Carson Leno, Fallon. Now it's wine talks with Paul K. Hey, welcome to Wine Talks with Paul Kay. And we are in studio today in southern California having a great conversation with the great Mister Kevin O'Leary. We'll get to the introductions in just a moment. Wine talks, of course, available on iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you hang out for your podcast. And always sponsored by the original wine of the month club, now sporting the Napa and Bordeaux series of wines.
But that's not why we're here today. We have the honor and privilege and the humility to have a great guest, Mister Kevin O'Leary, you commonly known him as from the shark tanks, but he has a tremendous amount of experience in many other industries and businesses. And so welcome to the show, Kevin. Really appreciate being on. Great to be here. Thank you very much. I see you're sitting in a barrel room because we're going to talk about
wine. You're wearing your taste vin, which is an extraordinary device, which I don't think I told you on this little agenda here, that I have a small collection of taste vin that over the years my father collected. They're beautiful things. I mean, you think about the rich history of what the testaven is and all of the poetry around it, and the thief that samples the wine out of the barrel and all of the. The artistic aspects of winemaking, as opposed to the scientific.
But you need both of them today if you want to make money in the wine business. You know, it's interesting you said that. And so you're gonna immediately go off script, because I didn't even have this written down. But this is an important thing. I was talking to Peter Mondavi from Krug, and I was telling him about one that the first american president ever to pour in american one was Eisenhower at a lunch with Queen Elizabeth. But he was telling me that he just got 100 points from a
49 or 45 or 46. I can't remember. Krug special select. And I started thinking, you know, those that had to be pre the labs, pre all the phenolic ripeness, pre all the acid testing, or at least much less of it. And here we have this ethereal value in a bottle of wine that just came out of the chutes that this guy created long before the technology and the scientific part of it.
Doesn't that bode well for the wines of, for instance, Burgundy and Bordeaux that are classic over the years from non technology? It does. However, in modern day winemaking, particularly new world wines, they're not made to last. They're sort of. If you think about the classic American Cabernet Sauvignon, I'd say that 50, 60% of them made can't get past five years before they start to really roll over. And Chardonnay. So I give them 36 months. The economics of the wine
business are nothing less than brutal. And I think, getting right at it, as I'm known as an investor, the old adage, how do you become a millionaire in the wine business? Well, you start as a billionaire. That's true. And so what matters is to start with the realization, in North America, 97% of wine is sold for under $14.99 a bottle. 97%. Wow. That means there's only 3%
of wines that are sold to premium. And so if you can't master the ability to have logistics and be able to ship a minimum of 150,000 cases, which is the break even number, you'll never make money in the wine business. And I realized that years and years ago. So today I'm proud to say I'm an investor in over 19 different vineyards. So 3000 acres either owned or leased, and we ship 2 million cases a year. Is that part of the O'Leary estates brand as well?
O'Leary is just one of the brands. It's vintage estates. Recently went public on the New York Stock Exchange. I was privileged to be able to go there with the executives and ring the bell. Last week in New York, went public through a sPac. But Pat Roney, the head of that team, has been rolling up the wine business for years. He's been acquiring venture after venture Vineyard. It's just been going on and going on. All of these different estates have been acquired under the Vintage Estates label.
Because in the end of the day, if you're going to be a player, you have to have the ability not only to make great wine, but to be able to ship hundreds of thousands of cases a day. And that's what we're able to do now. So I'm very much part of that. I'm exploring a much deeper relationship with the wine industry now as I move into direct to consumer in 42 states. That's where you can make money building a direct relationship with a customer. That's an
exciting opportunity for Mister Ronet. When I got to visit him at Napa a few weeks ago, and I was so, I was humbled by the fact that he would even sit with me days before he went to New York and rang the bell. And I was appreciative of that. And I find that fascinating, because he didn't start that long ago. And he's diligent in his discipline, and his business acumen is obviously very good,
and his discipline is very high. And he just was studious to make sure he understood the industry and has touched most pieces of it, if not all pieces of it. Manufacturing, growing direct to consumer, the wholesale trade. I buy a lot of wines through the wholesale network here in southern California from vintage estates, and there aren't, I don't know. I think the first public brand of wine was not that long ago, really. How many now
do you believe there are? I think there's about five or seven public companies that deal with wine. Yeah. It's not a heavily indexed industry yet. I mean, you think about the difficulty of consolidating and getting scale. The land is very hard to buy. A lot of it's owned by people that don't care if they make money or not. It doesn't matter. It's just a hobby. I mean, there isn't much Sonoma in Napa left to buy
anyways, and Walla Walla and Washington state. But at the same time, the industry actually survived quite well through the pandemic as the direct to consumer business got launched. And so now some of the skill sets required to make it in the wine business weren't what they were two years ago. Direct to consumer marketing, social media, logistics, all of that have now taken the fore. And if you can't provide that in a winery, you're going to go out of business, because we're still not back 100%
retail. We're still not back in restaurants, open 100% anywhere. We're all optimistic. But the purchase behavior of the average american consumer has changed. They don't want to carry a 39 pound case from the store. They want it delivered to them. And that's what I've learned, and that's what we're focusing on. Well, the DTC market, direct to consumer market during the pandemic was incredible. Right. So we had an amazing surge here at the wine of the month club. It's
still sort of surviving, though. We all expect that there'll be some pullback because the restaurants are open and because the restaurants are buying again and because consumers want to get out of the house. But it's still quite a spike from 2019 and 2018. But there was something interesting that I had a conversation with the Napa Valley Register wine Beet writer, and she was talking about just before the pandemic. I think it was like February, late
February. I visited her. She goes you know, we're just learning how to chat. And I thought to myself, you know, this is really interesting, that most winemakers in the beginning are farmers, right? They just. They farm grapes. They're part of the land. They want to produce a good quality product. They sell the grapes, and they start making wine. And I thought, how do you see the farmer in front of a monitor and wait for that chat bell to go
off and then try to sell something? And I think what you're saying is exactly right, is moving towards a consumer who understands the Internet now, who's always on the Internet, who sees these ads on Facebook and Instagram and responds to the ad, because why? I think pandemic created a lot more confidence in buying wine over the Internet. I also think it's about trusting the brand. I'm very fortunate to have millions of followers on social media. Everybody knows
me from Shark Tank as the wine guy. I blend my own wines. I don't just slap my name on a bottle. I really care that these wines are excellent. I serve them to my family. I give them to gifts, all my business partners. So I care what's in the bottle, and I'm pretty good at it. And, you know, I've been able to adapt classic french wines, pinots and cabernets and others
Chardonnays, Montreichet, to the american palette. So when I'm thinking about bringing over a Chardonnay from a french heavy oak style or maybe a Crisper Montrechet style, I adapt that into my Chardonnays. And I've been very fortunate because just my standard Chardonnay has now won its fifth gold award. And so I'm very proud of it because I know that the palette in the US has changed slightly. People don't want the heavy oak anymore. They want a crisper, lighter experience, a
lot more fruit forward. And we've been able to develop that into the O'Leary shards and as a result, have been winning awards left and right. But I don't think that's rocket science. It's really getting people to try it in different regions of the world. What people say in New York are different, what they say in Florida different. What they say in Texas or California, you have to take that data and almost be scientific about it and figure out, okay, these are massive states. I
have huge amount of users there that want to try these wines. I've got to blend a wine that's going to match all of their expectations, and that's exactly what we do at O'Leary fine wines. I think that's a hugely important factor of your brand. And I see, I've been watching celebrity brands come and go for 30 years now. There were 16 PGA golfers that had brands that all failed. There's only one left, of course, Mister Norman. And it's
because you take an interest. You actually taste the wines. You actually blend the wines. You actually participate in what the profile that wine is supposed to be like, based on what you're saying, the consumer's interest in the brands. And it's funny you said that about the over oak Chardonnays. I did a wedding tasting two nights ago at a family's house. I brought an over Oak Chardonnay, which I don't care for,
but people like them, the rombauers of the world. And I took a nice, crisp, California Monterey Chardonnay, and that won hands down over the oaked one. And I thought to myself, I said, that's really interesting, because it wasn't that long ago that that Oak Chardonnay would have been the preferred brand and the preferred character, which to us, to you and me, in any way, you lose the sense of Chardonnay. The character of the Chardonnay gets lost in too much oak. And you're. And you're
right about that. Wine won't age. You know, they're all drunk young. So maybe that's why people like them. You know, they like them because once they did age, they'd be out of balance. Anyway, you know, it's interesting to me, and I've watched how many episodes of shark tanks, and particularly ones that deal with wine. You know, these are pretty well versed guys and gals on the show. They've been around. They've probably been to
many fancy dinners and. And tastings and things. And they don't seem to really understand wine to the extent that I would think they would. And that's not the right way to say it. That I would. That I would say they laughed at you when you were talking about the Chevaliers that one time on that one episode. And I thought that was hilarious. Yeah. Either you like wine, you don't, but I think wine can be something you just drink occasionally. It can become a
hobby, or it could become a profession. It can become an investment. I have a very, very active futures business. I buy wine futures. I trade what I call divorce sellers. If you have a hedge fund manager getting divorced, the first thing that goes is the seller. And I have a team that goes and assesses what's there. We bid cash for it. We take an airline hangar, and we break it up into the lots for the syndicate. And I've been doing this for years.
You know, I have a pretty five different sellers around the world. And yet at the same time, I mean, it's, wine's a business. And so what I like to do is have a deep knowledge of the different bridals from the old world and then try and adapt those to new world pellets. And the same thing with, with Syrahs and Malbecs. I recently launched a malbak, the
argentinian berries. But I had to really pull it back quite a bit because it's such a big, spicy wine that I could get even for people that like spicy cab, Cabernet Sauvignon. I thought it was too overpowering, so I had to do some work in blending it down a bit, and it was well received. We actually partnered with QVC on that one. We sold $5.2 million worth of wine in 20 hours. That's a record.
And we were able to ship all that wine within 48 hours. And so that's the combination of the science and logistics, the investment in infrastructure, and the ability to market the wine. If people trust you, everybody on QVC knows that I've been selling wine there for years. I'm the number one purveyor of wine there because I built a following that. Trust me. And my return rates are extremely low because I know what that buyer wants, and they know what their palate's like and what they enjoy.
And so I bring the rose and the sweet wines in April, and then we pull it back for the fall, Thanksgiving, into the more Pinot cabernet Sauvignon's, the reds, and then into the holiday season. We go back into the sweet wines, Moscato, and things like that. And that whole ebb and flow of taste through the year is part of what we've learned over time to mine data for and figure out what to grow, when to grow it, how much juice to make, how many bottles to prepare for
all of that stuff. It's a science, but it's still an art. That's a real interesting point, and I talk about this all the time. For one to make money in this industry is very hard. No matter what side you're on, whether you're a direct to consumer center like we are, or a manufacturer, it's just difficult to do because the margins aren't that great. You can't, you can't buy a widget for a dollar and sell it for ten. It doesn't work in the wine business. It's. It's. There's too many hands in the
pie. There's too many pieces of money, you know, too many ways to spend money to get it to the consumer. And you've done an incredible job making that efficient and filling the logistics pipeline with wine that allows you to lower shipping costs. And, you know, we have returns issues, we have state legislation issues, we have compliance issues. We have cola labeling. I mean, there's a lot of complicated moving
parts to make this work, and you've made it work. I was talking to Mike Solachi at Opus, and he was telling me that in 2018, Cabernet Sauvignon was $8,000 a ton for grapes, and that equates to something like $120 a bottle for the juice. Well, how can you possibly compete with other brands that are known well and
have to sell the wine for $175 a bottle? I mean, it's almost impossible. And this is what the plight of the pandemic and as well as the fires in Napa have caused a lot of small wineries to be in rather difficult situation. Not having a harvest and not having embraced the direct to consumer market like they could have in the pandemic. Yet now we have all this. There's a lot of commotion going on in Napa right now. It's a very difficult industry to
parse out. And it's kudos to your brand and your branding and your understanding of the marketplace to make it work, because it is more than just the art of wine. I have to say this a thousand times, but it is business. You can only survive losing money so long when you're trying to make wine and sell it until it's just. You just can't afford it anymore. It's about scale. You talk about juice costing that much of. Although you can never make money at that situation. The only way around it is
to really scale up. You need thousands and thousands of acres, obviously, Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon classics. They're the great american red and white wine. But we also sell Costco and target and other entities that have huge demands and volume, and they want delivery, they complexity. We even have specialty business where if you want to etch a magnum
for a wedding, we can do that, too. We look at all aspects of the direct to consumer business and figure out how do we acquire a customer at what cost, and then what can we sell them on an annual basis? And does it make money? It's very much the ability to understand that preference. But lately, with all of the data you can mine, when you sell direct, the preference of flavor, the preference of red versus white, the time of the year they're buying,
is it around a birthday or a holiday? What is it they are actually buying at different seasons and just pouring all that data together and figuring out what to grow. You have to be totally vertically integrated and make the assumption you're able to meet demand, because there's nothing worse than acquiring a customer and then dissatisfying them on choices. They can't get what they want when they want it.
That's a disaster. That's a hugely important part in what you're doing, is so right on, because I can't tell. Any business I've seen come from business school, entrepreneur school, maybe Harvard Business School, Cornell, and they follow the spreadsheets and that's all they do. And they understand that wine is such an emotional product and you have to connect to the brand. Unlike most products, there are a lot, of course, procter and gamble, toothpaste
and salad dressing. But when it comes to wine, it's so brand driven to understand and trust O'Leary estates as the brand of their choice. And knowing that if you try a new varietal like Malbec or Seurat, you're going to get a good shot at it being something that you're going to like because you trust the brand. And it's just so important, you know, it's. I'm trying to sort some thoughts on my coffee is where, what inspires you to do this in the first place?
I mean, we're going to go back to the, to the Chevaliers here in a second. But where was this love of wine? Where did it start? Well, when I was young, my birth father died when he was 36 years old. He was very young. My mother remarried and my stepfather actually joined the United nations. And we started traveling around the world. Tunisia, Ethiopia, Cyprus, Switzerland, Germany, France, Japan. Every two years we moved, and it was a remarkable upbringing, but he had a great love
of wine. And he, whether we lived in Tunis, in Tunisia or Morocco or wherever, he would always learn about the varietals in those regions and look for great wines and take me on that journey with them, even though I was 1516 years old. So I was brought up in more of the traditional european fashion work. Kids that age, it's very common to be given
wine. It's not a bad thing. And then I became part of what I knew, and then I became more interested as I got older and got into a much deeper understanding of Bordeaux and Burgundy's and italian wines, and started to collect and go through the different vintages. I could tell the difference between an 82 and 88, 89 and a 90. Now, you know, you put a mask over the bottle, I'll tell you if it's a vertical litter or chevron, whatever. I did that because I
enjoyed it. But the wine business itself actually started from years and years ago. Sharknakes been on the air for 13 years and years ago. There was a deal called Zip's Wine, which was a single serve application. The first time I'd seen it. Using nitrogen to steal the plastic glass and making it available would last for entire summer season. And I was intrigued as a business to get involved in that. And I knew at the time I did the deal. I knew at the time that Costco was the
biggest wine buyer on earth. And I just, you know, one of the great things of being a shark is most people return your calls. But I had no idea who the head buyer was at that time. It was a woman who's now a legend named Annette Alvarez. She worked here in Florida, sweeping the floors of Costco. But her palate was so extraordinary that she ended up being the world's largest buyer when she became the head of the entire wine vertical in Costco. And I decided to just cold call her on a
Saturday. The air showed on a Friday, and I was able to get her cell phone number through nefarious ways. And I got it and I left her a message, and about 20 minutes later, phone range, and it was Annette. And she said, you were rude to Barbara last night on shark Tank. I said, what? What does that have to do with anything? And she said, no, I just didn't like the way you cut her off. And I said, that's good. When I cut her up, Annette, it's good to hear less
from Barbara. Anyways, we got into that conversation first, and she basically said, look, I know the deal. I watch shark tank. I'm leaving with my husband to Hawaii for holiday. We'll be in John Wayne airport on Saturday. Next Saturday, a week away. I'll give you an hour of my time in the layover, and I want to meet your wife. And I said, you want to meet my wife? She said, yeah, I want to know what kind of woman would marry a guy like you. I said, okay, great. So we flew across the coast
and we met with Annette. And she basically said this to me. It was really intriguing. She said, look, Kevin, you want to be in the wine business, you might be a great collector of wine. You may know a lot about wine, but you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to the wine business. I'll tell you what it's going to take to do business with me. If you want to do business with me, you're going to have to take an order from me and deliver me 150,000 cases in
one week. Now, how the hell are you going to do that? I said, well, Annette, that's ridiculous. Nobody can do that. She said, yes, there is someone who can do that. His name is Pat Roney. You go cut a deal with Pat to vintage wine estates, you figure out what you're going to do with him as a partnership, and then we can do business. And that was the beginning of my journey into the real game, because Rony had the scale, he had the logistics, he had the order system, and
he had enough juice that I could start blending. In fact, what you're looking at behind me is one of the very first barrel rooms that I was blending in years and years and years ago. This picture is very old. It's when I first started with Jung and we built this business up together.
Initially, I was in retail, but then when the laws changed, and this was the magic moment for me in the wine business, you recall it was only a few years ago when 42 states opened up that will allow you to directly ship, if you owned a winery in California, direct to the consumer. Well, Katy, bar, the doors. When I saw that, I said, watch this. And we started doing tests on television. It worked. We just blew the doors off. Direct to consumer. And now,
as far as I'm concerned, there's no other way to sell wine. You cut out three tiers of distribution. Spectacular. Direct to consumer. The chain. The laws are changing again, and I think there's more states coming online for the o. Two winery licenses in California. There's some states that are headed toward retail as well. There are some states that are clamping down. There's even talk of Utah doing something which would be like the only state has ever thrown anybody
in jail for shipping alcohol into their state. So it's pretty dynamic. And there is this conflict between the commerce clause of the constitution and the restriction of alcohol over state lines, all from post prohibition and Joe Kennedy trying to protect his base. But I see that loosening quickly, and you were quick to take advantage of it. But, I mean, even then, to produce 150,000 cases in a week was quite a tall order. I mean,
that's pretty amazing. How long ago, what year was that you were saying that happened. That was eight years ago now, but we do that on a routine basis now. We produce more than that. We ship millions of cases. Wasn't that the. I'm sorry, wasn't that the pre dosed wines that you're talking about that shark tank offered? It was the single serve, which actually, the market took off for. There's been other attempts to put wine in cans and all kinds of ideas, but
the real volume is done in the traditional bottle. I mean, I just drop shipped my new 2020 Chardonnay this week. This is, you know, I've even pulled back the oak even more. I just keep getting the data, and I mine for the data, and people want those big fruit forward, crisp, Montreichet style, apricot, blueberry, raspberry. I mean, it's really. This one has been a huge winner for us, and I'm very, very conscious of it.
I try it out on lots and lots of women. Women buy about 90% of that chart, and then this is a very rich pinot noir. I'm getting better and better with the Walla Valley varietals. The terroir is so much so close to DRC Region that I'm able to get that barnyard nose that is so famous. And I tell the american palate when I talk to them on television, listen, I want you to smell the inside of a pig
barn. And I think people really get intrigued because this was one of my best sellers on my recent sale, I said, you're going to smell the barnyard, you're going to smell the pigs, you're going to smell the cows, and then you're going to sip this incredible elixir, and
you're going to get an explosive outcome. And I got to tell you, the pno this year, even though it's early in the morning for me, I was sampling some of the different bottles to get bottled, just variants, to see what it was like across a few cases. You're saying it's from Walla Walla? Yep. So it's a Washington state pinot? Yep. It's spectacular. Oh, my goodness. And you, you know, I gotta tell.
You, you know, we can compete with the French. They have the brand, but what we can do now in the new world can kick French Bunn. There's no question about it. You know, we're in our infancy. We're in our infancy when it comes to these things. How much potential do we have? Well, I have Latash in my cellar. I have eschenzol. And in the summertime at my lake house, I have the big, snobby wine taste sock, where I bring out a latasha, a latour.
I go from Burgundy to Bordeaux, and I say, okay, we're going to do a blind taste test. Three whites, three reds, and you're not going to know what they are. And I bring out the heavy guns, like an 82 latour, and I put my own white beside it. That's funny. And more than 50% of the time, and I have 2025 people over. We did a white taste test last year and knocked everybody's socks off. I had a $14 bottle of my chardonnay at one beat out. That is really funny. You need to
understand the palate. You need to understand where people's palates are going, where the puck is going, not where it was. Well, it's interesting. You said that you vented this walla walla. Pinot for one. Walla Walla for pinot noir is a very unusual thing anyway, and so you found a district that creates this burgundian character, which is fascinating to know. I mean, I've tasted 300 wines a month. I've been doing it for 30 years. I don't.
I can tell you on one hand probably how many walla walla pinos I've tasted. And here you find. Well, and what happened in this case is we bought a winery, and there was barrels, the origin not known, but they were resting in peace there. And so you may be right, they didn't originate there, but we got all the inventory, and when I tasted it, I was blown away. Wow. There was also some cabernet Sauvignon there. So I did something that's extraordinary. I actually blended them across
years. I found these incredible barrels. We only had one crack at the bucket on this one, but we blended a cabernet Sauvignon from these extraordinary barrels were also from Walla Walla, and that won plenty of awards. But it's unusual to do that, to experiment that way. But you can do that in a new world. If you tried to do that in French, you'd lose your pension. That's right. I mean, you'd be breaking every law known to man over there. But
in the new world, we can experiment. We can try things. We can blend the way we want. And certainly blending is the only way you're going to match the american palate and how fast it moves you remember, you know, Rose, just a decade ago was nothing. Look at it now. I mean, it's incredible. And that's partly because of resurgence of the other thing. I don't know if you remember Bridget Bardot in one of her early movies in 19 54 55
put ice in her wine. She put ice in her rose because she was between takes and they filmed it. I think it was Life magazine or look magazine was on the set shooting and she was very hot. It was at St. Consanc, which is a famous restaurant. It's just a tent over the sand. And they had all these images of her putting ice into wine and it caused a sensation. And it's so common today to see people putting ice into
their rose. And that's where it started. And so that experimental vibe, the whole idea of having fun with wines and doing things differently and blending them yourself and saying, go ahead, put ice in the wine, and it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. It's what you like. I guess where I draw the line is I traded a case of Latour in 1990 to a buyer who mixed it with Coca Cola. Yeah, that freaked me out. I read about the chinese market doing quite a bit of that in
the beginning, though. I think they're more educated now. But that was. That is kind of disgusting, frankly. Well, I mean, you know, it's an acquired taste, but that was a 1990s latour in the wood, like one of the great vintages, rare bottle of wine, and that's what happened to it. One of the great vintages of the century. You know, it's funny, you said the rose thing is very interesting to me because this is southern California. We don't see a lot.
It takes a little longer sometimes for wines to reach the west coast as far as their pallets are concerned. But now I'm seeing so many roses from many, many districts of the world, and I'm trying to determine whether these roses are new or they've always had them at these obscure districts. They just decided to start sending them. Like you can buy Tuscan roses and Bordeaux roses, which are kind of rare roses from the Canary Islands, from Sardinia, from Croatia. And so I'm
thinking, gee, did the rose phenomenon start? And so these districts decided to make them, or they've always made them and now they're popular? No, no, they haven't always made them. What happened was this explosion of north american demand for rose and also the different styles of roses, because I notice on the east coast, when we bring a sweeter rose, we do very, very well. And so, same with Moscato. I mean, those wines do incredibly well in the April time period. And then as we get into
the fall, we want something a little crisper. The season for Jose extended a little bit. We still get sales in September, which was unheard of. And so it's becoming a varietal of year round popularity. And Rose is not a wine. You're going to sell her for more than, I don't know, 15 months or something. I try and make sure I'm out of it by the end of the season, so I'm not leaving it lying down over
the winter. But the demand is insatiable. So all these regions you just spoke of said, wait a minute, I know how to make a rose. I'll figure that out, because I can sell every case I make, and all roses, as you know, are not made equally. And there's a lot of really
crappy rose on the wine on the market. And when I really, when you bring a rose, you want to make sure, because you're going to get a lot of cross pollination for your Moscato drinker from people that really like sweet wines, dessert wines, they're going to try that rose and you want to make sure that their expectations are met. I'm all about, I always say I have your back on one. You're going to try something new for me. You know my brand. Trust me, I'm going to make it for you.
And so far, knock on a barrel of a wood barrel had been successful. That's a, that's interesting, because I took these three roses for this wedding, and I, I deliberately took three different styles because I wanted them to taste. And I had the whole table. There was eight people there. Everybody had a different opinion about which one they thought was best. And there was one sweeter, you know, slight residual
sugar pump up if it was from passo. I had one from the provence, which is leaner and cleaner, and I had one biodynamic one, I think it was from Mendocino, actually. And all three of them had a separate character. And each one of them garnered the votes from various people, but none of them came out as shiners. I thought, wow, different palates just sitting at this table
when it comes to Rose. And what I think happened with this group who were not rose drinkers prior, they realized this is a pretty fascinating product, and they are so different from place to place and from manufacturer to manufacturer. And you're right, there's some really, really bad ones. I taste them all the time. I find this really fast. I find this fascinating because
we're talking about the new world and it's very important. Jacques Ladier from Louis Jadot has told me, look, you guys in the new world from the beginning, have a chance to do whatever you want and to taste and experience experiment, including with food. In Burgundy, we're forced to make Pinot noir and Chardonnay, basically Bordeaux. We have five red grapes and three white grapes. We're stuck with that. And the foods have grown that way as
well. They sort of come along. But in the new world, and I've been reading books on the cuisine of America, we get to experiment. We get to grow Malbec in Napa if we want to. Or we can grow it in Paso. We can grow it in Walla Walla, Washington. Doesn't matter. We can try it and see how it works. But you belong to this organization, which is quite historical, called the conferee Chevalier de Testevent. And that is dyed in the wool, traditional burgundy. How did this come about?
I have a very expensive seller of burgundian DRCs, which I did as an investment years and years ago. These wines now trade for five, six, $7,000 a bottle. As you're aware, I dont sell my drcs. Theyre very hard to get. The prices have gone insane. Its very difficult to stay with your allocation each year as you watch these price escalations of 20% to 40% some years. But if you look for the most extreme wine lovers on earth, youre going to find them in burgundies, in white Burgundy, and in red
burgundies. The way to appreciate it is to go there and see how small this region is. I mean, the Montrachet vineyard is the size of your backyard. Each row is worth 2 million, 3 million euro. LVMH is trying to buy them one roll at a time is the way the king used to get on death, taxes. Half a roll of wine there. I mean, it's extraordinary. The wines have brand.
They have history. They have all of that. And so those societies, the Chevalier de Testevin, they gather usually every 60 days, and we do some serious drinking. Our seller in our chapter is worth millions of dollars. And if you want to come in as a member, now, you've got to buy in. But the deal we have for members that you can make the cut is you buy it at our cost. So you're getting an automatic appreciation of almost 500% to your allocation of the seller. So we have lots
of people like to join, but we're very, very selective, as per the rules. You really have to know your stuff, and you know, and you have to have an allegiance, at least a collection, at least a commitment to the burgundian wines, which, you know, everybody drinks Bordeaux, I get it. But you don't bring a Bordeaux. Do whatever the egg. That's the bad dinner I've ever so many. Kick that one. That doesn't happen. And so
you're basically having these roaring debates. And you remember in the mid nineties, there was a corkage issue on the whites, and so no one ever solved it. But a lot of the white had matterized, spoiled, oxidized. It was tainted. Oh, you can't ship it back. And we had these raging debates as to what happened. And yet, the other night here in Miami, I
enjoyed a 1997 Montrechet. It was perfect with one of my neighbors two towns north of here, who's got one of the world's largest private collections of white burgundies here in Florida. I have never seen a cellar that large. And because he has such perfect provenance for getting these wines, he's aging whites in a rare way that you
don't see anymore. You know, for the listener, I wanted to peel back a little bit, because in Burgundy, you're required to grow in the reds, p o noir, unless you in the south and you grow some gamin Beaujolais. But in Bordeaux, you're allowed to grow up to five varietals and blend them any way you want, or bottle them 100%. And so the argument goes on between the two districts is Bordeaux winemakers are blenders. You know, they're
farmers, too, but they're blenders. And in Burgundy, we have to be very conscientious about our terroir and make sure that we garner the best grape from that soil. And there's something fascinating about Burgundy that turns me on, frankly, and I learned it from Albert Bichaux, the group Alberbi show, when they brought the rock samples from 10 meters
down where the tap roots are. And if you're across the street from one of the great distress, let's just say Montrachet, or that 30 foot or ten meter root is touching completely different soil than its neighbor. And hence these micro small vineyards that create such dramatically different wines from its neighbor across the street, virtually from across the street. And that part is extraordinarily fascinating because it is terroir driven, is it not? Just completely driven on what we're going
to get out of the soil. Yeah, I mean, people don't, in the new world, don't put as much weight on what I call stressing the grape. I mean, obviously, you know the rules. Burgundy, you can't water it, you can't put manure on it. Farmers that are caught putting manure in their pants and they're walking their vines and then letting it fall their pant legs. I mean, all these rules are very strict and handed down from hundreds of years ago, but it does show up in the personality of the wine.
And I can tell it's incredible. I'm really in Bordeaux. I love Latour and I love Chevalier blanc and I've loved those forever. And I have massive verticals of those wines, but they have a different personality. They're not far apart from each other, but they're completely different. It's a combination of the blending and the terroir and the style of the cellar. But that tobacco y, cigar y vibe that a latour has is never present in a chevron blanc, ever. Very delicate wine. And
I love to. People often come over for dinner to our home, and I'll say, look, how into wine are you? Because if they tell me they don't care, I'm not going to open a tour. Exactly. But if they really are knowledgeable, I'll say, let's go deep, vertical. Let's try two different wines and two different timeframes and enjoy. The conversation about wine is about storytelling and making of it, certainly about storytelling.
But the drinking of it brings people together. I think it's a wonderful business if you can get into a place where you're making money doing it, and it takes you into extraordinary situations. Let me give you an example. I'm also a very large watch collector. It's a huge hobby of mine. It's an investment I make. I have very, very unique pieces. Now, here's where the two worlds merge together. There is a watchmaker named FP Journe. He's a frenchman, but he has set up shop in Geneva about 20 years
ago, and he became an extraordinary watchmaker. He only makes 900 pieces a year. They appreciate in value about 400% the minute they leave the shop, if you can get one, which is narrowly impossible. However, here's what happened again, a great story. He shows up in Geneva making extraordinary timepieces as a young
master learning his trade as a watchmaker. Some of the authorities in Geneva say that, look, if you move to Geneva, we'll let you put the seal de Genevre on the back of the watch, saying that it's a swiss made watch headquartered in Geneva. And he said to them, no, I'm not putting that brand on my pieces. Mine are too good for that. Wow. I'm above that. And the watch community. Imagine Patek Philippe, Rolex, Adam RPK, all these massive brands. They just freaked out. Who the hell is
this guy? How could he even think that? And that was the beginning of the legend of FD Jorn. Still alive. He's the Picasso. Watchmaking. However, this October, when the Jourin society meets, they'll be meeting in this exact room you see behind me. We're going to have a special tasting of my varietals from that year right out of the barrel. And we'll be also together with some of the most serious watch collectors in the world. Combining those two worlds together.
People that collect really high end, you wouldn't be surprised to know that also collect really high end wines. And it's a wonderful chance. And FP Journe is an avid, a huge advocate for french wines. I plan on doing a blind test, taste test against his wines. He makes some and I'm going to kick his ass. That's great. Can I let there be a fly on the wall on that one? It's interesting because we were talking about this before and I brought it up. I mean, I put in my notes about
watch collecting. I'm a classic car guy. I love classic cars. Watch the auctions. I'm constantly sending friends links to cars coming up for sale. And that's a volatile market, right? It always seems to go up. The upward graph has always been upwards, but it takes major dips along the way based on recessions and economic booms. Is it the same with watches, and particularly with wine as well? It's so hard to
resell a wine, but you have a seller that would be properly controlled. But do you find that with the watches as well? The trouble with the watch market, when you get into the rarified pieces, I have one of a kind pieces now that are made by the various maisons for me, because I'm known as a collector. I can't sell those sideways. It would be impossible to have Adam Arcuquet make a one of a kind watch and then all of a sudden see it show up in the secondary market during your lifetime.
So they would expect to see it in the state sale after your passing. That makes sense. Or passed on to your son or whatever, and your family. So, yes, while they're investments, and I do mark to market them for insurance purposes each night electronically, there's all kinds of applications. Now, one is called Chrono 24, that looks at the trading prices of every watch around the world, every minute, so
that you're able to assess the value of your collection. But I don't sell watches because this is an FP join on my wrist right now. Centigraph. This watch is one of ten made. Only ten. There was a demand of 1000. People wanted to buy it. I was very, very fortunate to be one of the ten picked to own it. It's six of ten. I've been offered ridiculous amounts of money for it. But if FP knew that I sold that watch without his knowledge, I'd be cut off. I would no longer be invited
back to buy more pieces. And it's a very personal thing. It's a very, very interesting relationship between the maker and his collectors. And yet the value inherent on this piece, I mean, some of these are selling for a million dollars at auction. Wow. You know, and you're wearing it around. That's great. I believe a watch loses its soul if it's not worn. I mean, I know collectors that keep them in their boxes. I have all the original papers and everything, but
I wear up to three different watches a day. And, you know, one for the morning, one at noon, one at night. The only challenge I've got now is my wife. When I come home with another watch, she says, why? Why? Why did you buy another watch? You can't even wear the ones you've got anymore. This is just insane. And I said, you just don't understand the passion of this. She says, no, I don't. You've got to stop doing
this. It's not a passion. You have a disease. I think we have the same problem at different levels because I get the same pushback. You're sick. You're a sick person and you need help. You have to stop wellness. I got pushed back on the podcast. You know, that's it. You brought something up earlier, which is very interesting because it is about the story. And I think doing this podcast in the media, as you understand, and you were in the business forever and you even had tv stations. I love
it. I love doing it. And I don't care if I'm making money at doing this podcast or not. I want to do it and I want to meet people like you, and I want to talk to other winemakers across the world and find out what they're thinking and what they're doing. And one guy put it the other day, he says, you know, I've met the most incredible people, tasted the most incredible wines and had the best food. I would never trade this lifestyle for anything. And the story behind that is just becoming part of
it. I think I was telling you about this dinner, this tasting I had for this wedding. And I was sitting there talking to my friends, a couple of couples there I didn't know. And one of them says, I heard your podcast on Vuv Clicquot. I go, great. He goes, so I went out and bought a bottle of gold label and I tried to get my wife to drink it and she says, why are you drinking champagne? It's in the middle
of the day, or it's like at nighttime. It's not a celebration. But you taught me through your story of Tilar Mazio's book right here that this is a very important piece of business. She was an incredible businesswoman, Barb Nicole. She was an incredible packager. She's an incredible logistics person. She's an incredible winemaker, she's an incredible socialite. And there was a really cool story, and that story is from 1790 or something, but it created a desire in this person to
go out and buy the wine and go out and buy the watch. To go out and buy the car. To go out and buy, like, I have a doom buggy, a 1969 doom buggy Myers makes. I only bought it because when I was a kid, my uncle took me out in his and I thought, one day I'm going to own this car. And I finally got to afford it, which is not an expensive car. But. But it's about the story. It's about what we're doing. It's about the history of it. And in your case, with the watches,
you can't sell it because you're the owner. The story's going to be, this was Kevin O'Leary's watch, and he was the only person that got to buy one of ten. That's an important auction. It was an auction Phillips had early in the year for a good cause. And I'm known for wearing a white, steel, white face daytona with a red band on shark tank I've had for years. And that particular watch the Prince of Monaco asked me put into the auction, and it did very,
very well. But I have to admit, I didn't think about how I'd feel when I got exit to them. But I'd worn that watch for years. And so even though Rolex was going to give me a new one, it's not the same. It's not that watch. Right. And so that went for a very high price. I'm very proud of it. I'm happy to support the charity, but I'm never doing that again. I'm not giving up a watch that I've worn for years. Cause I really felt a part of my
soul was lost there. And your wife will say, it's a disease. See, that's right. It was really, you know, we're coming out of 50 minutes. I want to take too much of your time, but I wanted to tell you about two things, and I want to. I was talking to Mister Spurrier, the great late
Steven Spurrier, and I was telling him about the Les Amis Devin. It used to be a chapter in here in southern California my father started, and it was a worldwide group, not like the Chevaliers, but it was an important group for wine aficionados. It was an important group for the consumer to learn about wine, to not be duped into Groupon, only type wines, to hear the stories, to hear the lectures, to have dinners.
And I've garnered the trademark for Les Amy Devant. And I'm going to resurrect the 501 to re educate the american palates, the american consumers, on what the wine business is about. And at the behest of Mister Spurrier, before he passed away, he says, you must do this. And so I'm going to start that up. I want to send you this communication on it. I've sort of brainstormed the idea. What does this thing look like in the virtual world? Is it virtual tastings? Is
it live tastings? Is it dinners? What's going to be involved? But I want to bounce it off of you since you're tightly connected to the. The passion of the wine business. And that's what I want this Leslie event group to do. So I'm going to expect that in the email. But the other thing we're doing, it's a great idea. My thing would be start small in a small geographic region and build it up. I mean, people want to. Our group, the Chevalier dutestevant, does a WhatsApp
conversation every night. About what? Everybody. Every night, we're always sampling each other's lines. Everybody starts with a white and goes into red for dinner. We're all in the database of knowledge of the different bridles that are being tried across that group of 80 people every night. I mean, you learn, that's amazing. If you find a wine from a certain year that looks bad, everybody go checks their sellers to see how many they've got and
see if there's any. It's a very interesting form of communication. It's a great idea. It is. It works. I mean, that came out of the pandemic. It's not going to stop. We're still doing it every night because people really enjoy it. Yeah, it's great conversation and it's. You can do it from anywhere in the world. I really enjoyed this. This was quite, quite different than what I thought it would be. It's great. Thank you. The last thing to tell you about is
a very special meeting. My good friend Mark Williamson at Willie's wine bar in the premier in Paris. It's a brasserie, if you haven't heard about it. He's been there since the eighties. He used to work for Steven Spurrier. We're putting together sort of a soiree, maybe the first quarter next year or the second quarter. Chefs, winemakers, professionals in the industry to celebrate Steven Spurrier's life. Just to get together, drink.
And we're calling it magnums at Willys. Some of the great negotiats will be there, and winemakers of the world and chefs. And I'm inviting you now. I'll keep you posted if you haven't. That sounds wonderful. If I may just do a shameless plug for something that's going to be. Please do. I'm doing a massive new online platform called Shop Mister Wonderful, where I'm going to be offering my wines in addition to some other shark take gourmet products.
Look for it soon. I think it'll be amazing pricing, but I just want to continue to expand this relationship I have with hundreds of thousands of people who bought my wines direct from the vineyard. So I want to grow that business even bigger. Well, you're a trusted source of passion for food and wine, and I think you'll do well with that. So last, before we get off, tell me, you know, you don't sound like the
guy on the shark tanks, the mister wonderful, which is sort of a condescending. Not condescending, but it's sort of an ironic term for the way you treat sometimes people, and I know that part of that, you don't sound like that person. So where did Mister wonderful come from? Did they call you this? Well, we think it's Barbara. In the first season when we're doing the. You know, we. We obviously started. She said, aren't
you just Mister Wonderful? I've done some aggressive deal. I said, yeah, I am Mister wonderful. It just stuck. Barbara and I are great friends. We've been doing this for 13 years together. The only reason she gets the shark tank set on time every year is I buy her a new brew. That must be a collection by now, then. Yeah, definitely. He's got the latest model every year. Well, we'll close on that. Thank you so much for the time today, and I hope
we get to do it again one time. But I will keep it posted on both Les Ami Devant and as well as the event at Willie's wine Bar. Thank you very much. Take care, my friend. Cheers. Thank you. Take care. Thank you for listening to wine talks with Paul Callum Carrion. Don't forget to subscribe. Subscribe because there's more great interviews on their way. Folks, have a great time out there in the wine world. Cheers.