Ep. 221 Monty Waldin interviews Catherine Stratton (CS Selections)

Italian wine podcast. Chinching with Italian wine people. This podcast is brought to you by Native Grape Odyssey. Native Grape Odyssey is an educational project financed by the European Union to promote European wine in Canada, Japan, and Russia. Enjoy. It's from Europe. Hello. This is the Italian wine podcast with Me Monty. All in my guest today is Catherine Stratton. Catherine is a Los Angelina, and she's the founder of CS selections. What is CS selections? It's a very, very tiny brokerage in Los Angeles. Right. Well, that was a great interview. Thank you very much for coming on the attending white podcast. See you next time. Very, very tiny. Okay. You're not allowed to kick the table. I'm sorry. Right. So what go on. Is it what an importer? So I I work for four separate portfolios, three of which are direct imports with distribution licenses, and the other one is actually a brokerage unto itself. So I broker for broker. It's very complicated, but I sell wine from all over the world. And zoning in on Italy. What works? What doesn't work? What do you work with? So I work with a California only importer that up until last year, when I essentially sought them out, we're only working in Northern California. So I've brought them to the Los Angeles market, and have been primarily focused on pretty classic style Italian wine, but I'm working with them to sort of broaden the stretch of certified organic, maybe more natural in the sense like clean natural side of wine, and maybe more unusual native varieties. Okay. So let's dig deeper into that in terms of native varieties. What is working at the moment? And where do you think you can make a difference in terms of Italian native varieties getting into your market? So Los Angeles is an incredibly open market in the sense that they are not stuck in some sort of rut thinking that Italian wine is what it was twenty five, thirty years ago. But that's all the places that they've changed. Are there any places in America that do you think still think Oh, absolutely. How would you care to name any or not? No. It's not fair. Oh, because I haven't been to many of them. So I feel like I can't be judgy. Okay. The thing about Los Angeles is it's like having thirty cities squished into one. So every neighborhood has its own set of wine that they would like to purchase, and there needs to be a huge array of things that you offer in an Italian portfolio to make everyone happy. So you have neighborhoods like Venice and Silverlake that only want super obscure natural wine at an incredibly low price, or you go to something like slightly outside of Los Angeles, you end up in Orange County, for example, where they're still, you know, their chardonnay is still queen and Cabernay is still king, and they still drink a lot of pinot noir. And they're the kind of people that still want county classico. They want barolo. They want, you know, they'll drink swave and gabi because they remember the names. It's generational. So as younger people can't afford to live in cool places and they're spreading out, I'm seeing the edges blur, which is quite exciting, which means there are areas where I couldn't go before with any of my interesting wines, my native grape varietals that made me no one knows how to pronounce. Now they're accepting them. So there's a nice blurring of the edges happening. Okay. So what about the future, though? I mean, how are you gonna continue to to make progress? Is that just down to you? Is it also down to influencing the media that also influencing what people people drink or restaurants. I know it's kind of chicken and egg, isn't it really? Yes. I don't definitely know where it will start. I think it starts oftentimes with the social media of the places where people like to shop. Less, like, I think that influence is coming from knowledge and events and this full Italian wine ambassador side of things for people. Now there's a title that goes along with my level of expertise, which is helpful so that when people ask me questions and I can, you know, extrapolate laid on for half an hour about something they really probably didn't want to hear about. I do forewarn them. I will go as deep as you'd like to go into this. Please for let me know. Do you wanna just have the fluffy conversation or do we wanna have the in-depth conversation you gotta get the impression you prefer the in-depth? I do prefer the in-depth, but only with the people who want to go there. I don't think pouring this knowledge on someone who doesn't understand enough yet about Italian wine is the smartest of choices because then it just gets more confusing rather than last but you wanna get them excited. You wanna intrigue them in the history and the style of winemaking the even just the simplicity of you drink more Italian wine, you'll probably have fewer headaches as long as it's of quality. You know, there's California market. I have so many people tell me, I'm stick to sulfites. It's my least favorite comment that I ever get because I'm gonna have to lecture them. Why? Because, yeah, she's it's the alcohol that's giving them the headache rather than sulfites. Or the pesticides spray down the grapes that then don't get washed that get made into wine, and then they drink a lot of it, and they're also showing buying the wine in supermarkets for eight ninety nine a bottle and buying forty dollars steaks at Whole Foods. Right. There's a a big kind of disparity on what people will do with their quality. And I find that people are willing to go to the ends of the earth to eat organic, but they forget to drink organic. Right. That's important. But isn't that hasn't that historically been a problem of availability? It's not a problem in LA anymore. Available of organic has nothing to do with it. I mean, we have stores that focus primarily organic biodynamic natural. It won't even get in the door. If it's not. So it's more the willingness of people to understand that wine is food. So where does Italy fit with that though? Given the Italy and, ranked also with Spain as one of the most important producers of organic wine on the planet? I think that they're leaders in the market in it, and I think Spain as well. Spain in California, oddly enough. I did have the pleasure of working with a wonderful Spanish book for a number of years, and theirs were some of the most fun wines to sell. So I can't I maybe have a skewed vision on it because it was a huge source of my income for many, many years was selling organic Spanish wine. So I think Italy has a better chance of breaking through that edge, that market because people have such a love for Italy. I think kind of universally person to person anyone you talk to United States. Loves Italy. Most of them have been there. If they haven't been there, they wanna go, and I think fewer people think about Spain with a with as much fondness. K. Do you do, events and tastings to get people in the theater when you're allowed to do that legally? How does Yep. No, I do. It's always linked through store. So some place that hasn't, we have on and off premise locations. So as long as they have an on premise license, meaning they can pour wine either tasting glasses or bottles. In an event, I have a number of favorite places to do them obviously is you get a lot of repeat people coming and the repeat people are the ones that come back because they know you're going to be there and they know that they will learn something valuable and take some really good wine. And that started. I mean, I'm not remotely famous, and I should probably be be better the social media part of it. It's not a huge huge skill of mine. I do try, but I kind of rely on the store to get the word out and then I'm there to educate people. So go run me through. Are I coming to one of your tastings? I sit down and then Most of them not sit down. Alright. Stand up. Yes. Stand up. Walk around. No. It's not about that. It's about LA's too casual. Oh, right. So it's kind of a convivial and Yes. So it's like a wine tasting with a glass in your hand. Yes. And you may or may not listen to it, but you're not actually standing there a speech and talking about, you know, pottyphenols and things like that, are you? Unless someone asks about them. Okay. I mean, I can go into that if we want to, but, basically, you see what you're there. They know that they can say, what is this made from? How is it Yes. Fermented? So the the tasting I did most recent right before leaving for Italy this time of the week before I left was when I called the north versus the south. It was an Italian wine battle for fun. We'd find five wines from the north and five wines from the south. And And, you know, I brought in a person who knows quite a lot about Italian wine, and she lives part of the year in Los Angeles part in Maine and had her as sort of a helper and she chose to pour the Northern wines, which is fine by me because I'm a little, you know, self in love and put it that way. And You mean self in love would have been with Port pouring. I wouldn't I don't know if I would have been particularly good at convincing people that the north was better. She was better at that. I guess to me, these wines that I was pouring from the south were, I think, the best expressions of what we were hoping they would be. And, you know, basically I, but mostly had Compania and Sicily when it was it was fun because you allowed people to sort of make a bit of a game out of it upon leaving when was supposed to place their vote so that we could find out who won. Good. And it was a very, very very annoyingly a perfect tie, which I was gonna play. That's good. They have to redo it. I know. I was able and then, apparently, it wasn't skewed enough, and I need to try a little harder. Let the sun. Now you wanna make your bum with that one? You keep coming back forever. Keep coming back keep giving them new wines, giving new experiences. Same wine. Same wine. Same wine. No. I said till you find a new wine until you get this. Oh, no. This is this is the the producers give the wine for this. Okay. What are you doing? So it's just the sense at least I'm not paying for the wine. But, no, at least to give the broads scope. I was trying to do something that maybe was even slightly more extreme. So we've voided the center of Italy altogether and for nothing at all from Tuscany, which is unusual for Italian wine tastings. And, people were really into it. I had a lot of almost every single thing every single thing we were pouring. Every single city is good. We had I had photos of the properties and, you know, so people had sort of like a little slideshow on an iPad going by and they could get a sense of where they were and and the extremity of things, but a lot of what I was doing was drawing parallel. So I had a picture the dolomites next to what the vineyards look like in European. And And Campania in the south. Yeah. And so She's five hundred and fifty kilometers away. So Polar opposite sides, elevation wise, the European vineyards are much higher. And so we're dealing with the six hundred and fifty meters vineyards in the south, and then the three hundred and fifty meters high vineyards in Trentino that we were looking at. And people, I think, don't realize that that it's so mountainous everywhere. Mhmm. You know, the south gets sort of a rapid being hot and dry and nothing else. And so it's fun to show them that you can knit not remotely the same thing, but you have so many parallels to draw all over this country, but so many little tiny, tiny micro climates, and it endlessly fascinating. You never run out of things to learn. Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons for that, the majority of land in Italy is on a slope because Italy's being scrunched up into the Alps by the African plate, and that's why you have these hills, all over the country where there is Aetna, it's obviously a volcano from, in Campania up to the the dolomites basically where the where the real crunch is happening. And so this advantage for hillsight, AI makes for intensity in terms of, airflow and things like that. It, it, creates complex turn wires. And as we were hearing, you know, you have, alps in the south of Italy and in the in the right in the Mediterranean part. You have snow, on those mountains, and into early spring. And that's what you're trying to say. It's just showing the photographs, I think, is a great way of doing that because people just won't believe it. It's very hard to process until you actually see the snowcaps in. This this is near naples. Mhmm. It's just not far from Africa. And even just or how much snow is on Aetna? I mean, people don't ever think of a volcano being covered in snow and still spewing things out of the top of it. It's fascinating. Mhmm. But my picture was actually square picture for Instagram where the top was the dolomites in the bottom was Irinia. I don't know anyone really knew, even though I had north written on the top picture and south written on the south, I don't think anyone ever processed them as being actually specifically different. So I want to show a battle, but also the complete similarity and a lot of it and just that everything is you get elevation, and you get exceptional winemaking kind of no matter where you are on this boat. Okay, Yipine, you just say that's, in the Campania region, and it's where you're gonna get Fiano Diavolino White in Taurazi red. It's where my brother would be. And Greco, my favorite. And Greco, that's my My brother-in-law's from last race, a policeman, he's from he's got a tattoo. He's got a tattoo earpus. He's got his work comes from the Latin Airpus. He's got a huge tattoo. He's got a huge tattoo to a police one. He rolls off his police jacket. Oh, yeah. He's got thing called Erpus, and so it was that was an Erpina. So anyway, I don't know why that was relevant, but it wasn't right. I will be out of town. So so so no worries. But he is a police officer. Very helpful to help you. He is. Yeah. He don't and he doesn't drink wine. Why? Because he just doesn't drink wine. Drink soft drinks, doesn't drink wine. There's nothing wrong with him? You're gonna have to ask Kim that. And carrying mine, he does carry a weapon twenty four seven. True. Okay. So that was the educational side for, obviously, trade. Yes. Yeah. So do you own do any work with consumers. Well, that's again what these these tastings are for. Technically, I'm dealing mostly with consumers when I do tastings. K. I actually prefer to do consumer tastings in small atmospheres and trade tastings in large. I think that sort of well, I think because trade knows what they want. Do they? A lot of them do. A lot of the ones that I work with are pretty they're on top of it. They know exactly what they want in life. They they know exactly what you think you thought you told them they should be born. Well, in part of my job, I think, is talking them out of what they think is everything is right and bring, but then I prefer to see them one on one. So if I'm gonna be at a trade tasting, it should just be a large trade tasting. People can come up, talk to you, if they wanna talk to you, and it's fine. But small consumer tastings, I think you get a chance to create a lot of new fans and fan base. Is that because they're not, they're not, stuck in a particular way of viewing it? You've actually you've got more freedom to say. I think more freedom though they are very stuck. They tend to drink the same thing every day. So you're dealing with with females and males when they come out and walk away. And how do they react to you as a woman? Not too bad. You know, I mean, there are some men that most certainly you can tell, when the moment they walk up that they they know everything and they wanna tell you about stuff, so you just nod and smile and let them think they know what's right. I do occasionally find myself wanting to educate people that do not want to be educated, and I have learned over the years just kinda let it go. Yeah. Some people cannot be taught and there is no point in attempting to burst their bubble because they don't want it burst. That's the bubble. Nope. Nicely live in this little bubble, and it's fine. You can just drink cabernet for the rest of your life. I don't mind. Oh, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's pretty little boring. Yeah. Well, I just the idea of that you're never trying anything new. How do you how do you know if you like it if you haven't tried it? So at least I think the first step is that they're willing to come to these. And they're willing to taste things that maybe they would never have tasted if they warranted a tasting. So they haven't been dragged along by that partner also. Maybe they have, but they're still tasting them. Do you deal with food and wine matching? I haven't in a number of years, but I used to. I come from the restaurant business. K. Why don't you develop that a bit more? What was it too difficult or too complicated or? No. Just putting the message? Or I got tired. In in Los Angeles, there's no such thing, well, rarely is there such thing as just a purely wine director or sommelier position. So it's usually piggy backed onto management, and it's exhausting. I was working seventy, seventy five hour work weeks, running a wine program, training staff, and still actually being on the floor every night, and it was it gets to the point where you just can't physically do it anymore. And if one wants to have a life and a family and, you know, all these things that you want in the world, if you're that's what you're gaming for, you cannot necessarily have both sides of our partnership as a husband and wife, both in the restaurant business. We'd never see each other. So Oh, okay. You know, it's it's it was a it was a conscious decision to get off my feet and start using my education for something that was more valued. Cool. Okay. So where do you see the future? Well, as we're diving further into the Italian wine world, I hope it becomes more and more focused because right now I don't sell just Italian wine. I sell quite a lot of many different wines from many different countries. But why would you say focus on italy when you've got, I don't know, champagne or German riesling or Australian? It's not so much chucking away. I've had my time with them. I actually enjoy selling Greekcoin more than many of the other things that I have, and there's a lot of connection there between Greece and Italy. But for me, it's it's just a long time love affair with this country that started when I walked off of a really, really awful tour bus when I was seventeen, and it was like I'd found home. Really? Thing. Yeah. So it's emotional for you. It's emotional, but also because I feel like I can bridge a gap. I am a purely American person with zero Italian blood that somehow found where they were supposed to be and learned the language, learned the hiss history dove into it head first. I mean, I came the first time at seventeen. I moved here at nineteen and lived, you know, essentially over three longer periods, about six and a half years in Tuscany. So for me Do you hear me? Are you hearing you out young. Mhmm. You're on your own. Mhmm. Yeah. Don't look at me like that. I don't know. I was worried about you, you know? No. I was a very independent child. I never would have guessed. Why why mom gave me lots of freedom. That's good though. Yeah. No. I mean, it it was before the times of, you know, people looking at a child walking home from school when they are eight years old is something bad. You can't really do that with children anymore in the United States. But for me, I grew up in Venice Beach when it was not a safe place, but you learn street smarts or young. I knew how to get around Did we even a foreign country, female foreign country? Yeah. We've been in these language issues. It's like, what can it? Oh, yeah. Oh, alright. Okay. Here it is. We're just thinking of your feetsi every night, you know? Well, I'm not quite so much that. And then then I learned that I really liked living in the country side. And so I moved out of Florence and used to commute in for work. And, you know, it just is I learned to live life here. Really live life. So, I mean, that includes things like dating and things like that. Yeah. But I wasn't so much of a a I I remember really played the dating game, sort of like a, when you call it, a serial monogamist. So I had You're all married now? Yes. Oh, okay. And he's not Italian. Right. Strangely enough. I don't know how that is. Because he knew that you're a serial monogamist. Yes. You landed the last spot apparently. He was very proud of it. Right. Okay. For me, it was the country itself taught me how to live life. I mean, this this is a place where I learned quality of life, how to live with very little. They get a lot with not very much. It's not like salaries here are exceptionally high or anything. At least comparative comparative to United States. And how much you can get for the, you know, your your monthly stipend, and and the quality of food, even just at the little outdoor markets and the supermarkets, and of course global is and I think is sort of taking over and and everything's quickly becoming as expensive here as it is anywhere else. But at least, you know, when I first got here, it was it was something pretty magical. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna get you on the supermarket suite podcast next time. How are we gonna? Yeah. Some some weekly recommendations for which vegetables are in season and Oh, yeah. No. I could I could talk about we could talk about food if you want to. Yeah. No. We could do that. I love food. Yeah. I kinda I think you love everything. I do. You're an enthusiastic person. You are. Mhmm. Yeah. How how enthusiastic were you with my interview technique? For what? My interview technique. You're enthusiastic with us. Alright? Well, it's it's not so I've never actually done a podcast. I've been on video before, but I've never done a podcast. It's podcast are easier. TVs are a pain to make. Well, yeah. Because then they have to keep telling you to do the do things over again. And I don't Should we have to do this podcast again because I got the sound wrong. Is that right? Sure. Oh, we talk about something completely different. Why'd you just talk about your husband's? Oh, no. We might get a little nervous about that. If he's not here. Well, he's he's getting here tomorrow. Is he? He'll maybe on an airplane or something while this goes out. What do you mean maybe on an airplane? Well, I don't know exactly when this all gets released. And Oh, okay. What old are we? Oh, okay. So perfect. Alright. I just won't tell him about it. There's no there's no plan here. It's just ad hoc improvise. No. And I liked that. I was like, I hate the thing where there's like scripted questions and things don't allow somewhat sense of natural flow. Yeah. You get you get asked the same question about four times by me because I've got a properly bad memory. So if I asked you but it's now it's recorded. Yeah. That's true. We can delete it. You could listen back. Yeah. I I generally tend not to because it's, you know. You don't like to listen to yourself talk? No. I don't mind. I have to sometimes. Okay. Yeah. I don't like to listen to myself talk. Well, then don't listen to this. Us and turn neon red the entire time. Yeah. Your husband to listen to it and and, you know, if he tells you are great, then you should listen to it. And if he tells you you are not, then he's Yeah. He'll probably just lie to me and tell me I'm great anyway. Well, I don't know. I don't know. I have a very, very direct relationship with my partner. Yeah. I'm pretty sure would just tell me I did a great job no matter what. Well, I think you did a great job. Thank you. No. It's interesting. It's it's a side of the industry that this kind of uses the hand to hand selling aspect. It's what's needed when you're selling something that is kinda kinda unique and it isn't really replicated. You can talk about Greco, as well as various Greco varieties, but, you know, if you're selling Merlo, you can you can get Myrlo from, I don't know, fifteen different countries. Oh, yeah. And, you know, some of these Italian varieties are really only grown in one particular place. So so that's the hand selling aspect. So what you're doing in terms of education that has a extreme logic to, you're you're taking the fear away from people that that we all have of the unfamiliar. And it's kind of, I think they feel very comfortable with me sharing information now because it's like I've been accepted as this person who is, you know, a pseudo expert of of what it is that I'm talking about. So they don't feel belittled. I remember when I was doing it in the restaurant situation, people hated to be overly educated at a dinner people. But when people are, yeah, when people are coming to you for information, it they want to learn. They're there to learn something. They might be moderately terrified and have no idea how to say it, but at least they're not trying to order it off a list. You know, they can come in. If I'll have wine number one, even if they have no idea how to say at least they're comfortable with this this concept of coming up and tasting things. And so I enjoyed talking to the consumers in addition to working with people actually who are the ones get the hard the harder job in a lot of ways of selling things to consumers on the floor of a restaurant. But what we wanna do for them, at least restaurant wise is giving them the tools that they need in order to, as we all know this business as much as anything else is sometimes about making money. So you wanna, you know, achieve a sense of acknowledgement that they they need value. They need use full reasonably priced wines that you can pour by the glass and not break the bank and get people excited about something because they're not gonna order a bottle of it. They've never heard of it. They don't know what it is, but hey, it's twelve dollars by the glass. Maybe I'll try it. Yeah. I never know you want Well, no, and it's amazing when you when you get someone to like something they didn't think they would. It kind of it's just a whole new world. And then they get addicted, and then they wanna travel here, and then it gets worse and worse every time, and they'll turn into another version of me. Addicted to the Italian experience from under the wine just to be very hard. We have have, like, a whole team of lawyers and health and safety executives. So we're very careful about that. No. I'd literally addicted to the to the lifestyle, like, all those little schmutzy videos they like to show us. Schmutzy. Yes. Yeah. Where you're just like, oh, it just makes you wanna cry just a little bit so pretty. I guess it is all about everything beautiful. And, of course, everyone drives a Ferrari, you know, but, though, honestly, the there's a level of of complexity to this country that will never cease to amaze me. Yeah. And it wouldn't go away, hopefully. And I hope not. Yeah. I suppose they my guests today on the Italian wine podcast catherine Stratton, founder of CS, I guess that's catherine transactions dot com. Very un not creative at all. That's alright. That's okay. It's mostly just utilitarian for the l l for the LOC. LLC, the limited liability operation name. Alright. In California, you would legally have to have so that I can sell people wine. So, I just wanna say thanks to my guests there, Catherine Stratton. Oh, I was gonna say wine educators are the stars. I mean, do you have any like movie stars come? No. I used to sell. I used to see plenty of them working in restaurants. I mean, it was actually that I'm completely unfazed by most of it. Yeah. You grow up in Los Angeles. You don't even think about people being famous anymore, but it was fun. Okay. You know, a lot of really awesome ones out there that are incredibly nice and very generous. Okay. So I like to give them a good name whenever anyone asks. Okay. I wanna say thanks to my guest today, Catherine Stratton, of CS selections in Los Angeles, wish you every success in your burgeoning career. Thank you. Being a brand member, an ambassador for Italian White, and, hope things continue to thrive. Me too. Yeah. Me too. Thank you. Job. This podcast has been brought to you by Native Grape Odyssey, discovering the true essence of high quality wine from Europe. Find out more on native grape odyssey dot e u. Enjoy. It's from Europe. Follow Italian wine podcast on Facebook and Instagram.