Ep. 2427 Margherita Andrenacci interviews Alejandro Fargosonini of Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini | Next Generation

This park is amazing. I've never spent any time in it, but I've driven by it a bunch. I spend quite a lot of time here. But after work, I try to come here. Read a book, drink something. Yeah. Yeah. It's very nice. And I love there's, like, the dogs here are, like, they have their own, like, I feel like social circles. Yeah. Like, it's crazy. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast, the next generation series. My name is Margarita Andrachi, and I would love to take you on a journey with me to find out new ways to pair wine. Whether with music, and activity, and experience, or your feelings? One question. Yeah. I am pronouncing Chattunuf de Fargozonini, because I'm Italian. Is this how you pronounce it? You're the only person that's ever pronounced it properly in the history of California. K. That's good. Let's dive into it. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Italian wine podcast, the next generation. Today, we'll take a deep dive on wine that not only has poems at their tasting notes, but will be reminded that wine is itself an expression of art. And as a product that is human made, it reflects what the winemaker wants to put out on in this world. Today, we have Alejandro from Chateunuf de Fabe. See, me. I'm just like I'm just one of those. I I shouldn't have named it that. It's ridiculous. Today, we have Alejandro from Satunov De Fargo Zounini. And for those who don't know you, who are you? Where are you based and what do you do? Hi, Margarita. We are based in Sanger, California near Sequoia National Park. We are two artists I made films and music for the last twenty five years or so. My partner Andy makes dance choreography, and she does a lot of projects for, sight impaired people in Canada to make dance choreography via sound pieces. Wow. Yeah. Which becomes a whole other art immediately. It's like just not a translation thing at all. We're two artists. We're doing our PhDs in philosophy about art at a European graduate school in Malta, and We started making wine a couple years ago and giving it away at wine fairs and people kinda got into it. We experiment a lot with the wine. We don't add any chemicals at all. None of the wines have sulfur in them. None of them are filtered. And, we're trying to work with the, maybe, like, Taawa of the future for a lot of the world where it's getting warmer. We have a nine acre vineyard where it's very hot. And very cold. And, yeah, so our vineyard, we plant as many cuttings as I can get from anybody. Anybody's listening and wants to give me cuttings, I'll show up. Yes. I'll do all the pruning for you. So we have about seventy fruits and grape varieties and hybrid grape varieties that are all in the vineyard in between the old vines that are ganache. And, yeah, we we experiment a lot with other aisles. We do stuff that nobody really does in North America, like Rancio wines, Maderaized wines. We let stuff get cooked in barrels and sun, and it really stabilizes and All the fruit becomes dried fruit and I love that. We also upcycle a lot of fruits that nobody is gonna use, from organic farms. So Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that. Upcycling. So, yeah, you make wine from food waste, basically. So can you tell us more about it? Yeah. So there is an estimated two hundred and eighteen billion dollars of food waste in America. Which is something like thirty eight percent of all food made or something grown. And most of that happens at the farm level. So basically, like this fruit right in front of you. It doesn't make economic sense for somebody at this farm level. And like it's a pretty large farm, but in the in the the world of farming, it's not that big. It's like a hundred and twenty acres. So they have a big output, you know, much bigger than like my my farming project, but they don't have the economic incentive to like turn everything into jam or dry at all. They dry a bunch of it. They can only sell so much dried fruit. Yeah. So they call me when they have stuff that's really ripe. It's in cold storage. If they move it to LA or the Bay where they sell all their organic fruit, it's gonna go bad on the way there. So I'm ten minutes away. I can go pick it up and put it in my press and make a wine. And then the fermentation, which is like an ancient thing humans figured out a long long time ago, fermentation can make food last way, way longer. Right? Either some sugar, some salt, some something has to be in there. Usually, you know, the yeast needs to eat some sugar. And yeah, then you can make stuff last forever. So it's kind of about extending the telos of that fruit to not to be like instead of it's like gonna go bad in twenty four hours. We can have a nice wine from it. Like, this one is like two years old, so you know, we can and that could last quite a lot longer. Probably, like, I don't know how age worthy it is, but it has a lot of tannins and stuff. So it probably lasts, like, five or six more years at least. That's beautiful. And what kind of fruit did you do you get? This farm is mostly stone fruit, but it we also do citrus. We do plums, pluots, apricots, nectarines, blackberries, Some of this stuff is wild also. So then it's not. I mean, it is wasted food, but it's basically like something that grows in our vineyard like blackberries, mulberries, figs are all wild where I live. So, that's kind of a different story that's more like gleaning, you know. But it's still, you know, getting a resource that's untapped basically and trying to be more efficient. So we're basically taking all these calories that are gonna a lot of them would just become food for insects. Yeah. Which sometimes that's even a problem. If they mulch it all, the insects can come and mess up their trees or whatever. Right? So, yeah, we're just trying to take those calories and stretch their life span out into something else. And then it becomes wine, and it goes from nourishment of your body to, like, more nourishment of your soul, maybe, or something like this. For sure. A lot of the calories become alcohol and, you know, it becomes a whole whole other thing. But, yeah, we've experimented with over seventy fruits. Wow. That's a lot. And and I wanted to ask how How have you gone into it? Like, it's how did it happen? What inspired you? Yeah. I hate this thing where, it often happens in the media or, like, from big companies or the government where they wanna blame the consumer for the world getting hotter and stuff. And it's not necessarily the consumer's fault. It's like a giant conglomerate's fault. It's the government's fault. It's the military burning huge amounts of oil. Whatever. And then they are like, but you need to, like, you can't you you need to have a paper straw or whatever it is. Right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. The paper straws suck unfortunately. The metal ones are pretty good. Sometimes they ruin the taste of things though. Or if you're not, if you don't have celiac, just disease, just use a bucatini spaghetti. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So, how did it start? I I had made mead and beer in my closet and in my kitchen and I'd fermented lots of foods. But mead is really how I got started and it was just chance. We had a film shoot. Somebody at Craft Services bought like forty pounds of organic honey. I don't know why. Okay. And then I made that into mead because we didn't eat forty pounds of honey. We're only like eight people. It was crazy. That's a lot of honey. So I made mead I made the first thing I made was weird. It had mesquite wood, the spicy wood from Texas. It had, some wild Jasmine flowers in it. Uh-huh. I was putting that in there to try to get yeast in it. And then, like, some years after that, I was Back in California, I had shown my films in LA for a while. Pandemic started. I was not gonna stay in LA for the pandemic. It's like being in a horror film to me. So I left for the mountains of Santa Cruz, and I lived in the middle of nowhere there. And I saw some wine barrels for sale from a brewer, actually. They were actually whiskey barrels. And I decided I was gonna buy them and make wine in my yard. I convinced my landlord who thought it gave her cultural Pache to have wine made in the yard Yeah. To let me do it. And then, like, I started looking at the vineyards and the grapes around Santa Cruz, and I didn't know anybody. And they were really expensive, like, three thousand dollars a ton. Wow. So I start combing the internet. And the place where I live now, they were three hundred dollars a ton. And they were unsprayed. They were organic by default because nobody farmed it. Mhmm. Fifteen years wild. Maybe before that, somebody did some things to it. Yeah. All those things are long since gone in fifteen years. So I call a guy, I drive way out there. I'm like, okay. The grapes are grapes are ten percent of the price. And it He just found that price in the farmer's Almanac. No way. Yeah. That's what it told him wine grapes are from in his county. Wow. Nobody bought them ever but me for two years. And every year, I'd make some wine in my yard. Mhmm. People like it. We would drink it. Trade it with winemakers, winemakers liked it. So I was like, I can make this into a company. People are enjoying this. Yeah. So every time I saw him, I would ask him if I could rent the whole vineyard. In the second year, he said, yes. Nice. He was tired of mess with it. He would do all this stuff and nobody would buy it. So we moved out there off grid three and a half years ago about and started we don't really farm it. We I I've met a lot of people, especially in Napa and some fancier spots. They buy a place with the vineyard. Yeah. And they hire the wrong person or they get the wrong information and somehow, and they mess up the grapes or they kill the grapes or the thing gets over pruned, and it doesn't make enough fruit the next year, whatever. Sometimes they actually kill them. I didn't wanna be that person, and I had all these people telling me what to do that I knew, and I was like, I think big part of the project is I don't mind saying no to a lot of things. So I said no, and it still has never been pruned. We've done some experiments. Wow. Never been pruned. Wow. Maybe fifteen years. Yeah. So they're giant. Like, look kind of like my hair. They're just everywhere and they're like some of them are like seven feet tall. Wow. These trees growing in there. No way. Yeah. They grow up the trees because that's the evolutionary thing. Yeah. Yeah. And so someone's supposed to make the fruit on the top and the birds take it away or whatever. So it's really wild. And then I have all my baby vines in there, which are way more well camped, but they're in between the big ones. And so, yeah, it just became a whole project. The upcycling thing started because I was interested in making other fruits in the wine, and I was already doing it in smaller amounts, and I just kept trying to find bigger and bigger producers that still had the same kind of values like organic farming and stuff. That's kinda how it started. Then we went to wine fairs. People responded really well. People wrote articles about us two or three years ago when we weren't even a real winery. Mhmm. And we were just giving it away. And, we became a real winery, in the last harvest and started selling, started legally producing at larger scale. And, yeah, it's it's going it's going pretty good. It's been fun. Now we have people that are interested in investing. We're talking to all these different angles of things we can do. So Yeah. That's great. It takes, you know, it takes a vision, first of all, and then I would say a lot of courage to just you know, go with your vision and, you can really tell that there's like an artist's mind behind it. I I would say. But before we go to that, I hear you just mentioned that you had You bought whiskey barrels? Yeah. And did you use those barrels for making the wine? I That's super interesting. If I had thought about it next time I see you, I'll give you one of the wines. We probably have like twenty eight bottles left. Okay. Yeah. That would be so fun. It's it's really weird. Even though they had been whiskey barrels, I think it was like a bourbon, like a fancy bourbon company. They still had a lot of toast flavor in there. Mhmm. Like the smokiness. And The wine is pretty simple. We stepped on Gernache. It fermented, and then we put it in there with gravity down a hill with like a siphon hose. And, then we left it in there for a year and bottled it And the wine is like, got this crazy mushroom thing now. Wow. And it doesn't taste like wood really at all anymore. Oh, yeah. I bet. Yeah. So know, that was when the first time I ever did it, like, winemaking. So I had, like, a crappy thing to put the cork in the bottle. Mhmm. And the corks aren't great. And so the corks are all halfway out. Yeah. But some of the bottles are still good. We drank one the other day. With with our our guy that was helping us at harvest. Yeah. So I was like, you gotta try the first one. Yeah. And it was kinda special. Does it have a name? Did you give it a name? No, actually. Not really. And, you know, Andy, she really thought it was gonna be not good. Okay. Like, when we were making it, because, like, why making is kinda nasty? Like, you're stepping in all this, like, putting at the bottom of the thing, you know, all the leaves and the yeast and stuff? And so she is the the project has also been a series of her being, like, it's incredible that this is good. I remember, like, standing in what seemed like mud. I'm, like, yeah, this is the mud. This is the dirt, like you were saying, you know. So, yeah, both you were an NDR artist, how do your respective practices influence the way you approach the winemaking process? So Andy danced and did ballet when she was young. And quit and became a modern dancer, more freedom, and all none of the messed up stuff about ballet. So she's actually the person who steps on everything. So she's dancing. Yeah. Okay. So there's that. And then, you know, I mean, that's a really, straightforward answer to that question. She just steps on the grapes because she dances. Yeah. And that's beautiful. She did mention, crushing the grapes by, like, yeah, dancing on them. And I just I was, you know, when she was telling me about just crashing the grapes by dancing, I imagine, I don't know, has it ever happened that, like, whole thing choreography comes out or, like, how is I just envision it as a process. And, of course, that's that's what she thought she dances. So It's funny. It's like, it's so utilitarian. It's like a forced march where you're like looking down. I try to make it fun. We put on music. Oh, yeah. We get an umbrella in there. We get the wine. I always make it a point that we have to drink the wine when we do it. Yeah. Because it's part of the thing And, you know, if we have a lot of labor to do, sometimes that's a bad idea to have very much. Because it is very labor intensive, and we're so tired during that time that, when you drink alcohol like that and you're physically laboring really hard. You're like tapping into some ancient human activity, right? Cause humans used to we're like a caffeinated society now. Yeah. That's so that we can make everybody work more and get up at weird times and working factories at night and all these kind of things. Right? We used to just be an agrarian, basically, alcohol society. A lot of places, they couldn't drink the water without it being alcohol. Mhmm. And they'd wake up really early and work in the fields and start drinking and eating and go to sleep. I don't know. I just think it, as far as the dance, you know, we have our moments, but it's it's it's funny how it can and it depends on the grape a lot too. Mhmm. The ganache is easy to crush. Sinceo is really easy to crush. Most of them are easy to crush. The Sacramento is like so hard and weird, and it takes forever to get any juice out of it, and it It's not a foot crushing grape, really. Take some real frustration too. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I normally, I get in there and I'm like heavier than everybody else doing it. And that helps a lot. Like, just to move my body around, it's like, I'm I can crush some grapes, you know. And Sacramento, sometimes it'll be like forty five minutes and you start to see some juice. You're like am I doing anything? That's a lot. Yeah. But yeah, if in the future you need some music motivation, I'm happy to Come help. I love that. Yeah. Come DJ for us, please. Oh my god. We have a real winery now too. So it's like, you know, climate controlled. It's not we can take them in there and yeah. Let's do something about it. Cool. So let's talk about since you mentioned the segmentino, let's talk about it. It has a Nicek quotation on it. Why did you choose a Nicek quotation? Is that appearing? What was the concept behind it? The Nicek quotation is about non knowledge, and I'm really interested in this in my PhD. It kind of depends on how you think the universe started. If you have a strong opinion about it, a lot of people don't. But used to all the philosophers talked about the universe starting with god, right, generally. Not everybody actually. There there were some some ancient ones with a different kind of conception. But, generally speaking, you know, Nikche's responding to these more religious people before him. And he's talking about how if there wasn't a god to start the universe, then all this knowledge came out of non knowledge. Mhmm. And he likes to talk a lot in when he talks about art particularly, but it's useful for other things to talk about how it's not real art unless it's constantly concealing and revealing itself in this like rhythmic pulsation. So if it's, written out and you know every single Iota it, it it can't be art. It needs to have another side. And so the wine's called the night is also a sun. And it's about how, you can find revealing in, in the concealing. Yeah. When the light goes out, you can still use the the night to guide you. It sounds kind of corny. It's a quote from my friend Mark Roth. He's an amazing painter. We have a painting of his in the winery now. He went to our master's program. He says that, creativity is the ultimate unlimited renewable resource Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it it's it's fun because yeah. I like I like Nica. I mean, he's completely insane at times, you know? That's the fun part about him is he's concealing and revealing all the time. He's his best work to me is the stuff where it's like a it's like literature. It's like a guy dancing on a mountaintop saying weird aphorisms, and you can kinda take them where you want to. Yeah. But yeah, I'm a big fan. You know, Miche went in a lot of directions. He got really famous. His sister was a Nazi sympathizer, and she edited his books to be to seem like they were a Nazi. He's actually completely anti fascist. Feel like generally speaking. Mhmm. And, so he got politically really abused after he died. And not everybody knows about that, especially outside of the philosophy world. So I always have to mention that, like, like, you know, and there's also obviously insane followers of hurt, his, like, anybody who's famous. So I can't endorse them all, but I like his spirit a lot. So he kind of spent his life in this weird isolation elation of going to the mountains and trying to figure out his health going to the sea. That was like what the doctor would tell you nothing. Right? I mean, that's pretty good advice still. Yeah. That's still pretty good. So p. Oh my god. Is this? I just sorry. No. No. Good. Is this modern time PTO? It will go. It take PTO to go to the c. Okay. Time off. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Oh my god. I'm so sorry. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Totally. Totally. Yeah. So he, he also embraces this, this, style of talking about things in a very epic way. That is really makes people uncomfortable these days. It's just not in style to talk like that at all. And maybe if you're like, you know, a boxer or something, they might talk like this still. Mhmm. But he's trying to channel these ancient thinkers who talked in this way, basically, to try to get out of their situation. And for him, it was like to try to not mope and be depressed about being, having bad health. Yeah. So and he has this other thing about, that relates to that called amor Fati, which is like the love of one's fate. So he says that, like, if you spend all your life denying, like, what you've become or who you are, like, something about you that's hard to get around, you're just gonna be resentful. And the resent resentment will just take over everything. And so you should just embrace your fate, you know. And my fate was that I wasn't gonna live that long, and I I was gonna be in pain a lot and blind a lot and and and in ill health and very lonely in a lot of that. And so that's why I'm the wisest person in history, which is ridiculous. But when you see the see it from what the truth of it is, it's really kind of beautiful. Yep. Because he could have quit. He could have done nothing so easily. He even could have continued to live. He had some sort of resources. Right? Mhmm. They're the state or somebody was paying him something to live, an uncle of his left him some money or something. Mhmm. But it wasn't about that. It was about, like, Why am I alive? What can I do while I'm here? And, he had a lot of books. He didn't get to write that he wanted to write. I listened to, a podcast the other day about a book about Herikleidus that he wanted to write. Mhmm. And I love Herikleidus, and he uses herikleidus. Her Clyde is famous for everything is becoming always. Nothing has ever been. So you never step in the same river twice because the river's different and you're different. And I like that a lot with the wine too. I we talk about the wine as a becoming. It's always changing. And, like, you know, we make it outside in a hot place. It gets kind of stabilized. It gets cooked a little bit. And, That's basically totally antithetical to the way most of my friends make. They they refrigerate it from the from the ferment on, right, till you drink it? Yeah. But that's why we love something that is different. And there's no rules unless it the only rule I would say, yeah, embracing your faith, make it, like, it feels good, does it does the process feel good? Does the result feel good. Not just the taste, like, doing it. Does it feel good? Yes. Then then this is it. You know? And I really I really love all of this, and I really love all all that you shared about about nature. And that's why I wanted to ask because when I saw the quotation, I was like, okay, I I know there's probably a world behind it. Yeah. And not just behind it because on the front, on the label, it's, the label, I believe you mentioned that it comes from, a film you shot? Yeah. You can watch, parts of it on my website. It's, dal paradiso dot x y z. Yeah. Yeah, it's a film I made in Colorado with, Andy's in it. My father is in it, which was very funny. He's a really good actor after about forty takes. So he didn't need to talk very much. So we we got it. And my friend Susan Stralis is in it, who, is a horse trainer and a painter and this legendary woman in Colorado, and I met her in Europe at our art school. Oh, and Mark Rothison at the guy I quoted earlier. Mhmm. Just he has a cameo, but, I gotta watch it. I know you mentioned it. I will watch it. It's not all there. There's just some trailers, but I'm still chipping away at it over time. Eventually, it'll be a whole long film. Nice. I really want to keep up with your project. It's everything is so interesting. So Chris Ramfro claim that your wine is the wine of the future. Can you speak on that for me? I really I I when he first said that, I was like, that's ridiculous. I can't accept that. And then I was like, I guess it's like a possible future. Yes. Very possible. The world's getting hotter. We're in the hot place already. This is what it might be like here someday. Probably not. The the ocean is a giant air conditioner basically, but you know, away from the Pacific Ocean, it it it's definitely getting hotter inland for sure. Mhmm. And we grow hybrids. That's something me and Chris have in common. He grows hybrids at the only vineyard in San Francisco somewhere And he has this, two eighty project. Teaches like the youth how to do farming and make wine and really, really amazing. So I met Chris by trading cuttings with him because I just give away cuttings. Cuttings are really weird. They're basically someone's trash, but people act like they're made of gold if you want them. So, I met him by just giving him some. And, whoa. Whoa. So, yeah, the upcycling thing, I hope it's the wine in the future. I'm working on it. It is definitely scalable. Even though I only use organic fruit, there's way more organic fruit production than I'm involved with. We've done about twenty thousand pounds into wine Wow. Of of stone fruit mostly. But yeah, I think that climate resilient, vineyard, and upcycling all this food waste is really important. I feel like the upcycling is just about getting our systems more efficient. We don't necessarily need to ever make any more food than this. We just need that thirty eight percent of production to all turn into something. Right? I'm turning it into wine. We're also talking about turning it into non alcoholic stuff like sodas and juices and different things. I they probably wouldn't just be a straight up juice because I wanna make something interesting. Yes. But, that's definitely another angle of it too. And even stuff like vinegar. Oh, wow. Because, you know, you make all this wine naturally. Some of it turns into vinegar. So we have some amazing vinegars. I'll bring you one next time. I bet. Yeah. They're like raw organic. It's hard to find to buy vinegar that's not been cooked and filtered and stuff. Right? So the chefs like them a lot. And, yeah, I've I think it's a possible future or, like, our possible future of it. And I would love to see it catch on. I would love to see other winemakers start doing it, you know? Maybe not immediately, maybe give me a little time. But I mean, I think you already own it. You know? Yeah. Yeah. The world the world needs stuff like this. Truly. Because, if we can have forty percent more food, that means we don't need to make to banned our food production for, like, maybe a really long time. Right? Yeah. So I don't know. The economics of that is actually insane because we import tons of food. We export tons of other food, and it's just a giant thing. It's not so direct, but but yeah. Yeah. And, again, I feel like making wine is already an art. If we want to talk about the traditional way. Yeah. It started as an art, then it became in my opinion to ruled out, but, it's already an art. So seeing an artist, you know, taking their spin on it. It's very inspiring. And I know we talked already about your creativity. But is there any other way that the creativity you have take a role in how you make wine? Yeah. We also, like, a lot of our decisions end up being from stuff that we just have to do because we don't have the resources to do another thing. Like That's very real life. You know? Yeah. Like the plum wine and the nine veils and no fuzz. Mhmm. They're all bottled while they're fermenting at a very low point three bricks. Like a champagne's like one point two or something. Right? So, we do that so that we don't have to add any chemicals when we bottle. And also, we know that the wine is gonna be good after we do that. The wine's Yeah. Very almost no chance of it going back if we bottle it fermenting. We also, the first time we did it, we just did it because we had to use the vessel it was in for something else that was ripe, and we could only pick it right then. So, yeah, the creativity goes hand in hand with, like, just being utilitarian and using what you can. I think, winemaking, which is older than civilization that we know. It's crazy. It's like twenty thousand years old or something. Remember there was a time when they were like, it's eight thousand year old tradition, and then they found even older stuff. So I think that for all of that time, and I'm sure there were many, many, many wine wizards that had a feel for it, knew some stuff that it was basically science, but not called that or whatever. Some of it was probably called science and Yeah. Greece or somewhere. They were way more dionysian. Mhmm. And, making wine is older than the idea of dionysus, and Nikche is famous for wanting society to become more dionysian. Mhmm. And so and then that's something that I love to talk about. Like, I feel like only the last hundred years has winemaking to come this, like, apollonian chemistry, math, numbers. How much yield can we get out of this? If we squeeze it harder, we can get some really bad wine out of the end of the thing. And if we do this to it, we can blend it with the good wine. You know, like, a totally soulless endeavor, basically. And I feel like that's the way the big companies are now. And, you know, some of them are they're not hurting that bad, but they're they're down a little bit. Yeah. I don't know. I I think that a return to something more dionysian is more honest and more fun. Like, they're never gonna be it's funny too, because people think that I take these huge risks by not sulfurying the wine and the way that I do things, but I have a method that works. Like, I pick things that are ripe or over ripe. They have way more antioxidants and a little more alcohol, but the wines end up not having that much alcohol alcohol, maybe from evaporating in vessels and stuff. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. I think I think the Apolonian time for wine is is dying. And I think that, it's it's there's at least a pretty good And you know, there's places like Georgia where they never quit making the wine they always made. Yep. So they're still doing things very dionysian. They do things like me, but even crazier. I mean, they'll bury their wine for like three years and never taste it, you know? They might taste it after a year or two. And I think that that's that's that's the way that it used to be done. And I'm I'm interested in that for my own reasons. And a lot of that, I have to say a lot of this project is very selfish and it's just about me wanting to try new flavors and new taste new things. My girlfriend is always tired of me experimenting in the kitchen. And when new people come, they're like, this is amazing. I've never had this And I'm like, I've never had this either. I made this up. And my girlfriend is like, please don't please don't get him excited about this. I'm I'm trying to make a traditional Italian pizza, and he always makes a weird pizza, and I make the normal one, and like So, I mean, she's very creative too, but in the cooking, she's like way more about the traditional classics. Yeah. So I also have a problem and a lot of this is like my emulsion. Mhmm. And I think that sometimes people see it as just that. And that's okay with me, but it, you know, there are bigger themes. There's other things that work behind Yeah. The scenes. It's not just about me being a flavor freak, but that's definitely how it got here. You know? Yeah. But that's beautiful. And I love, you know, compulsions or I love being hyper excited about something specific and just like, yeah. I don't I don't care how much you wanna dig into it. It's like, I love it. It's just one of those very, peculiar things that make a human even more interesting in my eye. Like, yeah, tell me all that, you know, about this specific thing and experiment all you want. I love it. You know, we need it. You know, that's how things sometimes get discovered just by trying and trying and experimenting and not being afraid of it. And that's it takes yeah. Again, a lot of courage. I want to ask you one last question about unconventional pairings. So pick one of your wines or any wine, but I think one of your wines would be good. But, yeah, also any other wine. And pair it if you can or want with a piece of art or a song or a book or a movie or song of your art, just something that it's not food. So there is this film director that I love. He's probably my favorite film director named Takashi Mike from Japan. Mhmm. He's completely insane. Okay. If you look him up, it's like, you might see he he's just the most, diverse genre and genre mixing director. He has a very funny sense of humor, I like. And a beautiful aesthetic, but he does dramas, comedies, horror films, musicals. I mean, he's he makes children's movies that have huge budgets in Japan and anime and He's kind of slowed down, but he used to make about six films a year with this Japanese like workaholic film crew. Like one every two months. Yeah. And he would, he would just take like a a famous anime or manga or book and rewrite the whole thing and oftentimes just totally forget whatever the book was about and just make this crazy film as fast as he could. Yeah. And he he's very famous. He's in the they put him in the Academy Awards. He's like a member of the Academy, like, a couple years ago, which made me die laughing. Like, I was like, what? Amazing. But he's also famous for like his horror films that are like extremely graphic and like push the boundaries of They were like, we wanna put a movie of yours on HBO, and he just made it to where they couldn't put it on there. He it was like a challenge to him. Mhmm. But he has this film, that I really love called Gosu. Which is extremely surreal. It's kinda terrifying at times. It's really weird. It's a Yakuza gangster film where they're like looking for this guy who's kinda dissed appeared. Uh-huh. And they go to this place that where nobody really seems real and ruled Japan. It's really weird. Yeah. It's really strange. I don't need to watch it. I I I it's, at times, it's kind of, like, it starts out like a terrifying gangster movie, and then it was this crazy fever dream. And I feel like that wine locally hated that has my picture on it, which shout out to my neighbors. I made that because of this neighbors I have that told me organic farming isn't real. Oh, okay. Yep. So I feel like that wine, it is the nine veils, but the nine veils was bottled while it was fermenting and has all the fruits and stuff. And then and this wine was put in a barrel, and it's outside in the shade, but it basically gets cooked. Mhmm. And it's it's nutty, but it still has the pick pool blanc high acidity. It's got some dried fruit flavors, but it's like halfway between Kumar spec, which is fully cooked in the sun. Mhmm. And the nine veils, which is fully like a regular old high acid fruity wine. And I feel like there was a woman tasting that Bay grape, shout out to Bay grape, yesterday. Who's really cool, and she said, this wine is a roller coaster. When I first smelled it, I felt something. I tasted it. It went in a completely different direction. And then the finish was like roasted nuts, and the acid just disappeared for all this like caramel y cooked barrel stuff. I feel like that movie is is in that. That's what I wanna be doing. Okay. I I want I wanna have wines that are, like, this wine is more one dimensional. Yeah. But it just it's because citrus oils are not a wine tasting thing at all. Like an aperitivo or something. Yeah. But yeah, locally hated. I was really happy it turned out. I hadn't opened the barrel in, like, a long time. So when it tasted that good, I was like, let's bobble it all. Let's label it all. Get it out of here Yeah. Before we cook it into nothing. That's beautiful. I can't wait. Now I really wanna try this one watching the movie that you just mentioned. Yeah. Yeah. I will say the movie is like times graphic and, like, it's just it's weird. It's weird. I mean, I love to be left confused. Great. There's, like, a little bit of weird sexual tension in one part. He, like, stays at this in in the middle of nowhere, and it's weird. It's really Yeah. But it it seen as like a comedy. It seems like you have a great sense of humor. Mhmm. I think you'll really enjoy it. Okay. Yeah. So anyway. Well, I mean, I think we have plenty of things to you know, get inspired by and while shipping your wine. So thank you so much for for being here, with the Italian wine podcast. And let's organize a great, crushing, event. Let's do it. I love that. Yeah. And if, if anybody wants them in the city, they're at bar, gym and I, bar and bottle. Mhmm. Friend of a friend, Chris Winfro's shop, Bae grape in Oakland, Redfield cider in Oakland. A couple of other oh, the laundromat Mhmm. Yeah. Which is fun, like a bagel place. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. They're fun. They gave me a lot of bagels the other day. And you can buy them online. Shatinuf dot x y z. Perfect. Figure out how to spell that. Yeah. We'll link everything in the description. And, yeah, everyone should check them out. Thank you, Alejandro. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you for joining us today. Let us know your thoughts on our social media at Italian wine podcast and follow us to keep up with the next generation of Italian wine people. Make sure to check out my latest article where we dive into music and wine on the Italian wine podcast web second. Cheers.