The Wine Bible | Karen MacNeil
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Matthew, bringing you this week's episode with award-winning wine expert and author Karen McNeil. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at google.

Karen McNeil is the only American to have won every major wine award given in the English language. Time Magazine calls her America's Missionary of the Vine. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Wine Bible, the only best-selling wine book in the United States, and is the creator and editor of Wine Speed, the top digital newsletter on wine in the U.S.,

She was the former wine correspondent for the Today Show on NBC and was also the host of the PBS series Wine, Food, and Friends with Karen McNeil, for which she won an Emmy Award. Karen is also the creator and chairman emeritus of the Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies at the Culinary Institute of America, which has been called the Harvard of wine education.

In this conversation, Karen discusses her book, The Wine Bible, Third Edition, which offers the ultimate education in wine, as well as expanded content. Originally published in November of 2022, here is Karen McNeil, The Wine Bible. Hi, Karen. Hey, Nick. How are you? I'm doing really well. Do you want to get into some questions? I'm ready. Okay. I'm going to start with a softball. Okay. Okay.

Okay, writing one edition of anything seems like quite a huge accomplishment to me. So what prompted you to write a third edition? Boy, there have been nights when I have asked myself that very question. Are you crazy? I'll say to myself. But you know, like you, Nick, I absolutely love the wine industry. I adore wines. I'm watching what's happening globally with wine.

And it was time. The wine industry is not only getting enormous, but it's changing even the traditional areas like Bordeaux, Burgundy, Tuscany. Those places are changing. So as one of the last generalists in the in the world of wine, it was time to do a new wine Bible.

Yeah. What do you mean by generalist in the wine world? Yeah. You know, it is such a big place now, right? Wine is made in Japan, in China, in all the traditional countries of Europe, but also in the Near East and in South America. And for a journalist, it often seems just too overwhelming to try and keep track of all of that.

And so many journalists today specialize, you know, there'll be a New Zealand expert or an Argentinian expert or a Burgundy expert. But for me, I like having the feel of the whole world if I can.

Well, I love that. I'm a generalist in a world of specialists too. So I was chatting with Rosalie recently, who I think you know, your friend and a fellow Googler of mine who had the idea of bringing you here. And we were talking about your writing style. You're so like approachable, fun, sharp. Like who's your writing inspiration?

Oh, wow. That's such an interesting question because I've never taken a writing class. I don't have a degree in journalism, but writing is one of those things that, you know, if you can do it, you can do it. Nobody asks you for your degree. And so I've been a writer my whole life. And one of the things that was kind of interesting in the writing of the first wine Bible was

in the late 1990s and early 2000s, people would say to me, oh, you know, this was the rise of the great American critic Bob Parker. And people would say, oh, wow, did you read what Bob Parker said about X? Or did you read what Jancis Robinson said about Y? And I would say, no, I completely sort of tuned out, intentionally did not read anyone else's

because I didn't want anyone else's thoughts about wine to kind of become my thoughts, to creep into my head. And so I suppose I haven't had a writing mentor. I don't know. Can Hemingway count, maybe? No, but I didn't know him, so. He counts. He counts. You know what I did do, though? And maybe this is what you and Rosalie were referring to,

is when I started in wine, all of the big books were written by British authors, and they were very stripped down, sort of gray column after gray column of wine facts. And to me, what made wine rich was all the culture around it, you know, history, food, art, architecture, religion, everything.

And so I wove my wine text back in with all of those elements that make wine come alive. And then as I was writing all three wine Bibles, instead of sort of writing it in a way that can often come off show-offish in wine, you know, like here's all the stuff I know, instead of doing that,

I kind of turned the binoculars around and I always imagined that sitting in the room with me was a person about 40, very smart, but who knew nothing about wine. And I would tell that person the story of any given place, any given wine country.

And so my writing naturally kind of comes off as a conversation because to me, it is a conversation. I feel that when I was reading it last night and now I'm here with you. So and actually, so you bring up the British. I wanted to ask you, you know, a question sort of, you know, picking on the Brits a little bit. I have a lot of friends who are British. You added a lot of sections in your book about historic food and wine pairings.

And as an American myself, I always say that in America, we can do whatever we want when it comes to food and wine pairings.

And I know the Brits are a little bit more traditional and opinionated on this topic. For example, they might say that you must pair port wine with Stilton cheese. What's your take on this? Yeah, I always believe that it's much more important to match wine to mood rather than match wine with food. And so, you know, if you're in the mood for Chardonnay and you're grilling a steak, you know, so be it.

because that's how cravings work. That's how behavior works. Food is a very kind of an archetypal desire. And when you're craving something, I suppose you could sit there and over-intellectualize it and say, asparagus don't go with Cabernet, so I'm not going to do that. But most of us

Most of us want to move more toward instinct, which is the way food and wine cravings began anyway. So, yeah, I'm with you on that.

Do you usually start with the wine and that determines the food or does the food determine the wine for you? I suppose I usually start with the wine and then think about the food. But but since I'm not rigid about it, you know, there could be some pretty crazy matches going on in my kitchen.

Do you have like a craziest match that you can offer us here at Google? A craziest match? Yeah. Well, one thing, in a way, it's not so crazy, but I absolutely love chocolate chip cookies and Madeira. Madeira is sort of this unsung hero of great wines, you know, and it's surprising because

The Declaration of Independence was written with the founding fathers drinking Madeira. Francis Scott Key was drinking Madeira when he wrote the Star-Spangled Banner. Madeira parties were the...

a part of all the original congressional congresses. So we've forgotten Madeira, even though it plays this huge role in American history. And so if you're getting excited listening to this and you think, wow, I should really go out and have a Madeira, go get some chocolate chip cookies too, and you'll see. I love that. I'm getting the invite to your next Madeira party, I hope. Yeah.

Do you want to tell the group just briefly how Madeira is made? I think that part is really fascinating. Yeah, it's an amazing story because Madeira belongs to Portugal. It's an island on...

off the African coast in the Atlantic, but it has always belonged to Portugal. And it's made in this very labor-intensive way that can, if it's made in the traditional way, can require as many as 40 years

20 of those years, the barrels of Madeira sit in warehouses in very boiling hot attics, you can imagine, because it's right near the equator. And as a Madeira person,

over that long period of time, it takes on the most sublime flavors. And before that, by the way, it is also cooked. It is the temperature of the Madeira is raised sometimes to more than 120 degrees. So Madeira is what is called matterized, heated Madeira.

and oxidized because the barrels aren't all the way full. So it is an otherworldly kind of sensation that all of these extreme things would create a wine that is absolutely so delicious. Awesome. Well, you've heard that, everyone. Go try Madeira tonight if you can get your hands on a bottle.

So, Karen, as we're speaking about heat, I'd love to shift gears and talk a little bit about climate change. Because I think as you mentioned the third edition of this book and how it was time to write this, I think some of that is related to what we're seeing in the environment. For example, you mentioned Bordeaux, which Bordeaux is allowing new grape varieties to be grown there outside of the original traditional ones like Tempranillo that grows in hot climates like Spain.

Or you have a new chapter on Great Britain, an area that wasn't known previously for wine. And so while Great Britain might be benefiting from climate change, who are the losers from climate change? What else should we know about this topic? There are a lot of losers. I was reading a scientific report the other day that said that wine itself, grapevines, may go extinct within the next 28 years.

And I thought, 28 years? Wait a minute, are they missing the one there, 128 years? No, 28 years. Grapevines are very sensitive to their site. They're sensitive to their site, to water, to heat.

And so, you know, I'm in California right now, which is officially in a mega drought. A mega drought is defined as continual drought for more than two decades. So vines are doing their best hanging on and lots of wine regions, including Bordeaux, including the Napa Valley, including Champagne, Spain, just about everywhere is beginning to, all of these wine regions are beginning to, to,

to take emergency measures. And those emergency measures could be planting in cooler sites, planting at higher altitude, changing the varieties. I mean, if Napa Valley is known for Cabernet Sauvignon today, I don't know, 20 years from now, it may be known for Toriga Nacional, which is the grape that makes port. And there are even some really interesting things like

a substance called kaolin clay that can be sprayed on grapevines and acts as a sort of giant SPF. It's like SPF cream for grapevines. So, you know, I guess climate change is not, as far as wine country is concerned, climate change is not just climate change.

It, in many cases, is climate chaos, wildfires one year, floods the next, pouring rain, extreme heat. And plants, if you even have houseplants, you know that plants like kind of gentle constancy. They don't like these big swings in temperature.

So I'm hoping, you know, there is an organization now called the International Wineries for Climate Action, another organization called the Porto Protocol. There are starting to be global organizations now

rallying wineries to quickly start making changes because we're running out of time. Sure. Is there anything that we can do as individuals to help if we wanted to? You can stop buying wine in big, heavy bottles. You know those big, I think of them as like, hey, how come you put all this money in this huge, heavy bottle instead of putting money into the

into the viticulture, into the vines, into the wine where all that money belongs. You know, I think we'll see in the next few years a radical change in packaging because one of the biggest carbon footprints for the whole wine industry is bottles, glass bottles. Glass requires an enormous amount of energy to make.

The world is running out of sand that is required to make glass bottles. Glass bottles are heavy to ship. So almost all over the world, the glass bottles are getting lighter, but they need to get a lot lighter pretty quickly. Or we can start going to bag-in-the-box packaging. And now some actual fine wines, not just inexpensive wines, but fine wines are being packaged that way.

Yeah, I saw that Tablas Creek recently packed some of the rosé in a box. Exactly. Yeah, very cool. Thanks for sharing. I guess on the topic of innovation, I'd like to dig into this a little deeper because we're a tech company and we like to innovate. And while there are some changes right now that you mentioned about packaging, I've observed that the wine industry can be a pretty late adopter to technology because of tradition.

What's really impressed you outside of wine packaging? Wow. Well, in terms of technology, I think one of the most interesting things that has happened lately are augmented reality wine labels. Those are really quite cool. And the leader in this field so far is a wine called 19 Crimes.

which is the series of wines. They're made in Australia. The parent company is Treasury Wine Estates. And the 19 crimes describes the time in the 18th century when England would send anyone who had even committed a petty theft

You could either be jailed in England or you could get on a ship and go to Australia. And so and there were classically 19 of these crimes. Well, right now, if you take your cell phone after you download what's called a live wine label app,

you can point your phone at these labels and the character on the front, the criminal, will come alive telling the story of the crime that he committed and as a result was sent to a penal colony in Australia. It's very cool. I mean, within the next, I would say, five years, we're going to see all kinds of augmented reality wine labels.

Yeah, that's the brand with Snoop Dogg on the label, right? Snoop Dogg is. Yeah, well, that's the other thing. Like the whole nature of who are winemakers and who are experts in wine is changing. Snoop is really into wine. It's pretty cool. That is so cool.

Well, you know, Karen, I want to get a little bit edgy with you just for one second. So you had an Instagram post recently that sent shockwaves through the sommelier community. You said that it is okay to hold a stand of wine glass by the bowl because it does not actually warm up the wine as some people suspect. I want to offer my personal opinion, which is I just don't like my oily fingerprints all over the glass.

So I'm curious if you can tell us a little bit more on your thoughts on holding stem glassware by the glass. And maybe you can tell us about your glassware line as well, flavor first. Oh, thank you, Nick. You know, I was thinking the other day, someone mentioned to me that, you know, wine, wine, it's so intimidating. And I was thinking, why is wine intimidating? It really is.

I don't know. It should not be intimidating. Maybe years ago when a lot of wine pros had that test about necklace hanging down and were always wearing tuxedos and kind of lording their knowledge over you, maybe then it was intimidating. But that's not so true anymore.

And then I realized that it's a lot of these little ideas that are intimidating, like something as simple as, oh, no, no, no, you have to hold a wine glass in a certain way.

And I, you know, I'm a good researcher. And so as I began to think about that, I thought, wait a minute, who says, when did that idea happen? And so you do hear people say, well, you know, you don't want to warm the wine. Well, you have to either be an incredibly slow drinker, my friend, or have really hot hands to

to warm up a whole glass of, let's say, white wine just by holding the glass by the bowl. Now, I'll give you the fingerprint part. That's true. But your mother should have taught you to, you know, wash your hands. So I'm sorry, I can't help you on that one either. The only other possible explanation which may be okay is,

If you put on hand cream, now you've got fingerprints and the smell of the hand cream. And that might interfere with the wine. But I think, you know what? We're all supposed to be washing our hands anyway. Nobody's hands are that hot. And this is just a silly rule we don't need. Sure. It's 2022. We can do what we want. I love pouring wine into a cup of ice in hot summer days. And I know some people would look down on me for that. I like your style.

I'd like to go back kind of to the, when we were talking about food wine pairing, you know, I'm curious if we can help out the audience with the transition from like red wine to white wine or white wine to red wine. Because some people I hear say, oh, I'm only a red drinker. I'm only a white drinker. Are there gateway wines that can help people get into the other world? Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

There certainly are. And one of the ways that we know that is that if you ever are truly blindfolded, they do these kinds of experiments at UC Davis all the time where you're put into a chamber so you can't see what's in a glass window.

And all of those kinds of tests show that people often have no idea whether it's a white wine or a red wine in their class. This is assuming that all the wines were at the same temperature. So if you can't really, if you couldn't see, which meant that you can't tell, then how can you be just a red wine drinker?

I think there are a couple of things. You might be in love, if you're a red wine drinker, with the way red wine feels. It often feels softer, silkier, creamier, maybe not creamier, but more velvety, thicker and softer. But are there white wines like that? Yeah, Chardonnay is kind of like that. Chardonnay is creamy and thick and soft.

And if you're a white wine drinker, you know, you like snap and raciness and sleekness and energy. But can you find that in a red wine? Yeah, a lot of Pinot Noir is exactly like that. So, you know, my, I guess my...

advice in a sense would be to cause yourself to interrupt what you think your own prejudice is. So if you are a red wine drinker, you know, spend a month drinking just really great white wines and then see how you feel. I love that challenge. That's a challenge for all of us.

I'm curious if, you know, I've heard from some friends who are red wine drinkers that, you know, they want to avoid their teeth turning purple. Do you have any hacks, you know, in the moment to prevent that from happening? No, you know, I'm afraid if you have teeth that absorb color, you just are going to have a purple smile. But it's kind of endearing and we know how you got it. So it's OK. I love that.

So, you know, Karen, you've traveled a lot. You travel a lot, I suppose, you know, for this, you know, third edition of your book. What what place, you know, surprised you for this edition?

The most startling place that I went, and this was right before COVID, a few months before COVID, was to a winery about 10,000 feet in the Himalayas.

in the Tibetan autonomous region of Yunnan province in China. 20 years ago, if someone said to me, you know, China will one day be known for really incredible wines, I would have thought,

I don't know, not in my lifetime, but that's exactly wrong. I mean, China is very quickly on the path of making some stellar wines. And this vineyard that I went to, the winery is called Ao Yun, which means flying in the clouds in Mandarin.

was on these old yak paths. They were tea trading paths that joined up to the Silk Road headed east.

It was astounding. You know, you would drive around these. Of course, there are no there are no guardrails on the side of these narrow, narrow roads with thousand foot drops in every direction. And every time you went around a bend, there would be like, I don't know, 20 giant yaks in the road.

I had yak yogurt for breakfast, yak tea, yak dumplings for lunch, and yak hot pot for dinner. And so you really have to like yaks. They're adorable little animals, adorable big animals. But as I was trying this wine and just having, you know, it was just mind-blowing to take all this in, I had a Buddhist driver named Tashi who,

who spoke good English. And so we were driving around in one very precipitous part up on this Himalayan ridge. And I said to him, so Tashi, there must be a lot of accidents here. And he looked at me and he said, accidents?

And I knew he spoke English well. So I said, yeah, yeah, like accidents. There must be a lot of accidents. He says, no, no, no accidents. Either you're fine or it's your time. I thought, OK, I guess I'm hoping to be fine because I want to come back and write about this winery. So, yes, that was a startling wine journey. I guess everything happens for a reason.

According to Tashi. I guess like taking this from like a different perspective, like are there any places in the world that you think are like past their prime where they're just not as good as they used to be? Wow. You know, I think in the 80s,

There were a lot of places resting on their laurels. To some extent, Burgundy was. To some extent, Bordeaux was. But then sort of the modern advent of criticism, wine criticism versus wine writing, I think of myself as a writer and not as a critic,

But Bob Parker really changed that world. All of a sudden, someone was willing to say, these wines are garbage. I don't know why people are spending this amount of money. And I think a lot of wine regions that had been resting on their laurels really stood up tall and realized they had to get better.

Sure. Speaking of like folks like Bob Parker, who has like a huge impact on the industry for better or worse, I wasn't going to ask this, but I think it's necessary. Sideways, Merlot, Paul Giamatti, can you tell us a little bit about Sideways and its impact on the wine industry? Sure.

Yeah. You know, I have to say I hated that movie, but not because I, I mean, I liked the whole Pinot Noir angle, but those guys were such jerks. I mean, really jerks. I'm sorry, man. You are better than that. I hope. Yeah.

But yeah, what was amazing is that you had a movie that was a bit of a kind of underground film at first that becomes a bestseller and the first one in the United States to really show people completely head over heels in love with wine. And so from that standpoint, it really, you know, I think it...

it caused a lot of people to think, whoa, what is so special about wine? I want to, you know, it's like Harry met Sally. I want to have what she's having here. So lots of, yeah,

People in particular discovered coastal California, Santa Barbara, especially the South Coast where the movie was shot. And then how beautifully sensual and delicious Pinot Noir can be. So the guys were creepy, but the wine was good. But they did say one terrible thing. You're right. They made a real negative comment about several negative comments about Merlot and Merlot sales plummeted.

So Merlot is only now starting to climb its way back up. But, you know, the leading variety in Bordeaux is not Cabernet. It's Merlot. So some parts of the Merlot world are doing just fine. So I like Merlot. Karen, can you convince everyone else on this live stream why they should drink Merlot? Yeah.

Yeah, if you have a, let's take Merlot and Cabernet side by side, because they're very genetically close, almost brothers from a genetic standpoint. Now, if you imagine two pictures, in one picture, the frame is really thick, wide, ornate,

And the picture is sort of like a watercolor, very faint. The other picture is a relatively thin frame, a smaller frame, but a really incredible, vibrant picture. So the first picture is Cabernet and the second is Merlot.

Cabernet has structure. It has literal frame, whereas Merlot is all core. It's sort of the juicy, wonderful, rich fruit in the middle of the wine that matters. It has less of a frame and more of a central picture.

Yeah, you could say it takes two to tango for Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, maybe. Definitely. Sure. So we're on the third edition of your book. You've storied the history of wine incredibly well. What's going to be in the fourth edition?

Oh my goodness. You know, it takes so much to write a book like this. The first wine Bible took 10 years. The second one took about five and a half years. And this one took four years.

So I'm getting really fast here. But if you can imagine, I mean, we had researchers, a person, Susan sitting right next to me here, who was sort of like the master conductor. You've got thousands of pages of manuscripts and research and photos and glossaries. And it's just an overwhelming organization job.

So it came out last week, Wine Bible 3. And right now I need a rest before I can think about Wine Bible 4. No, I can't imagine the amount of work it takes to write a book like this. And let me reframe the question maybe a little bit. Is there like a hot new thing that you anticipate happening in the wine industry in the next 10 to 20 years? Can you offer us a prediction? Sure.

One of the things that I love about wine is that it is not trendy. It's not fashionable. It's almost the opposite of that. And it can't be fashionable because...

A grapevine has to grow for about four years in order to have enough of a crop to make a commercial wine. And then you're going to age, make the wine and age it.

So, you know, you're often six or seven years into the process before you even have any revenue, never mind profit. And all those years you're spending money farming, taking care of the land,

And, you know, if all of a sudden, who knows what, Tempranillo becomes really seemingly the hot grape, you can't change that fast. It's years before you can change. So to me, in a world that can sometimes feel, you know, digitized to madness, we're all moving so fast. I like the fact that wine moves slow.

wine moves with the rhythm of nature. It doesn't, it doesn't move in with, with the rhythm of society. And, and, and that gives us kind of pause. That's why drinking it, I think, can feel so relaxing and magical and good and communal and bonding. It's,

It's really a pretty big head trip that you can take nature into your body like that every single day. It's a head trip. Yeah, that's a really great point. I remember a winemaker in Oregon said, I've got like 30, 40, 50 shots at this. You only have once a year to make your product. So you're spot on with that comment.

It's good to slow down once in a while. Yeah. So I'd like to comment on Beaujolais real quickly. You talk about it in your book and you remind us that Beaujolais is actually, they started the natural wine movement. And a lot of consumers today are all about natural wine and finding the best natural wine to drink.

So I guess I'd like to ask you two questions. One, I'd like to get your take on, you know, Beaujolais in general. And then two, I'd like to kind of transition over into, you know, natural wine and what your thoughts are about why that's maybe so trendy. Like, could you argue that that's a trend in wine today? Yeah.

Let me take the second one first. No, because all great wines throughout history have been natural wines. Natural wine is not a new idea. Natural wine is a very old idea. It has this new label now called natural wine. But the best wines in the world are made with

uh, next to no chemical inputs other than maybe a little bit of sulfur and sulfur is actually allowed by the natural wine movement. Sulfur is an organic chemical. It's, it's a molecule that is part of the earth's crust. It's on the periodic table of elements and sulfur, by the way, does not give anyone a headache. We can talk about that later if you want.

But I mean, other things might give you a headache, but it's probably not sulfur. So the idea that you want to drink something that hasn't been tampered with, that hasn't been built up with extraneous ingredients is a very honorable and good idea. But it's not limited to

to wines that you might just see in, let's say, a natural wine bar. So that very old idea, which is an important one, a valid one, an honorable one, is one that extends to a lot of wines, not just the so-called natural wines made today.

Those wineries who try to make wine without alcohol

any sulfur at all, which you can try to do, although your wine will still have a little bit of sulfur because sulfur is a naturally occurring byproduct of fermentation. But if you try to make a wine without any added sulfur and you really, you're not very careful about every aspect of your hygiene, you could also make something that smells, I don't know, like a standing drain or something that smells like

Someone today mentioned like a molar gone bad. He was a dentist, so we'll forget about that. But anyway, yeah, so you have to be careful, I think, and know the producer. But all great producers, whether they market themselves as natural or not, have

have a respect for the purity of grapevine. Yeah. And thanks for sharing that. And before we go into Beaujolais, I guess I'd like you to offer us some advice, maybe in addition to natural wine, as a wine consumer, I go and I look at a bottle of wine, I see all these things on there. You know, some might say something about being biodynamic, organic, you

natural, there's so many labeling terms and it's overwhelming to say the least. Do you have any advice for how folks can navigate and get something that they want with all those terms? Yeah. Well, in the United States, actually nowhere in the world is natural wine

defined. So it shouldn't say natural wine. It might say on the back label, we made this naturally, but natural is not a U.S. allowed designation because it has no meaning, no agreed upon meaning. Biodynamic means that the wine was not only organic,

but made sort of according to the rhythms of the cosmos, according to tides and the moon and the way farmers used to think about their crops, not just grapes, but all of their crops during the Middle Ages. And organic really does have certifications.

And we, I hope, should all be moving as much as we can toward or

because that's part of the way we're gonna save the planet. Land is precious. It needs to be treated with incredible respect. I read the other day that there are parts of California wine country where 44% or more of the vineyards are still treated with Roundup,

Roundup is a carcinogen. It's not only harmful to humans, it's absolutely harmful to the earth. So I guess my one, if I had one thing to say that would help with all of these terms is drink higher up on the scale. The most manipulated wines are inexpensive wines, right?

Inexpensive wines are made by taking subpar grapes, some of which may actually be flawed, stripping them all down through centrifuges and all kinds of stuff, charcoal filtering them, maybe using other kinds of very invasive filters, then building the wine back up with added acid, added tannin, all kinds of stuff.

That doesn't usually happen with a $35 or $50 wine, but it happens a lot with a $12 or $15 wine just to make something palatable that costs so little. So if you're really concerned, drink higher up on the scale. I love it. Let me ask you one quick pointy question about Beaujolais, and then I'd like to go into a lightning round with you before we take audience questions.

So Beaujolais, Beaujolais Nouveau with Thanksgiving around the corner. Should we drink it? It's so much fun. I mean, it's not a great wine, but you may as well. It tastes like the way I describe it in the book is it gives you the same kind of silly happiness as eating raw cookie dough, which I'm sure we're not supposed to do either because of eggs. But anyway, Beaujolais Nouveau is, you know, it is truly a marketing gimmick.

In France, kids drink it, which seems right because it's a little bit soda poppy in a way. But it's kind of fun and traditional. What I think it does that's sad, though, is because it's so goofy and Kool-Aid-esque, it takes the attention off

true, real Beaujolais, traditional Beaujolais, which is absolutely delicious.

and is made in many cases without any other, very naturally without any inputs at all. And it's made from the gamete grape, which is one of the most delicious grapes that there are. So yeah, if you buy a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau, also buy a not Nouveau, a regular traditional Beaujolais so you can see how good the real McCoy is.

Plus one to that. Are you ready for the lightning round, Karen? I guess so. I don't know what the lightning round is, but I'll do my best. Don't be nervous. It will be fun. What's the best wine you've ever had? A Pierre Peters Blanc de Blanc Champagne. Yum. What's the worst one you've ever had? Two Buck Chuck. What about that wine you enjoy, but you don't want anyone else to know that you enjoy it?

Wow. I don't know. I'm pretty. Oh, I know. Maybe I should say something like Lancer's or Mattoos, the old date night wines from years ago. Folks got to look up those commercials. They're hilarious. As we mentioned, some people find wine pretentious. What's your pretentious wine word of choice?

Pretentious wine word? Of choice, yes. Oh, approachable. I hate it when people say a wine is approachable. I'm like, what? That doesn't even mean anything. I love it. All right. This one's a fill in the blank. When I drink a wine that I love, my mouth blanks and my heart blanks.

My mouth screams and my heart flutters. All right. And last one. I'm from Seattle. So as Macklemore might say, only got $20 in my pocket. What wine do you buy? A red wine.

table wine from Portugal, all of which are such incredible steels and they're so delicious. I don't know, Portugal, I mean, pretty soon they'll catch on and they'll start charging a lot more for their table wines, but they are such steels right now. So folks watching this, don't tell anyone.

All right. Well, it's been so fun talking with you, Karen. I'd love to open it up for questions from the audience, if that's okay. Totally. All right. We've got our first question from Steven Wengravitz. Other than your own, which I already have on my bookshelf, edition two, which other books about wine should an emerging wine learner plus lover have? Oh, that's a really good question.

I, you know, I tried to make the Wine Bible the sort of all-in-one book,

But there's a wonderful book called Reading Between the Vines by Terry Theis, T-H-E-I-S-E. It's a very narrow book, but in it, he sort of takes the best stab I've ever seen of anyone trying to describe why wine is so emotionally compelling.

And that's a really, it's a really cool book to read. And then maybe I would also get the Oxford Companion to Wine, which is organized from A to Z. It's kind of an expensive big book.

Oxford University Press, but you can look up really heavy stuff. You know, if you've forgotten all that organic chemistry you never did well with anyway in college, it really describes lots of complicated ideas in wine pretty well. Awesome.

Let's go ahead and take our next question. This one's coming in from Nicholas Hayden. What would you give for advice to a Vintner winemaker who's just starting out? Make the wine that you love to drink.

Don't worry about the market. Don't worry about critics. Don't worry about anything that anyone says. When you make the wine that you love to drink, it will have an aliveness, a trueness that is really important for wine to have. I love that. All right. Let's take another question.

Another question from Steven Wingravitz. What parallels do you see between the vineyard winery and the book world or your career more broadly? What parallels between the vineyard and the book world? Well, one is, you know, I think the wine Bible has become the first

big American book with an American approach to wine. In many other countries, and certainly in Great Britain, for a long time, wine was a classist beverage. It revealed what class of people you belong to. But that's not true in the US. We don't use wine that way.

And I think the Wine Bible has a kind of American way about it. It's also true simultaneously that

the culture of wine in America has been evolving sort of at warp speed the last 20 years. And so what we see with American winemakers and viticulturalists is to forget about modeling themselves after regions in Europe and just make truly American wines. So I suppose that's a parallel.

Is there somewhere interesting in America that folks should visit? I love the Willamette Valley of Oregon, which is sort of Pinot Noir Central, also making super great Chardonnay these days. I love the coast, the Sonoma Coast of California, which also makes fabulous, cool climate wines. And for Cabernet, I think one of the most exciting places is in far North

eastern Washington in Walla Walla. It's sort of Napa Valley 40 years ago. It's a very cool, hip place with lots of young winemakers doing exciting wines. Anything worth checking out on the East Coast for us who are based here? Yeah. You know, New York, which is the fourth most important wine state in the United States,

You know, when you think about New York, lots of us think, oh, skyscrapers, Manhattan, etc. But much of most of New York is amazingly rural and gorgeous. And the Finger Lakes, which are some of the deepest glacial lakes in

in the United States that are in upper upstate New York make absolutely the most wonderful Rieslings made in the US. And in fact, they're fantastic dry wines. - I love it. Let's go ahead and take another question from the audience. This one's from Chris Gully. What is an unusual varietal that most people haven't heard of but everyone should try? If you were going to expand your wine horizons, what should you try?

Yeah, this is such an interesting question because there are 25,000 named varieties of grapes.

And some of these are names for the same grape. You know, Garnache in Spain is Grenache in France. But even accounting for that, there are 125 grapes in commercial distribution. The wines made from them are in commercial distribution. And yet on any given night, you know, most of us are thinking about maybe three, a choice between three grapes.

types of wine. Do we want Cabernet? Do we want Merlot? Do we want Chardonnay? It's unthinkable in terms of food. I mean, you would never say to yourself, okay, I'm just going to eat chicken and carrots every single night for the rest of my life. But in wine, we tend to drink really narrowly

And I whenever I teach classes, I always say the best way to learn nothing about wine is to continue to drink what you already know you like. Right. So the only way is to do what what this viewer is is saying, which is I should break out of this. I should do I should taste other things.

So I would say four things that come to mind right away. If you don't know Spain's Albariño, a white wine, very fresh and crisp and beautiful, that would be really fun to get to know. If you don't know Loire Valley, Chenin Blanc, Vouvray, one of the great historic wines that has just piercing, delicious though, acidity.

Gruner Weltliner, another white wine from, it's the main white grape of Austria, very peppery, sort of white pepper flavors. You drink it with anything and it just like makes the flavors of the food just spark. For reds, I would say Argentine Bonarda. Most people think of Malbec when they think of Argentina, but Bonarda is a wonderful variety there.

If you want to get really obscure, Saparavi, which is grown in the Ukraine and also in Georgia and Armenia, and was one of the great founder varieties in the beginning of time, which, you know, it was a little Casanova kind of led to lots of other varieties. And just to throw an Italian in,

a great grape called Schiapettino, which was rescued. The Italians and Greeks are doing a great job these days of rescuing all of these nearly extinct varieties in Greece and in Italy. And Schiapettino was rescued about a decade, maybe 15 years ago. And it's fantastic. It's

It's bright and fresh and spicy and just, again, so good with food. Well, I've got my recommendations and so does the rest of the audience. Let's go ahead and take another audience question. Stanley Zhang, what are your thoughts about how people score wine? Good question. Yeah, it's a tough question, right? Because if you're a writer, then...

It's antithetical. You've just given someone a reason to not read what you so, you know, it was agony to try and put wine into words. It's really hard to do.

And if you then give the wine a score, people don't have to read what you wrote. They just look at the score so that I can argue it that way. On the other hand, scores are, you know, they're a fast way of communicating. They're a fast way of giving someone a sense of

the relative importance of various wines. In my digital newsletter, Wine Speed, which is free, I invite everyone to sign up for it. We have about 40,000 subscribers. And people actually wrote to me asking me to score wines. So

The Wine Bible does not score wines, but in Wine Speed we do because that whole digital newsletter is about speed and scores are a quick shorthand on wines that you may find really intriguing. Thanks, Karen. Let's go ahead and take another audience question. This is from Rob Futima.

Recommendations for regions in the US that have a mom and pop feel. I was surprised about Yamhill Carlton and how the owners are so personal with their customers.

Yeah, I'm right there with Rob. Yamhill Carlton is within the Willamette Valley of Oregon. And, you know, it's so beautiful there. A lot of wineries are still down at the end of a dirt road. And you often have families where you drive up and the owner truly is on the tractor and the woman truly is a hand fixing woman.

labels to bottles and running the tasting room at the same time. So, yeah, I would say Oregon certainly has a mom and pop feel. And Washington State does too. Washington State has really incredible, especially way out in the distant eastern part of Washington,

Almost all of the wineries are small mom and pop operations that have that feel. I know the feel you're going for. As a native Washingtonian, I really appreciate your plug for Washington State. I have a bonus lightning round question for you, Karen. Okay.

So you've written a third edition of your wine Bible. You've won a lot of awards, including the James Beard Award for Wine and Spirits Professional of the Year, the Louis Roeder Award for Best Consumer Wine Writing, the International Wine and Spirits Award as the Global Communicator of the Year, and a full page profile on you in Time Magazine. They called you America's Missionary of the Vine, and you've been named one of the 100 most influential people in wine.

In one sentence or less, how do you feel?

Great. No, you know, it's part of me feels, I don't know, a little embarrassed, too, when you read all of that. But but I worked really hard not only to know wine, but to try and be a really good writer of wine. And so I suppose I could have said tired, too, because.

But I'm very honored for all of those awards. And I've worked really hard for them.

And we're honored to have you here with us, Karen. And I want to take my stemless glass and put my dirty fingers all over it and warm up this wine and just make a toast to you, how amazing you are for all of us in the wine industry, in the world, and you further our knowledge on the topic and bring it to a level where all can understand and appreciate and enjoy this really beautiful substance that we all should enjoy.

Every day, maybe. Thank you, Nick. It was really fun talking with you. Super fun. Next time, my friend, in person. Yes, in person. Plus one of that, I'll be out in Napa and leave this madness of New York City and the skyscrapers we have here. Okay. All right. Until next time. Thanks so much, Karen. Cheers, everybody. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for listening.

To discover more amazing content, you can always find us at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.