how it all goes together with the language piece. Michelle, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really decided to be here. If you want to read some of Michelle's published works, you can look for The Christmas Wreath, which was published in The New Yorker. Michelle, what are you working on writing now? Yeah, so right now I'm working on a memoir in linked essays about my experience with food, wine, and family. Those are the through lines of my life and so those are gonna be the through lines of my memoir. I volunteer as on the jury for the Fordham University Many Voices prize, which is a writing prize for first -generation college students. I am still working with the Fulton Street Fellowship, which is a small group founded by local people to help get Black people into the wine industry. Amazing. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much for your work. Yeah. Before we jump to the interview, I want to let everyone know that this is a listener -supported program. So please take a moment, pause the interview. We'll be here when you get back. Go to patreon .com /MotoDBerry and sign up to join the community, become one of the supporters, make sure that this awesome show gets to continue. So thank you very much to everybody who is a subscriber. You are keeping this ship afloat. Thank you very much. Okay, we've got local drinks, we've got local sayings, and then we've got the local wine shop. So I just have a lot of thoughts about the neighborhood wine shop and how it functions as a part of the neighborhood. Do you have any thoughts about that or stories from your time as the local wine shop? Yeah, I love being at a local wine shop. It occupies a really beautiful place in sort of a neighborhood ecosystem between like your home and your local bar. But your wine shop is someplace in between. Like you can grab your drinks to go, but also you come in, you talk to people that you So I have great customers that I've seen their kids grow up and I've having seen them come in for years when they were like, you know, 10, 11. Now they're 20, 21 and I've sold them their first bottle of wine. That's so amazing. I actually had someone come in. He had his little under 21 license cut up and he made earrings out of it and he came in and I proudly sold him his first bottle of wine on his 21st birthday. And that those experiences are really special. You get to be part of people's families. You know, I usually send my customers, I'll send them a bottle of bubbly when they have a marriage or they get married or they have a baby or just, you know, marking life's events 'cause you know, that's what you want wine to do anyway. You want it to be part of your life. And so I think, I just love, I just love that experience. - So in terms of bringing new drinkers into wine, let's talk about tasting notes because I love your tasting notes. I love your description. - Oh, thank you. - There are all these like little cards around the green grape on the bottles of wine. And I remember coming to the store early on and saying, who is writing these? Because these are really great. I know people have a lot of feelings about tasting notes. And I think that when it can be something that feels like a obscure or a prescription, and like, if you don't taste this, you're wrong. And some people have kind of moved away from the more descriptive tasting notes to talk about supposedly more objective things like structure or wine making, but I still love them. Tasting notes like yours. I love them. How do you feel about that? I'll start with, you know, what I've always seen as a peeve and something that I feel like kept me out of wine for a long time before I became familiar with it through, you know, education was that you go to a store and you're overwhelmed by either no descriptions or things that are talking about things that, you know, you don't know, like the average person has no idea what three day cold soaked maceration. Nobody knows what that means. My approach to writing tasty notes has always been three point. I want to tell you what the wine is, where it comes from, what you'll experience and what you can do with it. Because I think that's what people want to know. If you don't do that in a wine -tasting note, you're doing your customers dirty. Yeah. Yeah. Could you, off the top of your head, give us an example even if you're making it up now? One that comes to mind pretty frequently is the Fresh Arosa Pito Reggio and they have a beautiful Pito Nero that we carry. I had got a chance to meet the wine maker recently, and she was so lovely, and she told us this story about how Alfred Hitchcock loved her grandpa's wines. And he tried them in a restaurant and became so enamored with them, he found out who made the wine and then promptly either traveled to Italy himself or sent someone back to pick up the wine every year for about ten years. Wow. And that story stuck with me because what an amazing piece of history to have with that. Alfred Hitchcock liked your family's words. That's amazing, you know. Yeah. Another one I tend to think about is Marina Marcarino of Ponset Winery. She makes these beautiful or dented biodynamic Barbaristos in Pomonte and she was the first person to do it and definitely the first woman to do it. And everybody thought she was bonkers. She was just like, "I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna convert my family's wineries." And the whole, all the neighbors thought she was nuts. She did it and her wines are gorgeous. - And she was right. - She was right. She's teaching in a local university and she got kids out of kindergarten for being like a little bit of badass. Like someone who's just like, "I'm gonna do things my own way." And I think that really tarries into her wine as well. - They're great. Those are gorgeous ones. Oh, I love that. I love that. I've always had this thought because I'm a writer too. I remember when I first got into wine, I just remember thinking to myself, learning how to describe how something tastes and smells and makes you feel, this is going to make me a better writer. Even not writing about the wine, just tasting the wine. It's kind of like writing about music. It's hard. I remember when I was a concert promoter, which I still do, but I had like a house concert venue. I would promote the artists and they just would have nothing online about what their music sounded like. How do I tell the fans of my venue what this band sounds like? It's actually hard to describe, well, what music sounds like. It kind of made me think of writing about one. I think that's 100 % true. I always call it fun with adjectives. And in fact, I've always wanted to teach a writing class or teach a group of writing teachers about wine because it's fun with adjectives. - That is a great idea. Oh my God, let's do that together. - Let's do it, right? It'll be so much fun. - That would be awesome. - But it is really hard because we're always told that wine is subjective and it is, it absolutely is subjective, but there are feelings that come to the front and there are high notes and low notes and some of it is free association with what it makes you think of. And for the most part, the wines that I've tasted and sampled and talking with winemakers, you're pretty close. So the winemakers put their heart and their soul into their projects and they want you to taste that. And when you talk to them about it, and you share some of those things. They're like, "Yes, that's what I wanted." So it is difficult to do, but I really put my heart into doing it. - Yeah, yeah. Well, your tasting notes are amazing. Do you have the tasting notes up on the Green Grape website? - Yeah, they're actually all on greengrapewine .com. - And do you guys ship? - We do. We ship all locally throughout New York state. It's a little bit trickier in many other states because New York beverage law, or actually US beverage law is kind of fun to you, but we can certainly ship to like Connecticut, California, Florida, DC. And we also have a link on our website that will show you exactly where we can ship. Okay, great. Well, whether you want to order some wine from Michelle's awesome shop or she works or not, you can go to... It's green with an E at the end. So greendrapewine .com is our wine store specific website. Greendrape .com will get you to our company website. I also make a point of writing about each producer too, so not just the wine notes, but who are the producers? We want to make sure that our customers know that each wine is researched. We want to know about their labor practices. What makes them special? How do they approach it? Where are they? Don't take a look. I think maybe the place where people just started blowing off tasting notes all together was as a reaction or a swing away from the heyday of a wine critic with a score. I would hope that even when that was more of the model, that that was there as like a consumer service and not as like, I am the authority. And if you don't taste what I think, you know, fuck you. - I definitely think that is part of the reaction to it. Those scores blew up and people used them as a to pick the wines that they thought were the best, but they were the best according to one person. - It's Robert Parker. - Robert Parker. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - There's documentaries about it. Look them up, Robert Parker. I think also moving away from those tasting notes was a rejection of the conventional idea of what a sommelier is or does. It's someone who walks around in a restaurant in a three -piece suit, very buttoned up, and they have like a doodad around their neck and they taste wine and they tell you that this is the wine that you to have with your tacos, your $400 tacos. This is the only wine you can have with it. If you don't like it, there's something wrong with you. I think people rejected that and were intimidated by it. I think it was designed to be intimidating. The right intention of all of that was and still is, because I still think that's an important role, is to increase enjoyment of a customer. I want you to have a good time. I want you to enjoy your food. I want you to enjoy your wine. I want you to have a good night. Yeah. And I'm here in service of you. Yeah. But I think as far as the intimidation factor, yeah, I mean, things about power. I know about this. Yeah. See thing. And, you know, it's, it's hard. I mean, they make wine all over the world. It is legitimately hard. There's multiple languages. There's rules in different parts of the world. There's histories. There's geography, like, but your subject gets thrown at you, you know, in wine. And I think that's true that the role is designed to help people have a better experience when they pick wine or make it easier for them to choose wine because wine is the world. It's overwhelming and huge. Like most things there's an edge where it can start to tip into unapproachable and people can sort of take advantage of the idea that I am very powerful. I have lots of money so I'm going to buy this expensive thing that I don't even like and made you drink it. And I think that over time, especially like moving out of the, I think I would honestly say out of the late 90s and into the early 2000s, people started to reject that idea. They wanted it to be a little bit more casual. They wanted it to be a little bit more approachable. We saw this with the rise of the chef, the rise of like moving away from sort of the Uber French, very militaristic style chef who yelled at you all the time to the rock and roll chef with an armful of tattoos. I think this is a very similar movement. I really believe that to be the case. - Did wine get there though? 'Cause you're making me think of a food network moment where suddenly everybody knows what Y Goop beef is and all this stuff. I think it changed the way that people cooked and the number of people dined. Do you think we fully reached that moment with wine? - I think we're still struggling with that. I think it's on the path. I think that we're gonna get there. I just don't know that we're there yet. - What's gonna get us there? - I think a few more years of really making wine accessible and making wine diverse. Diverse is the people who drink it. People around the world, people in every culture, black, white, green, yellow, queer, not queer. Everybody likes wine. Everybody likes to drink something and they like to eat. Making sure that we can have wine producers on the market that reflect those people and making sure that we have wines that can address those foods. I think that will go a long, long way. - Yeah. - Where like not everybody wants to eat state au poivre. Like if you wanna have chicken wings, which I just had last night, they were delicious. What do you drink with it? Oh my god. I had this really lovely Italian orange mistato. It was a diverse demeanor. It was lovely. It was a little bit funky, but they had these really beautiful tropical fruit notes that just popped up with that jerk chicken spice. Oh my god, that sounds amazing. We need to tell people that you can do that. Yeah. And then I think it'll help really go a long way. Yeah, definitely. Well, I salute you and your work with education and everything. I've been feeling this in my heart for years. It has to diversify it or wither on the vine. Thank you for coming on the show. Frankly, there aren't that many Black people in the wine industry and y 'all are busy. Is there a lot of demands on your time? How do you manage that? I think that's true. I think that as historically underrepresented black people and generally people of color or any people in a minority position feel the need and are urged to do more, right? To do as much as they possibly can to keep up with average Joe who makes $2 more than you do, right? So I think that there is a drive to almost over commit ourselves and to do so much as we want to do so much. And I know I want to do so much, but sometimes I just want to lay in my bed because I'm so I'm so tired. Yeah. You know. So, all those things are true at the same time. Yeah. And I think it's true. There are still the numbers of black people in the wine industry and people of color generally are awful. It's less than 2 % of all working wine professionals in the United States. That's bananas. It is bananas. It is absolutely bananas. It's getting better very slowly. And it's a problem in retail, too. I live in a historically black neighborhood and the Green Grape stands out as a place where you're actually going to see those faces when you walk in. I mean, that's intentional too. Part of it is being a woman of color in that industry. I want to show that, "Hey, it's accessible to you," and I see it in my customers. Some of my customers, you know, black or brown customers comment, they feel a little bit more at ease because I'm not going to make them feel weird or dumb and with my staff, I'm like, you know, if you're interested, I don't care where you're starting. I will do my best to teach you and bring you into it and like help hopefully infect you with some of the same DD excitement that I feel about wine and food. And you can see that, you know, people respond to it, they love being given opportunity and you know, and I've told people who worked for me too, like even if wine isn't your passion and don't want to go into this as a full -time business. Whatever you learn and why, you can take with you anywhere. You can take learning how to describe something, you can take sales stills, you can take talking to people, coming out of your shell, those presentation stills that you have, and just an openness to try something new. That is necessary in everything, everything. Otherwise, you're just a bum. Like, - You're not cool, you're not cool. (gentle music) The wine, wine business is an industry that nobody, like very, very people understand how wine works. - Yeah, there's like this cachet and that's about it. It's the wine itself and the stories and the flavors. It's absolutely like learning a language so I can understand why I just feel like a lot coming in. But as you learn, I mean, for me, and this is what I always say with my work as an educator with the show, the purpose is to increase enjoyment. The purpose of greater, increased knowledge is increased enjoyment. I'm here to communicate, not to show off. And that, I think, is where I hope we can all head together. That's exactly what it should be. I think that's why we've always bonded about it, because that's what we want to do. And the wine communicates. I mean, that's the thing is no other product, food product in the world that I can think about. You can be like, "Okay, maybe cheese." Maybe cheese. You know, but just the way that it tells the story about the land and the place and the human natural connection and the weather in the year and the way that it's kind of this like geologic - Yeah. - It blew my mind, I couldn't stop messing with it. It became so much more than a day job for me. And that moment when you open up the wine list at the restaurant, instead of being like, what's, do you have a cavern egg? (laughing) And it's getting from there to, oh, I know this, I know this, oh my God, my friend that I'm eating with is gonna love this. And they're like, oh, she's gonna order for us. and then, you know, you taste it and you're like, okay, I know how to tell if this is flawed or not. And I'm not nervous about this little ritual of the, you know, but, and then where I'll drink in the bottle and everyone's like, oh my god, this is great. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah. I'm a wine picker outer. I figured it out. Even this, this use of the word master, yeah, a lot of these programs, no one could master it. Right. It changes every year, every year, Every single wine from everywhere in the world, unless it's like absolutely chemically modified so that it doesn't change every year. But if you're the small family farms that like I really am passionate about, and you're working in harmony with the earth, then that's why we need wine writers, I think, to help us keep track of, I don't know, even though I guess I'm making a case for vintage notes, but that's not even really that useful. Hey, how do you feel about vintage? - I wanna know what happened, but I think they became like a way to dam an entire region for the whole vintage. - I think that's right. I think that with anything, anytime you make a generalization, you run a wrist of losing bits of nuance, right? That's always a wrist, but I think that vintage notes are useful in giving you like a general idea, a very general idea. They need to know that maybe the wine from 2018 is not gonna be quite the same as from 2020 and a little bit of why. That's really helpful to know. We can make vintage notes more accessible for average consumers and then for nerds like us, we can go deeper. And then we wanna be like, okay, why was this vintage so challenging for this, that and the other person or this, that and the other region or like maybe this, just this sub region really had a hard time, but the guys down the road, great vintage, right? - Right, right. I think it's just so much more complicated than good vintage, bad vintage. Although I feel like great vintage is kind of one of those things everyone knows to say about wine, like gymnastics, stick the landing, right? And it's like actually, I mean, I like just challenging vintage. You know, it's not like, oh, bad vintage. I mean, maybe in the past, I don't know, but winemakers have been working so hard and learning so much science and a good winemaker can make something great. Yeah, just might not have very much to sell. But then you need to know, like, why is it more expensive this year? Exactly why their production was down. You know, I want so much for there to, I feel like things have gone so sour and numbers are reflecting that there's all these studies coming out of people wine and it's a little bit of a shouting for it. I'm like, "Okay, I told you to be like a zombie and you didn't listen to me." And of course, like I want this amazing product to succeed. So I worked in retail too, kind of bopped around in different parts of the industry before I started MotoGPerry. I always felt that this was so sad, but was the reality that it's an opportunity. Yeah. When people come into the wine shop, they expect to be made to feel bad. - Yeah. - In my thought about how to make things more accessible, if you're just not an asshole, you're already ahead. - It goes so far just not being a jerk when someone walks in the, just say hi. It starts with a hello. How you doing? Like you could just go straight there. And I think that's a hundred percent right. And just going back to your point about, I think why we need wine winewriters, it remained me think of the piece that Taryn McNeil wrote recently, which was excellent. And you should go read it. Her name's Taryn McNeil. She's written The Wine Bible. She's brilliant. She talks about the loss of the winewriter and feeling a little bit disturbed because there's no place for it anymore. I mean, I'm paraphrasing deeply, but yeah, yeah, yeah. She's a great winewriter. She's a great winewriter. I love the Wine Bible and it's one of my favorite wine texts because she really makes the story come to life. I mean, there's things that she says about how to taste that everybody uses. I don't know if she came up with it, but learning about body through thinking about skin milk versus cream, learning about tannin. But she doesn't just say tannin is this or that. She says, you make a cup of tea. Your friend calls you to tell her about her divorce, and then your tea is oversteeped, and that's tannin. Or Osiris like cowboy boots. Yeah, like and I remember that stuff. I think that's really important I I do see that we have lost some wine writers or lost places Or I guess I should say the more obvious in general is generally but the flip side of that is that There's still places to write about wine We just have to maybe change our idea of what who a wine writer is and where they write. So maybe there's not a column in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal anymore. There should be. But if it's not there, go on to Instagram. Go on to YouTube. I write about wine a lot on Instagram. Bed, B -E -D -S -T -U -Y -S -O -M -M on Instagram. That's where I write a lot about wine and culture and you can find those types of wine writers. And I think that's where wine writing is going. This doesn't maybe be smaller segments, much more not necessarily bottle reviews, but much more like experiential reviews or talking about who they met and how they enjoyed the wine less than, you know, well, this wine was created by magical fairies and Pulled on a truck of unicorns before it was told sold macerated for six hours We did just much more much less obtuse. Yeah real and more on the ground. I can't remember who said I want to say I'm Dorothy Dater Who's to work for the Wall Street Journal? Said wine is a grocery In Europe wine is a grocery and it should be and I like that I do like a grocery item. It's a grocery, right? Yeah Yeah, it's not something that you need to say for special occasion. It can be. It's daily bread. It's daily bread. You can have daily bread, but you can also have really great specialty bread. So I think once we start treating wine like that, we'll be on the right way, the right path. It's so hard in the United States though because wine at the grocery store here is, it's made by like five companies. And the wine that you get if you're in New York, if you're in Chicago, or, you know, you have to visit this, go and visit the specialty shop. And that's the way that I always encourage people. It literally makes no sense that you can't buy wine at the grocery shop here. But if you could, then this amazing thriving culture of independent wine shops would just wither and die because everyone would just get it all at Whole Foods. Don't don't make that a law, people. I know it's counterintuitive, But that's one weird prohibition era rule that in New York City, you can't buy wine at the grocery store that has accidentally led to this amazing Local wine culture that brings wine makers from all over the world to come in yeah be part of this cool education stuff I want that to Be found throughout the country even in New York. We have to have a specialty shop for that So I just want people to treat wine like a grocery item, to go back to wine and grocery shops. It is counterintuitive, but I don't know. If anything, I want the five companies who have these major stores to bring in the independent wine makers. I don't care where we sell wine, as long as we have access to the great stuff, great products from a multitude of makers, because people are making wine everywhere, so people everywhere should enjoy it. It just gets harder when, you know, if you're at, I don't know, a Wedmonds or a Walmart or Whole Foods, they're not going to... Whole Foods is almost a bad example because they dedicate their work towards independent small producers. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. But if we're going more for like Walmart or Target or whatever other big market store they're at. Or I mean, we're talking more about like distribution and the way that it works in the rest of most of the country, like, listen, I want to just say right here, like, I don't want to make anybody who's drinking Yellowtail, like, feel bad. Oh. The experience that I had was just, even talking about small farm versus, like, big conglomerate with lots of additives. Yeah. Anything you see in quantity to be found at stores, like, all over the United States, just the way that that viticulture works is just going to be kind of like the difference between like wine and a Coke. I like Coke. You know what I mean? It's just tough though because people just aren't exposed to this stuff too. Right. I've been to my mom's wine store in rural Illinois. Everything is like from like a huge, huge company. I think that's right. I'm kind of rambling right now. But I'm with you. I'm with you on the ramble. And I'm with you like it's, it's such a complicated problem that we have here in this country with as far as wine and access to wine and wine distribution and also wine marketing. It's one of the reasons why everybody has like those same three brands of wine is because that's the wine being marketed. So maybe if there was another way for wine to be marketed, more people would have access to it or more people would know to request the wine. Honestly, if you were in Joe Bob's like Big Magistor, wherever Joe Bob lives, maybe He lives in Cincinnati and more people requested pun set wines or hobo wine company wines, which is really small mom and literally mom and pop made wine, but excellent stuff. They would sell it. Yeah. Yeah, I am. So it's, it's super complicated. I feel like we're going to need to keep picking away at this problem for at least another 10 years to try to break it down, but it's, it's, it's really sticky. And I think that's where the word of a retailer comes in because, sorry, now it's my turn to ramble. Do it, do it, do it. People will go out to eat at a restaurant and they'll have a great night and they'll try a great wine and then they will go to their retailer and they go, I had the most amazing wine on my dad's, you know, 50th birthday party, whatever. They can't find it at a retail shop. So what position does that leave them at? They're only trying to get, they want to re -trade that experience and they can't go to the restaurant every day. That's where as a retailer, your work can be to find wines that are going to be kind of like that, wines that are really special, wines that bring something exciting to the person who consumes them, wines that have a great story, and then they can have that really special experience with a wine that they spent, you know, 20 bucks on on a Tuesday. And then you're like, "Oh my God !" And, you know, then they come back the next day and they're like, "Oh, that wine was great." And you're like, "Yeah, absolutely that wine's great." And you feel great about it. Yeah. Yeah. So, at this point in the show, I just want to say real quick that you should be following MotoDBerry on YouTube and Instagram. If you like the podcast and you're a fan of the podcast, there's also some other content there that you're missing out on in terms of what Michelle's talking about, about where the wine writer is. Check out the whole platform. Go to my website, MotoDBerry .com, sign up for my newsletter, Instagram, YouTube. Get in there and follow, subscribe, you know, keep up with all the adventures and see cool clips of me and Michelle and everybody else that I'm talking to. So get in there guys and follow Michelle. And Michelle, you talk about on your Instagram account, you do some wine writing, but you also write a lot about cocktails and you call it the shift drink. Yes. Can you explain for our listeners what a shift drink is? Yes. So a shift drink is a time -honored tradition in the hospitality world, where after a long day of serving your customers, whether you're at a bar or a restaurant, you know, the staff, after the last table is done, the last people are done, you lock the doors, and there's a chance for those staff to just sort of take a breath and enjoy something for themselves, that they don't have to share with anybody, that they don't have to deal with anybody, they don't have to pretend to be anyone else. They have to put anyone else's needs first for just that drink or that last couple of moments. And that's where the idea of the shift drink comes from. And so what I like to do is re -create that idea for just an everyday person. Like when you're done with work, when I'm done with work and I work in hospitality, I work in retail, but I still think of and as a hospitality person, I want to go home and I want to have that breath, that cocktail, that's just something that's interesting and something that goes with whatever I'm experiencing in my life at that moment, whether it's a subway to me or a really cool TV show or whatever. What's one of your recent cocktails that you've made for yourself at home that you're like, "Oh, that was a good one?" Well, one that I actually, I haven't put it up yet, but I'm really experimenting with it, is something really simple. It is a chinar, a tonic, and a lime, chinar, and tonic, and a lime. Oh, that sounds great. It's so good, and it almost gives you like a little bit of Coke vibes as someone who loves Coke, and diet Coke specifically. Diet Coke is magic medicine. It is magical. It gives you a little bit of that, but it also gives you like a little bit of a buzz, which is lovely. And I just, I can pour that and sit on the couch with my popcorn, it goes straight with popcorn actually, and just like, you know, deep to press. Oh my God, that's a great pairing. I love that. Michelle, speaking of getting into wine, how did you get into wine? How did you end up at the International Culinary Center? Oh man, so this is a funny story. I worked in children's in children's publishing right after college. I studied journalism and I said, "I'm gonna go and be a reporter." And then I was a reporter and I'm like, "I don't like this." So I ended up in children's books and I'd worked there for a long time and got a little burned out. And I wanted to - You read a couple of children's books also. I did, yes. Yes. I wrote books for middle graders, Science and Oxygen and Science and Sodium. So they're very, very high -tech books. But I got a little burnt out and I wanted to start writing about something I've always loved, which is food. It was such a big part of my life. So I found this job posting and I'm like, I don't know, if I can write about, you know, if I can teach second graders how light works, I figure I can help teach, you know, adult students how to fry an egg. So I interviewed and I really didn't think I had the job at all. I was like so nervous. I was in this beautiful, like, renowned school. It was Bobby Flays Alma Mater. It was, like, surrounded by chefs. I was the one intimidated. And the job was as a writer? The job was as a writer, to edit the schools. They had proprietary textbooks. I threw my hat in the rain, and I'll never forget. I was in an interview with Chef Nils Norene, who was the chef of Agrovi. Great, great chef. Amazing guy. Super, super intimidating to look at and he asked me what I'd like to cook and I looked him dead in the face and I said fried chicken and he looked at me and he said hmm and I was like that's it I've bombed this interview and I left and then like you know two days later I got a call and they're like oh yeah you're hired and I was like what oh sorry short that's how I got into the International Culinary Center and I got into wine specifically because the school was bringing on a wine program and they hired an amazing master sommelier, Scott Tarny, to head up that program. And so it was my job to put it out of the content. And Scott Tarny, who I'm telling you, this man is a G. He is amazing. He's worked at Gramercy Tavern. He's like knows everybody. He's just genius. But he's so kind and so compassionate. And when he's talking to me about wine lessons to include in the curriculum, he got me excited. He told me stories. He told me like about fruits and vegetables. And then after work, we would go get tequila. It was great. And so I eventually took a class with him and I was hot. I was bitten. And that's how I got into wine. And I haven't looked back since. That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. That's, it's a great, It's a great world to be in, great space to be in. (gentle music) Andre Mack is another wine maker who I love and respect and he also lives in Brooklyn. He's an amazing guy, worked at Perse, has many restaurants. He has a show on Bon Appetit. But he said something really interesting to me once. He said, "Most people in wine, "whether you're in wine sales, wine writing, wine business. We've had a couple of lives already. We've tried a couple of different things and we all fall into wine. Very few people wake up one day and go, "I'm going to get into wine." At least in this country, people fall into it. They are doing another thing. One day I produced music videos and I was like, "Oh, this is what wine's amazing." I'm there. I'm there in that story. Exactly. You're there in that So I think that shows that wine is a, is a world and a business for curious people. And the more curious people we have in the world, the better the world is generally. I love that. I said what I said. You can cook fried chicken for me anytime. What are we drinking with that fried chicken? Oh man, bubbles. You can always drink bubbles. Which one? Which one? Which style which style oh, that's I like a champagne or come on, you know champagne if I'm a fancy girl I've been obsessed with be Syverson champagne for years Not just because it's delicious, but because she's a black woman producer She lives in Brooklyn. She's from Brooklyn. She's awesome really really cool lady and her wines are excellent or The other end of that would be Pierre Rechard. They have a beautiful Cremant de Jura, 100 % Chardonnay, and it's just, it's everything you want. It's so, so tasty, you just like, you open it, and it's like less than 30 bucks too, it's great. It transports you to Jura. You're in the hills, you're in the mountains, it's fresh, it's pretty, it's mineral, It's golden apples and it just like pops along something like that. And why does it work so well with the fried chicken? Texture. Right? Like, bubbles are great because they're, they have texture and they will, you know, work with the snap, crackle pop of a good fried chicken. And that those soft apple and floral notes really marry well with whatever spice seasoning you have on a fried chicken. I like to add paprika to mine. And so it makes those like spice notes really pop. They sort of play off of some of the barrel notes and the fruit. It's just great. It's just so good. - All right, ladies, gentlemen, everybody. I think you can see why I had Michelle on the show to talk about how to talk about flavor. - I'm hungry now. - Oh my God, isn't that the worst? Isn't that the worst? So Michelle, knowing your story about having started in the culinary center, which to me, I'm I'm like, oh, wow, really? I'm like, oh, wow, fancy. When you let me read your gingerbread story, I think of this. Would you mind reading for us the gingerbread story? Oh my god, I am so honored to read it. Yeah, this is great. So what we're going to do, people, is Michelle's going to read this story, and we're going to excerpt it here because it's a little long for the interview maybe and if you want to hear the rest then there's going to be a bonus episode and you'll be able to hear the whole thing. You know, get excited. All right, Michelle, go ahead. One thing I liked about this story is that it kind of brings together my experience as, you know, a kid drawing up in New York with my experience working at the culinary center and I worked with amazing So once I did get the job, I worked with these amazing chefs who are a collection of wonderfully talented goofy nerds, right? They love to play and create and cuss and they're just like a lot of them are still my dear friends to this day. The gingerbread just for a little bit of context is something that I grew up with as a kid. My mom made these gingerbread houses. She planned them about six months out and constructed them over the course of a week and then invited neighborhood kids over to our house to destroy the gingerbread house. And it was 100 % edible. That was the only rule is she always put hours into this construction process and then just have it torn apart by like amazing little kids. What were they like? Oh my God. They were Some of them were Tudor style houses with white peppermint cones for, what do you call those things? Columns? Columns, yeah. Columns. Columns. A gingerbread house with columns. A gingerbread house with columns. She did a whole town one year, so a bunch of little houses. We made a Santa's workshop. We made a toy shop. So she made these little, basically little toys out of gingerbread and candy. Some of them were stopped it out of chocolate. Yeah, it's like, so they were a range of things. And every year was something, a chance to do something more creative. I'm going to read you this story. It's called "Under Construction." "Fucking gingerbread," Chef Jurgen said. Jack did open and sweaty after teaching classic pastry arts for six hours. His pale, staining uniform almost blending into one of the long white tables in the chef's office where he sat, stretching. Colored pencils and his mop of black hair were all that set the associate director of the pastry department apart from his surroundings. "What's crooked?" I asked them moments earlier, entering the office and passing along the other side to the table towards the printer. Since joining the International Culinary Center's Education Department, I adopted this as my customary greeting for the chefs. Chef Xavier, also sweaty but from the culinary department, glared impatiently from the computer station at the other side of the office. He'd swept into my office moments earlier, smelling like salted chicken to tell me that the printer was jammed, again. Like Jurgen, he was in the middle of a double teaching shift, Which meant that he had about a 90 minute break between classes He needed a print. He needed to print a handout for his class and he needed time for a few cigarettes outside There was no time to wait for the IT department. I'm not IT. I told him. I always told them that But you know as a computer. He said I don't know these shit Yes, chef. I opened a few panels and cleared the errant paper. Sweets and worrying dears told me that Xavier would be happy again. "Okay," he said with a smile and a clap of his hands. He rolled his body toward the printer to wait for his papers. I turned the door back to my own word, but the soft browns and reds and greens of Jordan's drawings stopped me. I sat down him. My body is suddenly heavy. I wouldn't be able to avoid Christmas with its jingling bells, snowy rom -coms, and warmly pictured family gatherings for much longer. I'd have to figure out something to say when asked about my holiday plans. Roasting chicken I would eat alone didn't sound so festive. Neither did saying I was estranged from my father and sister and have been since my mother died. Gingerbread houses always made me think of my mother. Christmas always made me think of the family I used to be close to. Almost everyone in the pastry department would draw, but Jurgen's lines reminded me the most of my mother's. I could see the formal training in both. The light strokes, swift moves that slowed down to the confidence their line placement grew. I looked at his hands filling in buildings and windows. "My mom used to make gingerbread houses," I said. "Oh, nice," he said in his liltin Austrian accent in English. I instantly felt stupid. I wanted to make them understand. Gingerbread. And that's how I say it with a capital G as a time, an event, maybe even a place, and at its simplest and purest, a housing project, an inversion of the one in which I drew up in East New York. I love that story so much, thank you so much for reading it, thank you for having me. Where can people follow you, your writing? My brand is Bedz Dysom, so that's B -E -D -S -T U -Y -S -O -M -M dot com. That's my website. And you can follow me, bedstice .com on Instagram. And that's where I do my writing. I'm currently working on a memoir of food, drinks, and family that this piece will be in. Bringing together more of those ideas. Like, you know, there's a piece about cereal and there's this piece about dating people and their drinks so things are like coming together. Hopefully that will find its way into the world pretty soon and I'm so excited to have the chance to sit with you Rose it's lovely. Oh my god it's wonderful and what about the Fulton Street Fellowship where can people find that? It's FultonStreetFellowship .org and it is a really great organization founded by myself and a local wine seller Chris Leon and what we do is we raise money to put black people and people who identify as black specifically into the wine industry. We do that through agitation and mentorship. We pay for scholarships to the Institute of Culinary Agitation's wine program and we offer them a chance to connect with people in the industry and find jobs, find mentorship and find each other, build a community. And now the ICC and the ICE, different things? Yeah. So the ICC RIP, that school closed in 2020, I know it broke my heart too. But the curriculum lives on through the Institute of Culinary Education, which is located in downtown Manhattan. And you will find actually many of the chefs who worked at ICC there, including Chef Yardin, who is still today, one of my dearest friends. And curriculum that you, when you were there, that you edited and then you wrote. You guys will see my words, my writing. I've worked on the culinary programs, the wine program, the pastry program. So I've worked on lots of different books over the years. Michelle, I didn't even ask you about for your local saying. Oh! Yeah. What's a local saying from your life that you want to share? You know, I was thinking about this. I think I texted you a one point something like I'm overthinking that like one of the local sayings But one of the ones that really sits out with me in new york that I think I use a lot is get out of here you know because This is the way you say it. It's like get out of here. You could say it in different ways and has different meanings like What get out of here or get out of here, you know, you do not intensely say fuck out of here. You know It means so many things. It's like, or it's a rejection of something. It's a disbelief. It's just like, oh, you're like, yeah, you know, it's great. You know, what I like to is that you see other communities use it. So I live in East Flatbush now, and I hear Caribbean's use it. And they say, did I, you know, you hear the Italian Americans use it? Yeah, everybody says, did I hear it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like bacon, egg and cheese on a roll, salt, pepper, no ketchup. It's like, it's just one of those things that just comes and it really has a meaning. - I love this, it's like positive, it can also be like positive disbelief, like I got some really good news for you. You're like, I didn't know you had a piece of the New Yorker, get out of here. - Yeah, exactly, and it's like, yeah. - You gotta tell me this shit. - Yeah, that's what it is, like, yeah, fuck out of here. - Write about that, write about that more, please. - I know. - We've been friends for years. I'm like, what about your publications? Oh, just the New Yorker, yeah. - I know, I know, I am really modest. I am really proud of piece though. It's called the Christmas wreath if you want to check it out in New Yorker and it is a true story of the time where my mother hid razor blades in a Christmas wreath to keep people from stealing it off the door. Oh my god. And the gingerbread makes a house appearance, makes an appearance there, so does my dog, but it's very much about what family is and what it means to build a home. Thank you for sharing these stories about your mom and your family and your childhood. - Thanks. - Thank you for bringing them to the show. - Oh my God, super fun. - I'm so glad you're here working in this world. I'm so glad we're friends. And thanks again for coming on the show. - Anytime, anytime. You can't get rid of me, I love you. (laughing) - I love you too. To our listeners, keep an eye out for the bonus episode of Michelle's full piece about the gingerbread house, wherever you go and whatever you like to drink, always remember to enjoy your life and to never stop learning. at the link in the notes.
Music composed by Ersilia Prosperi for the band Ou: www.oumusic.bandcamp.com
Produced, recorded and filmed by Rose Thomas Bannister
Audio and video edited by Giulia Àlvarez-Katz
Audio assistance by Steve Silverstein
