Ep. 1213 Dr. Rebecca Lawrence | Voices With Cynthia Chaplin

Some of you have asked how you can help us while most of us would say we want wine. Italian wine podcast is a publicly funded sponsor driven enterprise that needs the Moola. You can donate through Patreon or go fund me by heading to Italian wine podcast dot com. We would appreciate it. Oh, yeah. 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, work in the field of wine. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and rate our show wherever you get your pods. Hello, and welcome to voices. This is Cynthia Chaplin, and today I am very happy to welcome my good friend, doctor Rebecca Lawrence to the show. She's a WSET wine educator with me at the Italian wine academy in verona, as well as a freelance educator and a writer, and she currently works with Jermaine Stone as the head of editorial for crew love selections which is a New York based wine branding and marketing firm dedicated to blending wine and hip hop culture. So she actually began her career life with PhD in architectural theory, but she switched her path to wine around two thousand and fifteen after a few years of exploring the gastronomy sector in the UK, and she holds a WSET diploma. And most recently, Rebecca was responsible for the wine and hip hop festival held in Brooklyn, New York in November. So welcome back because Rebecca was actually the original host of voices. So this is kind of fun. Thanks for giving us time today. Oh, thank you for having me. It's it's nice to be on the other side of the questions, actually. It it is. It is actually. That's that is fun. Well, thanks for coming. And I thought before we get into the meat of this interview, which is gonna be about wine and hip hop, and I can't wait to hear about that. I thought everyone would probably like to hear how you got into wine. So, you know, I know the story, but most people don't. And what I'm getting from your Ohio is, you know, architecture boring, food, and wine excited. So what was the sequence of events that that got you here to being really heavily invested in wine and wine education? I mean, that does pretty much sum it up, you know, architecture. Boring and challenging, wine, super fun and exciting. Not that there aren't exciting aspects of architecture. Basically, I qualified with my PhD, and that happened in the middle of a massive recession. I'm sure many people can relate. So I didn't get the fellowship I was expecting. There weren't a lot of positions available in my very niche section of architectural theory, which is about psychotopography. So your emotional responses to landscape and how we judge that through the sort of cultural outputs, from those landscapes, so novels and films, etcetera. Very niche. Not a lot of core for psychhotopographers back then. So I started looking around thinking, well, what else am I really passionate about? And a couple years previously, myself and my now husband had traveled to Italy and fallen in love with Italy. I mean, we live here. It's amazing. Who doesn't? Food wine, people, landscape, everything. And I had sort of started getting a little bit into wine. My husband had always been into wine. He was sort of slowly introducing me to things, And I had this epiphany moment on a September afternoon in an Enertecker and was really just taken aback by not only the complexity of what was in my glass, but also the passion with which the guy who's now a friend was talking about this wine, the connection he had with it, the connection he had with the people who made it, the landscape, the place. And as someone who has you know, through architectural theory studied place and connections to and emotional connections, that just resonated so hard. I think kind of planted this little seed in my brain that kind of slowly started to grow and grow. Over the course of the I'm gonna say maybe two years that followed that, possibly a little bit longer. I was made redundant three times. Oh, fun. Oh, yeah. And during that happening, really started thinking about you know, if this is gonna keep happening to me, what what should I be working towards? What am I looking for? Where am I going? What do I really want? And what I really wanted was to live and work in Italy. So started doing this assessment of how do I get there? And what's the thing I really want to be doing? What's the thing that I'm actually really passionate about that will sustain me through these difficult periods? And that thing came very clear to me was wine. A fun thing to enjoy. It was a great thing to talk about. I had lots of beginning to build lots of connections just through my interest in it. So I went to the local wine shop. The third time I was made redundant. I was like, hey, guys. You know me? What was in here? Here I am. I'm always asking about Italian wines. Can I can I have a job? And the owner of the wine shop, Eric, was very, very sweet and very, kind of taken aback and said, well, you know, What do you know about wine? And I was like, oh, I like it. I love Italian wine. I can tell you quite a bit about that. And he said, well, I'll tell you what, if you really want a job, go away and get your WSTT level two because We don't just talk about Italian wines. We've got, you know, they had a thousand different wines on their shelf. Get yourself a little bit of knowledge, and we'll think about it. And I think he just expected me to go away And never come back. Exactly. It's like, oh, thank god. I got rid of that crazy woman. And then I came back. Must have been two months later. I was like, hello, remember me. Hi. I've got this WCT level two certificate. And now you owe me a job. Exactly. And To be fair, he was true to his word and said, okay. Well, we need someone who can help out on a Saturday. So I started doing that. Within two weeks, I had keys. And within two months, I was helping assist with their events team and it just spiraled from there. I did my level of three. I did my diploma. I then opened their WSTT wine score for them became truly second in command for their events, ran most of their tastings and smaller in shop events. And it just snowballed. And I never looked back. I realized that being in wine never actually pays very much. That is so true. Sad but true. But I had never loved a job like that before in my life. Being able to share your passion for something whether that's you know, just talking to a customer about a bottle of wine they might buy on a Tuesday night, whether that's leading, a WSTT class, whether that's hosting an event, leading a tasting, planning someone's wedding wines. There was never a dull moment, and just wine never gets boring and neither do the people. Like, the wine community, they're just the nicest bunch of people. And I was like, I don't care if it's long hours for not very much pay. The wines I'm drinking are amazing. The people I'm meeting are just fantastic and I'm hooked. Yep. I think well, that's an awesome story. And I think so many of us in the wine sector can relate to that getting hooked taking a massive pay cut, doing all of those things to follow a passion. But, yeah, when you and I read off the same page often, as educators, we both love seeing people's faces light up when they serve the penny drops. They get it. They it's a it's a magical moment. So since you did all that, you've you've gone on to co author two mama jumbo shrimp guides, one to, Italian grapes and varieties and one to international varieties in Italy, and you started up a business, Rose Moreno, and Vino. But I know a secret fun fact about you, which is that you make up wraps for your students to remember key facts about wine. So I just wanna kind of address the obvious elephant in the room before we get onto the hip hop thing. You know, you are a white woman from England. You've got a cut glass accent, and your upbringing was pretty far removed from Brooklyn and hip hop. So let's just stop here for a minute and talk about what got you into the world of hip hop and wine and what's keeping you there? You know, how did you meet your main stone? How'd you get in involved with crew love? Okay. Yes. I do ramp. Very badly about wine in my classes. Oh, it's all about perceptions. Yeah. I enjoy them. Okay. Yeah. I'm not I'm not sure all my students would agree, but I've always been into music and I've always had a very wide spectrum of tastes and discovered when I was studying for my diploma that one of the ways that I could learn more effectively was by learning wraps and rhymes about regions. I'm very visual, but I'm also a very oral learner. And I could just close my eyes and recite a verse in my head sitting in an exam with all these, like, really stupid rhymes, and it would help me remember something, like the millions of soil types in the El SaaS, or the order of the predicates, or the grapes varieties that grow in Casa robles, And so I built this, built, came up with this ridiculous series of of wraps for my diploma, and then thought, well, if that's helping me, maybe that will help another student, because really we're all students. So I started doing this in some of my level two classes, And it seemed to go down relatively well, and definitely some students resonated with just making that material somehow more approachable. Yeah. I I think that's such a key to being a successful learner and a successful teacher to the material. It's pretty dense. Wine is dense. There's a lot of information. As you said, it never gets boring because you can never know everything. But, do I dare ask you for a sample of one of your reps? No. There there definitely hasn't been enough wine for that yet. I have a terrible, terrible feeling, however, that members of your team probably have evidence of me wrapping. I'm sure they do. I'm gonna have to find it because I have seen it myself. So, you know, going from from that level of education, figuring out a way to make the material, you know, accessible to you, sharing that with your students, Where did Germaine and crew love come into the story? I am obsessed with podcasts. And I was looking around for wine podcasts that were a little bit unusual. Because I knew that podcasting was something that I'd eventually like to get into, but also I just wanted something fun to listen to. And I wanted something that resonated with my approach to wine, which was taking things seriously, but also bringing it to, a different level culturally, like, changing how we think about our approaches to wine and who we see in the wine space, you know, much like voices, you know, being able to, elevate cultures and demonstrate that wine is all not just one perception. And I came across exactly. And language in particular is is a huge bug bear of mine. It's challenging as a WSTT educator, the use of language because so much of WSTT because of its origins, obviously, is in this, Eurocentric focus. And and even tighter than that, this kind of British centric white British centric focus. With a lot of French words thrown in there just to make it even more fun. Yeah. And even right down to the way we describe wines and the the fruits and and the colors and that kind of language, that very which so it should be the simplest language. Being able to describe a wine to someone should be simple, but it's not actually when you deep dive into it because cultural, expressions are so very different and cultural touchstones are so different. So I went looking for People who were talking about wine and presenting wine in different ways. And truly one day, I just googled, wine and hip hop. I was listening to more more hip hop working on these terrible wraps, and Germaine's podcast came up. I was immediately hooked. Absolutely loved it. And in a ridiculous fan girl moment of bravery emailed him. I actually reached out to him on LinkedIn and said, I love what you're doing. This is fantastic. Would you be on my new ridiculous podcast about running and wine? And he said yes. So after I picked myself up, the floor, I was like, oh my god. We recorded the podcast and had this amazing conversation about use of hip hop and connecting people from different cultures in wine, in wine education, and we got talking about, you know, what what can we do together to, you know, change what's happening in wine? And he reached out and, you know, I'm looking for someone who can be in this editorial position. Would you be interested? And I, again, after picking myself up off the floor, was like, yeah, because I was just really excited that something different was happening in this space. And There are lots of other people doing that. It was just that my connection with it was through what Germaine is doing and particularly how he uses language, how he uses music to bring these two cultures together. And it just it inspired me and and does every day. I mean, I get to work for wine and hip hop. What? I know. It it doesn't get a lot cooler than that actually. Yeah. And I'm really I'm not a cool person. Like, please don't, any of your listeners get this idea that I'm a really cool person. I'm really not. I'm, like, the least cool person, and hopefully, the British accent gives you an idea of that. But if I can, like, tag on to a little bit of cool with Germaine, and I'm I'm fine with that. Exactly. Exactly. I I think, get your cool where you can. Well, tell us about the wine in pop festival. I know it was in November. And I know because we're friends, I know behind the scenes, it was an enormous amount of work. So what was the objective? Like, who got involved? What was it like during the festival? What was the outcome? Can we look forward to some more of these events? What's going on with wine and hip hop and that festival? Are you enjoying this podcast? Don't forget to visit our YouTube channel. Mama jumbo shrimp for fascinating videos covering Stevie Kim and her travels across Italy and beyond, meeting winemakers, eating local foods, and taking in the scenery. Now back to the show. So Germaine has this saying that, the only person crazier in the company than he is is me. I'd I'd probably go with that. Yeah. Because he always has these crazy ideas, and he always expects me to say no. And I invariably always say yes. So he said, I'm trying to think when it happened. May or June. I wanna hold a festival. And I went, cool. Okay. I probably shouldn't have been so quick to jump on it because he followed this very quickly with this year. And I was like, oh, this year. So, yeah, I think we should do it in November. So when you're struggling where you don't live, where I don't live. And at this stage, it was about, I'm gonna say, two or three weeks before we left for a fortnight of content shooting in France. It was suddenly we're holding a festival. But the other great thing about Germaine and where he gets his nickname of the wolf of wine is because he's a fixer. He can get anything done that he puts his mind to. And boy, when he puts his mind to something, it happens. So we just went full steam ahead. Okay. What do we need? We need a venue. We need events. We need conception. And then we need speakers, and then we need staffing and sponsors, and then you put a festival together. And the majority of the company is, Germaine and me with some help coming in from the videographer team, who come in sort of as and when, plus we've got a guy who helps out with the social media, and we've got a podcast producer who's very much focused on that. But the core of the team is myself and Germaine, and I was like, wait. Let's just make a list and get it done. So we found our venue, and We actually decided to hold it. Well, he decided to hold it in Bushwick in Brooklyn, which if you're not familiar with It's kind of a bizarre area, actually. It is. It's not perfectly connected. So it was a little bit of a challenge definitely with some of the logistics. However, we found this incredible space that really fit the needs of our particular style of event because a lot of what we do is content production. And using our particular style of content and content development to bring different perspectives about wine to our audience and show the clients, the brands that we work with in a completely different light. And we found this amazing dine in movie theater, so big screen, tables, and chairs, So, like, proper, like, raised seating, but with each of that seed having, like, a little, like, table in front of it, so we could screen content on a big screen and hold panels and master classes with this big screen to show speaker zooming in or to show content. But then outside of that, this huge bar restaurant space, which meant we could do our food hall, which is connected to our taste notes from the streets content, which is about pairing kind of neighborhood and street foods with fine lines. We could host this. So that is a walk around tasting. We could host a big dinner working with a local chef in New York who does themed dinners around hip hop albums. We could do big walk around tasting seated dinners. It was just perfect. And then we threw it together. It's like we're gonna do three events a day. One very much focused on kind of education and career progression connecting people with key players in the industry, both wine and hip hop. Thinking about themes of entrepreneurial spirit or production and the artistry of production, walk around tastings to really showcase as many wines as possible, especially with food pairings and unusual food pairings, and then big sit down dinners arranged around different themes the first one on the Saturday night was the Black Thai gala, which was all about Brooklyn based hip hop, being paired with different wines in different dishes. And then on the final night, this concept of complex rhymes and complex wines, and how sommeliers are the wordsmiths of wine and how we compare them with different wrappers and different tracks and different wines. And somehow we pulled it off. How many people did you have there? So across the weekend, we had around eight hundred people through the doors. Wow. Fantastic for a first time event. Yeah. We were we were thrilled, actually. But the other great thing has been the engagement digitally. So we had the We've produced content in the run up to this that was launched at the festival that there has then been launched with our partner, Quench magazine. So they've been streaming content afterwards. And the social media reach was a little bit insane. We I think we had fifty thousand unique interactions with our social in the month before and after the event, which is just amazing. Yeah. That's fantastic. So being able to have that kind of reach with something that we're doing is is amazing. It's really pleasing for us and pleasing for the brands, but it also kind of demonstrates how relevant this is. I think lots of people go, oh, why in hip hop? Why? And it's like, well, there's obviously an audience. This is a way for both of these cultures to come together in the same space and connect people. So more of these events I'm guessing, what's the schedule? Oh, wow. Yeah. The we are working on the dates for the Nothing like a nothing like an evil question. Yeah. I know. We've actually we've just held a follow-up event, kickstarting a a series that we're gonna have next year called wine bars, where we take over local bars, come armed with different wines, Germaine hosts wine and hip hop trivia, and we host a kind of, rap battle amongst attendees kind of searching for biggest wine and hip hop connoisseurs. That's something that's gonna carry on into next year. We're just planning the next round of tours. You're, so, we're gonna be in, see, Italy. So, Piamonte, Champagne, hopefully coming to verona. Back to Burgundy, We've also got some plans to be in Germany. We're gonna hit a ton of US cities, all the way leading up once again to the festival in November. The dates, which should be announced in January. Fantastic. That's amazing. I'm glad to see, like, the groundswell growing under it. Because as you said, there's there's an audience, and and people who are really, really curious and want to combine two things they already love in a way that's meaningful. So I I love that. And next year is a huge year because it's the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop. Oh, wow. So we're we're hope gonna be hosting a whole range of events in New York to celebrate that. And I believe And I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here. Sorry, Germaine, if you're listening. I believe the plan in homage to that is to hold the festival in the Bronx next year, the home of hip hop. Yeah. And better connected. Yeah. But, you know, that's that's amazing. And it's great to know that you guys have a schedule of events. You have, you know, a, a totally solid plan to keep this, you know, the forward motion going. So aside from all this, what's coming up next for you? What new projects are on the horizon for you personally? What's the ultimate wine goal in your life right now? Wow. That is a big question. You know, it's really funny. You know that I'm a runner. I'm sure that some listeners will know that I'm a runner. So all of my goals for next year have been running based rather than wine based. Interesting. Which is really, really interesting. I haven't sort of thought massively about my wine goals yet. Well, there you go. I'm giving you space to breathe it in. I often make very similar wine goals each year, which is just to try and taste as broadly as I possibly can. One of the things I find challenging about being in Italy, which I never expected to, I mean, Italian Hines are my great love. And there's so many of them. But having come from the UK market where you can get access to almost anything. I have found that I don't taste now even when I'm educating as broadly as I used to when I was in events. I completely agree with that. It's, you know, it's not easy to even in verona, which is sort of the Italian wine capital, if you will. It's very difficult to get, you know, Spanish wines, Australian wines, you know, other wines from other countries because Italy is a great exporter, but not a great importer. Yeah. And I can understand in many ways why because the wine culture here is based around these amazing local grape varieties they haven't had to hunt elsewhere for quality. But I was recently back in the UK and sending a gift to someone and was sending a blouse burgundy from the finger lakes. So I'm in the UK. Oh, nice. Being able to buy and send to someone else, a wine from a completely different area, you know, quite unknown. And it was just such a kind of like, oh, yeah. So I definitely think I'm gonna continue hunting out those opportunities. And that is I have to say one of the great things that wine and hip hop has brought me back is because we have these fantastic opportunities to travel. I've once again been to new areas. You know, I'd never been to Burgundy before. It was my first time in Burgundy this year. I'm just shocked by that. I'm utterly shocked by that. It's it's ridiculous. I focused all of my wine travel almost exclusively, honestly. And then I got here and realized that I'd missed going to lots of other places. And I have been to lots of different wine regions, but some of the classics I haven't managed. So I'm really looking forward to opportunities to to go out and taste in different places, being in New York, again, being able to taste some of the incredible wines coming out of the East Coast right now, which is just a real eye opener. So I think probably my main goal is just to remind myself to taste at every opportunity you get. And I think that should be a goal for anyone who's in wine. I was gonna say it's a very good goal, and it's not it's not as obvious or as easy as it sounds. Yeah. But keep keep your palette fresh and excited. Keep your brain looking for the non obvious looking for the interesting, the weird, the wonderful, the small stuff. Like, that's really what I want for my for my wine journey next year. I'm gonna make make an effort to not always just buy the Italian wine, which is always my default. That's so great. I I hear you. I I hear you. Well, before I let you go, I, you know, I will ask you the cringe question. Know, as we are two wine women sitting here having a chat, I have to ask, what's your favorite Italian wine and what's your favorite wine in all world? And if you can't thin it down, what's your wine crush these days? Basically, I'm just picking your brain for wines I can scout out over the holidays. Oh. Oh, I always say my Desert Island wines would be the, two thousand and thirteen Talenti Roso Dimolcino. Oh, nice. They were our wedding wine. They were the wine, basically, that got me into wine. A hundred percent, Sanjay, just incredible, not too much oak. Thirteen, a little bit challenging. So a little bit fresher to lend you ten to sometimes have some challenges. And for me, their wines are great in the bad years when it's a little bit cooler. I have to say the the current release of the brunello is Okay. One to try. I'm writing it down. So good. So good. And then the white is also it's also from the same area, but I I always come back to it, which is the, Montanidole, toledicionale, which is their kind of entry level, Venacha di san gimignano. With some extended skin contact. And that's the white wine that changed my mind about white wines. I was never someone who could get behind white wines. I didn't really understand them. They they didn't have the texture, the complexity. I thought that red wines did, and I was really struggling. And I was introduced to this as a well, here is a white wine that has texture, that has acidity, that has chalkiness, that has a little bit of tannin and grip that ages incredibly well, and that just blew my mind. Yeah. I I can relate. It's the whites in Italy are things that, people who aren't familiar with with some of the higher end quality white wines in Italy. Don't understand the textural aspect of them. And it's really something to to dig into and delve into. It's a lot of fun, and that Verneacho de Saniano is a great one. And my crush, the one I'm crushing on right now? Yeah. When I was in New York, I was incredibly honored to go to the restaurant of a friend of mine, Janek Benjamin. Oh, a friend of mine as well. Contento, lovely restaurant. The best. And the son there recommended the Nathan Kendall Pinot noir. So from New York State, and it blew my mind. I wish I could've gotten a bottle back with me, but again, just interesting, light, but textural, just gaining some of that kind of extra complexity you get with. It's just a tiny little bit of age, really, really delicately made. I mean, amazing. And I've since been doing a little bit of a, you know, crushing on Nathan Kendall. It looks like everything he produces is in this style of managing to gain texture and interest, but also elegance. And I am on a one woman mission to hunt out more of his wines and taste more of his wines. So If you get a chance to to try his Pinot noir, I've I have it on good authority that his whites are incredible as well. I I have no problem believing that, but that Pinot noir, wow. Try it. Okay. Alright. Well, there we go. And when my brother comes to visit me from the states, I'm gonna to ask for that as as my, gift for hosting him. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. I'm really grateful for your time and for sharing all the, sort of, all the backstory of wine and hip hop. This really fast scenading. And it's great to know that the the concept is moving forward and that you've got all these events coming up and things that you're planning. I'm sure that you and Germaine will put your crazy heads together and come up with some even more interesting stuff. So thank you so much. And all the best, happy holidays, and have a great new year. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for listening. And remember to tune in next Wednesday, 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 or wherever you get your pot.