Hannah Wallace

When Wine Pros Lose Their Senses to COVID-19

This story ran on SevenFifty Daily on Sept. 21st, 2020. 

After being temporarily robbed of career-essential senses, sommeliers and wine journalists reflect on how the experience changed them

 

A week after restaurants in Portland, Oregon, were allowed to reopen for on-site dinner service in June, Arden Wine Bar owner and sommelier Kelsey Glasser tested positive for COVID-19. Glasser was lucky; unlike Wesley Brown, one of the wine bar’s servers who also tested positive, she had barely any symptoms. But the one that terrified her was the one that threatened to undermine her career as a wine professional: the loss of smell and taste. 

“It was scary,” says Glasser. “I would blow my nose and stick it up to vanilla, cinnamon, or a lemon. And it was like: nothing.” Although she could feel the temperature and texture of food while eating, it had zero flavor. At one point, Glasser put a spoonful of fermented habanero hot sauce on her tongue, but she couldn’t sense any tingling or flavor. 

                                                    Kelsey Glasser, owner and sommelier of Arden Wine Bar in Portland, Oregon 

 

The loss of smell is a disconcerting, unpleasant experience for anyone. But for wine professionals, the consequences are far more disastrous—and potentially even career ending. Glasser isn’t the only wine professional who lost her senses of smell and taste due to COVID-19. New York-based sommelier Amanda Smeltz penned an Esquire article in July about how losing her senses of smell and taste (during what she assumed was COVID-19) caused an existential crisis.

“This total blackout of smell was unlike anything I’d ever experienced,” she wrote. “I found myself thinking for days about what it would be like if this were permanent loss, if herbs or coffee disappeared from my life—if wine did.” Even after recovering from COVID-19, wine professionals are grappling with continuing changes to some of their most essential senses. Those who’ve regained those senses are more appreciative of them than ever.

A Shock to the Senses

“Taste and smell are of primal importance to people in our field,” says food and wine writer Jordan Mackay, who contracted COVID-19 in early March while visiting New York City. “I believe that it’s a heightened responsiveness to these senses that drew many of us into the gastronomic world in the first place. Losing them would be disastrous, akin to going to broke and having to completely reinvent one’s life.” 

Mackay says that as someone so passionate about wine and food, it was bizarre for him to suddenly feel so indifferent to it. “Without the immediate sensation of flavor, I have no interest in eating at all,” he says. “You can’t even appreciate texture without taste. And that’s the most despairing feeling I’ve known when it comes to food and drink. What’s most terrifying is that you don’t know if your senses will come back or not.” 

Jordan Mackay. Photo by Vanessa Yap.

Like many other COVID-19 symptoms, changes to smell and taste vary widely from one infected person to another. For wine writer Jamie Goode, the founder of WineAnorak and author of four books about wine, a disturbance in taste was an early indicator of COVID-19 when he caught the virus in early March. “I didn’t lose my sense of smell—it was just distorted,” says Goode. “Food tasted okay-ish, but because I’m tasting wines analytically, I noticed they weren’t right. They all had an additional taste—a sort of stony, slightly oxidized flavor—and the fruit was gone. Initially, I thought the wines were at fault, but shortly realized it was me.” 

After New York City-based wine and food writer Lisa Denning, the founder of the Wine Chef, got sick in late March, it took 11 days until she could smell even a few things: coffee grinds, orange peels, blue cheese. Her ability to taste again was a longer, more gradual process. “It took at least three weeks to even get up to what I estimated was 80 percent of my smell and taste back,” says Denning. 

Still, Denning’s sense of taste remained altered. For months, she noticed that her taste buds were more robust in the morning—“Sometimes I would purposefully save some of my dinner so I could eat it at breakfast!” she says—and she had no appetite for wine for more than a month. “It tasted horrible! Like bitter alcohol. There was no fruit,” she says, noting that she turned to refreshing gin and tonics instead. “When it stopped tasting horrible, it was still bland—lacking in fruit.” Finally, on May 4, when Denning was tasting a 2019 Domaine de Cala Rosé and a 2016 Boekenhoutskloof Cabernet Sauvignon, she says she felt as though her palate had fully returned. “The latter had all those lush cherry fruit flavors that had been lacking in red wines the previous couple of weeks,” she explains.  

Denning, who has just started experiencing an intermittent metallic taste with certain foods, says she’s one of the lucky ones. She belongs to a “COVID-19 loss of smell and taste” Facebook group and says that many people haven’t gotten their taste back. “I feel so bad for them,” she says. 

The Science of Anosmia

A week after Glasser first noticed she couldn’t smell anything, her sense of smell returned. “Every day when I woke up, I’d grab things and smell them,” she says. “Finally, I woke up and smelled some lotion and got the faintest hint of cocoa. I was so relieved.” Her senses of taste and smell took two full weeks to return entirely.

Most people who lose their sense of smell due to COVID-19 regain it within weeks, but some do not. Others regain partial smell, but they perceive aromas differently, something that could be just as difficult for wine professionals to cope with. 

Brown, the Arden Wine Bar server who also tested positive for COVID-19, suffered from fever, body pain, a sore throat, and extreme physical exhaustion in addition to losing his senses of taste and smell. Although he has regained his ability to taste and smell, he says the flavors are dialed down a bit. “Everything tastes a little less vibrant than before,” says Brown, who was studying for his Wine & Spirits Education Trust Level 3 exam when COVID-19 hit. “Everything is a little less intense. Sweet things are a little more bland than they were before.” 

Temporary anosmia, or loss of smell, is not uncommon with colds and sinus infections. But what’s different with COVID-19, says John Hayes, Ph.D., a professor of food science at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, is that loss of smell with the novel coronavirus is not due to “nasal obstruction,” or a stuffy nose. Instead, the virus indirectly affects olfactory sensory neurons.

In July, Sandeep Robert Datta, David Brann, and colleagues at Harvard Medical School published a paper in Science Advances showing that cells that contain our smell receptors don’t contain the ACE2 receptor, the backdoor by which the novel coronavirus is sneaking into our cells. These olfactory sensory neurons, which are located in the olfactory epithelium at the top of the nose, don’t have ACE2 on them, so the virus doesn’t attack them directly. Instead, the virus is aggressively attacking supporting cells that live “next door” to the sensory neurons, explains Dr. Hayes. “When those cells get inflamed, it perturbs the environment,” he says. “The cells and mucus layer get all screwed up. It’s a local perturbation of the region around the smell receptors.” 

This is good news because it means that the sensory neurons themselves aren’t damaged, which indicates that the novel coronavirus probably won’t cause permanent loss of smell in most people. Hayes, who is also the director of the Sensory Evaluation Center at Penn State, is one of the founders of the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research (GCCR), which is collecting data on the specificity of smell and taste symptoms in COVID-19 patients. In April, the consortium launched an online survey, which is available in more than 30 languages; it has received 40,000 responses so far.  

Wine writer Lisa Denning lost her senses of taste and smell in late March and didn't fully regain them for 3 weeks 

Hayes says that loss of smell is turning out to be one of the most common symptoms of COVID-19 infections, with half of all COVID patients reporting the symptom. That number climbs to 75 percent when looking at objective studies (studies where medical personnel are present to test the patient’s sense of smell). There is less data on loss of taste, but the first paper that Hayes and his colleagues at the GCCR published in Chemical Sciences about the results of the first 4,039 surveys they got back reveals that COVID-19-associated chemosensory impairment is not limited to smell; it also affects taste and chemesthesis, which is sensitivity to such chemicals as capsaicin (found in chile peppers) and menthol (found in peppermint). 

There’s much more to learn about COVID-19, but Hayes says that rough estimates show that 80 percent of patients regain their senses of taste and smell in two to three weeks after they recover.

Back to the Glass

The first week she was home sick, Glasser led Arden’s weekly online wine tasting as if nothing was awry. “They were wines I’d tasted before, so I had some notes,” says Glasser. “But I did feel like a fraud.” 

Brown says the whole ordeal shook his confidence a bit. “I get a little anxious when someone asks me to describe the wine,” he says. “What if what I’m tasting is a little bit different than what they’re going to taste?” Brown notices the biggest difference with the category that was previously his go-to preference: high-acid white wines, which taste slightly sour and less enjoyable now.

Mackay says that by day 14, he was back to his normal, healthy self, as though nothing had happened. But even this experienced wine professional had doubts. “Could I smell as finely as I did before? Was I able to get the whole aroma of a wine or a cup of coffee?” he asked. “I couldn’t be sure. Something didn’t seem exactly the same. Yet, when I compared notes with others, my sensations seemed as valid and precise as theirs.”

In the weeks after recovering from COVID-19, Mackay was able to get varietal cues from wines, but he was still plagued by the fear that he wasn’t smelling “the whole thing.” 

Then, during a virtual dinner party with friends six weeks after his COVID-19 experience, he blind-tasted and correctly identified a 2016 Littorai Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. “I pumped my fist in relief,” Mackay says. “I knew I was all the way back.”

 

The Next Wave of Sustainability in Wine

By now, the wine-drinking public is familiar with sustainability descriptors like organic, biodynamic, and even natural. They’ve been to LEED-certified wineries, and they may even have heard about a more holistic certification, called B Corps, which takes into account the way a business treats its employees, its environment, and its community. But a new wave of winemakers is working with ultra-sustainable practices—some of which are so groundbreaking they don’t even have a certification yet. SevenFifty Daily spoke with winemakers who are setting the bar with green building and agroecological farming practices to learn why they’re worth pursuing—and how they can help create a more sustainable future.

A “Living Building” Tasting Room

A few years ago, when Cowhorn winemaker Bill Steele was planning a new tasting room at his Jacksonville, Oregon, winery, he had a game-changing conversation with Stephen Aiguier, the founder and president of Green Hammer. Steele and his wife, Barbara, knew they wanted a green building. Aiguier listened as Steele talked about his aversion to chemicals in the field and in the cellar.

“We wanted a building that was consistent with our biodynamic farming philosophy,” says Steele, whose winery is located in the Applegate Valley AVA. “And Stephen said, ‘It sounds like you’re describing the Living Building Challenge.’” Once Aiguier started explaining it, the Steeles were all in.

 

The most rigorous standard for green buildings in the world, the Living Building Challenge (LBC) was formulated by the Seattle-based International Living Future Institute (ILFI) in 2006. It’s designed around seven performance areas, referred to as petals. Unlike other certifiers of green buildings, the ILFI won’t certify a building until a full year after it’s completed. That’s because some of the building’s petals—namely, energy and water—require 12 months of continuous occupancy before they can be shown to work in accordance with the challenge. The Energy Petal requires that the building produce 10 percent more energy than it consumes; the Water Petal requires (among other things) that 100 percent of the project’s water needs be supplied by captured precipitation or other natural closed-loop water systems.

There’s a reason it’s called a challenge.

For Green Hammer and the Steeles, it was the Materials Petal that posed the biggest challenge—it requires the architect to reject materials that contain any one of more than 800 chemicals on the International Living Future Institute’s Red List. Since there are no reporting standards for the building industry, this means the architect of an LBC project has to call each manufacturer to ask if its products contain any of the Red List chemicals. Aiguier spent more than a thousand hours on the phone with companies, asking questions about their products’ components and microcomponents. When making these calls, he says, “you sound like a crazy hippie. A lot of people essentially hang up.”

Barb and Bill Steele of Cowhorn. Photo by Clair Thorington.

But the Green Hammer team persisted. Fortunately, the ILFI has a product database of nontoxic building materials (made without Red List chemicals) called Declare. High-profile companies—Etsy and Google, for example—have publicly signed on to using Declare products in their buildings. As a result, materials vendors are starting to reformulate their products and be more transparent about what’s in them.  

In May 2018, Cowhorn’s tasting room became the first winery tasting room in the world to be named a Certified Living Building. And it’s not that other wineries haven’t tried. Sokol Blosser, which had already achieved a U.S. Green Building Council LEED certification for its barrel cellar in 2002, aimed for LBC with its new tasting room but was unable to achieve certification.  

Continue reading at SevenFifty Daily. 

 

Embracing Smoke Taint as an Expression of Terroir

This story appeared on SevenFifty Daily on July 25.  

The 2017 Eagle Creek fire is seared into Oregon winemaker Michael Garofola’s memory. Since February 2017 he had been working with a 0.61 acre block of Dolcetto for his Cutter Cascadia label in the von Flowtow vineyard on the west side of Hood River, and the fruit was just beginning to ripen. On September 18, the fire was raging. Hood River was on Stage 2 evacuation notice—locals might get a call at any moment to drop everything, grab their family members and pets, and get out. In the meantime, Garofola—who leases this block and farms it solo—was thinning fruit and taking samples.

“You’re out there with a bandana over your face in the vineyards,” he says. “The sky is orange. It’s just like what you imagine the last skies over Vesuvius looked like. It’s dark. It’s eerie.” That particular day, Garofola didn’t get the call. “I did my work for the day, packed up, and drove back to Portland.”

During the fire, which started on September 2 and wasn’t fully controlled until November 30, the grapes were going through véraison—the onset of ripening, when the berries change color. “If the fire had happened a month before, it wouldn’t have been a problem,” explains Garofola. “But post-véraison [the grapes] are ripening, losing acidity, but their skins are becoming more porous.” The porousness makes it easier for the skins to soak up the smoke. Phenolic glycosides contained in the smoke, such as guaiacol and eugenol, which are initially bound with sugar, break apart and become volatile during fermentation.

the Dolcetto vineyard during the fires [Credit: Michael Garofola of Cutter Cascadia] 

 

A Smoky Vintage

Most winemakers and critics abhor the taste of so-called smoke taint, using descriptors like “burnt,” “medicinal,” or “wet ashtray” to describe it. But instead of letting the grapes sit on the vine—as some neighboring growers did—or selling them off to the bulk market (a common practice at bigger wineries when smoke taint is detected), Garofola decided to go ahead and make a rosé and a red under his Cutter Cascadia label. Earlier this month, he released 30 cases of his rosé, called Strawberry Mullet, to Portland area shops including E&R Wine Shop, Division Wines, and Pairings Portland. He’ll bottle his red in late July.

“This is the climate of the vintage, without a doubt,” says Garofola, who is also the sommelier at Beast in Portland. “It’s not something I want to happen every year, obviously, but at the same time, I did with it what I felt was the best for the wine.” That is, he manipulated the wine as little as possible. After forest fires, some winemakers use carbon filtering, reverse osmosis, or manufactured yeast strains to mitigate or mask smoke taint, but not Garofola.

Making wine without such processes or additives was “the most authentic thing for me to do,” he says. “I’m not apologizing for the smoke. I’m not the one who started the goddamn fire! I’m just leaning into it.” Garofola says the smokiness of the rosé, which had almost no skin contact, is muted. The red—which obviously will have had more skin contact by the time he bottles it at the end of June—is a little riskier. Right now, the wine conjures a vivid sense memory for Garofola. “It reminds me of a tobacco shop my old man used to take me to in Indiana,” he says. “It smells exactly like black cherry tobacco.”

Hiyu Wine Farm winemaker Nate Ready is also unapologetic about his smoky 2017 vintage. He grows over 100 varieties at his main vineyard, five miles south of Hood River—this was the site that was most affected by the fires. In fact, Ready believes there’s a delicacy to these wines that comes from the fire, which delayed ripening and—because of the cover of smoke—created lower-alcohol grapes with a finer thread of acidity.

“The wildfires are totally part of the terroir,” says Ready. “That’s what’s so cool about wines—they reflect the culture and the ecosystem. And living in the West, we should get used to it. This is going to be part of the flavor of living in the West.”  

Ready dislikes the term smoke taint because it labels a smoky character as a flaw. The smoky nature of his 2017 wines has made him more attuned to élevage, the progression of wines as they ferment in barrels. “You’re looking to take the wine to a place where these things express themselves in the cellar and evolve to a place where—Oh!—it’s more stable and compelling,” says Ready. “For sure, it’ll still change in bottle, but in ways that are more subtle.” As a result, he will probably hold the 2017 wines in barrel longer than usual. (Nothing has been bottled yet.)

Ready plans to talk openly about the forest fire’s effect on the grapes at tastings and in his newsletter. “I would just say, ‘There was a fire in 2017 and you can taste it in the wine. You can taste it structurally,’” says Ready, whose wines—he makes rosé, white, and red—are bottled under his Hiyu and Smockshop Band labels.

A Rauchwein for Aging

Barnaby Tuttle at Teutonic Wine Company in Portland is a little more brazen. Last year he committed to buying Riesling grapes from Laszlo Regos at Pear Blossom Vineyard in the Columbia Gorge. Needless to say, he didn’t anticipate a devastating wildfire—or that the grapes would come back from the lab with an exceptionally high sensory threshold level of guaiacol. Knowing that the chemical guaiacol was concentrated in the skins, Tuttle pressed the wine—whole cluster—as fast as he could. “And then I thought, ‘Hey, let’s have some fun. Let’s make a deliberately smoked wine!’” Tuttle recalls.

Tuttle explains that he and his crew crushed the fruit, did pigéage, or punch-down, and gave the wine four days on the skins. The result, which he bottled in April and calls Rauchwein (“smoke wine” in German), has an ever-so-subtle smoky scent. “I can feel it texturally on the palate,” says Tuttle, who has made enough Riesling to know what the mouthfeel should be. “And then, in the finish, there’s a kick that makes me think of mezcal.”

But the Rauchwein may become smokier over time. Teutonic’s tech notes for the wine say it’s meant to age “a long time.” Knowing that the smoky phenols may become more prominent as the wine ages, I ask if that concerns him. “I hope the taint grows in bottle,” he says. “I suppose there is a point [at which] the taint could be overwhelming, but it would have to grow exponentially for it to be a distraction. Maybe there is a risk to making interesting wines?”

After the winemakers grapple with the effects of the smoke and fire, however, it’s up to the retailers to sell the wines. Some retailers are talking up the smoked character of the 2017 vintage; others, not so much. Jeffrey Weissler, owner of Pairings Portland, has been pouring Garofola’s Strawberry Mullet for guests and is almost sold out. “People like it,” he says. “It’s an interesting, delicious, funky wine.” But he doesn’t push the forest fire angle. “It’s a sore spot for a lot of winemakers,” he says.

But Brent Braun, the sommelier at Portland’s OK Omens and Castagna, does talk to guests about the two smoky rosés he has on the by-the-glass menu at OK Omens. One is Strawberry Mullet and the other, a Dolcetto rosé made by winemaker Darryl Joannides of Viola Wine Cellars in Portland. “People love them. Especially the Strawberry Mullet because it’s so intensely smoky,” he says. “It’s so obvious. It’s fun!” Viola’s Dolcetto, on the other hand, is “lightly smoked,” says Braun. “It hits the classic notes. It’s a pretty light, refreshing patio rosé.”

Michael Wheeler of PDX Wine distributes Teutonic’s wines to restaurants and wine shops across Oregon and, when he’s doing a tasting, likes to talk about the smoky smells and flavors that resulted from the forest fires. “Or as I like to call it, terroir from the sky,” Wheeler says. “Taking what nature gave and making a true, full terroir wine—land and air. A pure wine of nature and the vintage.”

 

Preserving Oregon's Wine Legacy—One Interview at a Time

I did a Q&A with the director of Linfield College’s pioneering Oregon Wine History Archive for SevenFifty Daily. 

In SevenFifty Daily's Unsung Heroes series, we profile behind-the-scenes professionals in the drinks industry who are essential to making businesses function but who don’t normally get the spotlight.

Archivist Rich Schmidt (right), behind the camera. 

In 2011, Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, established the Oregon Wine History Archive, an ambitious project to chronicle and preserve all aspects of the Oregon wine industry. Since then, Linfield—which has also hosted the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC) every summer since 1987—has become a significant hub of wine education. In March of this year, after a $6 million gift from Grace and Ken Evenstad of Domaine Serene in the Dundee Hills, it became the first liberal arts school in the country to offer an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in wine studies.

The archive, located in a climate-controlled room at the Linfield library, houses everything from old photos and receipts to wine country guidebooks from the early ‘80s and land-use planning maps. “It’s a sweet space for a college of our size,” says Rich Schmidt, the director of archives. The archive’s online component is growing too. It currently contains over 200 oral histories—video interviews with winemakers, viticulturists, and others immersed in the state’s wine industry. SevenFifty Daily asked Schmidt about the genesis of the project, why Eric Asimov made the cut, and which oral histories will always stick with him.

Continue reading here. 

 

Why Hyperfocused Wine Clubs are on the Rise

This story was published on SevenFifty Daily last week.

From grower Champagnes to Oregon producers, niche interests are fueling subscription services

Wine clubs are nothing new. They’ve been around since at least 1972, when the the Wine of the Month Club was founded. Even publications like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and The Nation have wine clubs. But over the years, this sector of the wine industry has stagnated, according to Paul Mabray, a veteran of the successful wine tech startups Wine Direct and VinTank.

Until recently, that is.

A flurry of hyperfocused online wine clubs have launched over the past few years and appear to be thriving. There’s a wine club for organic and biodynamic wine. There’s one that focuses exclusively on Oregon producers and one that ships only Champagne; there’s even a club that singles out wines from women-owned wineries in Sonoma County. These subscription wine clubs are startups that are either self-financed or financed by investors (that is, they’re not financed by wineries).

“The subscription economy is in full force,” says Mabray, who is known in the wine industry as “the dean of digital.” “It’s a whole new rebirth of this thing that wineries have been doing for the longest time.” Though there are no statistics for subscription wine services (aka online wine clubs), Mabray, who is on the board of the startup Clubzz, a wine subscription management tool, says this sector is growing “very strongly.”

The rebirth of online wine clubs echoes the popularity of subscription services in general. Consumers are now buying personalized wardrobes on Stitch Fix, new razor blades on Harry’s Razors, and gourmet dinner ingredients on Blue Apron. Even Amazon has gotten in on the action with Subscribe & Save—customers get 15 percent off when they order the same staples on a regular basis. Consumers love the convenience, personalized service, and (in some cases) discounts. “And for companies,” says Mabray, “subscription services create a predictable revenue stream.” A recent survey by McKinsey & Company shows that the subscription economy has grown by more than 100 percent a year over the past five years, with the largest retailers generating more than $2.6 billion in subscription sales in 2016 (up from $57 million in 2011).

Etty Lewensztain launched Plonk Wine Merchants in 2010 as a highly selective online wine shop. “It was a digital version of that cool wine boutique in your neighborhood,” says Lewensztain. “I was getting rid of the wines that are a waste of time.”

But the unique wineries and offbeat grapes she featured on the site were so little known that customers were stumped. “They didn’t know the brand or recognize the varietal,” Lewensztain says. “So we decided to choose wine for people.” Sales with the wine club quickly outpaced à la carte purchases, and in 2013, Lewensztain rebranded Plonk as a wine club. (Though she’s added a wine store back onto the Plonk site, it’s mainly where current subscribers go to reorder wines they’ve loved from their shipments.)

Today Plonk Wine Merchants features wines that have been made with organic and biodynamic grapes—though Lewensztain stresses that she’s not dogmatic. “Some are certified; some are not,” she says. “We’re not religious about every single wine needing to be Demeter-certified.”  

The same goes for natural wines. Though she’s generally a fan herself, she’s wary of selling the “interesting” but not mass-consumer-friendly type of natural wines. “You know—the kind that have particulate matter floating around in them,” she says. “I think those wines are better suited for an on-premise atmosphere where you can have a sommelier explain the wine to you—and take it back if you don’t like it.” But her litmus test is that the wines be made well and sustainably, with no sprays in the vineyard. “Authentic wines that are not made in a boardroom and tinkered with with Mega Purple and so on,” Lewensztain says. “We’re really not into that style of wine.”  

Some recent popular bottles include the Balla Geza Fetească Neagră from Romania and a Pojer e Sandri Nosiola from Italy’s Trentino region. Plonk’s monthly shipments of 4 or 12 bottles include shipping costs. The 4-bottle shipment is $110, and 12-bottle is $285, making it the better deal, at $23.75 a bottle. Plonk features wines only from existing wineries (there are no private-label wines). Though Lewensztain would not disclose how many members Plonk has, she said the business has grown “quite a significant amount” over the past five years. Like other online wine clubs included in this article, Plonk does not accept marketing dollars from wineries. “We are self-funded,” says Lewensztain, “and we definitely don’t take any sort of payment.”

Plonk Wine Merchants provided inspiration for Carrie Wynkoop, a political strategist based in Portland, Oregon, who founded the wine club Cellar 503 three years ago. Says Wynkoop, “Lewensztain does a good job of explaining wines in a non-snobby way.”

But Wynkoop created Cellar 503 mostly because it was something she craved. “I have a big passion for Oregon and for Oregon wine,” she says. “I was sitting on the beach with my husband, and I was like, ‘I just want someone to send me Oregon wine to my doorstep.’ He said, ‘There you go: That’s your idea.’” Six months later, she had launched Cellar 503, focusing on small-batch winemakers (fewer than than 10,000 cases a year) and bottles under $30. The club, which Wynkoop and her husband funded through their own savings, is breaking even right now, with roughly 300 club members, but Wynkoop says they’re on track to make a profit in 2018. Though 40 percent of Cellar 503’s members are from Oregon, the remaining 60 percent hail from 28 other states—an indication of Oregon wine’s prominence on the national stage.

Wynkoop loves ferreting out small producers that the wine-drinking public would otherwise not know about, saying, “I like to call myself a little PR agency for the small guys.”

Each month, to keep things fun, Wynkoop sets a theme. January was “Italy in Oregon,” so she featured wines like a 2014 Primitivo from Cana’s Feast and a 2016 Vermentino from Troon Vineyard. February—“We Love Southern Oregon!”—included bottles from little-known wineries like Simple Machine in Talent (near Ashland) and Nicole Reese in Medford. In May, to celebrate Mother’s Day, Wynkoop features women winemakers. Members can choose to receive shipments of two or four bottles, either monthly or quarterly.

 

After experimenting with prices, Wynkoop now has a flat pricing structure. “One of the things members said was irritating was that [the price] was different every month,” Wynkoop says. So now, two bottles of white are always $45, and two bottles of red are always $55; mixed is $50. (Shipping is an additional $19.99, though club members in the Portland area can pick up their wines at a monthly free tasting at the Cellar 503 tasting room.) Because Wynkoop wants to feature wines that are approachable and affordable, bottle prices never exceed $30. “I want folks to feel comfortable opening them on a Wednesday night,” she says, “[and] not feel they need to save them for a special occasion.”  

But there is a wine club at the “special occasion” end of the spectrum too. SommSelect, founded by Master Sommelier Ian Cauble in 2014, focuses on premium wines—the kind of high-quality bottles you’d find at Michelin-starred restaurants. “There are a lot of people in this space who are discounting,” Cauble says. “[But] nothing incredible is ever 80 percent off.”

That said, for premium wines, SommSelect’s half-case prices are hard to beat. The club offers a monthly “educational blind-tasting kit” of six wines (three red, three white) for $199, or Somm Six, also $199, a monthly shipment of six of Cauble’s favorite wines (a mix of reds, whites, and rosés). Shipping is included.

But most of the company’s business comes from à la carte ordering. Every day, SommSelect sends out one to two detailed emails telling the story of a wine—profiling its winemaker, the estate’s history, and its appellation. David Lynch, the James Beard Award–winning wine writer and former wine director at Babbo, Quince, and more recently, St. Vincent, was hired as SommSelect’s editorial director last year, and he and other writers help Cauble compose the lively, absorbing profiles. (Cauble’s deep tasting notes are included, as are food-pairing recommendations.) Customers can either snap up the featured bottle on the spot or build a custom order for later shipment. (Members get free shipping if they buy roughly $100 worth of wine.) The custom order ships after 60 days or once it has reached a 12-bottle case—whichever comes first.   

“We’re offering wines that people are fighting to get a taste of,” says Cauble, noting that when allocations are small, the emails go out only to the company’s top 500 customers. Some examples of upcoming wines that will be offered to all email subscribers are Nicolas Joly’s Clos de la Bergeries Savennières 2014, for $55, and a 1990 Frog’s Leap Merlot, for $150.

Cauble would not divulge the number of club members SommSelect has on a monthly basis, but 20,000 people have signed up to receive the free daily emails. He says business has been growing by 20 to 30 percent per year since 2014. “We are making money,” Cauble says, “but everything is going back into the company.” SommSelect has new offices in Sonoma, California, and is expanding its warehouse as well.  

Last fall, after the wildfires in Northern California, the writer and brand strategist Amy Bess Cook posted a list of women-owned wineries in Sonoma County. “I wanted to bring attention to female wine entrepreneurs,” she says. “There are plenty of women in the wine business, but we’re not in departments of upper management.” Cook’s intent was to create awareness so that consumers could funnel their dollars to these women-owned businesses. After getting positive feedback on the site, Cook, who had operated a wine club at Tin Barn Vineyards, decided to start Women-Owned Wineries, a club dedicated to these wines. It launched a few weeks ago, financed so far through a crowdfunding campaign. The club’s current focus is on the 51 wineries on the WOW Sonoma site initially, but Cook says that it will eventually grow to include all women-owned wineries in the U.S. Bottles will start shipping in May.

Niche wine clubs like these illustrate the continuing fragmentation of the wine market, says industry analyst Rob McMillan, the founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Division and the author of the annual State of the Wine Industry report. But they may prove to be exactly what the discerning consumer desires. “The need is there to get these small wines to consumers,” McMillan says. “The wine lovers that are out there want these. If you can be a trusted curator, that has value to consumers.”

 

Gretchen Carlson on Fighting Sexual Harassment

The news anchor encourages women in the wine and spirits industry to speak up and demand action

When Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson came forward in 2016 with sexual harassment allegations against Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, there was no MeToo hashtag or Time’s Up movement. “It was an excruciating decision,” says Carlson. “I felt like I had jumped off a cliff by myself.” In an inspiring keynote address at the Women of the Vine and Spirits Global Symposium Napa, California, this week, Carlson encouraged women to have the courage to speak up about sexual harassment and sexual assault in their workplaces.

Speaking Out

Like many women, Carlson has endured sexual harassment and assault throughout her career. She was harassed by a stalker for four years early in her television days. Screenwriter William Goldman wrote a book in which he referred to her as Miss Piggy for being overweight when she was Miss America in 1989 (she was, in fact, 110 pounds). She was also sexually assaulted twice, in her 20s, while starting out in the television industry. The first time, she had cold-called a high-level TV executive. He spent the day showing her around the offices, making calls on her behalf, and then took her out for dinner. In the backseat of a cab, though, he attacked her. “All of a sudden he lunged [at] me and was on top of me and his tongue was down my throat. I screamed for the driver to stop and let me out of the car,” says Carlson. “At the old age of 22, I didn’t realize that breaking into the television business also meant letting him break into my pants.”

The second time, she was in Los Angeles, meeting with an agent. “Again, we were in a car—he grabbed my neck and he forced my head so hard into his crotch I couldn’t breathe,” says Carlson, adding that she managed to escape.

“Only recently did I realize that these cases weren’t actually harassment—they were assault,” says Carlson. “But like so many female survivors, I thought, ‘I’ve got this. I’m okay. Just move on, Gretchen.’ I bought into the myth that somehow I’d asked for it, and thought I wouldn’t be believed if I told people anyway.” It took Carlson 25 years to call these two instances assault out loud.

So while she encourages women to speak up about sexual harassment and assault—and also urges men to speak out when they see it happening in the workplace—she realizes how tough it can be. When Carlson’s complaints went public in 2016, she was most concerned about the impact her case would have on her children, who were 11 and 12 at the time. “They were of paramount concern to me,” she says. “My face was constantly on the news, and they were going to school.” But ultimately, she says, she underestimated her kids. Her daughter came home from school bewildered by all the gossip but said, “Mom, I felt so proud to tell them that you are my mom!” And when her daughter finally stood up to two kids at school who had been taunting her, she told Carlson, “Mommy, I found the bravery and the courage to do it because I saw you do it.”

Continue reading at SevenFifty Daily.  

What's Next for Oregon Wine?

I attended the Oregon Wine Symposium last week here in Portland and reported back for SevenFifty Daily. 

At the 2018 Oregon Wine Symposium this week, Nielsen’s senior vice president of beverage alcohol practice, Danny Brager, announced that Oregon has the fastest-growing wine industry of any state. The state’s annual wine sales increased 17 percent in 2017 (over 2016) compared with 2.3 percent for Washington, 3 percent for California, and 2.8 percent for the U.S. overall.

One of the most interesting panels of the two-day symposium was “What’s Next for Oregon? Exploring Oregon’s Changing Wine Landscape.” There were three official panel members: land-use expert Richard P. Mendelson, from Dickenson, Peatman & Fogarty; Liz Thach, MW, a professor of wine and management at Sonoma State University; and Chris Tanghe, MS, the chief instructor at GuildSomm (and Wine Enthusiast’s 2017 Sommelier of the Year). But on the spur of the moment, moderator Bree Boskov, MW, of the Oregon Wine Board asked Ken Wright (of Ken Wright Cellars) and David Adelsheim (of Adelsheim Vineyard)—both respected figures in the Oregon wine industry—to join the panel.

[Image courtesy of Oregon Wine Board]  

The trend of sub-AVAs and “nested AVAs” (or AVAs within AVAs) is going strong, said Mendelson. Napa Valley already has 16 nested AVAs, and the Willamette Valley (so far) has six. “It harkens back to the old-world appellation hierarchy,” Mendelson said. But it creates some marketing challenges. “What I had seen in France was that ‘Bordeaux’ became nonexistent on labels of Médoc and even finer, distinguished wines,” he said. “You will not see the word ‘Bordeaux’ on the label.” The more consumers become familiar with a sub-AVA—Yamhill-Carlton, for instance, or Russian River in California—the less they associate that wine with its larger AVA.

 

But there is a way around the problem: conjunctive labeling—that is, including the names of both the sub-AVA and the larger AVA on the label. Thach used the example of Sonoma Valley. In 2005, there were 13 AVAs in Sonoma Valley, and many had separate marketing associations that were really good at their job. “Sonoma County was not being marketed at all,” Thach said. “No one was putting ‘Sonoma County’ on their labels.” As a result, sub-AVAs such as Russian River were better known to consumers (who may not even have known Russian River was in Sonoma County).

That changed when grape growers came to the vintners and suggested conjunctive labeling. After consumer surveys and many conversations, the various players created a Sonoma County logo and a joint marketing program with a digital strategy, events, media tours, and the like. In 2010 the California legislature passed the idea into law, requiring all wineries in Sonoma County who claimed a sub-AVA on their label to also have the words “Sonoma County” on their label. Thach says the logo—a stamp that reads Sonoma County—has been highly effective, especially because it means wineries don’t have to entirely redesign their labels. (The stamp is placed to the right.)  

Oregon winemakers may wish to pay attention to this success story.

At a recent meeting of the Willamette Valley Winery Association’s marketing committee, winemakers brought 40 bottles of their wine to share. Of those bottles, 36 didn’t have the words “Willamette Valley” on them. “Which is amazing, just amazing,” Wright said at the symposium. He worried that something valuable might be lost in the single-minded focus on the marketing of sub-AVAs: “We have forsaken the Willamette Valley.”

The experience got Wright thinking. Last summer, he called together a group of Oregon winemakers to discuss his concerns. Eight concepts came out of their lively discussion, but the two he mentioned at the Oregon Wine Symposium were conjunctive labeling and a requirement for 100 percent varietal content for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. (At the moment, Oregon state law allows winemakers to use up to 5 percent of other grapes in a varietal without declaring them on the label. Federal law allows even more leeway—it allows producers to add up to 25 percent of other varietals without declaring them.)

Though at first it may seem unrelated, the idea of having 100 percent varietal content shares the same goal as conjunctive labeling: to protect the name of Willamette Valley and the high quality of its Pinot Noir. Wright’s concern stems from the fact that most choice areas in the Willamette Valley are already planted. New growers and winemakers are planting on the valley floor and may be making “thin, diluted wine,” mixing it with other grapes, and marketing it as Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. “And that,” said Wright, “would be a problem.”

According to Wright, only two places in the world require 100 percent varietal content by law: Spain for its Albariño and Brunello for its Montalcino, which must be made of 100% Sangiovese. “We should join them,” Wright said. “It’s religious. It’s like tomatoes from San Marzano, bamboo shoots from Kyoto. . . We have Pinot Noir here that inherently wants to be spectacular.”

Thach challenged Oregon winemakers to try to bring more entry-priced bottles to market. Oregon wineries produce plenty of luxury and ultra-premium wine, as Thach demonstrated with a graph that showed Domaine Serene on the high end (with a $320 bottle) but very few bottles in the $15-to-$20 range. Entry-level wines, she said, will help reel in consumers who have not yet tried Oregon wines because of their high price tag. “It still needs to be good, clean, fruit-forward wine that’s accessible,” Thach said. “Just not as expensive.” She emphasized that it doesn’t even have to be Pinot Noir.

Tanghe, who teaches a master class on the Willamette Valley AVA for GuildSomm, spoke about the four Oregon sub-AVAs that are currently under consideration with the TTB: Laurelwood (nestled into the Chehalem Mountain AVA), Mount Pisgah in Polk County, Tualatin Hills (abutting the Chehalem Mountain AVA and the proposed Laurelwood AVA), and Van Duzer Corridor. He said applicants are frustrated that they have been waiting three years for approval from the TTB. Mendelson advised patience, in his experience with Paso Robles, California, it can take as long as seven years for approval to be granted.

Earlier in the symposium, Mendelson had reminded attendees that to be approved as a distinct AVA you must prove that you have “distinguishing viticultural features”—such as climate, geology, soils, elevation, or physical features. But once an AVA is approved by the TTB, it needs something more ephemeral if it doesn’t want to “die on the vine”: strong leadership. “And then that leadership has to justify the value-add [higher prices] and you must protect the name,” Mendelson said. It will be interesting to see whether the TTB will approve the proposed new AVAs—and whether conjunctive labeling will soon be coming to the Willamette Valley.

Becoming a Master of Roussanne

Maggie Harrison on her unconventional path to becoming a winemaker and her dedication to a difficult grape. (This story was originally published on SevenFifty Daily on Jan. 19, 2018.) 

As soon as you taste one of Maggie Harrison’s wines—whether it’s an earthy Pinot Noir, a marvelously complex Chardonnay, or her lush, floral Roussanne—you understand why she has such a loyal following. What you taste in the glass comes from the unconventional ways in which this winemaker picks and ferments her fruit, particularly the Roussanne, a Rhône variety that’s notorious for ripening unevenly. For more than a decade, Harrison has been pulling the very best expressions out of a handful of varieties and making exquisite, nuanced wines at Antica Terra in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Maggie Harrison with Sean O’Connor (left) and chef Timothy Wastell (right)

 

The Epiphany

Harrison’s unlikely journey to becoming a winemaker started on an island off the coast of Kenya. With a degree in international relations and conflict resolution from Syracuse University in New York State, Harrison landed a job at the Carter Center in Atlanta but deferred acceptance so she could travel. After a year spent backpacking around Europe, another year in South America, and yet another year in Africa, she was less and less sure about pursuing a career in conflict resolution.

“One evening, on an island off the coast of Kenya, I was having a beer and a complete nervous breakdown,” Harrison says. “A fellow traveler from Mozambique was unlucky enough to have pulled up a seat next to me. I spent most of the evening explaining to him that I was feeling adrift. Finally, this guy put down his beer, exasperatedly, and looked me in the eye. ‘You’ve just spent half an hour telling me everything that’s impossible,’ he said, ‘everything you don’t want to do.’”

“Then he asked, ‘What is it that you want to do?’” Harrison considered the question for a moment and said she thought she’d like to learn how to make wine. The traveler asked if there were any grapes in her country and she said there were.

After leaving Africa, Harrison headed for a winery in California. It wasn’t just any winery but Sine Qua Non in Ventura County—the cult winery owned by Manfred and Elaine Krankl.

The Oregon Trail

After working eight vintages with the Krankls—a period she calls the most formative of her life—Harrison was asked by one of their dear friends to be the winemaker at a new venture in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills. She demurred.

“I had just begun Lillian—my own tiny Syrah project in California,” Harrison recalls, “and my first vintage was still resting in the barrel. I was afraid that if I took on another project, I would be stretching myself too thin.”

The owners of the new vineyard—Scott Adelson, John Mavredakis, and Michael Kramer—none of whom had winemaking or vineyard experience, were persistent. Ultimately, though, they accepted Harrison’s firm “No, thank you.” But they did ask her for a favor: Would she mind taking a look at the vineyard and giving them some pointers on how to farm it? Harrison flew up to Oregon on a rainy spring day.

Her arrival was not auspicious. One of the partners picked her up at the airport and drove her southwest to the Eola-Amity Hills. The weather was gray and bleak, and the endless suburban strip malls along 99W only made things seem bleaker. When she finally arrived at the vineyard, in the countryside northwest of Salem, a sign in barely legible script read “No Trespassing.” “The r was backwards,” Harrison recalls, “as if it had been written by an ax murderer.”

But once she set foot in the vineyard, Harrison fell in love with the property.  

“To our left were wetlands and views of the ryegrass growing beyond. To our right, on a steep hillside, was a forest of gnarled, moss-covered oaks. When we reached the top of the hill, the first thing I noticed was the light,” Harrison says. “The clouds fractured over the vineyard and allowed the sun to ray through… I could see the vineyard—a sea of yellow leaves and stunted shoots. The vines were at the beginning of their growth cycle, but they were already beginning to defoliate. The site was so beautiful, the potential so clear—but the suffering was equally clear.” Harrison had only been there a minute before she ducked behind one of the oaks, called her then-boyfriend (now husband), and said, simply, “We’re moving to Oregon.”  

Luckily, he agreed.

Harrison finished her last vintage of Sine Qua Non in 2005, and in 2006 she became an owner—with Adelson, Mavredakis, and Kramer—of the 40-acre property in the Eola-Amity Hills. At the time, only six acres were under vine. But since then, she’s planted another 13, bringing the vineyard to just under 20 acres. It’s here that Harrison grows Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes and bottles them under the Antica Terra label.

Reckoning with Roussanne

But Lillian, Harrison’s California project, lives on. Each fall, she flies south to California and picks Syrah, Roussanne (which she started sourcing in 2011), and (in the past) Cabernet Sauvignon. The clusters, carefully stacked in vented plastic totes, are sent to Oregon by refrigerated truck to be sorted and fermented at the Antica Terra facility in Dundee. The resulting wines are bottled under the Lillian label, named after Harrison’s maternal grandmother.

Harrison has a particular passion for Roussanne, the only white wine she makes under the Lillian label. If you ask her how she produces it, she grows animated, eager to share the unique methods she’s devised to get the most out of this tricky variety.  

Lillian and Antica Terra bottles at Harrison's Eola-Amity Hill Vineyard (the Roussanne is at left) 

“There is not a tremendous amount of Roussanne grown in this country, because of its somewhat annoying habits,” Harrison says. “The growers struggle with it because it ripens incredibly late, and the winemakers struggle because it ripens incredibly unevenly.” (Jon Bonné, in his book The New California Wine, reports that fewer than 400 acres of Roussanne are planted statewide.)

“Roussanne is the least uniform grape variety I’ve ever seen,” says Harrison. “A single vine will have clusters that are green, yellow, gold, amber, rusted, and botrytis. Nothing is ripe at the same time.”  That’s a major frustration for most vineyardists, but it became a creative challenge for Harrison. Her work-around is to pick when 80 to 85 percent of the fruit is perfectly ripe and then collate by color.

“Roussanne becomes really russet when it’s ripe—deeply amber and a little bit scaly,” says Harrison. She and her vineyard team bring the whole block in at once and then separate it by color at the sorting table. First they sort by clusters—one box for the greenest, then gold, then amber—as well as a box for the fruit with the highest percentage of botrytis. The grapes on the richest end of the spectrum are sorted one by one. Harrison handles each of these boxes differently.

The grapes on the lightest end—the greenest ones with the highest acid—she handles like Chardonnay. “I’ll give them 10 to 18 hours in the press,” she says, “and then [send them] directly into barrel.” The yellowish grapes, she’ll macerate on the skins for six hours and then take them to the press. Deeply golden grapes she might let macerate on the skins for as many as 20 hours to extract maximum aromatics, flavor compounds, and textures. Says Harrison, “We’re trying to eke out what’s there.”

Finally come the richest grapes. “The challenge here,” says Harrison, “is really how you’re going to access the aromas you know are there—in the gentlest way possible.” Instead of walking on the fruit with rubber boots (the way winemakers may do when making a dessert wine like Sauternes), she macerates and ferments the fruit on the skins for three to five days, gently washing the skins with the juice twice a day until the aromatics crack open and the flavors become really clear. Each of these Roussanne wine groups is fermented in barrel, separately, for a year. “Then we take samples and take them to the blending table,” says Harrison. “That’s where we find the ratio that comes together to form the most compelling whole.” The result is a highly aromatic, floral wine with a lush texture and an almost oily quality.

A few years ago, Harrison was at a dinner party at a winemaker’s house in California. She says the winemaker exclaimed, “We hate Roussanne!”

The reason it’s a turnoff for some, she surmises, is that it’s a low-acid grape. “If you try to retain the acid that exists, you lose out on the dripping honey beeswax characteristic,” she says. “But if you forgo that, you lose all the acid.”

In her inimitable way, Harrison has figured out a method for working with the fruit and pulling the best aromas, flavors, and textures from it to create the finest expression of a Roussanne.

 

Confronting Sexual Harassment in the Drinks Industry

{Note: this story was written before both Mario Batali and Andrew Friedman were accused of chronic sexual harassment and assault by dozens of women who have worked for them over the years. I expect many more women will come forward over the coming weeks and months to reveal other powerful men in the restaurant industry have been guilty of the same thing.}

 

Over the last few months, numerous women have come forward to accuse movie producer Harvey Weinstein and dozens of other men in various industries of sexual assault and harassment. The restaurant world has begun its own reckoning: Celebrity chef John Besh was the first to fall, as documented in a lengthy exposé in October in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Twenty-five women came forward to share their stories of sexual harassment while working for the chef’s restaurant empire. Besh, who has stepped down from his role at the company to “focus on his family,” has inspired both fear and soul-searching in the restaurant industry. Could your company, too, be fostering a culture where sexual harassment thrives?

For those working in the restaurant and alcohol industries, it’s not exactly breaking news that sexual harassment is widespread. In 2014, a report by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United found that 90 percent of female restaurant workers had experienced sexual harassment. Two-thirds had been harassed by a restaurant owner, manager, or supervisor.

The women SevenFifty Daily interviewed for this story—sommeliers, PR execs for alcohol companies, event planners, bar managers—mentioned not only persistent sexual harassment throughout their careers but also “look the other way” human resources policies, especially at male-run restaurant groups. “It’s just endemic across the whole industry,” says one wine PR executive who asked not to be named. Melissa Lang, a veteran of several restaurant groups who now is the events manager for the Dallas-based restaurant chain Dave & Busters (more on that later), says, “Sexism is so rampant—you become jaded to even noticing.”

The alcohol industry may be even worse than the restaurant world. Though no sexual harassment statistics are available for the booze industry overall, the culture of free-flowing wine and liquor is certainly known anecdotally to spur bad judgment. “A lot of my sexual harassment complaints are alcohol-fueled—there’s no question about it,” says Richard Curiale, a Bay Area lawyer who litigates sexual harassment cases and leads sexual harassment training for the tech and wine industries. “I would say 60 percent of the complaints I get wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been drinking.”

As stories of sexual harassment and even assault continue to emerge, it may be instructive to look at companies that have structures in place to deal with sexual harassment. The resources and tips cited here have proven effective in reducing harassment by employees, employers, and customers.

Continue reading at SevenFifty Daily. 

Navigating Pregnancy and Maternity Leave in the Drinks Industry

Paid maternity leave is still a rarity, but some forward-thinking companies are setting the bar

{This story was published by SevenFifty Daily on Oct. 17th.}

Three years ago, when Chelsey Smith took a job at the Jack Daniel’s bottling plant in Lynchburg, Kentucky, she had no idea what the policy on maternity leave was. “I didn’t have a clue about it until I was pregnant,” says Smith, now 26. So when she and her husband, Drew, a truck driver for the company, learned they were pregnant with their first child last year, they were happily surprised to discover that Brown-Forman (the owner of Jack Daniels’s) had a progressive parental leave policy: Chelsey was entitled to 12 weeks of paid leave, and Drew, as the non-birth parent, was due six weeks, paid.

Brown-Forman’s parental leave policy proved crucial for the new parents. Chelsey had complications during labor—the epidural caused part of her left leg to remain numb—and she came home from the hospital on crutches. In addition to pediatrician visits, Chelsey had to see a neurologist several times and have an MRI. (The cause of the numbness is still a mystery.) The extra appointments would have been impossible if Drew wasn’t also home and able to drive the family.

“When I came home from the hospital, I was on crutches and couldn’t put my foot on the ground. Drew did everything: bathed me, cooked supper, went grocery shopping, did dishes and laundry—the list goes on,” she says. And because Brown-Forman’s policy allows the non-birth parent to take his (or her) six weeks any time over the first six months of the baby’s life, Drew can reserve a week or two for when Chelsey returns to work.

 

Drew, 32, realizes how rare paid paternity leave is in the United States and says he can’t imagine not having this benefit. “Those nights of hardly any sleep are much easier to deal with,” he says, “when you don’t have to worry about getting up on time in the morning.” And the time he’s been home with Chelsey and their daughter, Megan, has brought them closer as a family. “I sure am glad I was there the first time that little girl smiled,” Drew says. “I would’ve missed that and many other memories without these benefits.”

Chelsey, Drew, and Megan Lee Smith. Photo courtesy of Drew Smith.

Brown-Forman—which also makes brands such as Woodford Reserve, Sonoma-Cutrer wines, and Finlandia vodka—has one of the best parental leave policies in the alcohol industry.

“Their parental leave policy is fantastic. And their paternity leave is the highest I’ve seen,” says Deborah Brenner, the founder and president of Women of the Vine & Spirits, a membership organization dedicated to the support of women in the alcoholic beverage industry.

“It was a topic that mattered a lot to me,” says Kirsten Hawley, Brown-Forman’s chief human resources officer. “It came from conversations with women who were trying to make hard choices between staying at home to bond with a newborn baby or coming back to work so they could earn an income. And also talking to dads about their desire to stay home with their newborn child longer than they had the opportunity to.” At the time, the company already offered decent parental leave—two weeks, paid, for dads, and six weeks, paid, for moms—but it was covered by a short-term disability insurance policy. Hawley thought the company could do better. She says, “We decided to not treat childbirth as a disability.”

The revised policy, which kicks in after a year of employment, also makes no distinction between fathers and same-sex partners—the “non-birth parent” can be male or female. “We wanted to be sure that our leave addressed today’s modern families,” Hawley says. It also covers adoptive parents and foster parents, giving them six weeks of paid leave. It covers all Brown-Forman’s salaried workforce and hourly nonunion employees.

Needless to say, this is not the norm in the alcohol industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2016 National Compensation Survey, the leisure/hospitality sector has among the lowest rates—6 percent—of access to paid family leave. (That category includes restaurants and hotels, though not bars.) The only category to fare worse was the construction industry. Manufacturing, which includes companies that make alcoholic beverages, was slightly higher, at 10 percent.  

“The restaurant industry is not flexible, and it doesn’t put any value on families or mothers,” says Jessica Brown, 34, who oversees the food and beverage program at JetBlue. Brown should know. She had worked for two years as the wine director for a notable New York restaurant group when, soon after she’d told her direct supervisor she was pregnant, her position was eliminated. “It’s unclear whether the owners knew about my pregnancy when my position was eliminated,” she says, “but it was definitely a shock.” Not that the company offered any paid parental leave anyway.

Brown spent months applying for jobs in the industry and had some positive interviews, but once she disclosed that she was pregnant, in each case she was told (later, by the various HR staffs at the places she applied) that the employer had decided not to fill the position. Ultimately, she was able to parlay her food and beverage experience into a “day job” at JetBlue.

But maternity leave is also not the norm in any industry: A mere 15 percent of workers in the U.S. have access to paid leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent data. That lack of paid time off means that one in four employed mothersreturns to work two weeks after giving birth.

Five states—California, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Rhode Island—and the District of Columbia have passed paid family leave laws, but many other states offer just six weeks of paid leave at partial salary, which any woman who has given birth says is barely enough time (or money). Still, it is better than the unpaid leave mandated by federal law. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires all businesses with more than 50 employees to offer new moms and dads 12 weeks of unpaid leave. (To get this “benefit,” though, you have to be full-time and have been with your company for a year.) Crucially, the FMLA also offers job protection: Your employer must offer you the same job when you return to work, or one that is nearly identical, with identical pay and benefits.  

But what if you’re pregnant and you work for a small employer, like a restaurant, cocktail bar, or small wine importer? “You hope to win the lottery,” says Kate Newhall, the policy director at Family Forward Oregon, a politically savvy nonprofit that advocates for family-friendly policies in the state.

Family Forward Oregon spearheaded the campaign for a statewide paid sick leave bill, which was signed by Governor Kate Brown in 2015, and it is one of the leading organizations behind Time for Oregon, a coalition fighting for paid family and medical leave in the state. A bill to provide such leave was introduced in the 2017 legislative session, but it didn’t pass. Newhall is confident, however, that it will be on the agenda again in 2018, saying, “We’re in it to win it!”  

Until Oregon passes a paid family leave bill, it is one of the 45 states where new mothers have to fend for themselves—or rely on family. When Sonia Kehler, 44, a bartender in Portland, was pregnant with her daughter Vela, her boss at Captain Ankeny’s bar gave her six weeks off, unpaid. Kehler survived financially because her partner, also a bartender, was able to find a better-paying day job and because her father babysat Vela when she went back to work. She was able to pump breast milk in an employee bathroom. Having been a bartender for years, Kehler wasn’t surprised by the lack of any kind of paid maternity leave. She says, “I never even asked.”

Rare is the independently owned bar or restaurant that can afford to offer paid maternity leave. Liz Davis, the owner and manager of Xico, a Mexican restaurant in Portland with 25 employees, has offered health insurance to all employees—even those who work only part-time—since the day the restaurant opened five years ago. But paid maternity leave is another matter. “Our profit margin is so small, and we actually can’t operate with one less server,” says Davis. “We’d have to replace her. So it becomes a situation where we’re paying two people.” But after reading Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened (Simon & Schuster) and thinking about the issue at length, Davis decided to offer one week of paid maternity leave. “I know that’s nothing,” she says, “but for [my employees], it’s the difference between being able to pay rent that month and not.”  

In states like California, which was the first in the nation to pass a paid family leave law, in 2002, restaurant owners aren’t faced with this tough decision, because thestate pays for the leave through a worker-funded insurance program. Jacquelyn Dowell, 33, is a bartender at Oakland’s Ramen Shop. When she told her boss she was pregnant, he was very supportive.

“He sat me down and said, ‘What shifts are gonna be good for you? I just want you to be comfortable,’” Dowell says. “So that was amazing.”

Six weeks before her due date, Dowell was racked with false labor pains, and her doctor told her not to return to work. California’s short-term disability program covered her at 55 percent of her salary for six weeks, and the state’s then Paid Family Leave covered another six weeks off, also at 55 percent of her salary. 

Was that enough to live on in the high-rent Bay Area? “Not at all—not even close,” Dowell says. But fortunately, Dowell’s husband, Kevin, works for a small spirits company, The 86 Co., and he was allowed a month and a half of paternity leave at his full salary. Knowing that most bartenders in the U.S. don’t receive any pay during maternity leave makes Dowell feel lucky. “Yet I feel that what I received wasn’t enough,” she says. “It’s super unfair. It’s just crazy to me that pregnancy isn’t covered.” Last year, California governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that will increase the Paid Family Leave payment to 70 percent of a minimum wage worker’s salary. (Workers with higher pay will get 60 percent of their salary.)  The new coverage will take effect in 2018.

Companies in the alcoholic beverage industry that are truly family-friendly, like Brown-Forman and The 86 Co., are few and far between. Some leading wine and spirits distributors offer paid leave, but only to members of the sales team. (This recalls Starbuck’s recent fiasco: Earlier this month shareholders objected that a new, 18-week parental leave policy was only for salaried workers, whereas hourly workers receive only six weeks.)

Diageo, the British multinational spirits and beer company (Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, Guinness) whose U.S. offices are based in Norwalk, Connecticut, has made Working Mother’s list of 100 Best Companies for the past nine years. In addition to subsidizing day care, the company offers job-sharing, flextime, and a decent parental leave policy. All full-time employees who have worked a year for the company—even fathers and adoptive parents—are eligible for four weeks of paid leave.

One restaurateur who is helping set the bar for paid family leave is Danny Meyer at Union Square Hospitality Group. Last fall he announced an eight-week parental leave program at all 16 of his restaurants and bars that applies equally to birth parents and non-birth parents. The program covers full-time employees who have been with the company for at least one year, and gives four weeks at 100 percent of the base wage, and another four weeks at 60 percent. Of course, this means that workers at restaurants that still accept tipping will not get tips while they’re out, but the base wage at USHG restaurants is still higher than the tipped minimum wage in New York City. (Similarly, workers who take advantage of this leave at the group’s nine Hospitality Included restaurants—that is, restaurants that have abolished tipping—would not get revenue share, but their base wage is higher than the current New York City minimum wage of $11 an hour.)  

But the majority of companies in the alcohol industry don’t offer paid parental leave for the simple reason that they don’t have to. Kat Kelly, now 38, was pregnant when she took a job as import manager at Baron Francois, a French wine importer. (She did not disclose she was pregnant in her interview because she feared she would not be hired if they knew.) She says her boss presented the company as family friendly in her interview, but he offered her only six weeks off, unpaid, when she gave birth. (Because she hadn’t been at the company for a full year, and because Baron Francois had 20 employees at the time, Kelly was not entitled to any time off under the FMLA.) Luckily, she had applied for short-term disability and so got a tiny portion of her salary. But just a month into her six-week leave, Kelly says she felt pressured by the company to work from home.

“Psychologically, I wasn’t ready. And I don’t think I’d physically healed from the C-section,” says Kelly, who returned to work exhausted. “I was forgetting things, feeling overwhelmed.” The only place she could pump her breast milk was in one of two single staff bathrooms, and coworkers were always knocking on the door. To top it off, she also felt pressured to go to evening wine events and drink a lot. “I wanted to be like, ‘Oh, I’m still cool,’” Kelly says. “But I wasn’t able to do that anymore.” She eventually left Baron Francois—and the wine industry—to work at NARS Cosmetics, which she says is a truly family-friendly company. “They have a nice, big pumping room,” she says. “Women have babies, and that’s a natural part of life.”

Kylie Henshaw, human resources coordinator at Baron Francois says the company still doesn’t have a formal maternity leave policy, but in January it will be subject to New York state’s new Paid Family Leave Program, which requires that all companies offer eight weeks of leave to new mothers and fathers, paid at 50 percent of her or his salary. (The Program covers full-time and part-time employees; full-time employees must work at least 26 weeks, or six-and-a-half months, at a company to be covered; part-time employees must work at least 175 days to be covered. The Program also covers employees who need to care for a sick relative.) Henshaw says the company has since moved to a new office space and now has a private room in which new mothers can pump.

But until all states start passing paid family leave policies like California and New York’s—or bars, restaurants, and alcoholic beverage companies start issuing more progressive maternity leave policies on their own—the drinks industry will continue to lose some of its best employees.   

“One of the main problems that the restaurant industry has right now is maintaining qualified employees,” Jessica Brown at JetBlue says. To her, it is no surprise why.

“They’re losing a tremendous number of seasoned professionals because they don’t support families or any type of maternity leave.” Employees who have been with a company for a long time are, she says, “put out to pasture” just because they decide to start a family. “The industry has to take a hard look at this issue in general. They need to look at the Big Picture.”

 

Private-Label Wines: A Peek Behind the Label

 

When consumers hear the term private-label wines, they may envision Trader Joe’s Two-Buck Chuck or Costco’s Kirkland Signature brand, which includes Chiantis and Malbecs that retail for $6. But what they may not realize is that the private-label market has grown beyond the bottom shelf. Premium private-label wines are popping up at Costco and even Whole Foods for as much as $24. 

Private-label wines—traditionally, brands created for a company (often a retailer or restaurant), which sell exclusively via one sales channel—are no longer, by definition, plonk. (Though plenty of volume-driven, inexpensive wine still exists.) These days, restaurants from Shake Shack to The French Laundry, as well as brands like Whole Foods and Grand Hyatt hotels, are getting into the private-label game, partnering with respected wineries like Frog’s Leap (in the case of Shake Shack) and Michael Mondavi’s Folio Fine Wine Partners (for Grand Hyatt’s Canvas line) to make wines that are exclusively available to their customers. Some of these wines are easily identifiable “linked” brands, such as Costco’s Kirkland, Sam’s Club’s Member’s Mark, and Trader Joe’s eponymous label. Others are less obviously aligned with their owners, including Whole Foods’ Wine Farmer or Kroger’s Acronym, which many consumers may not realize are private-label brands. What all private-label wines chiefly have in common is that the retailer, hotel chain, or restaurant often has a hand in forming the flavor profile and style of the wine and that the resulting wines are priced lower than similar wines from recognized wineries.

The profile of these wines has risen to such a degree that the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnist, Lettie Teague, recently devoted a column to the category. She singled out three Costco wines, including the 2015 Rutherford Napa Valley Meritage ($14), which she called a remarkable value. She also liked the 2016 Member’s Mark Mosel Riesling ($10.50) at Sam’s Club.  

“Everybody has the same goal: to buy good wine for cheap,” says Andrew Cullen, founder of the CostcoWineBlog.com, which publishes independent reviews of the retailer’s private-label wines.

And every retailer has the same goal: to make more money.

Continue reading my story on SevenFifty Daily. 

Thriving While Sober in the Booze Industry

I wrote this piece about alcoholism in the wine, beer, and spirits industry for a new wine industry publication called SevenFifty Daily.  

Drinks professionals weigh in on their recovery from alcoholism and how they’re charting a new course

 

It’s July 2014 and Giuseppe González, celebrated bartender and owner of Manhattan’s swank Suffolk Arms, is in New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail. It’s his birthday weekend. A rock-star partier, González also has type 1 diabetes, and his doctor has just told him he needs to quit drinking—or else. But at this weeklong bacchanalia, his doctor’s advice is far from his mind. Instead, he heads to a party and ends up in the bathroom with a bag of blow. His cell phone rings.

“It’s my mom, calling to wish me happy birthday,” González says. “She hears me and she’s like, ‘Joey, are you all right?’ and I say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’” González got off the phone with his mom and called a friend to ask for help. His friend replied, “I’ve been waiting for this call for a while, bro.”

The next day, González went to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He’s been sober ever since. That’s not to say it has been easy. “Alcoholism is chronic—it never goes away. There’s never gonna be a day that goes by that I think I have control over it,” says Gonzalez, who, three years later, attends an AA meeting every morning.  

González has plenty of company. People who work in the food and beverage industry are around alcohol daily and are often expected to drink it. Temptation is everywhere. As González puts it, “I had easy access to some of the best spirits—and some of the best bartenders in the country were my best friends.” In such circumstances, it’s easy to overindulge. Statistics bear this out: The hospitality industry is the profession with the highest rate of substance abuse, according to the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Recently, though, a handful of high-profile bartenders, chefs, general managers, and others in the industry have been speaking out about their struggles with alcohol abuse—and their newfound sobriety. Sean Brock, chef at Husk, McCrady’s, and Minero in Charleston, South Carolina, went to rehab last January and spoke about the pleasures of not drinking in a recent article for the New York Times. A year ago, Jack McGarry, co-owner of New York City hotspots Dead Rabbit and BlackTail, stopped drinking after a close call that landed him in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. And Mickey Bakst, general manager of the Charleston Grill in South Carolina, who’s been sober for 35 years, is outspoken about his alcoholism. “I have an extraordinarily blessed career, all due to the fact that I got sober,” he says. Though not all recovering alcoholics have stayed in the industry, many have—and they say their careers are more successful than ever. The stigma of being a drinks professional with alcoholism is seemingly starting to disappear.

Continue reading on SevenFiftyDaily.com.