Ep. 2271 Pascaline Lepeltier | Voices with Cynthia Chaplin

Speaker 0: intelligence make us pessimistic but goodwill make us optimistic so i want to be optimistic i think i will be more i i want to continue to work as a family i really like my job and i want to continue to use the platform more and more to talk about what we are talking about right now it's it's about name is mordinola tru he's pretty well famous at least in the us because he taught at columbia we to give solutions it's time to just talking is great and criticizing is great and all that but to to give solution which is what i'm gonna try to give in this next look you know it's about okay what what are we doing what are we can we really be doing Speaker 1: welcome to the italian wine podcast i'm cynthia chaplin and this is voices every wednesday i will be sharing conversations with international wine industry professionals discussing issues in diversity equity and inclusion through their personal experiences working in the field of wine if you enjoy the show please subscribe and rate our show wherever you get your pods Speaker 2: hello welcome to voices this is cynthia chaplin your host and today i am so thrilled to welcome pascaline lapeltier to voices pascaline hails from france and she is a leading light in the world of wine with a lengthy list of achievements and her first solo book millet vignette a thousand vines was published in twenty twenty two and just released in english a couple of months ago so she was named one of the top five best new sommeliers in the usa in two thousand and eleven she received her court of master sommelier diploma in two thousand fourteen she was recognized as a forty under forty taste maker by wine enthusiast and the best sommelier in france in two thousand and eighteen and right now she's currently the beverage director at chambers which opened in twenty twenty two and is already one of new york's most revered restaurants so very very busy woman thank you so much pascaline for coming on today i appreciate it Speaker 0: thanks a lot for having me well Speaker 2: you're originally from anjou a really important wine region in the north of france but you didn't set out to have a career in wine you studied philosophy and you were getting ready to be a university professor in that field so what happened that made you change tack how did you get involved in wine obviously you lived in a winemaking region but that wasn't what you were planning to do what happened Speaker 0: yes i was very lucky to grow up in anjou but my parents were not at all in wine or restaurants so i kind of knew wine but from very very far away and as i was going into the study i just realized a few months before i was starting to take my diploma to become a teacher that i was not ready to teach philosophy i was quite young at the time i was twenty one i kind of cruised through my school years and so a philosophy teacher seeing me kind of really down and depressed and was burnt out by everything i was doing and wondering a lot told me listen you should just go and find a job somewhere you should take a year break and he loved wine and he told me you should work in a wine shop so i went to work in a wine shop and i took the bus almost like right away like i didn't know at all about this universe and started to fascinate me and on top of that to make a little living during the summertime i started to work in a catering company and i discovered the world of food and restaurants and i loved it and so i asked my parents if they were okay if i could take a year to explore the field and i went back just to do a bit more restaurant management and here we are after a complicated start of that career because i was not really in france it's very hard to transition especially when you are good at school people are looking at you very strangely when you want to do vocational school so i had a very hard time entering a hospitality school people were telling me that i was stupid to change career but i perceived and i went back to university i did an mba and then i really realized i loved wine i tried a magical wine at the end of my mba in nineteen thirty seven he came and i was like okay want to become a sommelier so i went back to vocational school at twenty five and i had my first job on the floor of a restaurant at twenty six and here we are Speaker 2: well philosophy's loss is the wine world's gain i have to say it's funny how these things happen i think a lot of people in wine myself included i was on track to be a psychologist and i think we fall in love with the world of wine and as you said also food which in france can't be that hard to fall in love with and i think sometimes people who love to study as you did and as i did wine is a never ending thing to study so that's also really attractive and seductive so i'm not surprised but i am certainly very glad that you made this big change and once you got into the wine world your career took off in a huge way you went from working in some of the best restaurants in europe including rouge talent in brussels and in paris onto the us and as i already mentioned you were named one of the top five best sommes in the us in twenty eleven and got your diploma from the court of master sommes in twenty fourteen so this is a huge amount to achieve in a very short period of time and i didn't know about the mba and the restaurant management program so clearly you are a very very driven person many people in wine go decades before they accomplish this much so what was driving this what you were just on fire with everything you were doing what was pushing you forward into the world of wine like this Speaker 0: people i think you know it's very funny that says that about wine i'm very glad to hear that i think when i found wine i find something i could really deeply relate to you know often i take the the metaphors and the interviews with music i would have liked to to be a pianist but despite all the hours i put into my piano lesson i'm definitely not a great pianist but you know so to me why now i found maybe my my my calling my vocation and so i was twenty five twenty six time was running out a little bit you know i was quite old when i started up in my school people with me were like sixteen seventeen and i was just absolutely passionate suddenly when you discover something you love you know you just embrace it and i think it went quite quickly because my age it could have seemed to me at the beginning as a disadvantage became an advantage and especially with my background at university where i was extremely lucky to learn how to think and how to learn so in a very short amount of time i could i think just absorb a lot of information and data that was not very hard for me and i was guided by the right people in the vineyard and in the winery being from anjou i was really lucky to be exposed and to meet right away some people that are extremely important for me that were part of this evolution of the viticulture into the farming approach i'm thinking about the nicolae valley of the world the marcolae valley of the world my region is a very important bed of people thinking about organic biodynamic and today even regenerative farming and these people were extremely nice and kind and i could right away discuss with them test with them and i saw my work very quickly on so as very political work as i was doing my mba i discovered the world of michael pollan and all the anthropologists talking about the current system of the food around the world and i never took lightly to be part of an industry that was feeding people the luck for us to be feeding people with beautiful food extremely enhanced food with an incredible culture but what does that mean to feed people to give wine to people how are sources produced what are the intentions behind it and so you had two big drives you have my personal drive which was the pleasure i was taking to discover this universe and really the enjoyment as you said to be able to connect wine to aesthetics to geography to politics to culture to everything that was fantastic to meet people and the drive to realize that i could i was i was in a position that was extremely important today to try to be a little bit more vocal about the importance of the food system and my first job at couche tomat was exceptional because of this restaurant was embodying a thinking of what is to be a restaurant today how is it to be truly sustainable which means from the way you build to the way you you run your restaurant in terms of energy in terms of supply in terms of all the questions about food cost about sourcing about the health of the clients how you staff your restaurants and for ten years i was able to see that it's possible to work in this business and to really try to offer an alternative to the current food food system which we all know is extremely problematic so that's why so the drive was extremely selfishly personal on one side meeting discovering these incredible people tasting wine that was blowing my mind feeling that i could play a little part in the needed change of our society Speaker 2: i think that's such a smart approach to putting food and wine together and the hospitality industry i loved what you said about not taking it lightly to be part of an industry that feeds people i think it's something that we tend to forget sometimes and wine is certainly an agricultural product in a way that a lot of other alcoholic beverages are not so wanting to be more vocal about food systems and playing a part in that certainly doesn't sound selfish but i do understand the joy that you can find in there so a very good reason for pushing forward you managed to weave your career between the usa and france you were one of the forty under forty taste makers from wine enthusiasts and best sommelier in france in twenty eighteen so how did you end up balancing your transatlantic responsibilities and your very transatlantic life that you have Speaker 0: yes i'm based in new york since two thousand and nine but my first job with anjutomats allowed me stay in touch with europe because the company was originally based in belgium so that was one part and on the other part i negotiated from day one in my contract that i would have a certain amount of time off to be able to go back to vineyards and so i spent every year then a couple of weeks a year in europe and in france at least just because you continue to learn about wine because i really think you learn about wine in the vineyard with the winemakers and the vineyards this is really where things are happening it's not on the table in an office in new york city so i was lucky to be able to do that it was always extremely important it was part of i would say part of my job to go back to europe and for france i think you know it's the same thing it's the thing you can understand is when you start to live abroad this is when you realize that you have gold in your hand at home so i really i learned so much from my first years in the us about a new way of thinking about life a different culture a different way of working in restaurants certain amount of freedom you know and i left france originally because i felt the way the way it's really of the tradition it was hard for me to be a woman at that time in a wine business it was hard to be ambitious to be also interested by non traditional wine i was really a lot into low intervention wine i was very curious about wine that were not french so when you put that together two thousand and nine two and eight in france you know it was not the easiest place to find a job with responsibility my first couple of years in the us in new york i had this beautiful restaurant incredible budget and i could do whatever i wanted you know so the freedom was fantastic but after a couple of years i realized that i was who i was because of my heritage because of where i was coming from so it was very important for me to keep in touch with france with my colleagues with what was happening with the history of my country with the gastronomic history wine history and so i really made a big commitment to be in tune with the two countries because i could see how i was nourishing myself from both experience and new york is not the us as we kind of know new york is its own beast it's its own little island manhattan especially with this extraordinary incredible amount of culture of nationalities together in this tiny island so i'm nourishing myself here from this eclecticism of culture this fact that you are meeting some of the really most passionate people in any field you can think about coming from all these countries having all these stories exposing you to all these incredible food culture i love that here in new york i love the entrepreneurship but new york is a city that never sleep it's always new new new new new it's like go go go go go it's always time doesn't really count and so when i go to france i really like the idea that it just takes time that there is this heritage that is extremely strong that i can learn from there is this fascination there is mentorship there is a lot of things that i really cherish and i wanted to continue to enrich myself from both countries and try to take the best of both and so yep so it's part of i'm going in france in a few days for a week i write for a magazine in france really enjoy being from now being from two cultures i really cherish that i think welcoming that is very important Speaker 2: we definitely destined to have this conversation because my life has been the reverse i'm i'm american obviously and i lived in new york for a while and i moved to europe thirty two years ago so i i know exactly what you mean that each place that you are brings something new into your life and into your spirit and i think it's a huge compliment to you as a person to be able to appreciate such different cultures particularly as you said manhattan is not america it really isn't but it's incredibly different from france even paris so understanding how to draw something that's beneficial from both places is a testament to what you're doing in your life and clearly shows in your work you never seem to stop you won wine list of the year from the world of fine wine magazine for rouge de motte in twenty seventeen you became a partner at racine in new york in twenty eighteen one of the top wine and dine restaurants in the us and then in twenty nineteen you were awarded personality of the year by la revue du vin in france where i know you write for them as you said and you were the first woman ever to receive this very prestigious award and you mentioned it's not always easy to be a woman working in the wine business particularly when you're young i went through that and many people who are listening to this will have gone through that sometimes it doesn't get a lot easier sometimes it feels a little bit lighter but i can't imagine you have enough walls in your house for all of these awards you've won and yet you never seem to be a person who just leans back and enjoys all the limelight of your success what keeps you so humble but still so motivated you're still doing so much in wine we'll get to that in a minute how are you balancing this great success with continuing to work a lot of people would just say i've arrived i'm done i'm going to sit back and do nothing Speaker 0: you know i think i'm just i feel very lucky to have been able to do so much and it's not me you know it's also a lot of support from so many people that have been on my side all this year to push me and to move forward and yeah and to get all that i think i continue to do a little bit of competition in all this because i also realized that it was well first i i like i like to continue myself to improve i think some people a lot of people can relate to that that idea that there is always something to learn and the one is infinite if you say it you can never stop and after i you know i really for me it's very like i'm very lucky to do a job that can seem extremely superficial you know which is serving wine in a restaurant i live in a neighborhood in manhattan and live in west harlem since now ten years and i can't tell you it's been the wealthiest neighborhood in new york at all it's more grounded with the current crisis that the city is going through i never wanted to continue to work in restaurants that was also from michelin star restaurant working for the wealthiest people in the world even though my restaurant right now is in tribeca which is one of the wealthiest zip code in new york but it's also a very of neighborhood known restaurant i think i was very influenced by the fact that the winemaker and the people that the most i wish the most respectable but that are the closest friends of mine and that we mentor me extremely simple humble people themselves and keep on putting love saying hey listen we are really lucky to be able to work in wine and the situation in this world is so complicated for so many people all around the world and so great you can have the best for me so what does that really mean why you know and that ground fake of reality is needed you know and and once again i was very lucky to be born in a family that was fine that you know allowed me to do some study i didn't have to work when i was a teenager or a young person we paid for my study i you know loving family like go on i was extremely lucky and so i just i just i just want to put things in perspective with the reality of this world today and this i told you my motivation on one side is very selfish because of course i love wine i love meeting people love reading i love continuing to and i i created my own little world for that but today i'm seeing whatever i'm doing and especially the media and the limelight to be more of a platform to push a serious agenda which i'm lucky to be able to be a voice for which is we us that we can that we have the freedom and the money to be able to do so we need to really to be realizing that we have a certain luck and how participate to some of the needed change that the world that we're in needs to see you know and one of them is through once again the agricultural and the food that we are eating and how can i be avoided for that how can i be avoided supporting alternative system in my restaurant way we buy the food the way we serve the food how it can be one bottle at a time and that's really my job i think it's to make people realize how how they are powerful with their palate how the sense of eating and the sense of their taste and the nose is a source of joy is a source of pleasure but is a source of health is a source of fulfillment if they are a little bit more maybe aware of that because they never been exposed to to things that ingredients wine that are really exceptional for their their vibrancy they don't need to be expensive how can they be suddenly realizing that and say wow this is what i want for me is what i want for my kids and so this is why you know this is why i do my job every day and at the end you know i don't do a lot when you think about it the big responsibilities today in my field are i think taken by still the winemakers because being in the agricultural field today is as we know extremely hard from the farming itself to the extreme of the evolution of climate change to taking the decision to make your living out of crops and valorize it and to then to go and to sell it my job is really very you know i don't take a lot of risk in my job i'm just passing through you know running a restaurant is a bit more difficult i would say but so just let's put back everything in perspective and when you do that suddenly you're like okay that's cool got that one but like you know what there is so much more to me that needs to be done so yeah Speaker 2: well i love that and keeping it in perspective is something that is easy to forget about especially in light of lots of things happening in the world today as you said so i do want to focus on this and i want to talk a little more in-depth about your recent work and the wines that you're focusing on in twenty twenty two you opened chambers in tribeca as you said focusing on farm to table food and organic and biodynamic natural wines so i understand your connection and wanting to really take a look at food systems and educate people and show them the joy and the magic can be there you've said you want to spotlight wine as a central part of civilization and focus on the link to nature and to culture so people can rediscover what farming really means so how are you modeling this philosophy at chambers let's talk about chambers a Speaker 0: little bit yeah but chambers is a new iteration of restaurant called coressing that was opened in twenty fourteen twenty fourteen sorry but how we do it in chambers we do we try to do it on our small scale you know we are a small independent restaurant in which is not an easy thing to do today in once again manhattan where like the cost of life has been you know skyrocketing so Speaker 2: and the and the restaurant business is extremely competitive there Speaker 0: yes it's it's been really a yeah it's there is so much so many restaurants here in the city yeah a lot of people are asking me why i'm still in in new york with everything and thinking that i should be somewhere else but i'm still in new york because i think new york is an amazing platform once again to reverberate and people are looking at what's happening in new york it's still one of the most incredible city for for for for and and this interaction of culture so i'm still in new york here but we when we changed restaurants to chambers already one of the first thing was to re adapt the restaurant to the post covid era which was a very different problem new york before covid was very different than new york after covid and so chambers wanted to be a more grounded first restaurant we also changed a lot of things we changed the way we are operating to guarantee a better lifestyle to our team we decreased the hour of operation we made sure that we had two days off in a row we created a we put the restaurant in the way that okay if you want to pay your staff properly how do we need to operate and not like okay if you want to make that amount of money what we need to do and where we can risk with cost so that was the very first thing so we changed our model of operation for that to make sure we could have a good quality of life for our team and not the pressure that the restaurant used to have also we are a dry restaurant we are raising funds in health with staff that was one side we changed the design of the restaurant for the guests to feel better at ease when they were coming so it's a very soft very little lit very noisy restaurant we work with a lot of people to rebuild it that were local suppliers and so we did a lot of the work with people in brooklyn and in new jersey just for the build up inside we thought about all our energy bill we thought about recycling that how can you operate it in you know the most sustainable way if you want and then for what we put on the plates and on the glass my chef is american and worked with one of the most iconic farm to table restaurant in new york for seven years so we had extremely strong connection with all local suppliers so we are making a small menu on purpose that is rotating as the market is rotating so it's not like a big massive tasting menu it's just five courses five main five app two desserts and really really seasonal and local focus most of the food comes from like around not even a hundred miles extremely seasonal including for the fish that we are serving and we do the same thing for the beverage so yes have wine from a little bit all over the world but mostly in fact north american and european with my years at wolf tomat i had the time to think a lot about all these questions locator versus organic because i was lucky to work for ten years with a team of scientists and nutritionists that were helping me to put the criteria how you select your beverages so we have a selection of new york wine we have a selection of north american wine including wine from vermont from montreal from quebec from ontario i have wine from virginia and then i go to california and i retry every time to think about how people are farming what are they farming and it's not the list is not we just take organically certified wine we just take biodynamically certified we know it doesn't work like that we know that as soon as you start to be able to be more aware of farming conditions in one region you know some of these regions are not as suited in north east america for example is the birthplace of most of the wine diseases that we know like downy powdery blackrod phylloxera i mean it comes from here so it's very complicated to farm organically here it's not impossible there is almost nobody certified but how can i really know the winemaker i'm working with how can i have a direct relationship with them and if i don't have a direct direct relationship with them can i have a slightly indirect through distributor that i totally trust and how can i build this program with the people that i think in the region i want to showcase wine from are are the ones that are trying their very best to farm the most sustainably possible to produce wine that are really wine of place which i think is why wine should be probably a definition of wine should be changed in the future like we can talk about that a little later but i think wine definition should change and how can i also find wine that has this sense of place this unicity this taste this really incarnation well and for me it's very important to remain affordable so money has changed quite a lot over the year from brazil to opening this chamber up to today just because of the cost of wine and especially in certain regions where it's becoming absolutely prohibitive and we want to stay affordable for people so we try to keep our price reasonable so that's why we thought the way we're thinking about the operation of the restaurant so that sustainability in the plates how can we still provide extremely beautiful ingredients well done well prepared at a fair price as much as we can being in in manhattan with the cost of living and how can i do that with my beverages with the spirits the teas the coffee the alcoholic the beer the cider the wine and exploring looking for what's the future at a fair price for my guests so that's what we're trying to do every day and and not to teach people about it on the floor i want to teach i'm i'm teaching in a school but at at the restaurant it's really for people to have this experience of this thing just something good and if they want to know more about it i'm more than happy to discuss about it with them but never forget that i am a restaurant first which is a place where people are coming to enjoy themselves with their guests and and eat and drink not to have a master class on the the crisis of of of the wine industry you know so but Speaker 2: that's true that's that's very true and i think all of us who work with wine and have worked on the floor or in hospitality we do forget sometimes that we can't be educators every minute sometimes i know myself if i've had a long day and i've been presenting or been judging or whatever i want to come home i want to drink a glass of wine i don't want to talk about it or think about it i just want to enjoy it and i think a lot of people who go out to restaurants want that experience too and as service people we forget that it's very interesting to know that you're putting that first in the way that you treat your guests and how you welcome them in i know that your other life is chefika it's a wine project that you started in two thousand sixteen with the goal to rediscover the potential of organically grown native grapes and sparkling wines in the finger lakes in upstate new york so not too far from where you are people forget new york state is a big place the name topeka means root and comes from the lenape language spoken by the indigenous people from the delaware valley and this is your joint project with winemaker nathan kendall so you've been talking about your relationships with winemakers and you were blessed from early on to meet winemakers who became dear friends and now you're one of them so what's happening with topeka and nathan and what wines are you making there and how are they being received Speaker 0: yeah thank you topeka is a beautiful project so thanks for talking about it with my dear friend nathan he is born and raised in the finger lakes upstate new york topica came up to me because i was working at rooftomat and i had a question of farming versus local you know was really a problem for me at the time there was no organic profitability was very tricky in in new york in twenty fourteen fifteen because of what i said like york is a very big wine state that people don't necessarily know about but it's a lot of wine in new york and a lot of american vitis are grown in new york there's a kind of an important history especially in the finger lakes that's dated the beginning of the nineteenth century and that history of the finger lakes closer to the canadian border was with hybrids with the local hybrids and what we call the natural hybrids which is the one that were spontaneously created for some of them before phylloxera arrived from in europe and then came back to to to the us but that part of phylloxera went really hybrid starting to take off in europe with with the hybridization program here as you as you probably know when european arrived they wanted to to drink wine and they brought vinifera and vinifera was dying because of all the disease so they were planting vinifera in their backyard didn't work very well but sometimes vinifera was able to cross with american bts like the ricarias labrusca some hybrids were born from that one of them being the dulaware grape which is also why we call the project shapukaya an homage to the dulaware indigenous people tribe and so the fingerlegs they grew a bunch of hybrids one of them was specifically created called conchal and it's still extremely present in uptet and for these hybrids they were growing there without any problem and they disappeared after prohibition and when finger lakes developed really in the sixties right to platybenefera and they tried to really forget about the culture of hybrids and i discovered the culture of hybrids really thanks to nathan because i was like nathan i would like to have a project i would like to have an organic wine for the restaurant from new york do you think it's possible and it's impossible with vitis vinifera it's so hard but if we want to do something we can go for hybrids and i'm like hybrids and me going to finger lakes for multiple times before that none of the winemakers were showing me the hybrids or when i was trying hybrids i don't even know what exactly they were showing me because it was bland of grapes i never heard of they were back sweetened they were very very artificially made in the setters there was this lollipop blue alcohol a little bit sparkling wine in the winery that people were drinking what we call in limo like during bachelorette party like no respect for the grape and the friend is like okay what about us trying to find an organically farmed vineyard of hybrid and try just to take like seriously like really good good good way making i said okay why why not and he said it's definitely so in tune in fact there's a history of the region because all these hybrids were making extremely successful wine especially at the end of the nineteenth century they got middle in europe people from champagne came to learn how to make sparkling wine with them and nathan was like need to read this book so you gave me a book about the history of all that and i was like wow that's fantastic which was a grape oh croctober dulawer mostly it was croctober and dulawer can we find some he said yes and we'll find this organically certified vineyard that was certified since nineteen seventy one with this hundred years old october and delaware grapes and he said let's give it a try and we gave it a try and we from day one we knew we wanted to make sparkling wine because that was what was made in new york state in eighteen fifty eighteen sixty eighteen ninety without anything added so first vintage we added a touch of sulfur because it was the first vintage we were not sure where we were going and since then we haven't added anything the ph of the wine being what it is it's a very low ph it's extremely stable in terms of microbiology so no problem no sulfur no problem and all these hybrids are extremely fascinating grapes they don't really oxidize in terms of the aromatics and so the project that started with me one of my stuff my one child's restaurant grew up because suddenly it was more about both of us realized that it was a project about rethinking what does it mean to grow in a very specific space in a very specific environment and the environment on the finger lakes is extremely hard for vitis vinifera we don't say it's impossible to wear vitis vinifera but it takes a lot of time it's extremely demanding in terms of treatment in terms of labor well hybrids grow extremely well and we're like okay but how can we how is it possible that we can't think today in a different way like if you were very very very serious about what grows in a certain environment new york state is an amazing state for apple apple trees so we should be an extraordinary state for cider if we're very coherent about what is local and environment as we know people don't really want to drink cider at least in america so people are looking to drink wine but if you want to be very serious about how to really grow something well in this environment hybrid should be the way because you don't have to retreat them that much they give you plentiful yield they are pretty cold resistant and so tchapica became a manifesto for us about rethinking what should be grown in a certain environment it's not because you can that you should it's not because you have the technologies that you should because at one point we are seeing it in some other parts of the world you don't have the resources anymore maybe you want to grow grapes in the middle of the dessert what's going on if you don't have enough water you know like right now you can still treat with a lot of synthetic products but what's going to happen when petrol is going to be too expensive and you're not going to be able to afford clinical treatment anymore you know so so that tshepika became that more talking about a global environment and then we also started to be more involved with associations in the finger lakes one of them where in fact the project for us is not a money make up project it's really a love project because i have the restaurant nefton has his own winery and so part of the money we're getting from chepika goes back to certain associations that for us are also extremely important to support one of them is about literacy of workers we have a lot of immigration workers without paper and it's going to become a very very big port in the next couple of months with the new president coming in to washington but how these people they come they don't speak english so how can we be part of an association helping them to learn english and to get paper and you know to know how to reach out to this country so we do we also support that association and we support another association that is called osisdap that is about preserving the culture of the indigenous people of the female exteria that have been unfortunately more or less eradicated with the colonization and how can we preserve their culture and make sure there is the old people are able to have funding to save the knowledge to teach about it to create school about it tupica is also about that about okay how can we are lucky we can buy these grapes we have this fancy outsider winemaker but how can we participate and give back to the region where we are growing the fruits from Speaker 2: well i think our industry is facing so many challenges as you said a new president possibly new trade tariffs the surgeon general's warning coming out the potential loss of many many jobs so the fact that you are looking forward in such a supportive and positive way towards migrant workers people who do jobs that other people don't want to do that support agriculture at just the moment in time where agricultural existence is at risk so i think it's really important that you're doing that of course as i said i'm american so understanding the devastation that expansion in america wreaked on all the indigenous people it's great to hear that you're supporting maintaining that learning maintaining that knowledge and tradition and culture for the delaware people in in the finger lakes region it's not something that's happening enough and so it's great that you're involved in that and you you're in the midst of all of this unbelievably demanding hard work and you still published your solo book your very first solo book in twenty twenty two and it was just released in english as i said just a couple months ago and this book is one of the most beautifully written wine books i don't say that lightly i write myself and i read a lot of wine books but in the past few years it really stands out as just beautifully written and comprehensive showing off all your skills researching and storytelling so where did you get the idea for the book and are you going to write another book in your free time Speaker 0: well thank you in my free time well my first thanks a lot for for saying that i have a lot of respect for a writer you know like studying philosophy and literature you know i grew up surrounded by books so i have a tremendous respect for so i don't feel like i'm a writer yet i have an amazing translator for the english translation so malcolm guerra did an amazing job so i must really sing his praise his mother grant also did a beautiful work of editing so the Speaker 2: she's a fantastic woman she is a powerhouse i love her Speaker 0: yeah so it was extraordinary for me to work with her also you know i feel extremely lucky about that because it's a person that i don't think people know enough about at least you know maybe on that side of the pound and wow you're right it's an incredible woman so a big shout out to her and a big thank you to her for the book yeah no the book came out to be because i decided to teach more especially here in america and i got extremely frustrated by how we're teaching at a certain level i was extremely frustrated about what was asked to the student to be able to pass diploma and to get their diploma which for me looks like really more just learning by heart things without trying to understand and i felt that especially on the somalia side i think it's a little bit different especially with the master of wine program for example which is way more comprehensive and when you really have enough of a research approach but the sommelier approach and the more general public approach felt extremely narrow minded and just about learning things by heart and i felt that was a really major mistake especially to be able to give ourselves the tools to understand the current challenges and instead of complaining to try to find solutions and so this is why i wrote the book because i wanted to give myself first the joy of doing research back because i really enjoyed doing research when i was at university to you know really immerse myself into the field of knowledge of where i'm feeling so incredibly rich but a little bit more and more like expert driven so many great works but extremely precise in their expertise and so my selfishness of getting into that but how could i digest it and put it in a way that could be very useful for my students and showing what would mean to build critical thinking tool and try to understand why are we here today why is it important to know the generality of the concept and the ideas that we are using today and to realize that we cannot not be anthropologists we cannot not be aware that whatever we are using and doing is part of a very specific culture civilization era and that is going to have a mystery that's going to change that adaptation has been humankind since day one so the way we think the way we understand the world way we are and so putting that back in that perspective so that's why the book came to be i wanted marie first to write a book for me and to answer so many subjects i was interested by to see if i could digest them and explain them and then really for my students give them the tools to to try to be able willing them to think by themselves and not being scared of things that were complicated from outside but it's not complicated it's complex i'm not being scared of complexity or dynamic of things changing and swiftly because it's a reality of our world it's a reality of our world that everything is connected it's a reality of our world that when you talk economy you talk history and you talk religion and you talk a bunch of other disciplines and all the disciplines are connected so i wanted to make people feel more at ease with that to give them the tool and then they could go on their own journey after that to embrace that that so that's how the book came to me Speaker 2: well we're we're both educators i'm a wine educator too and i love your book so much and i know that you're also interested in a new much more mindful approach to tasting not just learning about wine i agree with you wholeheartedly that we have to change the way we teach about wine we want to welcome new people into the world of wine people don't want to learn this way anymore and it's really not appropriate for how much wine has changed so i'm on the same page with you there pun intended but i know you want to come up with a more mindful approach to tasting as well and i think this is really important you've been doing a lot of work focusing on the palate and the whole mouth rather than just the nose and i know you're looking at developing more holistic practices for wine tasting i really want to talk about this it's so urgently needed right now especially in the light of all the attacks on the smallest consumption of wine and declining consumption among younger consumers and people who are new to wine what have you got in mind with this how would you like to see wine tasting and the methods that we use evolve because they do need to evolve they really must change Speaker 0: yeah yeah i think you i'm so glad that you are saying you understand what i'm trying to do because sometimes people ask like what are you talking about yes this this came out to be in fact once again sometimes things came out to be because you are you are very like selfishly but i i saw i was reaching a plateau like two and a half years ago about the way i was testing reaching a plateau in terms of my ability to taste not necessarily remembering the analysis where my tools were taking me and it was also parallel to when i was writing milvin in french and i started to read a lot of work of neuroscientists and at that time some neuroscientists started to emerge into the scene very actively at least in france really new research about how your brain works with your taste i really enjoyed this new approach and i rediscovered the tasting the intuitive tasting that was done by a gentleman called jacques herrigault in france that was then a breast which is about rediscovering the testing on the palate in the mouth that was done in the eighty eighteen ninety's nineteen hundred's in france so less importance on the nose less importance on the side more importance on the feeling going back to this energy that was embraced so that approach was embraced by producer i really respect like all that and all that so people that i really really respect were also looking in that field of what i've been doing for like fifteen years so i was like really like wow there is something there and so i trained with this very famous french sommelier called frank thomas which has been applying this method since a while and i really took something out of it but it's not the most easy to grasp at the beginning and i continue to kind of dive in that and you know what really was the triggers was competition and so i continue to do wine competition kind of like the last one is the one i did for the world in twenty twenty three was a happy accident because i didn't think i was going to qualify to represent france and i did and suddenly i had to kind of wow i need to be ready to go for this competition it's very demanding and i decided to change my approach for that competition how to prepare for it and i connected with connected with the olympic team of archery Speaker 2: wow that's definitely a different approach Speaker 0: yeah and their national director loves wine so he put me in touch with the psychologist of the archery team and with the physical coach of the archery team then i started to work with them on breathing on muscle the contraction of concentration the way you need to do for you with archery because when you do blind testing for us for example it's super quick you have like four minutes and you need to have all your senses all your focus all your concentration and you need to find the wine you know so it's kind of the same mindset you need to be hyper focused but also if you are too stressed it doesn't work too you know i was like that makes total sense so i said to work with them and i got a little bit of results Speaker 2: you came force let's let's just say that out of i think it's about seventy people who compete and it's a competition that only happens every three years you came forth which is incredible so yes that was a good result Speaker 0: it was a good result and so to continue on that and you'll see where i'm coming from a couple of months after that result i had a knee injury and i had to get surgery for my knee and so big problem you know when you're on the floor so i have to take a break and to stretch that path forward as to recover from my knee said to do pt and i said to do yoga which i never was able to do before and i was i say to do that to compete again for the european so many competitions that i took like three months ago one and a half ago and i understood so much the process during the world not necessarily of the competition itself but i understood so much rethinking about my approach to my body and my health and how impactful it was on my testing concentration that i decided to get even more full speed on that for my last competition so i worked even more with a physical coach with a psychologist with yoga technique with breathing technique and i realized on top of continuing to work with that more intuitive testing to understand better my body better my palate better my health my nutrition because now a lot of studies are going to go and we are going see that in the future how is the guts of course influence the way we think the way we are the way we taste that we kind of know a little bit about it but now the studio is coming out and the results were from a little like month year preparation were incredible so i am now that will be the subject of my next book that's what i'm to work on after studying the subject of the object in milvin now i'm studying the subject with myself and i myself guinea pig right now to see by trying to understand better my physiology my health to try to develop more i know everybody is making like a lot of people are making fun of me i wrote that little stuff in decatur and i got some people saying like you go yoga before going to a testings that's both it okay but really is and the word mindfulness has been overused but i feel we definitely don't know how to do mindfulness when we are testing you know that you have been an educator are you really looking at yourself before going to a testing are you calibrating yourself before doing a testing are you calibrating with other people when you do go and do a testing do you know your threshold of sensitivity yourself do you know how sensitive you are to certain acid or certain tannin or alcohol do you know that do you understand what is your best pick when you really want to have that understanding of the wine you are blind tasting or you need to taste to to write for an article how many wine can you taste before you have palate fat sig how much what you are eating is influencing what you are how and i really really really think it's just the beginning of small like it's going to be for me a revolution but without being done with major changes it's a little bit more looking inside of yourself knowing yourself better to be able then to taste better and to appreciate wine better and in that way i'm totally convinced there is a pathway to say that you can reach a certain level of well-being and mindfulness while enjoying wine in a reasonable way because wine is just so complex it's one of the most complex thing we can eat or drink in the world of food creation and wine is a perfect way to enter this internal universe that we are just discovering that each individual with its unicity in its individuality cultural and physiological can be an extraordinary mirror to know ourselves better and by knowing ourselves better to go into a better well-being stage i definitely am totally convinced about that so that's what i'm working on right now Speaker 2: this is so exciting this is my favorite part of this entire conversation very very exciting i judge a lot of wine competitions i completely understand that frustration of feeling getting up in the morning i usually go for a run coming back and sort of taking a deep breath okay now i'm going to go taste eighty wines and you think am i being respectful of the producer am i doing this in a way that is as you said mindful is overused but that is thoughtful and it's hard to sometimes know the line i would love to know myself better at that moment so i'm excited for this new book that is a big deal for me i think you're going to be able to laugh at all the people who are making fun of you right now because these things are important and again in light of all these health warnings and things that are coming out i think taking a good look at how we taste wine how we drink wine even people who are not professionals who you know how they incorporate wine into their daily life and getting to know oneself better that way is super exciting concept i i love this so i'm i'm looking forward to that book already i i know it's probably not gonna be out for quite some time Speaker 0: but yeah because yeah it's gonna take some time i'm i'm really doing real time on myself so so but yeah and i i but i i i will see it's i have so many ideas coming out and when you start you know which is you know you know it is there is sorry there is sometimes there's laggards happening in the world but you know as i'm i started to read stuff about couple of ideas i have and there is already a lot of people from it's a bit what happened in milvin you know i started to read stuff about i'm fascinated by the tea ceremony in japan i think we can learn a lot from the tea ceremony in japan not from the tasting itself but the preparation the ritualization what does that mean to have a ritual a physical ritual a mental ritual there is that on one side there is stuff about i never read before but i just discovered about the philosophy of smell that i just discovered on something else there was a biologist i just had to read that i didn't connect it before but he's been writing a lot about the difference between performance and robustness and so it's exactly about that it's how can we be wine professional more robust more adaptable and not in the performance all the time because we are in the performance when we want to test eighty wines a day or when i want find one in four minutes but is it really what matters today not really anymore so how can we ourselves be more robust build i don't like the word resilience because everybody is using it but how can we be knowing ourselves better for our health and our curiosity mindfulness the way we learn the way we analyze stuff because there is a lot of things to say also about that and and and suddenly you know when you start to look you start to and i must say since i've been doing it i've never felt that good i've never felt that good and i've never tasted that well i don't know what to tell you it's really cool Speaker 2: i can't wait for this this is super exciting well before i let you go there's one last topic i want to ask you about you've kind of answered it but i'm going to push you a little bit so just recently in december in twenty twenty four decanter hall of fame awarded you the rising star as recognition of up and coming talent and cited your talents as a sommelier and an author and your efforts to improve wine's environmental and social impact so what does this mean to you now it's kind of a big responsibility when someone says you're a rising star you kind of have to rise up and do something so this book sounds like this is going to be the focus of your brain work and your personal work but what other projects are you devoting yourself to in the next couple of years what's your goal for thirtythirty with chambers and tchapika in five years what would you like to be talking Speaker 0: now it's a big one yeah Speaker 2: i know it's a big one Speaker 0: yeah i'm not sure where going to be in thirty-thirty on one side the other day somebody sent me a little note for the new year's and he said intelligence make us pessimistic but goodwill make us optimistic so i want to be optimistic i think i will be more i i want to continue to work as a family i really like my job and i want to continue to use the platform more and more to talk about what we are talking about right now it's it's about you know you can continue to be an advocate and talk and talk and talk but that doesn't really we saw that that doesn't make things moving around you know i'm a big reader of philanthropologists the first i passed away name is bruno latour he's pretty well famous least in the us because he taught at columbia we need to you need to give solution it's time to just talking is great and criticizing is great and all that but it's to give solution which is what i want to try to give in this next book know it's about okay what are we doing what can we really be doing which project can we be doing so i think in in twenty two thousand and thirty i i hope that i will be consciously to be part of that movement of allowing people to to understand that they are part of the change are part of what can be done and one of them is going to be through the way they take care of themselves genuinely re empower themselves and maybe they will be through school maybe through the techniques i want to know to try to develop and talk about i want it to be free of access that can be taught at school so i can see myself i think i understand that things don't change only because people are also showing by example but because there is all this legislation behind so i would probably be a bit more involved on that side because i really want like i had an amazing career i have an amazing career i tasted incredible wine i traveled the world i met extraordinary people i want to give back and i feel like giving back will go through being more involved in understanding the system and being involved at the level where you can remake thing change Speaker 2: well you've called yourself selfish a few times in this interview and i have to say that's about the most unselfish thing i've ever heard in the wine sector so i applaud that you've made me feel really happy for the end of this interview i hope if you are going to compete again in the blind tasting everybody better watch out because i think you're in the right headspace to really crush it this time and i can't say how you said you want to be more optimistic you have just given me a gigantic load of optimism today for a very gray and rainy friday in verona i am so glad that i got to speak to you today pascaline thank you so much for your time it was really really great to hear your very unique perspective thank you Speaker 0: thanks a lot for having me i really really appreciate it thanks for all you are doing i think this kind of podcast you know continues to give you the diversity of voices and perspective with thoughtful questions and not being you know scared of asking us more important questions is really great so bravo for what you do really that's awesome Speaker 1: thank you for listening and remember to tune in next wednesday when i'll be chatting with another fascinating guest italian wine podcast is among the leading wine podcasts in the world and the only one with a daily show tune in every day and discover all our different shows you can find us at italian wine podcast dot com soundcloud spotify himalaya