Ep. 2494 McKenna Cassidy interviews Danny Vale of Chicago Yacht Club | Next Generation

Know, I took a job at the Yacht Club because growing up in the suburbs, I was able to be brought down to the city my entire life and got to explore and know where to go because I've been lost in every part of the city and had to figure it out. So honestly, just taking the job at the Yacht Club was just a chance to actually fulfill the dream of moving down here. I kinda started my passion for wine because when I first started at the company, our list was everything you could buy at Walgreens and kinda like our membership now, our people traveled all over the world, and I quickly found out that travel the world and you can have a glass of wine at your favorite place, from a place you visited, people will pay money for that. Welcome to the Italian Mind podcast. This is the next generation with me, Mackenzie. For the next episode, I invite you to explore with me what young adults are up to in the Italian wine scene. Let's feast on our discussion of Italian wine and culture. Grab a glass with us. Hello, everyone. I'm Makenna from the Italian wine podcast. Welcome back to the next generation segment where we spotlight rising stars who are shaping the future of Italian wine around the world. Today, joining us we're gonna be sailing into exciting territory literally. Danny Vail works as the beverage director at the historic Chicago yacht club, right on the shores of Lake Michigan here in Chicago. Danny has a background in finance and a deep passion for wine, and he's also currently studying for the Van Italy International Academy's Italian wine Ambassador exam. A very challenging exam that he'll sit next week when the academy joins us in Chicago. Originally, Danny's from the Chicago suburbs. And in just a few years, he's gone from pouring wine to helping redefine beverage service in one of the most cities iconic clubs. So, Danny, welcome to the show. Great to have you. Thank you, McKenna. Thanks for having me. It's gonna be awesome to have our discussion today. I'm looking forward to hearing more about your personal story, how you got into the wine scene, and then your thoughts on the exam to encourage and inspire more people to continue their studies in Italian wine. So we'll continue from there. Let's start at the beginning. You are finance major by training. Talk me through kind of your upbringing and going to school, and then we'll bridge that to wine later, but talk to me about kinda where you grew up and why you chose finance in college. You know, I, grew up in a suburb of Chicago, Saint Charles, shout out to all the six three o people. I went to college for finance because I always had a background in just business and operations stunning for my father. I technically worked for him since I've learned how to type on a computer. Like, it was always how can I help doing background research for, like, companies that they were acquiring at the time or direct competitors? So finance was easy because I didn't really care what I did. I just knew I could learn pretty much anything. And then I also was a political science in real estate, my double minor. Those were more of the things I was interested in. Yeah. And I fell in the service industry. So There we go. Your hope was to do real estate or you were just interested in the field in general? Know, in another life, I've worked either in commercial banking here in, Cincinnati or private high net worth wealth management on Pittsburgh, but, you know, it keeps the day to day. My day to day is never dull here. No. Absolutely not. Every day is definitely different in hospitality. So then what led you to working with the yacht club and pouring wine and and working on beverage programs? You know, I took a job at the yacht club because growing up in the suburbs, I was able to be brought down in the city my entire life and got to floor and know where to go because I've been lost in every part of the city and had to figure it out. So honestly, just taking the job with the yacht club was just a chance to actually fulfill the dream of moving down here. So I kinda started my passion for wine because when I first started at the company, our list was everything you could buy at Walgreens, and kinda like our membership now, our people traveled all over the world. And I quickly found out that if you travel the world, and you can have a glass of wine at your favorite place, from a place you visited, people will pay money for that. That's awesome. So you're able to remind them of their travel experiences through the wine list you offer them at the club. They're in linking your club to those global experiences of travel, which is Unifying the whole experience. That's awesome. No. Absolutely. Because it's unique for a sailing club, because it's I can tell people about a place, like, for example, I sell Antinori, Brmito Chardonnay. That's from Omria. And people I've sold it to are like, yeah, we've been there. We sailed there. And I'm like, oh, I'm just gonna forward. Enjoy. No more explanation necessary. It's a delicious wine, by the way. Oh, it absolutely is. Yeah. It's a delicious wine. So I guess you have this exposure. It seems like people travel a lot to Italy. Are there other countries that traveling to? Do you see, like, a concentration of Italian travel specifically linking their experience to these wines? Italy is just very central in the Mediterranean and me being the History buffet kinda has for a couple thousand years is we're taught in the book. They've been growing wine for even longer than that. So it is definitely a good stopping off point to travel elsewhere. And so your history knowledge, like, I you had rightfully corrected me. Your major is finance and political science and re real estate, but you know more about history than almost anyone I've met aside from maybe my college professors. Is that just like a a personal passion through movies, books, etcetera, or what were you like as a kid that you became is very, very smart history free. You know, my, friends who have known me the longest, give me a little shade. And all they say is Danny, you've been forty since you were twelve. I think I learned how to tie it tonight off YouTube before then. Honestly, it just I love stories. So whether if it's a story of triumph, failure, overcoming that failure, or just I watched Game of Thrones every year it came out, and I have a lot of books that are thicker than the Italian wine book. And I can tell you the last three hundred years of tarkarian history. So if you give me basically the lore and the story, I will read about it and learn as much as I can about it. So wine is definitely a great avenue to channel that down. Heard. Absolutely. There's something between stories and memory as well, and then, like, that couple linking the wine to their present through their memory, through the story that they already built visiting that winery. Yeah. That's awesome. So then talking more about wine, like, tell us kind of what you have to go through managing this beverage program. You talk about inventory, you talk about ordering, but you also have quite a bit of exposure to trade events being in Metro Chicago. Tastings with prestigious, winemakers, with proprietors, etcetera. We were just talking about the women in the Mandavi family kind of leading their winery forward. So what are all these facets that kind of make up your job on the whole? No. That's a good question. I could have a lot of different answers to it. My personal favorite thing to do is exactly what you described sitting down with the winemakers because that's the ultimate story because a lot of these winemakers are their family has done it for generations like, I met Christian buyer in a tasting event, walked around the event two and a half hours asking him questions, not knowing who he was. He just seemed to know a lot about wine. And so I was asking him, I kinda let's call him dumb questions that I think I know the answer to. Just needed to confirm or deny. And