Ep. 2446 Jessica Dupuy interviews Jonathan Ross MS of LEGEND Imports | TEXSOM 2025

For TexOM, you aren't talking about Australia at all. You and Nick Davis, y'all are gonna do seminar on service. Tell me what you guys want people to walk away from this seminar with. This is first kind of like a part two from what I did last year with Joseph Morse. Nick and I are certainly still planning things. However, I'm hoping we're not kind of pitting this to any kind of certification that this is much more useful in everyday real world scenarios and real businesses. Love it. The idea is some service scenarios. The way in which we handle work our way through or apply service tactics to those scenarios. Those are all very much functions that you can learn, practice. I know we don't have a lot of ability to do a ton of demonstrations, but we're gonna try and do a few. Hopefully, we can get the audience involved in some manner as well. Shall y'all. I'm Jessica Duppuis, guest host for a special Texom series on the Italian wine podcast, covering the twenty twenty five Texom Conference in Dallas, Texas. Join me in the heart of the lone star state as we dive into conversations with key speakers and attendees, exploring career paths, challenges, and the latest trends shaping the wine industry today. This series is proudly sponsored by the Texas Department of Agriculture' Uncourt, Texas wines program, which celebrates Texas wine culture by promoting local wineries and grape growers, both in state and around the world, building a vibrant community around the Texas made wine. Be sure to scribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't miss our Texas wine tidbit in every episode. A fun little fact, insight or story that highlights the people and places behind this exciting wine scene. Alright. Well, Jonathan Ross, thank you so much for joining us on the Italian wine podcast for this special TexOM series. I'm thrilled to have you. Let's start, you know, kind of broadly and tell us a little bit about your backgrounds I'll let you cover it, but you're a sommelier. You're an importer. You're a winemaker. You've kind of done all the things. So let us know how and why. Yeah. No. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me, Jessica. Yeah. I started working in restaurants while going to school in New Jersey. And I was studying first sports medicine and then architecture. And I just enjoyed going to work at a restaurant more than I did going to school. So I left school and focused on restaurants. And then kind of did us, local hospitality degree in New Jersey. And I guess I was just totally bought in. I loved everything about it. I was working at a restaurant, New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I would take the van, the the company van to the green market union square weekly and call the chef and buy the produce. I'd stop at the strawberry farm down the street from my parent's house and pick strawberries on the way to work. It was just such a fortunate way to be introduced to us fatality with an extremely authentic connection to food. And I think that really set me up on a really wonderful path that restaurants called stage left. They're on their thirty fourth year. They're pretty incredible. And then, there was a point where I was like, I need to, if I'm gonna do this full time, and for my life, I need to move to New York. So I moved to New York. Well, I said, I gotta my first job in New York, and when I was twenty four. And at that point, you know, Mark and Francis at that stage left had already kind of you know, we're teaching wine and so on, and I had passed the first, the intro and certified portions from the CMS. Yeah. Went into New York and found myself. I didn't realize that, you know, a young energetic could work ninety hours a week and didn't really care was kind of, you know, in demand then, young people to to use and abuse. That's what the restaurant industry wanted. So I was, very quickly became the AGM of a Michelin Star Greek restaurant. At twenty four, I was paid thirty eight thousand dollars a year, and I worked eighty hours a week. In New York. In New York. And and I loved it. And then paying out a little bit better over the years. And then, yeah, it just kind of continued and I think being immersed in that restaurant industry culture, it was this really kind of blossoming time for the wine industry and was totally swept up in it. I was very much, you know, fortunate to be kind of in the right place at the right time in a lot of ways. And, yeah, and then kind of worked in a number of different restaurants. And in twenty seventeen, Jane, we were already working together and living together. I was, essentially, I'd been this had somebody out of Madison Park for about five years. And she got a job offer to go run a restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, the wine program in a restaurant in Australia. And we said why not? And we left, and we went for three years. We'd never been before, and up until that point, my only connection to the wine industry was the very final moment of a bottle of wine. I had probably managed restaurants more than had specific sommelier roles. Wine has always kind of been part of the whole for me. It's not the thing. Started bartending before I ever learned about wine. We got to Australia, and we were living within an hour of five different wine regions. Sure. I'd go up to the Finger Lakes every now and then or to Napo or whatever, but it was never there. All the time and so easily accessible. So, like, kind of the door flung wide open and there were just opportunities to become completely ingrained in the wine industry from raw material from the farm all the way to the table and that when you're working in a big city that's not near wine industry, it's really hard to have that relationship with wine. So the time in Australia was really profound in a lot of ways, and it's totally guided the rest of our career since then. We came back to the US in twenty twenty and started porting Australian wine. That was a really concise way of putting that all together. Because when I hear about you, first of all, you know, Jane Loebes, we should mention, like, she kinda stands on her own in turn in the wine industry here in terms of just recognizability, her hard work in the industry. I love I always forget, like, that job offer to Melbourne, Attaca was just kind of out of the blue in a way. It's not like y'all had an Australian connection at the time. It just happens, which is really pretty amazing. Because as you said, so you started making wine. You started a a label. Is that the best way to Yeah. So I, we realized we were moving the first thing I wanted to do was go make wine because I hadn't done it before. I was like, I don't wanna work in a restaurant. I wanna work outside. Yeah. And know, so we got there. Jane got there in February of twenty seventeen, which would have been better. I need to, you know, give a little bit more notice with telemedicine and kind of punctuate our life in New York and so moved down the end of March. And it was actually quite. It was a really wonderful moment because we got there. Essentially, when fifty best, they finished their voting in October and the awards come out the spring of the next year. So I got to Melbourne at the beginning of the Melbourne Food and wine festival, which was coinciding with the world's fifty best awards in Melbourne. Amazing. So the festival was massive. And through the E and P connections and the E and P email address, I was able to like I was essentially bartending and serving at this pop up restaurant at the hub center of the Food and wine festival, which was perfect. I was like, okay. So I got there in the first two weeks. I was like meeting everyone in the Australian wine industry and restaurant industry. I was like, well, this is a great way to do this. At the best time tasted, I don't know, three hundred wines. I never knew existed because that's what life moving to Australia was. And ended up being able to work the wine Australia bar at the fif