Ep. 787 Tim Hanni MW | Get US Market Ready With Italian Wine People

This episode is brought to you by the Italy International Academy, the toughest Italian wine program. One thousand candidates have produced two hundred and sixty two Italian wine ambassadors to date. Next courses in Hong Kong Russia, New York, and Verona. Think you make the cut. Apply now at viniti international dot com. Thanks for tuning into my new show. Get US market ready with Italian wine people. I'm Steve Ray, author of the book to get US market ready. And in my previous podcast, I shared some of the lessons I've learned from thirty years in the wine and spirits business helping brands enter and grow in the US market. This series will be dedicated to the personalities who have been working in the Italian wine sector in the US. Their experiences, challenges, and personal stories. I'll uncover the roads that they walked shedding light on current trends, business strategies, and their unique brands. So thanks for listening in, and let's get to the interview. Hi. This is Steve Ray, and welcome to this week's edition of Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people on the Italian wine podcast network. This week, my guest is Tim Haney, and it's it's very hard to define or describe Tim but I think by the end of this interview, you'll have some insights until why that's the case. So Tim, welcome to the show. Thanks. Great to be here, Steve. Can you give me a little background on on you and and how you kinda got to where you are and and may maybe even define where it is you think you are in the world of flying. So I I I started my whole adventure with wine in nineteen sixty six when I was fourteen. My dad was the director of the Dade County Medical Association in Miami, Florida. And what little growing up I did I did in Miami, but, he was responsible administratively for the medical association including conferences and getaways and and so forth. And Miami Beach, especially being, you know, the the getaway hotspot, in the Bahamas, we were dragged along my brothers and and myself, to the Fountain Blue Hotel and the Dural, all sorts of stuff. And so the whole World Define dining was we were introduced to very early, including wine. My dad was a Volney aficionado. One of my figures. Yeah. I've got a a copy of the his Shanda Rota Sirs certificate from the from nineteen sixty seven, and then I've also got mine from decades later. And I was just fascinated by this wine thing, you know, and loving food and whatever. So I actually tried to go into the line business first, but found I had to be eighteen. Right. So I'm twenty one at the time. They would point it out to me on my my first application at Crown Liqukers in in South Miami. And, so I decided to go to the culinary path, and and keeping wine is a a real passion and avocation. I found the social advantages of wine early on And when I was seventeen, I found that I could go into a liquor store and, ask for a French burgundy by name. I was limited in pronunciation anything with two syllables. So Volnae, Pomard, etcetera, Corton. And and if I asked for why no one would card me. So that gave me, quite a skill as a seventeen year old. And, the the The first wine I ever bought was a nineteen sixty four Corton Jablee Vercher, three and a half bucks. And guy took my money, gave me change, said come back again soon. And I said, you betcha. So we used to do dinners at the beach at Crandon Park, roast duck and Escargo and all that. And just was just really hooked on the history and the the background and sciences and everything. And and as my familiarization grew. And as I transitioned full time into the line trade, the other thing that I really loved was the people I was meeting in in the travel and going to these places. So I worked as a chef for ten years, wound up. I dropped out of college to go go to work in Bert's Steak House in Tampa. Of course, I have the largest wine list in the world, and my dad had been going there. We we had a copy of their wine list when it was only seventeen pages. I've been there as well. It hasn't been many, many years since I've been there. Like, my dinner was a couple of books. Yeah. It's about six hundred pages now. So anyways, when I was in Tampa, going to University South Florida, my dad would find reason to have business. We'd go to Burns, get a nineteen fifty nine Shabbalay vericherr, dot net to pop. That was our our go to. Thirty eight two ounce porterhouse that we would split. Age seven weeks. So I've never been really good at school. I'm dyslexic, and I'm ADHD. And so I thought, well, I could be a chef. So I dropped out of college to the horror of my family wasn't hit back then, and, started in the kitchens at Burns, moved back to Miami, did my pastry apprenticeship at the Sonesta Beach Hotel, and, then continued With that, you know, working up the ranks to executive chef. And then after a series of adventures ended up in Atlanta in nineteen seventy nine, and I was chef for a a Chinese family and actually in Chinese kitchens. Which is one of the things I also love is Chinese cuisine and and, I I could run a professional three walk station, which is it is pretty good for a Western guy. I found a job being advertised for wine buyer and wine manager for a company called Happy Hermons in Atlanta. And, I was hired for that, and that's when everything went really head over heels for the wine end of things. And I just loved it. It was sourcing and purchasing and negotiating, bringing in wines that had never been in the Atlanta market, many, like Vegas Cecilia and all sorts of Italian wine that were really unknown in Vegas Cecilia back then was sixteen dollars and ninety nine cents. And everybody's like, what are you crazy for a Spanish wine? But we're buying containers of Bordeaux. I was working with a guy who had a huge Italian portfolio, Armando Duram in Florence. And so I just just was happy as a clam, but we're the stores were also gourmet groceries, beer liquor. And all that. So I became general manager, and we had multiple stores, and we had a really good business for a place called Happy Herman, and a very vibrant, rare wine business also. So the dollar was really strong, and we were sourcing lines out of auctions in London, and floor stacks of fifty nine Lynch Bodge, and all sorts of cool stuff. I I left the retail end of things in nineteen eighty six and became a broker and importing and representing hundreds and hundreds of of wines and wineries. And I met people at Behringer, and I've been talking to Tora Kenward who now has the the wine label tour. And Tor said, well, come on up and work at Behringer. I said, Leo, your wines kinda suck. I've just told somebody today. Don't fall in love with your wines. The best bottle of wine is the one I just sold. Right? Let's focus on what our real task here is is to sell it. That's right. Yeah. And and this is this was actually going back quite some time before I left Happy Hermon's And it was also when Behringer was sort of on its meteoric path of improving quality. And, in nineteen eighty eight, I moved out to Napa Valley, joined Barringer as director of communications, and just furthered my love of everything, you know. And being able to hobnob and and be in the heart of it with the people I knew and and loved in the business. And at that time, I also heard they were internationalizing the master of wine program. So the big shift that was going on is prior to nineteen eighty eight, the section of the master wine program on business, pretty much required you needed to work in the London wine or the UK wine trade. And in nineteen eighty eight, they internationalized that section. And so I had sent in an application. They accepted me to sit the examination, and I did that in nineteen eighty nine and ethically failed, the MW exam. I went and took a writing course to improve my communication skills. And for those of you, a lot of people aren't familiar with the difference between master Salier and master of wine, and master of wine is more of a focus on the business and sciences versus specifically the hospitality end of things. Armed with my new skills at at formulating arguments and answering the theory questions for the master of wine program, I passed. Yay. To this day, everything I teach, all my wine business courses, everything I do in wine and food, in perception sciences, and so forth are based on critical thinking skills. The ability to take a topic, an argument, a point of dissonance, stand back, ask more questions instead of jumping to your foregone conclusion. If you have, cognitive dissonance, basically cognitive dissonance is when you know something's wrong, but you don't know what to do about it, who to ask, or you're too fearful to say, wait a minute. I think something's wrong here. So I passed in nineteen ninety, and Joe Butler and I were the first two Americans to pass it. Let me kind of bring you back to, talking about your early years. So you your first real, executive experience was with Barringer cut your teeth on that, became a senior exec in in sales, and, was deeply involved in the wine industry. But as we started this thing, I called you Econiclast. An Econiclast, you called yourself a troublemaker you've always taken a different approach to things. One of the monikers that is attributed to you is the swami of umami, one of the people who was first to bring that concept of a of a fifth taste, human taste capability. And you've written a couple of books, and one of them I thought was really interesting called why you like the wine you like. You've written a couple of books one in particular why you like the wine you like, which is a completely nontraditional approach. To explain and address how consumers look at, think about taste and describe wine. That doesn't really match with all the wine geek stuff we have on the other side of our and the traditional world of wine. So I passed a master of wine exam. So at Behringer, my my primary role became director of international business development, but I also was the wine and food pairing guru. And that's according to Jansis Robinson. She's the one who coined that. And and given my newfound curiosity about what is it that I don't know? I don't know. In all the in so many areas of of dissonance that that I could see every day in in what I do. I sat down with a group of chefs and journalists and were at Behringer for the school for American chefs, and I said, And this is a an intro to a a two week program. And I said, normally, we cover wine and food pairing here, and I'm gonna start doing it differently. We're going to look at modalities of wine and food pairing. And ask ourself the questions. If this is a classic combination, what is the the background? What's the truth about it? We know you know, I know anybody in the industry knows you get ten experts together. No one can agree And literally, it can be as as polarized as this is absolutely disgusting. It's horrific to wait a minute. This is the best example of this I've ever had in my life, literally. And then you throw food into the mix, and it just totally goes haywire. So so I started on this path of answering questions, and I started to work with food scientists outside the realm of wine. Food and sensory scientists. And so Barringer was owned by Nestle. So I had access to all these scientists and research and data. I was a master of wine. So I had you know, people would answer my call at Manel Chemical Sense Center, stuff like that. And I kept hearing this word umami come up. And it was in the context, you know, there's the five basic buckets of case, not So in the scientific community, it's way beyond five tastes, but they fall into sweets, our salty bitter, and umami. I said umami, wait a minute. I heard that word. What does it mean? And literally, I was told, well, never mind. It's too hard to explain. So I sent off for a database, surge of, of, articles about umami tastes. Got a list of a hundred and fifty articles. The first one I read was seasonal glutamate variations in and palatability of sea urchin gonads. Grab me at gonads. Who wouldn't be curious? And, basically, if that's what Uni is, It's the gonads of sea urchin. So I start I it started to emerge. The proposition was that umami is a primary taste, meaning it's not a combination of other tastes. It's not a combination of taste and smell, and it meets certain criteria. And so when I started to talk about this back in nineteen ninety, and this actually goes to eighty nine, I wrote about umami in my my NW papers in nineteen ninety. People would literally get angry. I'm at, you know, the American Association of culinary pro professionals or I'm in in London doing a a lecture or whatever, and you wouldn't believe the pushback. So this was evidence of need for disruptive innovation. And so I I I kept I was I was creating a a long, long list of mentors most of which I keep in touch with today. And so in in my book, there's a an appendix that was written by the scientist who he and his wife were responsible for identifying the human receptor responsible for umami taste. And that was kind of the clincher. And, of course, now it's ubiquitous. So, you know, you go back. The concept goes back to eighteen sixty six in Switzerland, when a guy named Rittenhausen, identified glutamate as as a taste compound, in nineteen o eight, as a scientist in in Japan identified it and proposed it formally as a fifth separate taste. And then his, colleagues researched the role of nucleotides. So umami is the primary taste of glutamate, which is also synergized by nucleotides to create that tastes. The best way to to actually get a demonstration of it is take a raw mushroom and take a bite, take the same mush mushroom from the same package that's been, cooked in the microwave thirty seconds and taste it. And the glutamic acid has been converted to glutamate. Alright. Now back to this wine and food thingy I'm doing at Behringer, I had already discovered that there's something called sensory adaptation that occurs so that when you have a sip of wine and you have salt, and try the wine again, and just a tiny, tiny bit, salt suppresses bitterness. Add a little bit of lemon juice. So it's Robert Mandati coined it Tim's tequila trick, and, was a big, big fan of my, my work and my research, even though I was at a competing winery. And everybody who should try this, if you haven't, Tannock red wine, take a sip, a little salt and lemon, y'all, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, y At the point, we knew that sweetness in food will amplify bitterness astringency, and it will reduce the perception of fruitiness and whatever. So so sweet it's brush teeth, drink orange juice. And that that sensory adaptation, one example. We also knew that there were certain things that were suppressing, and and it discovered the the tequila trick, but something was in the food that was causing a negative reaction with the wine. And as I learned more and more about umami, that emerged as the culprit. So when you have high amount of umami in your food, it will have the same adaptation of quality as sweetness, and Hay umami food makes wine more bitter more astringent. You'll find everywhere in French cuisine, in Italian cuisine, the use of salt and acidity, in sauce, bor de laise, in anything a la provençal in Bisteca a la fiorentina. And it's demonstrable. So so in in in addition to being a hack of of wine lore and trivia history, I'm also really knowledgeable about cuisine of France, you know, prior to World War two and and stuff like that. So the disruptive innovation came in proposing that Maybe we rethink this whole line in food thing and talk about reactivity and what you can expect. And then instead of, oh, this is a perfect match with without trying it, without knowing it, Then I started a list of things to research. Well, what about it it ended up creating more questions than answers? And that's fundamentally what I do in that area now is research reactivities, but there was a wild card. And so you're you're with with somebody smelling a line, and somebody saying, oh my god. This smells so much like I can't even stand it. It's like, well, what world are you living in? And you've seen this also, you know, you're you're trying to describe lines and somebody's coming up with these things and you're going, where in the world did you come up with that? So in my research with with the interactions, it also introduced me to perceptual individualism. Essential individualism is what makes us each different in the colors we see, the intensity of light, sound, taste, smell, touch, and all these things. And I I'd sort of was looking at things kind of topically and whatever then ran into doctor Linda Bartashook, and Linda is the one who coined the term Supertaster. Now I need to clarify we're trying to eliminate that word, not the concept. And Linda agrees she's become one of my mentors and a good friend. And and basically, the the the breakthrough for me in this was there's a group of compounds called Tia Eurea. And a number of forms of it, and basically a hundred years ago it was filled in a lab, and people were noticing that oh my god. There's this disgusting bidder. I can't stand it. There was some of the people in lab complaining, oh, well, it's bitter, but you're really overreacting. And then there was a group of people going, what are you guys talking about? Nothing. Right? So that really led me to well, how different are we? How how different is our perception? And this is always open to revision. And, again, I I'm constantly updating my information and my my materials, but as a basis, it's fair to say some people have fewer than five hundred taste buds, but other people have over eleven thousand. And now there's identification of specific genes And this is the work that, Linda Barteschuck was doing. It wasn't wine research. It was genetics. And she was the one that was able to find the genetic snips, the single nucleotide polymorphisms, responsible that then could predict whether you would be hypersensitive, which is the word we're using, sensitive or tolerant. And still use, you know, her words We all live in our own unique individual sensory world. And we've as an industry, we've really gotta get this. So it's somebody drinking Muscato who loves Muscato who wants it with their steak, they're gonna love it with their steak. And by the way, that's equally as traditional in Tuscany is is having red wine. And if you go back historically, they didn't have these big, ah, tannic red wines. The staple Kianti was by law diluted with white wine. It had canaiolo added to the San Gervais. And so the wine the the whole premise we've come up with for wine and food matching is a fraud? Not not flawed. A fraud. I think that's Oh, and flawed. Yeah. About flawed, but it's more than flawed. It's I I like your comment about fraud because if everybody, we're we're all following the lead of somebody else and and spouting or adding to the the misper misunderstanding of what these terms mean. I was, at an, an event at tales of the cocktail and a buddy of mine was giving me a presentation. He's a chemist. And he did the, I don't wanna use the word. So the, what what was the word that you used? The The prop test? Yeah. Yeah. So you people were easily recognizable as someone who was really, affronted by the the bitterness, someone who could tolerate and someone who couldn't even taste it. And it was clear as a bell. Well, if it was that strong and it was that distinctive, how can any of us talk about a wine and its taste and flavor and communicate in any any way. You've come up with a concept called vino type, kind of a riff on phenotype. We all know from biomethone, not everybody knows, but I remember from biology. So how did that develop from what you're what you're talking about? When I when I was writing, why you like the wines you like, I was, doing very in-depth, research with Doctor. Virginia Utermulen at Cornell University. She's now retired, and Virginia is absolutely brilliant, speaks four languages impeccably, a board certified pediatrician, and she did her medical school in Paris, in French. So that's how fluent she is. And, Virginia occupies the space where if you're a wine expert, she's basically trailer trash. Because she loves white Zinfandel. She loves Muscato. And, you know, it and this is part of the dissonance. Wait a minute. She's not. She's not the stereotype. She speaks languages. She's brilliant. She has a group, you know, lots of money. And but if a wine's over eleven or twelve percent alcohol, the trigeminal burn from from alcohol is intolerable to her. Wines that are over eleven percent alcohol, dry and tannic are just flat out disgusting. And this is why she was so great for the research because she represents about forty percent of the total available Caucasian market. France, Italy, Spain, South America, Australia, you name it. And she's not the cliche. She's so with her work, she actually had done a study of And this is how I found her. She published a study of prop sensitivity, so whether you're hypersensitive, sensitive, or tolerant, to, professional roles in the hospitality industry. And and a high disproportion of hyper sensitive people who are in the front of the house and are the chefs. The people who are less tolerant are more tolerant are running the businesses. They're the bottom line oriented. So what was emerging is there are certain personality traits and behaviors associated with where we are in the spectrum of sensory sensitivity. Different spectrum than the who's commonly used the autism spectrum. In this case, the spectrum of Which is just an an extension because frankly, Virginia is is one foot in the autism spectrum. And then it goes even further. So the spectrum isn't just for the autistic, my current project. It's called the perception project. From Einstein to you name it. It is generally accepted by the scientific community that perception is not reality. Perception is not an individual's reality. That perception is an interpretation of energy. So sound doesn't exist as we think it exists. So that's the answer to that if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? It makes waves, but it's not a sound until it's perceived. Yeah. And and this was this was one of those and this is my life, duh, or wow, or mind blown. And so so if what what the Vino typing does is it enables conversations with people to get a sense of the world they live in before we start jumping to Oh, this wine was rated this or this goes best with this dish and without even talking to the the people we serve in retail and in restaurants and online and in education. And then as part of a collective delusion, there are also efforts to validate the delusion with pseudoscience. Right. Yeah. Well, that's like we were talking before about this whole thing about the the tongue. We all remember this image of the tongue showing where the receptors are in the tongue. That's been disproven forty, fifty, sixty years ago. You still see it in textbooks, and people still think that that is true and accurate, and it's not And the consequences of this is insecurity and doubt. Here's the key to the whole thing that you're in security and doubt. Okay. I love that that concept that people somehow think that somebody else knows more therefore they themselves are wrong because they perceive it differently. And I think we can all agree that we've all been doing this for so many years. We've just created a monster of alienating more people from the wine industry than embracing them, we're welcoming them. And the harder we try to convince them of that, the more damage we do. So it it's it's like the electrical engineering's engineers. My son's an electrical engineer now. And, you know, his brain just works differently. And and and so imagine, you know, you go into a store to buy a VCR in electrical engineers saying, oh, It's simple to set this clock, and you walk away even more befuddled than when you started. I have no idea what language that person. So what's happening with wine education, with wine and food pairing, with the best intentions The more you learn, the more you become part of the problem that really needs to be solved, how can we be better stewards for the market we're serving not just in our own heads, trying to argue well, I objectively taste wine. No, you don't. It's impossible. Just that you're an individual means it's subject to your interpretation your sensory system. And we're gonna talk a little bit about sensory systems, which is your genetics and physiology, your receptors, sort of your heart, you know, your sensory hardware. Your neural network and neurotransmission and and sending of information from a a receptor to your brain and and then back again for actions and behaviors So one of the things when you're doing the prop tasting, you can ask it, don't anybody say anything, but you can see in the response to the prop. People are disgusted, and someone sitting next to them is like quizzical, like what? Right? And then the third part of the the, the sensory system is, the psychology of it all and brain plasticity. So as we become expert, where our brain is adapting when we acquire a taste. What we usually are inferring is that something became more or less important or represented an aspiration or an achievement and rewired our brain so that it's receiving positive validation of these receptions of this. So I didn't used to like that, but I learned to like that. It's us that don't understand that which is the tragedy. One of one of the most one of the easiest of of myriad examples is cilantro. All you gotta do on Facebook or Twitter, whatever, Oh, I love this dish with cilantro. What does it go with? And you'll get people going. It goes with nothing. Cilantro's is horrible, disgusting. And then you'll get all these well intentioned, smart, educated people. Oh, I didn't used to like it, but you'll learn to like it. So we try to force people into things that they are genetically never going to like. We think that it's because we experienced in a certain way or we learned to adapt that everybody should. And ju and Julia child had the it's, or six, a two, genetic knit cluster, and Julie child had it. And Sage fits in the same same thing, cilantro and sage. Yeah. She she had that reaction to cilantro. And, during an interview with Larry King, she actually was asked. Is there anything you can't stand? And she said, Cilantro. It's disgusting. If it's in my food, I'll send it back and ask, why didn't you put that on the menu? Some of us find it disgusting. And I'll try to pick it out if I can and throw it on the floor. But otherwise, I can't stand it. So her palate wasn't mature. She was ignorant. You tell me. Right. No. It didn't in that case, clearly, being one of those people that's clear is about. But it's like, like, Frank Benjamin Franklin said, I love this line. He said, it's funny how when you're riding in the mist, everything around you is clear, but everybody else seems to be intruded and fog. Wonder wonder what that is. Yeah. Exactly. And and, I mean, that's the the basis of of of my work. Outside of teaching line business, and, you know, I'm on faculty at Washington State and Lynnfield University, So there's a pragmatic end of what I do in the industry, but this is my real passion. What makes us different? And how can we communicate more clearly and more meaningfully in a way that attracts and engages people? And you you hear about people in tasting rooms and wine clubs. Our churn rate's too high. And how can we better connect with consumers? Well, it's us that's gotta change. And and that's my message to the industry. It's going to require a serious effort out from under the cloud of delusions and pseudosciences that now stand as, quote, unquote, the truth or reality and they're nothing of the sort. So the challenge, I I've seen it because the couple of words that have been used in that, the world of wine geekdom that I live in, minerality, and salty. And people try explaining to me while, you know, that the plant absorbs the the minerals. They absorb a water solution that contains certain molecule, but it's not where it's grown that that flavor It's grown in these stones, so it tastes tony. There there isn't that direct correlation. And yet, once again, as you were saying, there's a billion people telling this story, people nodding their heads minerality. It tastes the stone. I mean, I that Yep. Well, you know, it's a it's a it's a great example of how we make shit up. And and instead, vastly refuse. Now if you smell the stones, if you smell something like that, Science shows it's not that. Don't confuse me with the facts though. Well, nobody nobody want you. I'll put your fingers in your ears. The word terroir itself prior to the nineteen sixties was the worst thing you could say about a wine. Because it didn't mean soil. It meant soiled. So it was the smell of poop. It was unclean. It was infected. And to say a wine was a Van de terroir meant that it was so out of bounds with contamination and britannum ICs and and and spoilage that it was unpalatable. And and then trying to make wine easier to understand somebody decided Oh, let's start writing books about terroir based on a false interpretation of what it means because terror means soil, but it also means earth and earthy and soiled And so what happened was there were there's started to be this mounting mound of b s that that is trying to explain something that is is b s. Okay. But wait a second. Let me let me let me play the devil's advocate here. So the entire, well, fine wine industry, it seems, has kind of jumped on the terroir bandwagon and by definition, if you think about it, the state produced wine is unique. Nobody else can produce those grapes on that ground if you're already on that grounding or making the wine from, and nobody else could do it. Now is your wine sufficiently similar to your neighbor's wine. Are the soils the same there? Maybe similar, but probably not the same. We see that certainly in New York state. The variation in, soil type within a given plot is just extraordinarily diverse from clay to stones. And you can't make general assumptions about that. So think for a second. Remove the word soil from from from the definition and think about it as territory. Okay? So territory. Alright? By the definition, does every wine in the world? It's is every wine in the world, thus some expression of terroir. Of the conditions of where it's grown. Soil exposure, moisture, altitude. Well, and and again, soil isn't part of the taro. It it's a part of the equation, but it's it's over emphasized. I was gonna jump to the the parallel word that used more in France than anywhere else is tipicity. The idea that the wines grown in a certain area taste the same. Yeah. I think that's an oversimplified view of it, but that, Burgundy and chardonnay is different from chardonnay produced in California. All of them? Well, of of that's one point. That's kind of a big statement to me. How is it identified as it is in steel or open when it's fundamental differences in the perception of Oak in the concept of vanilla and whole thing about lactic acid and malic acid. We all know To to cut it short. Yeah. Do you think I could take five wines or six wines, three from California, three from Burgundy and fool you? Whether you cut you might be able to, but I have been in it in the tasting which I thought was really interesting. We were in Vienna, and Willie Plinger used to run the Austrian My Marketing. I know Willie. Yep. Dion De Glace who ran the Nexpo at the time. They did a blind tasting for about two hundred people who were all in the room. My wife was with me. So here's all these blind experts. Right? That's the only people who came there, and we did blind tastings. Most people couldn't identify seven year long. Right. Which it is is about as distinctive as you're going to get or at least that genre of lines. And I would kind of admit it to my wife. Yeah. We're all kind of a bunch of bullshit artists. It without me laboring it, the fallibilities of the human sensory system are so great and the hyperbole of these glaring differences that aren't there. And that combination just leads to it's all bullshit. Yeah. I love that. That's a great way of looking. You're boiling all down, and that's what it's all about. It starts on a flood assumption and then proceeds into sublime craziness. To e exactly. And build it in and dig our hail heels in. And yet we've done that. Okay. Alright. Alright. So how do we get out of this mess? And is that what you were trying to do with Vino typing and with some of the things that that you're doing? How do we make wine because people like us are influential in how wine is communicated to, people who who drink. How do we change that? Well, it's really tough because collective delusions have all sorts of dynamics associated with them. If you're part of the co collective, whether you agree with what the the collective is actually saying, you will lie to them and even to yourself. Just to be part of the collective. T, I can think of a political analogy there, but I'm not gonna go there, but if we keep going. Yeah. If you can stand back, one of the things that, inhibits this to the greatest degree is our own willingness to be human and fallible. And especially if we've attained some degree of an expertise, and we start to make shit up, and then people nod their heads in agreement He must know what he's talking about because he sure seems to be, and he's got the education of the street cred. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And in some ways, and every collective delusion has a consequence of not adhering to the principles. Now in my book, this is actually in the there's a chapter on collective delusions and what they are and how they're defined and so forth. And we use the example. Remember how people used to think the world was flat? I don't personally remember it, but yes. And but you've seen you've seen things. You've read about primitives and pagans used to think that. And the consequence was if you sail off the edge of the world, what what's there? Deemons and monsters. Right. And lots of pins with angels on the heads up. Exactly. So so here's this delusion. The earth is flat. People used to think it. There was a consequence if if you sailed off the edge of the earth. Alright. I got a call from, my co writer of the book. And the reason my book got written was because of Harvey Postert, and I think you know of Harvey. I know of him. Yes. Senior vice president of communications, Mandavy, created the Nap Valley, forty five years in the industry and cannot drink dry wine. He is a sweet vino type. He has so many taste buds, the alcohol, etcetera. Okay. He had hooked me up with with Sarah Paulson. And she called me one day, and she said, Tim, you gotta see this. I said, what is it? She said, here, read this article. And it was an essay on how Our example of the the world is flat as a collective delusion is a collective delusion. There is no evidence whatsoever people can research this. You can find the data. Nobody ever thought the world was flat. Actually, this is just a modern construct of how we think they thought. In the Victorian era, people started to show how others were heathens and pagans. And and things like they thought the world was flat. But before the Victorian era, there is zero evidence of any community, tribe Interesting. Culture thinking the world is flat. So a quick example for everybody to do. That hits right at the heart of wine and food and so forth. Red wine goes with red meat because cows are big. You hit them with a tractor. There's red everywhere. You get your wine should be served in a big glass Alright? And then we've got the the pseudoscience. Oh, the fat of the beef smooths out. Coach your mouth and smooths out the tannin. Alright. Everybody tonight, pour a glass of strong red wine, cook a really nice prime choice steak, grill it, broil it. I don't care what the hell you do, but don't season it. Nothing on it. Nothing. And if if you're cooking it in butter, use unsalted butter. Try the wine. Try a bite of the fat. Try the wine. The wine gets more bitter and more astringent. The the basic premise is completely flawed and the opposite. And then you've got that. I do all the proteins because of of of known chemical reactions of protein. Okay. Yeah. WSet Winders Beard Education Trust is adopting my principles. They've taken the credit to me out of it, but they're restoring that. So they are now teaching interactions and teaching a modified version of, vino types. Okay? What we need to do as an industry is number one, recognize our own fallibilities, our own sensitivities, and get that people are not necessarily experiencing the same things. We've gotta learn to communicate on a whole new level that consists of a conversation with people? What do you like? Without fear of attacking that person, which is inherent, it's it's built into the system. Oh, if well, I like Muscato, When we do research, the hardest thing we we have to confront is getting people to not lie about their preferences. Right. Right. Right. Okay. At the title of the book again? Why you like the wines you like? Changing the way the world thinks about wine? Somebody wanted buy a copy. Where would they go? They would go to, Amazon. Either put in my name or why you like the wines you like. And, If people would like to get into touch with in get in touch with you directly, are you, would you share your email address with us? Absolutely. It's tim at Tim Hani, t I m h a n n I dot com. Okay. Great. So we're talking this week with with this week with Tim. Well, I always thought it was Hany, but, Now that was the delusion. We could talk on forever about this subject. But, you know, in my mind, Tim's, kind of the reigning iconoclest in the wine industry challenging some of the the standards and the norms that we've all kind of been, I don't know if you wanna say suckered into, but, you know, kind of fallen into. And it probably there there is a right time to change the way we in the industry talk about line to be more inclusive of people, than, the generation that I'm leaving to you people. So once again, a big thank you to, Tim Hadeye. Thanks. For sharing your time with us today. And this is Steve Ray, and we'll see you next week for another edition of Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people on the Italian wine podcast. This is Steve Ray. Thanks again for listening on behalf of the Italian wine podcast. Hi, guys. I'm Joy Livingston, and I am the producer of the Italian wine podcast. Thank you for listening. We are the only wine podcast that has been doing a daily show since the pandemic began. This is a labor of love and we are committed to bringing you free content every day. Of course, this takes time and effort not to mention the cost of equipment, production, and editing. We will be grateful for your donations, suggestions, requests, and ideas. 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