Ep. 602 Robert Joseph (5StarWines 2021 Special)

Italian wine podcast. Chinchin with Italian wine people. Welcome Robert Parker. Welcome to me. No. No. Let's go back one. Take take take two. Take two. Welcome Robert Joseph. That's true. I you know what? I get you guys really mixed up. So Yeah. Yeah. He's old. I'm quite old. He's very old. He's also I am fat and he's fat. Okay. So he is American and older and fatter and richer. Okay? All of those. So just remember that. More famous, fatter, richer, more American at Alda. So I don't get any of those. Oh my god. Okay. That was a fantastic beginning. So let's go back to the beginning. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. Today, I have Robert Joseph here in front of me. You're such a good sport. So I'm loving being well, firstly, I'm loving being anywhere outside the UK because I haven't traveled in. So two thousand and nineteen, I traveled probably close on six months of that year, certainly five, nine, six months, including coming, here to Varonor, I think twice. Last year, like everybody else, I traveled almost not at all, although the first two, three months I did. And so, it's wonderful to be here in verona. It's wonderful to catch up with with friends, with other people. And certainly, the five star wines is an opportunity as indeed is the wine to wine event later in the year where I just catch up with people not just from Italy, but also from Pedro Bellisteros, Torres has come in from Spain, who's a really good friend, who I love to see and from from France and so, you know, I wouldn't get catch up with these people. So that that's really terrific. And of course, my friends in the Italian industry who, I just I just love being here. Well, I'm I mean, I guess the first thing that I, you know, listening to you say that, how many years have you been doing this? Tell me how you got into wine. And I know you've probably said this to people, you know, people ask you this all the time. So the the the story that I was abducted by a group of albanian gypsies who made wine is not true. But I've tried telling it over the years, and it it never quite works. So the real story is that I grew up. My parents accidentally, and this is true. Actually ended up owning a hotel and restaurant in the south of England. Basically, they bought a nice old building that they were going to convert into something else, and they didn't have much money. And the people who came in with investments said, well, we'll turn it into a smart hotel. My parents knew nothing about hotels or running hotels or stuff. So, and I as an only child grew up in this, quite exciting place, not far from Gatwick Airport. We were in the days where this is politically incorrect, what I'm about to say. But in those days, if you wanted to be an air hostess, a, they, looked at, they considered the way you looked, and, b, at, I think, thirty, you were retired. So, and we had, air crew staying in the hotel, and we had air crew working, moonlighting, working by the bar, and so This was not a bad place to grow up. I I I, you know, and there was swimming pools and tennis courts and all this. That was quite nice. So, I I grew up in that kind of world, and the wine, I I was not great in the kitchen. What I didn't understand was why people wanted the dish to taste the same as it had last time. I wanted to try something different every time and the chefs didn't want me to do that and the customers definitely didn't want me to do that. And that by the way is relevant to my view of wine today. I think that people when they go and have a pizza margarita want it to taste like a pizza margarita and wine people actually want this vintage to be different to. Oh, it's so exciting. The the the the this is I don't know that most people see things that way. I wasn't great in the bar because remembering that it was seven gin and tonics and two whiskeys rather than seven whiskeys and two gin and tonics wasn't great. So that wasn't really. And, you know, eventually, the wine cellar, I I gravitated there, at an age which I mean, anyone listening in America, this is ludicrous because I was doing that at the age of fifteen or sixteen. So that's like five or six years before it's legal to drink in the US. And I was absolutely fascinated by these labels, I like lots of kids, I collected stamps, a bit. And all these labels were like stamps, you know, they're all different. What does that mean? Why why this one? Why is this more expensive? The bottle shapes were pretty much the same, but the labels were varied. So So you became obsessed. I became not obsessed, but but quite interested, and I was able to taste the Italian, maitre d, and this is interested in that. And he, the leftovers at the end of the bottles, I got to taste. And, you know, initially the first wines, I can remember probably where so turn and some some some sweet, crowd, child pleasing wines. But, you know, little by little I got into that, and Hugh Johnson is my hero his first book called wine, which is still a terrific book. It's it's it's old. It's from the nineteen sixties and seventies. Was that the book that turned me on and the wine Atlas that that came out in the seventies after that. And I then went to live. I did to improve my French before some exams, I did two weeks in Charles Hyde sellers in Champaign at about fifteen or sixteen. And then at the age of around twenty I went to live in, burgundy with my then girlfriend. I I went there for what I thought was gonna be six months. I thought I'd learn everything about burgundy in six months, and I ended up living there for about six years off and on And I at the end of six years, I didn't learn everything about burgundy. So But, you know, oh, wow. Okay. And then what happened? The gypsies came back. That's gonna make it difficult for you to that out. No. I'm I'm gonna leave that in. No. Basically, I had no money. I I most of my time in the burgundy, I mean, when people talk about bottles of wine from burgundy costing hundreds and hundreds of dollars, I Even back in those days, things that that the people probably find hard to imagine, the the the shops road by my food in Burgundy, the average person living in Bohn, they weren't drinking Pino noir for the region. They were drinking stuff that came in liter bottles with stars around that you got a deposit back when you brought the bottle back. And the wine by that time probably wasn't algeria in anymore, but it came from anywhere. And you bought it by the alcoholic degree. So your ten percent was more expensive than nine and eleven was more than ten. And anyone who talks about the romantic past of wine, I can tell you that there were years when I was there in the beginning of the late nineteen seventies, years by nineteen seventy seven, for example, horrible, horrible advantage. People were picking grapes at eight percent natural sugar. And then they were putting in three or four percent in in in added sugar. The beautiful thing about those days was that because legally can only put two percent. Of sugar. So but of course, how do you do that? So the the the the local supermarkets were full of sugar at that time of the year. And so because you had to buy your sugar from the official place, so you everyone's buying sugar and then is or it's jam making time. And by the way, if you've never done this, anybody who's never been in a cellar when you are capitalizing the wine. In other words, you've got this fermenting vat of ripe or not very ripe grapes and then you put in the bag of sugar and the smell. It's like the best jam factory in the world. It's just glorious. The whole place suddenly exposed with great, wonderful, and in Pina noir it's raspberry, but if you're down in Bordeaux, which they were doing it every year as well. Anyway, so, I digressed a bit, but I was, I wanted to write about wine. I was gonna write a book about Burgundy. And then, a man called Anthony Hansen, very annoyingly wrote the book about burgundy that I was gonna write, and he did it far better than I would have done it. And so, okay, I wasn't gonna do that. So I, but I was invited to come and start to work on a magazine having already contributed a few articles to a trade magazine, a trade magazine that was called wine and spirit, and it was edited by somebody, called Janis Robbins, and I don't know what's happened to her since then. But anyway, she was editing that then. And, so I came back to the UK and started a magazine called wine international, what's what's called what wine then. And then we run a competition, not competition. We run an article, in nineteen eighty four, where we just got a few English spark English wines, not Sparkling wines, and there's a few English wines to compare with wines from other places. It's all white wines. And We got as many we had no budget, but we got as many, tasters with foreign names living in London that we could get. We didn't have to pay them anything. But the English wines actually did incredibly well. This was a big surprise to everyone. You know, essentially, we got a lot of coverage and so on. And but when we published that, I don't know what we were gonna call it, but my publisher at the time said whatever title we'd given, it wasn't very good. And he said, you should give it a punchy title. So we called it the international wine challenge. They're like fifty four wines. It wasn't a big deal. It was in the basement of a pub that we did it. But that actually became a competition. And then it grew and eventually became the biggest wine competition in the world. And I then went on to do it in places including Thailand and Vietnam and Russia, and India, and Japan, and Japan, and Poland, and you know, anywhere really. So out of all of the places in which you have tasted and written and talked and all the things that you've done, what where what's your favorite, your favorite country? I mean, do you base it on the your favorite kinds of wines? You know, Italy. So so here I am sitting in Verona. So, you know, the obvious answer. Well, that's the obvious answer. If I were in Buenos Aires, you know, what was I? What what what would I say? I I am promiscuous. You know, I I basically, I lived in Burgundy as I said, Sabineon, where is my wife, but Grenash is my mistress. Oh. And if I want to go out having fun, Grenash is probably where I'll go, because I I now produce wine in in the longer and one of the so we produced pinot noir down there which tastes nothing like burgundy. The things I learned about was don't own vineyards if you can avoid it. So, especially if you haven't got any money, it's a good reason not to own vineyards. So what I wanted to do this is at the beginning of the the the two thousand and five. I was fascinated in the success of new world brands, the the Mondavies, and the penfolds, and so on. And they were doing very well in the UK particularly. And I want to know why, why don't we have French brands? Why don't we have Italian and Spanish brands? Yeah. We have a few. We have Antinor, we have Torres and so on, but not very many. And they're not brands very, very often in the way of those newer brands. And I thought why couldn't want to have a French brand? And, so we didn't have any money, as I said, but and I didn't know how to make wine, which was another a problem really. And I'd never run a business of that kind. But apart from that, I was pretty set up for this. So, I found somebody who was a very clever winemaker who'd been what they call a flying winemaker who'd made wine in in about seventeen trees. So, so then that solved the winemaking side. And I found a label designer, because I'd already I'd done a book on wine labels, and I understood that the label was gonna be important, and I couldn't afford to pay a wine label designer. So we made the label designer partner. So Kevin Shaw had done the label for Hendrick's gin already, and he was a superstar designer. So I had Hugh Ryman, the winemaker, Kevin Shore, the designer. So that that's two starts. So then we needed to find somewhere to make the wine and the what we needed to do was to find somewhere where we could make a lot of a lot of wine and maybe make more, some volume and scalability that had the international grapes that people understood. So I needed chardonnay and cabernet and so on. And people who would understand what we're trying to do. And, we looked around and we found this wonderful set up, called, Jean Delibert, the set of cooperatives, near the wonderful, old kind of Disney, westeros type the town of carcassonne, and they understood immediately what we were doing, which was the because Minavoy, sadly, which is a fabulous, fabulous place to make wine, with with vineyards at high The the the the altitudes go from fifty meters above the sea to about three hundred meters and there's winds coming every which way. There's every kind of soil and every kind of grape going. But minivoy is hard to sell. Or how to sell for a for a good price, unless you're a smallest to eight, and some of it, it's been very well, and brilliant wine, some of them. But we came along and said, Hey, we're gonna we're gonna make a branded wine. And we called it, a lughorn wine, it's got a big black sheep on the label, and the idea was that we were kind of standing aside from the herd. And we started off with a Cabane Sierra or Cabane shiraz, which was the Australian blend, which I love that combination of grapes and it's what Bordeaux used to do a long time ago. And then chardonnay, you can make very good chardonnay and limu down the road from us, but it tastes a bit like burgundy, and I, and it doesn't necessarily taste like great burgundy, but tastes good like good burgundy. But I wanted to do something a little bit different, so I didn't want to make new world chardonnay. So what we do is we blend chardonnay from two or three different sites within the region with some vionnier, with about fifteen percent vionnier in it. And from the beginning, the concept was what we say in in the expression that won't make much sense to most consumers. We don't talk about the consumer's the news about it, but we call it a wine de terois. So it's not a wine de terois. Every wine we make is from a minimum, I'd say, of three different sites and probably five on average. And that is does two things. One is it enables us to keep the freshness, from using the high, higher altitude sites so we get a first dose. And none of our wines is ever over about thirteen point two, thirteen point five percent alcohol, which is not always easy at this in these days. So we can keep the alcohol level. We are making wine that tastes pretty much the same every vintage. Back to my pizza margarita that I was talking about earlier. And because the the cooperatives are working with, they've got a lot of land. We've been able to build up productions. And now we have fifteen different wines. So we've got a Savignor, Malbec, and, a pinot noir that does, it's it's it's it's it's really, but the GSM, the Grenash Sierra Morvedre, which is probably my favorite because of my, the Grenash part of it, if you like. But we're always playing with new things, new styles. And we're doing, the better part of, what, three point eight million bottles now, which we sell in about sixty countries. So we are, I've just learned in the last week We are the number one French brand in India. The Indian market isn't that big, but it's still quite nice. And we saw it in Russia and a lot and and it's just fun and I've learned a huge amount that I didn't know as a journalist So I now do consultancy. And I love that. I love working with we've worked with the Bordeaux Chateau recently, but I'm working with the country of Moldova and so on. And, trying to work back from the consumer to the wine. As well as saying, yes, we've got these grapes and these vineyards, but the wine industry tends to start with the, I'm making this. How do we make people buy it? And actually it may be quite hard sometimes to do that. And you may have to say, well, what is it that they want to buy, or what do we even make them want to buy? And how do we bring these things together? Wow. You sound very busy. Very busy. I shouldn't. I haven't got the time be. I I should go now. No. But I mean, the the wine production, you know, the writing, but that the tasting, you know, you just did five star wines, like, what's next for you? Do you have any plans for Are you gonna be starting anything new this year? Yes. Yes. I'm very excited. I've got a project in Georgia. Okay. Which is really exciting. I've two separate projects in in Georgia. And which I think is is an exciting country that a lot of people have, now know about. And it seems to be one of the go to, places for a lot of people. So that's, that's, that's, and I would have been there last year because of the pandemic, I couldn't and I've got some really quite interesting consultancy things coming up. It's just I think the wine industry is such a fascinating, world full of some of the most fabulous superintelligent people, but a lot of them actually are financially struggling. And to me, there's far too many people who are rushed to say, why does that wine cost so much? How can any wine customers actually say, well, how much did you pay to go and watch Milan? Play Manchester City the other day? You know, how much did you pay for that t shirt? And people don't seem to get as exercised about some of the prices of the other things they buy or or a meal in a restaurant or whatever. And I think we have to be, I mean, my wines are are very at the affordable level. We're in the US, we're about ten, twelve dollars a bottle. So we're not at the super premium end. But even at that price, we're probably a lot more expensive than many of the wines out there. And I'd love to be making some wine at fifteen to twenty, and when we will be. But it's actually trying to bring together the culture, the wine is to me. It is agriculture, it's art. There is a spiritual side but it's also a business, and I don't think we should be frightened of that. So I just, you reminded me of something a moment ago when you were talking about Georgia for your next big project. I've been reading a lot about orange wines in Georgia. Is that something that you're Yeah. I mean, what they would call Fevery because of that's the name for the amphora. Yes, but I think that this is is fascinating because I think there's a huge we have this one four letter word beginning with w, wine, and it covers everything from the bottle of burgundy that I read about the other day. It looks like forty three, forty seven thousand dollars or something from, you know, it's just stupid amounts of money, but it's just a bottle of liquid down to something that we could buy for fifty because I go to the bulk wine fair every year and it's fifty cents a liter for perfectly drinkable stuff and it's all made from grapes. It's all called wine. Now within all that, you've got now we used to have red and white and sweet and fortified and sparkling. Now we've got another color. We've got orange. So I first went to Georgia in nineteen eighty eight eighty nine when the Soviet Union was still going, and I tasted my first February orange wine then, and I didn't understand it at all. And I've tasted a lot in the years since. And I think it's fascinating. It isn't what most people necessarily want to drink every day. It it it's any more than most people want to drink every day necessarily or or, so turn or whatever. I think it's it's another addition. It's another color on the palette that you can use with your painting, your paintings, but I think that the, what we've got to understand is where it fits. And so what I'm trying to do, because orange wine in in Georgia is what, as you've mentioned, you've heard about it, It's about it was about two percent. It's about five percent of George and wine. You know, there's ninety five percent of of the wine that is not in, I'm going to work orange wine. Of course, the the red wine that's in the amphora isn't orange. It's just red wine that's been left on its skins for a long time. I think in the future, we're going to see, and I think this is very exciting to me. We're gonna see the use of orange wine, wine that's been fermented on its skins as a blending component. And we're that's one of the things I'm playing with where you're actually saying, right, we've got a wine that's been in stainless steel or wine that could have been with oat or whatever, and you're putting a certain percentage of skin contact wine in it, which adds interesting flavors and complexity and so on. Whether we're gonna see a future in which there's gonna be a lot, I mean, really large volumes of skin contact wine. I'm not so sure. Well, you know what? I have to say. I'm I'm quite humbled because I I I wasn't expecting to get to interview you today. And I wasn't expecting to be interviewed by you today, but I'm delighted to to I'm delighted as well. And honestly, I know what's gonna happen. I'm gonna I'm gonna go home and I'm going to look up, all about, you know, I'm gonna search Robert Joseph, and then I'm gonna be like, oh, boy. Well, then you can actually, the the the I think that the the previous, that the clubhouse session that we did here with DB Kim, on celebrity wines, where I found myself defending, celebrity wines against, some quite vigorous, feelings against them, but by a very distinguished, American journalist, based here in Italy who who hates them, as a concept. And so, yeah, go go listen to that. No, I did. I edited it. I I do recall it. And I've seen, you know, obviously, I've I've I've I've read things that you've written. And I've seen your photo a bunch of times, and I've listened to you on Clubhouse, and I'm exposed to you constantly, but I've never met you before. It's it's it's I think of this. Being exposed to me is not something I recommend to anyone. Well, you know, I can tell you now that it it's been a pleasure and I appreciate you doing this interview so much. And, yeah, I I hope you enjoy the rest of your time. Are you going to Opera one? I'm definitely going to Opera. I'm in the setting. I mean, Verona was just one of the most extraordinary places is anyone who's ever been here knows and many other people who haven't been here will probably guess. And to actually see the opera in the setting of the coliseum of the arena here, I can't imagine not wanting to go to that. So yes. But this is just I think that the Italians I think anyone who lives here is very lucky. I think, you know, it's who you're surrounded by, wonderful scenery, around around the city, but there's also the the ancient buildings. And, that there are I think it's lived in. Piazza Abe where it was last night. You know, this is a place where the buildings go back hundreds and hundreds of years. But they're not museums. People are living them. People are having lunch and dinner in buildings that people had lunch and dinner in. Oh, it's wonderful. Four hundred years ago. City is absolutely. I can't, you know, broadcast aside. I I came here by accident. And I don't wanna leave. I absolutely love it. It's No. I get that. Robert Joseph. I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Listen to the Italian wine pot wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, HimalIFM, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time.