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Sober Curious meets World-Class Flavor with Jøyus Non-alcoholic wines this #SoberOctober

By Joe Winger — 1 year ago

Jøyus non-alcoholic wines are making big moves in the beverage industry. Not just for #SoberOctober, but its award-winning tastes help you celebrate all year-long,

Jøyus non-alcoholic wines not only taste like wine, but great wine. With the industry awards to prove it.

Recently I sat down with Jøyus leader Jessica Selander.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can find the full, un-edited conversation on our YouTube page.

Can you give us a personal story, maybe that includes the celebration of wine, if you have one?

Jessica Selander: The story is very personal and the funny thing is I get so nervous before talking about things because when I started Joyus, I did not originally [think about] doing things like this, being so face forward.

I thought I would create a product that I was really excited about. Eventually I came to realize, how do I do that without telling the “why did I do it?”

The whole reason that Joyus exists and it influences everything I do is because I’m sober. I quit drinking alcohol 17 years ago now, which just feels like a fantastical amount of time.

For me, it’s been very rewarding. I’m very glad about it. But it was definitely something that was really hard and very personal. It wasn’t something I shared about publicly. So that’s also why this is a journey of getting comfortable talking about my sobriety, my recovery.

I like the taste of wine. I like beautiful glasses. I like the smell of wine. I love the community and people; and hanging out and celebrating. It literally says ’let’s celebrate’ on our bottles. How great sparkling is for summer, but sparkling is such a happy thing.

You know what I mean? Something good happens in your life and people are like, let’s celebrate. Let’s pop some bottles. New Year’s Eve is such a beautiful idea of let’s start over. Whatever happened last year, whatever terrible things went down, there’s a brand new year.

It’s a new idea that we can celebrate either that past year that was good or celebrate the potential of a new year. That’s going to be better and that’s sparkling.

And for me, I didn’t have any options.

I started Joyus nine years ago. People ask me how long the company’s been around and we launched about two years ago. So it took me a very long time to figure it out, to save up the money to do it because as you can imagine, nine years ago, people thought it was crazy.

They’re like, ‘That’s a terrible idea. Nobody wants that’. And I’m like ’I want it’.

Having quit drinking, I had a lot of friends that also didn’t drink. I had a lot of people in my life too, who were just light drinkers – could give or take alcohol. Then I have two kids and there’s a huge percent of the population that quits drinking for nine months [because they’re pregnant], sometimes even longer.

You can get into medications, you’re not supposed to drink on it. Anxiety medication, not supposed to drink on it. Heart medication, cancer treatments. There’s a lot of medical stuff too, that you could go down the list.

So I get a lot of people now who are like, ‘Oh, it’s not alcoholic. It’s trending.’ And that’s a thing now.

Early on in my sobriety, I actually used to drink a lot of soda pop out of glass bottles, and then eventually discovered non alcoholic beer.

Non alcoholic beer is definitely having a really cool movement right now. There’s so many different options for non alcoholic beer, but the beer has always been around.

I was like, this exists and it tastes like beer. What’s up with non-alcoholic wine?

There was one sparkling [non-alcoholic wine] in the entire country and that’s all you could find. There was one white and there was one red and that was it.

For me these options were really sweet. They were very affordable, which is nice, but they didn’t have the complete experience that I was going for. I wanted non alcoholic wine that tastes like wine.

I wanted something that I could bring to a gathering and bring to a get together and have it feel appropriate and look appropriate and just look like everybody else’s [alcoholic] bottles. Smell like everyone else’s bottles that you just wouldn’t even know that it was non alcoholic until you saw it on the label. And that’s what I did.

So after trying to find it for forever, eventually I was like, I’m going to do it myself. And I had no idea that this whole sober curious, non alcoholic world would take off like it has at exactly the right time.

So part of me is very frustrated that it took so long. But part of that too, it was like saving up the money to start the company.

This is a bootstrap company. I like making my own decisions. A side effect after getting to this point is I’m 100% in control of all the decisions, which also means that I can control the quality because [it] is incredibly expensive to make.

Let’s talk about your sober story. What it means to you, how you got there, what your mission is, how that helps others.

Jessica Selander: So for me, I can’t drink alcohol. What happens when I put alcohol in my body is that I make decisions I don’t want to be making.

I tried a lot of things. I tried cutting back and it didn’t work. I tried replacing [the drinks and that didn’t work].

My life became pretty chaotic.

I stopped drinking and once I get my life in order, then everything will be fine. I can drink again.

Then after not drinking for a period of time, I was like, Oh, you know what? There’s actually something to this and it’s something deeper and it’s probably the best thing I ever did, honestly, in my life.

I would not be the person I am today on the inside if I had kept drinking.

I have a wonderful spouse and I’ve got amazing kids and I’m able to be a parent and be a person and do that clear eyed and there’s a lot of my upbringing was not the most positive.

Sober curious, it’s a hashtag now.

I’m not saying alcohol shouldn’t exist. I’m not that kind of person whatsoever.

On a personal level it is so exciting to see other brands pop up. The first time I tried non-alcoholic tequila, it blew my mind. It was amazing. The spirits are interesting because some people build it up from science and some people are de-alkalizing; taking the alcohol out.

So that’s the really interesting thing about this. Normally spirits are completely separate from wine, which are very separate from beer, but in non-alcoholic, we’re all in the same swimming pool and everybody’s doing it differently and everybody’s got their own take and you can try one non-alcoholic whiskey and it’s incredibly different from another one.

Community not competition is one of our core values. Normalizing non drinking is a big one. It’s not necessarily replacing alcohol either. I’ve talked to people in the wine industry who are very offended by the idea of non alcoholic wine. I’m like no, it’s backwards. You’ve got it backwards. Non-alcoholic wine is a love letter to wine. You love wine so much that you still want to have it. You just can’t have this one piece that’s in it [the alcohol], but I want everything else.

I want to cheers that glass with other people. I want to drink that red with a really strong stinky cheese. I want to pop that celebratory cork. I want to Rose all day. I just can’t.

I think that wine is very important culturally. It’s so interesting historically. The process is this fascinating mix of art and science. I love everything about it. Getting deeper and deeper into it too, because I want Joyus to be around for forever and I want to make the best possible non-alcoholic wine.

There’s so much stuff to perfect that I could spend the next 50 years just working on non-alcoholic red – period.

You mentioned you’re seeing other competitors in the marketplace. How many different ways are there to make non-alcoholic wine? Are some ways higher quality than others?

Jessica Selander: I can give tips. Our wine is a dealcoholized or alcohol removed wine, which means it’s gone through the whole winemaking process.

It’s aged, it’s fermented, and then we have removed the alcohol from it. Our bottles also say it’s non alcoholic. Sometimes you’ll see a bottle in the store and it just says non alcoholic on it. It doesn’t say dealcoholized or alcohol removed. They’re interchangeable. That means it wasn’t fermented.

So if you’re looking for a wine that is really going to taste like wine or have that fermented taste, look for dealcoholized or alcohol removed.

[Look at the label on the bottle] look for dealcoholized or alcohol removed, because it could say that it’s a non alcoholic red or a non-alcoholic grape [varietal] and it might just be a juice, that hasn’t been fermented or ages but comes in a wine bottle.

What are your goals in the present moment and in the near future to help your company continue to be a leader in the industry?

Jessica Selander: I think goals are accessibility. Normalizing sober drinking. Making [non-alcoholic bottles] easy to find. We do ship off our website, which is great. We’re shipping from Seattle. We ship everything ourselves. If you’re out East, it’s going to take four or five days to get to you.

Also starting to talk to restaurants, getting into more restaurants is a big one. I’ve had anniversary dinners with my spouse and I’m drinking an Arnold Palmer.

I’m calling restaurants and I’m calling grocery stores and they’re still really skeptical that it can be good and that people want it.

Do you think it’s just audience reaching out? Is there a tipping point?

Jessica Selander: Yes, that really helps having people being in a restaurant and saying, “Hey, what do you have that’s an alcoholic?” Because restaurants are saying nobody’s asking for it.

Here I am double digit sober and I had never gone into a restaurant and asked for it.

I would look at the [menu’s] non alcoholic section, which is always juice, soda pop, iced tea and stuff. If it’s not on the menu, I would never ask them for anything. Here I am for over a decade, not telling them that I want this thing. So we started doing more education on social media and online.

If you walk into a restaurant, ask them “What do you have that’s not alcoholic?”

Just pregnant people alone. There’s a large percentage of the population.

Is there science that says a pregnant woman can drink this and have zero concerns?

Jessica Selander: Yes. So this is super interesting. In the United States we’re the most strict in terms of alcohol. If you go to the UK, they have different, actually higher limits for how much alcohol can be in something. The US’s rules come from prohibition when you can’t sell, make, transport alcohol.

The government said once it gets under 0.5%, it’s not alcohol anymore. So that’s where that number comes from and sometimes people see it and say, “Oh, there’s a little bit of alcohol in this.”

There was a study done in Germany where they tested a lot of grocery store items. What they found was there’s a lot of stuff in our grocery stores that had a little bit of alcohol in it. Very ripe bananas, which we feed to toddlers have some alcohol in them. Orange juice is another one.

American hamburger buns. But it also makes sense, bread, yeast and we have more sugar in our products, right? Bread actually has more alcohol than people realize.

Let’s talk about your wine’s flavors and aromas and the winemaking process to get there.

Jessica Selander: I knew what I wanted and I was incredibly picky about it.

We launched with the sparkling white and the sparkling Rose’ and people were asking for a Rose’ with no bubbles.

I thought it would be easy. It was not easy.

Stills are very different from sparkling. I’m a balance of “I know what I want. I’m going for this thing and very focused”, but then I’m also balanced with listening. So we do a lot of focus groups. I do want feedback. I do want opinions.

We were working on it. Everyone’s saying it’s good, it’s great. But I didn’t think it was good enough. We were supposed to launch it in summer and I pushed everything back. Back to the drawing board.

What if we did this? What if that? Talking to people, reading science and chemistry books

Was it like working for the right blend?

Jessica Selander: It’s tweaking so many different things and pieces in the blend. But it doesn’t always work out. If you tweak a blend, sometimes other notes will come forward that you’re not expecting, or sometimes you’ve diminished things that you didn’t intend to diminish.

The still Rose is a great example, it didn’t have that click and so I just kept working on it. And that’s the one that won Double Gold and Best in Class in the San Francisco International Wine Competition, which is one of the biggest and oldest blind tastings in the world and the biggest and oldest blind tasting in the U.S.

Can you share any details and lessons you learned taking on the world of winemaking?

Jessica Selander: There’s so many things. We’re not just making wine. We’re wholesale, we’re distributing, we’re direct to consumer. We have so many different facets.

I could talk for hours about how our wines are very low in sugar and they don’t have the alcohol in them. So our [bottles] probably freeze easier than anything else on the market. So shipping during the winter.

I’ve had conversations with other non alcoholic people too. Everybody’s doing it differently and that’s the hard part too, where I feel like there’s a solution for every problem.

We’ve gotten better and better at winter shipping, but it’s not quite there yet. Figuring out what can we ship in that’s going to have thermal protection, but isn’t going to contribute a ton of garbage. We’ve got the most eco-friendly, innovative winter shippers. They’re made of corn.

They’re expensive as hell, but it’s better than styrofoam. We have to keep everything under 50 pounds for UPS and 12 bottles of sparkling is 51 pounds in these corn shippers.

That thermal protection is still not enough, so we added heat packs.

Let’s talk about your wines.

Jessica Selander: We have four varietals. We’ve got our sparkling white, a sparkling Rosé. Still Rosé, a Cabernet Sauvignon. I love our red a lot. The reds are hard. They’re the most complicated; red wine has the highest alcohol content to begin with.

What flavor notes should we be looking for?

Jessica Selander: It’s definitely an American Cab. More fruit forward. It’s not grape juice. It’s fermented, it’s aged in American oak so you’ll get some green-ness to, like forest floor. The longer it’s been open the more tasting notes you’ll get. I like it more and more throughout the week because the fruit notes settle down. Black currant, cherry, some leather

The still rosé, watermelon, a nice floral to it.

Sparkling rosé. Slightly floral. Some orange blossom to it. Blackberry, but some people say raspberry. Some people say strawberry. They’re very summery

I think sometimes tasting notes feel in excess because we all taste things very differently.

Our audience is foodies. Let’s talk a little bit about some of your favorite meals that you think would pair that your favorite pairings with your wines

Jessica Selander: I bake. I come from a big family, so I can pretty much cook anything.

I heard someone say one time that baking was more science. And cooking was more art and I do agree with that.

Let’s talk about the wine competitions. How you see them, what the experience has been like, and of course, what their results have been.

Jessica Selander: I did not know that competition was as big of a deal as it is [which was a blessing]. So what happened was I was beating my head against the wall being like, “They taste like wine!” And my brother said, nobody believes you. You have to enter them into wine competitions. You need to prove to them in their own landscape that you belong there.

So, here’s this competition. The first one, the sparkling rosé won gold and sparkling white won bronze.

Then I looked deeper into what the competition was [and realized it was the acclaimed San Francisco International Wine Competition & World Spirits Competition ]. It was a blessing because I think I would have been scared to do it. Then [next year] I do it with the Still Rose and the Cab. Then hearing back, you’ve got the highest a non-alcoholic has ever gotten and you’re Still Rose is the best non-alcoholic wine of any varietal entered from all over the world.

I was only wondering if it was even going to place, and here it ends up winning the best.

I was at a grocery store [today] I’ve been trying to get into for two years where the head buyer won’t even try it. So it’s [frustrating] but the more of these awards that we stack up, at some point in time they have to not ignore it. They’ll be like, Oh, this is a real thing.

We haven’t [hit that goal], it’s not normalized yet. We’re in over 300 stores and in almost in every state.

If you want more non-alcoholic near you at a restaurant and grocery store, what are the step-by-step, simple direction

Jessica Selander: This is super easy for people.

So if there’s a grocery store or a local market that you shop at already, you just go into the wine department and say, “Hey, what non-alcoholic wine do you have?” And let them know you want it. Verbally say it

It’s the same thing in restaurants. I do it myself now too, where I get the menu and I’m not seeing what the stuff on it. And I just ask and say, Hey, what non alcoholic stuff do you have?”

Tell us how we can learn more about Joyus. Shopping and following on social media.

Jessica Selander: So all of our social media stuff, our website is DrinkJoyus.com. Our Facebook, our Instagram, our TikTok are all DrinkJoyus

And on the website, there is this Find Joyus store finder map. So you can look on there and find us closest to you and working hard to add new stores pretty much weekly and email, email us. There’s a contact form on the website. Email. If you’re like, Hey, there’s a store by me. I want them to carry you. Email us. And we will call them and we will try, we’ll do our best and we’ll call them again three months later and we’ll call them again.

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Sofitel Saigon Plaza Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary, commemorating a quarter century of Joie de Vivre in Vietnam.

By Contributor — 1 year ago

Sofitel Saigon Plaza Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary, commemorating a quarter century of Joie de Vivre in Vietnam.

Sofitel Saigon Plaza is delighted to commemorate a significant milestone this October with the celebration of its 25^th anniversary.

Drawing inspiration from local Vietnamese culture and traditions while embracing life with a French zest is what the hotel successfully stands for a quarter century.

Daniël Stork, Consul General of The Netherlands, Mario Mendis, Sofitel Saigon Plaza GM and guests

Since its establishment in 1998, Sofitel Saigon Plaza has consistently delivered a 5-star luxury experience marked by heartfelt service and hospitality excellence in the heart of Ho Chi Minh.

Globally acclaimed through the decades, Sofitel Saigon Plaza has welcomed dignitaries and political figures, from the former French President Francois Hollande to the US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Ambassador Lesly Benoit of Haiti performing with Jazztown

On October 5th 2023, Sofitel Saigon Plaza hosted an enchanting Anniversary Dinner at its opulent Diamond Hall in presence of Mrs Maud Bailly, CEO of Sofitel.

Maud Bailly, CEO of the Sofitel, M Gallery & Emblems Worldwide

At this extraordinary soirée, the hotel had the privilege of hosting esteemed guests, ranging from international diplomats and government officials to renowned celebrities, CEOs of prominent corporations, and dedicated Heartists (Accor team members) who have passionately served Sofitel Saigon Plaza for over two decades.

Chef Kieko Nagae

The honoured guests were thus invited to enjoy a sumptuous six-course dinner crafted by Michelin-star and celebrity chefs from Asia and France. This exquisite evening was topped off with spectacular performances blending these two cultures. To mark the occasion, Heartists whom are within the property since the opening have been highlighted and recognized for their exceptional commitment and remarkable work.

“Founded almost 60 years ago, Sofitel was the first French luxury hotel brand to develop an international network of hotels and resorts…

Maud Bailly

CEO of Sofitel

“…Each of the establishments now artfully blends the French art-de-vivre with the essence of the local destination, offering chic design, the best of culinary arts, and exceptional personalized service. The 25th anniversary was truly an illustration of the cultural link between France and Vietnam, exemplifying the symbolism of the Sofitel logo, which signifies the seamless blending of French and local cultures. Over these two and a half decades, we have not only celebrated the excellence of Sofitel but also the enchanting partnership of Saigon’s vibrant spirit with the elegance of French heritage. At Sofitel, we want to inspire people to celebrate life and its beauties with joy, impertinence, and, most of all, pleasure! This celebration embodies the essence of our vision, where the rich traditions of Saigon meet the sophistication of French savoir-faire, creating a world of endless delight and unforgettable moments”, commented Maud Bailly, CEO of Sofitel.

“It is a privilege to be part of an establishment that has redefined luxury, elegance, and service in Ho Chi Minh City. Our gratitude goes to our valued guests, passionate team, and partners who have been unwavering supports in this journey. This anniversary not only pay tribute to our past but also reaffirms our dedication to offer unforgettable experiences to our guests in the future”, said Mr. Mario Mendis, General Manager of Sofitel Saigon Plaza.

Michelle Wee- CEO Standard Chartered Vietnam - Madame Trang Le Counsel General Daniël Stork of The Netherlands

Michelle Wee- CEO Standard Chartered Vietnam – Madame Trang Le R- Counsel General Daniël Stork of The Netherlands

The festivities will continue during the 5th Saigon Gourmet Week, taking place from October 6th to 8th at Sofitel Saigon Plaza.

Event Curator and Producer Tracie May-Wagner

This event promises a delightful array of culinary experiences, including immersive cooking classes, exclusive lunches and dinners, and an unforgettable brunch featuring renowned chefs.

Phoung Nam Art Theater

The lineup includes Sébastien Voelker (French Pastry Chef), Truc Dinh (Vietnamese Chef), Shozo Tsuruhara (Japanese Chef), Victor Savall (Spanish Pastry Chef), Sakal Phoeung (French-Cambodian Chef), Keiko Nagae (French-Japanese Pastry Chef), Vuong Vo (Vietnamese Chef), Adrien Guenzi (French Chef), and French Michelin-Star Chef Thierry Renou.

Sofitel Saigon Plaza

Sofitel Saigon Plaza harmonizes the sophistication of French art de vivre with the vibrancy of local Vietnamese culture, delivering a luxury hospitality experience enriched by genuine heartfelt service. Conveniently located in a tranquil enclave on Le Duan Boulevard, Sofitel Saigon Plaza places you in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City’s business, cultural, and shopping district.

The hotel boasts 286 rooms and suites adorned with refined décor and deluxe amenities, a fitness center feauring advanced exercise equipment, and an outdoor swimming pool with breathtaking city views.

Sofitel Saigon Plaza also features five dining establishments serving local and French cuisine, seven polished meeting rooms, and an opulent ballroom equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, making it the ideal destination for business, leisure, meetings, and gatherings.

Sofitel Hotels & Resorts

Sofitel Hotels & Resorts is an ambassador of modern French style, culture and art-de-vivre around the world.

Established in 1964, Sofitel is the first international luxury hotel brand to originate from France, with more than 120 chic and remarkable hotels in many of the world’s most sought-after destinations. Sofitel exudes a refined and understated sense of modern luxury, always blending a touch of French elegance with the very best of the locale.

Sofitel also includes a selection of heritage luxury hotels under the Sofitel Legend banner, renowned for their timeless elegance and storied past.

Some notable hotels in the Sofitel portfolio include Sofitel Paris Le Scribe Opera, Sofitel London St James, Sofitel Dubai The Obelisk, Sofitel Legend Old Cataract Aswan, Sofitel Mexico City Reforma, Sofitel Legend Santa Clara Cartagena, Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi and Sofitel Ambassador Seoul.

Sofitel is part of Accor, a world leading hospitality group counting over 5,400 properties throughout more than 110 countries, and a participating brand in ALL – Accor Live Limitless – a lifestyle loyalty program providing access to a wide variety of rewards, services and experiences.

sofitel.accor.com | all.accor.com | group.accor.com

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Leslie Odom, Jr Returns to Broadway in Purlie Victorious

By Rocco Delfino — 1 year ago

Leslie Odom, JR Returns to Broadway in Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch.

The first Broadway revival of the American comedy Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch by legendary Ossie Davis is now in performances and will officially open on Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at The Music Box Theatre (239 West 45th St.).

Leslie Odom, Jr Returns to Broadway in Purlie Victorious

Tony & Grammy Award winner and Academy & Emmy Award nominee Leslie Odom, Jr. stars in the production as “Purlie Victorious Judson”, alongside Vanessa Bell Calloway (Dreamgirls) as “Idella Landy”

Billy Eugene Jones (Fat Ham) as “Gitlow Judson”, Noah Pyzik (Addy & Uno) as “Deputy”, Noah Robbins (To Kill a Mockingbird) as “Charlie Cotchipee”, Jay O. Sanders(Primary Trust) as “Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee”

Heather Alicia Simms (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) as “Missy Judson”, Bill Timoney (Network) as “Sheriff” and Tony Award nominee Kara Young (Cost of Living, Clyde’s) as “Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins”.

The company also includes Melvin Abston (u/s Gitlow Judson), Willa Bost (u/s Missy Judson/Idella Landy), Brandi Porter (u/s Luttiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins) and Donald Webber Jr. (u/s Purlie Victorious Judson). Direction is by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon (Topdog/Underdog, A Soldier’s Play, A Raisin in the Sun).

Tickets are now on sale to the public at Telecharge.com or 212-239-6200. For more info, visit www.purlievictorious.com

Leslie Odom, Jr. returns to Broadway for the first time since his Tony Award-winning performance in Hamilton. Exuberant and outrageous, Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch is the joyous comedy that finds inspiration and laughs in the story of a man with a mission.

Alive with love and hope, this timeless story by American Playwright laureate Ossie Davis is directed by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon (A Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Topdog/Underdog). Have an evening in the theatre that will lift you up and “won’t let you wipe that grin off your face.” — The New York Times

Purlie Victorious is produced by: Jeffrey Richards, Hunter Arnold, Leslie Odom Jr., Louise Gund, Bob Boyett, Willette and Manny Klausner, Salman Moudy Al-Rashid, Creative Partners Productions, Glenn Davis, Irene Gandy, Kayla Greenspan, Mark and David Golub Productions, Ken Greiner, John Gore Organization, Patrick W. Jones, Kenny Leon, Van Kaplan, Nicolette Robinson, National Black Theatre, Alan Alda, Nnamdi Asomugha, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, Phylicia Rashad, Kerry Washington.

Tickets are on sale at Telecharge.com, 212-239-6200 or in person at The Music Theatre box office, which is now open Monday through Saturday from 10 am – 6 pm. For more info, visit www.purlievictorious.com.

www.purlievictorious.com

Follow Purlie Victorious on social media @purliebway

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Upgrading Your Manhattan Brownstone? Start by Choosing Your Best Mattress in 2023

By Katie Macken — 1 year ago

Upgrading Your Home? – Your Best Mattress in 2023

Reviewed and revealed. Time for you to find your mattress in 2023. Most of us spend a third of our lives asleep. Science says it’s how we repair, recharge and dream. With hybrid work or work from home, we sometimes rest more. Some of us work from our bed.

You’re moving? You upgraded your house? Either way, it’s time for a new mattress. And a lot of changed since the old days of mattress shopping. Even if “the old days” was just 5 years ago.

Big changes. Real science upgrades depending on sleep position, body type, health conditions, body temperature, temperature of the room and flexibility, adaptability of all of these variables.

It’s a lot of decisions that you probably don’t want to research. You just want an awesome night’s sleep.

So we did the mattress research for you

Brooklyn Bedding’s Signature

What’s the best mattress overall?

Brooklyn Bedding’s Signature is pretty amazing. The Brooklyn Bedding Signature Hybrid is the brand’s flagship bed.

The mattress offers three firmness options, a strong steel coil foundation layer, a comfy “give” that rests your aching bones, strong and durable hybrid construction.

Their hybrid mattress (a bed made with coils and foam) offers a neutral-foam feel that’s more light and airy than traditional memory foam. It also offers improved edge support, thanks to a thick layer of pocketed coils with reinforced coils around the edges of its support bed.

Accommodating for all body types and even suits any sleeping position.

If you time it right (they have sales), it’s surprisingly affordable.

Price is usually closer to $1200, but with the right timing (discounts), you can sleep well for under $1000.

Layla Hybrid mattress

Best Mattress for Side Sleepers

Layla Hybrid mattress is special! Generations ago, flippable mattresses were popular and the Layla brand is bringing back the trend. So yes, it’s flippable and both sides offer different firmness levels – so yes, you have two choices to pick from to match your personal preference. One side is soft and pressure relieving while the other is firmer and more supportive.

Also, Layla’s primary comfort layers are made with copper-gel memory foam which helps regulate temperature, while the material feels ultra light and airy. This is more responsive than the foam’s traditional slow-bouncing nature.

The Layla Hybrid is ultra plush and soft. Indulgently comfortable. A. great choice for side sleepers of all body shapes and sizes.

The Layla Hybrid comes in a range of sizes: twin to California king sizes and prices range from $1,299 to $1,899.

Saatva Classic

Best Firm Mattress

The Saatva Classic offers both plush comfort with premium support. Its thick and supportive construction provides contouring that fits each of your body’s curves. Unique from most hybrid beds, it offers two coil layers (one innerspring layer and one pocketed coil layer), memory foam, Lumbar Zone Active Spinal Wire and a quilted, zoned pillow-top add to a luxury experience. Designed to promote comfort and spinal alignment.

The innerspring mattress hybrid construction is the magic behind why this bed is so supportive and firm.

The Saatva Classic’s special lumbar technology is designed to keep your spine aligned while comforting your shoulders and hips.Also allows you to choose how firm you want your firm bed to be.

The Saatva Classic comes in sizes twin XL to split California king and prices range from $887 up to $2,296.

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New York Wine Studio starts classes this October in NYC, with Wine Expert Alan Tardi

By Contributor — 1 year ago

New York Wine Studio starts classes this October in NYC, Wine Expert Alan Tardi reveals why you need to Enroll

He’s worked as a chef, a restaurateur, a sommelier, a consultant to some of New York City’s biggest and best fine dining restaurants. He’s also written for magazines and publications, such as Wine Spectator, Wine and Spirits, Decanter, of course, the New York Times.

Today Wine Expert Alan Tardi visits us for a conversation about NYC, restaurants, Italian wine and his new classes starting this fall (October) at New York Wine Studio.

As a get to know you question for everyone out there who loves food and wine and spirits, but they don’t necessarily know your background so much.

You’ve been in the wine world, the hospitality world, the restaurant world for many years. Tell us about a celebration in your life that inspired you to join these industries?

Alan: Sure. First I should say that, when you introduced me, you said I was a chef and a restaurateur and all that’s true. But before I was a chef, I was a cook. And actually before I was a cook, I was a dishwasher. I took a little bit of a break from college and went to Europe and traveled around and then came back and wanted to come visit my sister in New York City.

And so I did. And I ended up staying. And at a certain point, I thought okay, I’m going to go back and finish my undergraduate degree, but I also want to get a job. So I walked into a place that could have been a shoe store or whatever. A gas station. But it happened to be a restaurant.

One of the new, the first restaurants in this area called Tribeca, when it was just starting to take shape and walked in there and said, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a job.’

The person who was in the back that they sent me back to talk to in the kitchen was washing the dishes. And he said, Yeah, I’m the owner. You want to wash dishes? Yeah, sure.

So I started washing dishes there in this restaurant. And then after a while I would, I became a bus boy on the floor. Then when I would come into work, oftentimes the kitchen was a little bit behind. So I would help them out. I ended up going to the kitchen while I was going to school at the same time.

For me, it was a job and while I was going to college in the village after my classes in the evening, I found this tiny little restaurant on Greenwich Avenue in the village called Chez Brigitte.

It was like a counter basically, they had two little tables on the side, but there was a counter there with maybe eight seats. And there was this French woman named Brigitte who was cooking food back there. I started to go there, so I didn’t go home by myself and have supper.

I started to get half bottles of wine from a nearby wine shop and took it to this place, Chez Brigitte. I spoke French. I was talking to the woman cooking there.That was a celebration for me, and I was there all by myself. I would go there after, after my schooling before I went back home.

So that was like a celebration. I would go there two or three times a week. And that was my own sort of really like dining. But it was very casual. It was an open kitchen. But that was my celebration factor. And then after I finished my degree I thought I’m actually into cooking.

I was cooking in this restaurant in Tribeca. And so I went and knocked on the door of a little restaurant in Soho, which was called Chanterelle. It was a legendary restaurant for about 25 years. And the woman, the manager, the wife of the chef, Karen Weltuck, and David Weltuck was a chef.

She hired me. I was the third person. Before that, there were two people in the kitchen. I became the third person in the kitchen doing Garde Manger. Then after six or nine months, I was promoted to he sous chef. So I went from a Garde Manger to the sous chef in this really legendary restaurant.

So that was my celebration.

The fact that you grew up behind the scenes in the back of the house makes me curious.

For a couple – whether it’s a date night, an anniversary or a business dinner,

do you have any tips for how to take that fine dining experience and make it really truly memorable

Alan: First of all, we talk about fine dining. To me, sometimes you have the best experiences in a very simple, very unpretentious place. When I was working at Chanterelle, I was there for a little over three years. Every August, the restaurant would close for the month and most of the staff would go off on a gastronomic tour.

I went with some of my colleagues to France two years in a row. We would go through all the three star Michelin restaurants. At that time, you had to write a letter in French asking for a reservation at a certain time.

You had to reserve ahead of time because you had three star Michelin restaurants, highly sought after. Three or four days a week we would be eating in these fancy restaurants, sometimes lunch and dinner. It’s crazy. But there would be the down days too, right?

When you’re just traveling somewhere, you’re going to a different part. Some of these meals were amazing, that it was a whole new world for me. You get the menu, all the service and the cheese and the wines and everything. It was a great experience.

On the off days, you would just find a place to eat. And sometimes we would go to a little aubergine. I remember one in Normandy, walking into this place. It was just a few doors down from where we were staying overnight, waiting for our next kind of big meal. We went to this little aubergine and they had the most banal dish, trout almondine, right?

Trout almondine. It was in Normandy, however. There were women in the kitchen, not men, and usually in these three star restaurants, it was all male at that point.

I realized that some of those down meal nights and simple places, they had no stars at all. You had amazing food.

The meals were on the same par as some of the best three Michelin restaurants I had. So that was an important distinction for me to make. When you’re talking about how to really create – whether it’s in a very simple environment or kind of more fancy – how to really make it special. I think it has genuinity.

Just being what you are and trying to take care of your guests as best as you possibly can. That can really make it very special. You need to have good food, you need to have good wine, you need to have good service. All of those factors play in. But the most important thing is really trying to take care of your customer.

And I think you can do the same thing at home, your customers, whoever’s coming to your home and you’re going to offer them something and you want to try to make it as special as you can, even if it’s just hamburgers, but that can be really great and memorable.

We’re going to stick with the restaurant for a second, but move toward the wine list.

What are some tips for someone who wants to have a nice bottle out at dinner and they just don’t even know where to start?

Alan: That’s a great question. When I had my restaurant I decided to take a certain approach to the wine program, which was to find the best regional wines that would really best accompany the food.

Many of them were wines that people were unfamiliar with, they were just not among the top 10 that people would go to automatically. This is some years ago when a lot of the wine lists in the restaurant were the most famous ones you see all over the place because people are comfortable with that. So sometimes it threw people off and they would ask questions. What is that? Don’t you have this other one that’s very popular and all over the place?

No, but we have this and – we didn’t always say this – but it’s actually much better and it costs less.

So people would try it. They would take a leap of faith and for the most part they always loved the wines, and they went very well with their food. Not only was I the chef and the owner but I was also the sommelier as well.

We tried to train the staff very well about the wines and inform them. We had monthly tastings with them so they could taste the wines.

If people were really interested, I would come out of the kitchen and explain, make a suggestion based on what they said they liked. Sometimes it’s very difficult for people to explain what they want, so you have to read into that a little bit, but it’s something that really worked.

I know you love Italian wine, you’re an expert in Italian wine. Are there some Italian wine regions that deserve more attention?

Alan: Absolutely. I love wine from all over the place. Initially I spent time in France, delving into the wine regions there and they’re amazing and superb. When I was working at Chanterelle after the two first years going to France and the three Michelin restaurants, the third year I said maybe I’ll go to Italy and just try that out.

When I actually went there, it totally blew my mind. We rented a little house outside of Siena and explored the area. We went to a fantastic restaurant and it’s still in existence, La Chiusa, in a tiny little village called Montefollonico.

That really blew my mind completely. Because it was in an old olive oil mill, outside of this tiny little village up in the hills. The food was both very traditional and also very kind of cutting edge. They were trying to expand a little bit, but there was a really great balance of that. I actually went back there to do a stage, a summer stage working in the kitchen.

What really blew my mind was the fact that everything there was local. It was right, very close to Montepulciano and I would go walk in the vineyards. A lot of the food they got was made from grapes in the vineyards outside the restaurant. And the cheese was the pecorino.

The cheeses in Tuscany were made locally and everything was from that particular area. This was long before farm to table.

So it was a tremendous experience and that was just the beginning because Italy has 20 different regions, each one of them very different.

We think of Italy’s being old, the ancient Romans and the Etruscans. That’s true. But Italy is a country just a little bit more than a hundred years old. 150 years old. It was formed in 1861 bringing together the Italy that was once where it was fragmented after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Up until that point, you had all these different city states that had their own language, their own identity, their own cuisine, their own architecture. And while it’s been now collected into one country, each region is very independent and different from one another.

It’s changing a little bit now. At one point the dialects were very strong. When I moved to Piemonte. In the village where I lived for over 12 years, when I moved there in 2003, most of the people – who are over 50 years old, spoke Piedmontese as their first language. They had gone to school, so they learned Italian, but they spoke Piedmontese whenever they could.

In Italy there’s an incredible diversity of different places within the country. And it goes into the wine. The wines are very different. The grape variety, there are more grape varieties in Italy than most any other place.

I appreciate how you fit all these areas together: the wine, the food, the identity of the people themselves. When people Google you, they can find a lot. Your videos, your books, your webinars.

What do you think is a tip to being a great speaker when it comes to food, wine, travel, these types of genres?

Alan: I feel like I’m very humble, especially when you’re talking about wine, there’s always something new to learn and it never really stops. So I’m learning too, as I go along..

I approach it as I want to learn about something myself. Then I want to explain it and talk about it to other people and fill them in on it as well, because it’s exciting for me it might be also interesting and exciting for other people.

The other thing is really trying to share that information in a meaningful way. I’m not trying to be an expert. I just want to share that excitement that I’ve felt myself.

Tell me how your background and the learning we’re talking about informed your decision to launch the New York Wine studio?

Alan: As you alluded to, I’ve been teaching for quite a while. All these things just happened almost organically. I didn’t say I’m going to become a restaurateur or a chef. I just started. From there, I really got interested in wine because there’s a very strong correlation between wine and food.

I got really interested in wine. I was doing a lot of panel tasting with Wine and Spirits magazine, whose office was very close to my restaurant. Josh Green, the editor there and a friend of mine for quite a while. At one point he said, Hey, do you want to write an article? I said, sure. So I started writing for them a lot and it just went into other venues as well.

Teaching is the same thing. I started giving presentations at wine conferences like Society of Wine Educators annual conference I started teaching around 2015 for the Wine Scholar Guild. I was teaching for about six years.

I’ve been doing it in many different forms. Italian Wine Scholar. French Wine Scholar and Spanish Wine Scholar as well.

I thought maybe it would be a good idea to offer this program, the IWS, Italian Wine Scholar program, in New York City. No one is doing it here. Why? Why is that? So rather than doing it online, I thought it would be really great to do it in person. Where you can actually interact with the students that are there rather than just having them in the background on a computer from many different places in the world.

So I wanted to offer that along with wine because that’s a very important component. Obviously, if you’re talking about wine and explaining different Appalachians and different growing areas and different winemaking traditions, it’s good to be tasting the wines while you’re learning about that.

I came across a place that was willing to host these presentations, a beautiful wine tasting area, right in midtown Manhattan, close to Grand Central.

In addition to the Italian Wine Scholar Program, to start things up, do four individual classes that are theme oriented.

Is it fall and spring, or what’s the schedule?

Alan: Right now we’re going to be starting this fall beginning in October, I want to ease into it. I’m not loading up an entire schedule of things, but I’m going to be offering part one of the Italian Wine Scholar program, because There are two parts to this certification program.

The first part of the Italian Wine Scholar program will be this fall. Six 3-hour sessions live in-person with wine once a week during October and November.

Then to add something else, in the evenings, we’ll be doing four courses. One in October, two in November, and one in December. Two hour courses with wine, as well, and they’re not regionally driven, they’re thematically driven.

The first theme class is going to be: the many faces of Sangiovese because Sangiovese is a grape variety, Italy’s most widely planted grape variety, and of course it’s very closely tied to Tuscany, where there are at least five major appalachians that really focus on that grape variety.So we’ll be showcasing 10 different San Gervasio based wines. Five of them from Tuscany and then other San Gervasio based wines from other regions that, that really featured that like Umbria and Marche and even up in the north, Romagna, which is part of the Emilia Romagna region. Emilia and Romagna are completely different places.

There will also be individual classes on volcanic wines, Appassimento wines, which are wines that are made from grapes that have undergone this drying process.

Then also sparkling wines, which I’m a big fan of. My second book was about champagne and I’m really deeply into champagne. It’s going to involve sparkling wines from three different countries.

It sounds like this might be the most in-depth Italian class you can find in Manhattan.

Alan: To be careful, I would say it is “one of”, the most comprehensive program in Italian wine anywhere.

This program has not, has never been offered in New York City. It’s kind of a first time for that. It’s very comprehensive. It covers all 20 regions, all of the significant Appalachians and there are many of them.

All of the significant diverse grape varieties and I say significant because it might even be a little bit more now in the Italian National Register of Grape Varieties. Many people think that there are more than 2,000 different grape varieties. They just haven’t been genetically defined before.

Because it’s so deep with knowledge, it’s great for trade. New York City is a huge foodie and restaurant dining scene.

Alan: If you want to have all these post nominal certifications, that’s good. Nothing wrong with that. The most important thing, however, of course is knowledge and understanding. that you can use if you’re in the trade.

The understanding, the awareness of wine that you can then transmit to your customers in a restaurant or to your customers in a wine shop where you’re selling to.

It’s a very comprehensive program, but you don’t have to be in the trade to do it. There are a lot of people who are just really fascinated and interested in wine. This is certainly a great comprehensive program for people who just are really fascinated by Italian wine and they want to learn more about it.

What are the goals for the New York Wine Studio? What’s the future for you? What’s the future for the studio itself?

Alan: For me, it’s this and I’m very excited about it. I like this sort of counterpoint between the really focused credential certification course with an exam at the end, and then the other ones that are more mixing it up and comparing / contrasting these different wine regions.

Next spring I plan to do Italian Wine Scholar Part Two. There’s also an introductory course, used to be called Italian Prep, now I think it’s called Italian Essentials. It is for people who aren’t ready to jump into a whole certification program with all that detail, but it’s an introduction to Italian wine.

I would also love to do the French Wine Scholar, along with some additional classes in the evening.

Tell us where we can find more. Websites? Social Media?

Alan: Check out the website www.NewYorkWineStudio.com. It talks about the programs, the IWS program with the schedule mapped out and the four individual classes.

There’s also an email there, info@NewYorkWineStudio.

Labor Day BBQ Secret Juicy Chicken Shark Tank's Turbo Trusser

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Holiday BBQ Secret Juicy Chicken Shark Tank’s Turbo Trusser revealed by Brian Halasinski and Kirk Hyust

By Contributor — 1 year ago

Secret to BBQing a Juicier Chicken? Shark Tank’s Turbo Trusser revealed by Brian Halasinski and Kirk Hyust.

Want juicier chicken? Yes. More flavor? Yes. Get it all setup in seconds? Yes. Two guys who love good food decided to tackle the problem.

Luckily, a Chef and a Builder were on the team. And luckily the team has business smarts, creativity and can-do spirit. Lastly, the team got global attention by winning their way onto hit TV show Shark Tank where Kevin O’Leary got excited by the flavors, the team and their product.

Today Turbo Trusser partners Brian Halasinski and Kirk Hyust stopped by for a conversation about delicious food, creating a great team and the secret to cooking.

The below conversation was edited for length and clarity. Find the full conversation on our YouTube channel.

Can you guys share a memory about how being in the backyard with your family and friends inspired you to create the Turbo Trusser?

Brian Halasinski: Kirk and I have been working together on inventions for the last eight years and oftentimes we’ll have an idea that’ll come up and we’ll text each other and we’ll write it down in a notebook and then we’ll come and visit it later.

It just happened that I was getting ready to make chicken for my family and I was going to do a rotisserie chicken and I was trying to figure out how to tie this bird up with traditional strings. So I got my iPad and I’m watching a video.

I have to pause the video. My hands are covered in chicken juice. And after it was all done, it wasn’t done well.

I texted Kirk because he’s a trained chef from the culinary Institute. There’s gotta be a better way. We started working on the Turbo Trusser from there.

After your success on Shark Tank, Turbo Trusser has become a global hit. How have your backgrounds inspired where you are today?

Kirk Hyust: I’ve been a building contractor for 25 years. Before that I was a chef. I got burnt out [being a Chef] and then I started building things and that’s how Brian and I met. I renovated his house for him.

I was in the middle of inventing a wrench and Brian saw it [and said], ‘I want to start inventing too. You want to be inventing partners.’

We still haven’t quit our day jobs. We work seven days a week. Luckily working for us a lot of the time is cooking. Which is good.

You mentioned you are a trained chef. Tell us about your chef side.

Kirk Hyust: I went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Classical French cuisine. We’re from Ohio, so I like meat and potatoes and hearty casseroles.

Do you have a favorite dish?

Kirk Hyust: Fettuccine Alfredo and Turbo Trusser chicken.

Brian, can we touch on your background and how how you ended up with TurboTruster?

Brian Halasinski: I have been in the pharmaceutical sales industry for the last 20 years. I have a fairly flexible schedule to where I’m on the road and can be on the phone and be multitasking quite a bit when I’m working.

I’ve had that entrepreneurial spirit in a way. Then when I met Kirk, he had invented this wrench and he was working on my house and he was there for it was a pretty decent sized project.

So over time we became friends. I became interested in the whole process of inventing.

And then with that, you could actually take your invention and license it to somebody, basically renting out your idea and collecting a royalty. Kirk and I always thought that would be great.

We did a couple of products and we licensed them. Didn’t end up working out […]. We learned a little bit about the failures. And then ultimately that day I texted Kirk and said, listen, we got to come up with a better way to trust a chicken or Turkey. And we looked out there and there was nothing available other than butcher’s twine, which has been the way it’s been done for a hundred years.

A huge majority of people cook chicken and turkeys the wrong way. That’s my assumption.

When we compare your final chicken to a poorly done chicken what’s the difference?

Kirk Hyust: Trusting actually is a technique that brings all the meat together. If you don’t trust a bird, you’re actually cooking five pieces of meat separately. You got two wings, you got two legs and thighs and a breast. What you do, when you truss a bird, you actually bring all the pieces together and it cooks as one piece of meat, so it’s cooked more evenly and it’s juicier.

If you don’t cook it, if you don’t tie it up, if you just throw it in the oven or on the grill, what happens is all the meat cooks separately. The breast is gonna be done before the legs. The wings probably are going to dry out and they’re going to be inedible. Because when you use the Turbo Trusser the wings are great.

It makes one ball of meat essentially and cooks it as one piece of meat instead of five.

Is it the ego of the grill master? Or how do we help people realize they can have a better bird?

Kirk Hyust: That’s a really good question because we get that a lot. People have never even heard the term truss. To truss a bird.

Your bird’s gonna be a lot better, but it’s gonna take you about five minutes to do it when it takes 20 seconds to use our product. Especially a Thanksgiving Turkey because that will dry out a lot faster than a chicken.

Brian Halasinski: With the Turbo Trusser, the way it’s designed it’s going to hold the stuffing in place too. So the stuffing’s not going to dry out the way it closes the cavity.

If you’re going to do a rotisserie, you absolutely have to tie that bird up or your legs and wings are going to be just flopping around the whole time.

Can we talk a little bit about the process going from zero to where we are today?

Brian Halasinski: It was when we came up with the concept.

First, we started making prototypes. We made them out of cardboard. Then we made them out of wood. Kirk’s got all these tools so we could easily cut things. Then through trial and error with prototypes that we could make cheaply, we ended up with a very similar design to what we have today.

Then from there, we found a local fabricating shop that was able to laser cut out some samples for us so we could actually cook with them. We did all these things, refining the process and refining the product down to where we wanted to make it. Then we had to make a decision: make this here in the U.S. or go overseas.

Kirk and I made a decision based on our beliefs and our values that we wanted to make it here in the U.S. Being in Ohio, we were close to Cleveland, Ohio. This was the rust belt. There’s still a lot of manufacturing here.

So within one hour of our headquarters, we were able to source everything we needed to mass produce and launch this product to the world from Canton, Ohio.

Kirk Hyust: We had six prototypes by the time we got to our seventh one. That was the one that we stuck with. We just kept refining the prototypes until we landed on the seventh one, which is that what in the stores or online.

Can you tell us a little bit about from prototype one to seven? How did we get there?

Kirk Hyust: When you’re doing a prototype, obviously you have to solve a problem. When you build a product, it has to work correctly or you’re going to get bad reviews.

But we started out with a couple different designs. We bought a chicken and a turkey; and we put this contour gauge on the leg, so that made the dips that you see now where the legs go into. Then we were in my shop, cutting it out and it looked like [bird] wings so we ended up putting the heads on it because it already had wings that the legs sat into the cradle.

It’s a lot of detail.

Kirk Hyust: Yes, exactly. We just got our patent […] issued for the very first time. Even if it’s a piece of stamp metal and 2 wires. How intricate it really is.

Kirk, between your chef skills and your contractor skills. A perfect combination of bringing those two skill sets together.

Kirk Hyust: It is. We have sales and numbers and Brian’s also creative. […]The technical stuff, the websites, we develop everything together, but we have our strengths, he has a master’s degree in business. So he’s trained really well for that.

So it’s lie our strengths and weaknesses definitely fit together with each other.

Can we just talk through in the most simple, basic steps, how to use the Turbo Trusser?

Kirk Hyust: It’s really very simple. I usually buy a five pound bird. [With] smaller birds, it still works. It goes up to a 10 pound chicken.

Then you take the plastic off, pull the packet of giblets and everything out of the inside. Rinse it off. Pat it dry with a paper towel and if you have time, put it in the refrigerator and let the skin dry out. Put the Turbo Trusser on it, hook the legs in, hook the wings.

Use duck fat or some kind of a binder to put your spices on it. Salt and pepper, your favorite rub, something spicy, something sweet. Coat it with some kind of oil, or ghee or olive oil.

Put it in the oven at 375 for an hour and a half until it hits 165 degrees. That’s pretty much in a nutshell how easy it is.

Brian Halasinski: The Turbo Trusser is just three pieces. You got the main piece. Then you have two hooks. The hooks are going to go through the holes on the body of the chicken. You’re going to put the sharp end through the hole. It’s going to lock into place with the other end.

So it’s simply, put the two hooks into the Turbo Trusser body. You hook them onto the wings. The legs go into the cradle and in 20 seconds, you’re done.

How do we get that strong-willed Backyard Grillmaster to give the Turbo Trusser a try?

Brian Halasinski: Just telling them to keep it simple and go back to what people have been doing for 100 years. And that’s using string to tie it up. Only we came up with a simpler solution. So it’s what everybody’s been people don’t do it because they’re intimidated, but now they don’t have to be. The turbo truss are so easy to use.

Anybody can use it. Even if you have dexterity problems, you’re never going to figure out how to, you’re not going to be able to tie up a bird if you have problems with your fingers, right? older people, maybe they have arthritis and it’s hard for them to tie a knot. Now with the turbo trusser, you can do that without fear and you can, it’s simple and effective.

As we wrap up, tell me about the Shark Tank experience.

Kirk Hyust: It was crazy.

Brian Halasinski: I’ll give you a high level view. We launched our product on November 1st of 2021.

Right away we went online and we applied for Shark Tank. It was 100% online. Before COVID they would do open casting calls like Like American Idol.

About 50, 000 people apply. They narrow that down to about 125 people that tape [a TV segment], and maybe 100 or so will end up airing on television for the season that you’re in.

So we apply, we have no sales, we don’t hear a word from them for a couple months. So we launched the product. We did pretty well. We sold like $50,000 worth of Turbo Trussers in the first two months of being in business with nobody ever heard of us.

We went back and we re-applied again, we got some sales numbers. Eventually they called. I Six months after we initially applied, they called us.

You basically work down through the process every week. They’re giving you something new to turn in, to make a video.

Our first video, we came up with the idea to wear the chicken and turkey costumes. We said we wanted to stand out. We know that Shark Tank is television. If it’s not good TV, people aren’t going to watch it. They loved it.

We made it all the way down through. We went all the way out to California and taped [our episode]. We ended up getting a deal with Kevin O’Leary, which was incredible.

Kirk Hyust: Brian’s a salesman. I’m not used to that. So when I was on Shark Tank, I messed my lines up. I went blank for a couple seconds. I missed my cue to go over to my spot and I was really flustered, but I recovered, but man, that was the worst part.

Tell us the website, social media, where to find you, where to browse your products, where to learn more about you.

Brian Halasinski: The first thing for our product is TurboTrusser.com.

You can make your decision if you want to buy from our website, or you can go to Amazon Prime across the country.

You can find us on all the regular social media at Turbo Trusser on Facebook, Instagram, TikToK

You can find me, Brian Halasinski on LinkedIn, connect with us and be happy to chat or answer any questions with anybody.

Kirk Hyust: I’m on LinkedIn as well.

You can reach out if you have any questions. I write a lot of the PPAs (provisional patent applications) and stuff. So any kind of questions, how to cook a good bird we’re accessible. We want to help we want to help anybody out there that we can, because we’ve had a lot of people help us along the way.

Healthy, Sustainable (and Flavor) are a priority for my family - I tried Safe Catch Tuna - Food Review

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Healthy, Sustainable (and Flavorful) Meals are a priority for my family – I tried Safe Catch Tuna – Food Review

By Contributor — 1 year ago

Looking for Health, Honesty and Flavor in your Tuna? I tried Safe Catch and caught some Vibes.

I used to love tuna. I like the briney taste and who doesn’t love the health experts. Call it a fantasy, but I thought my skin looked better as a result too.

But then I felt lied to by the whole industry. Dyed? Faked? Poisonous? Really horrible conditions? I avoided tuna for years.

Is Tuna healthy? What’s the worst kind? Farm-raised? How do you *really* know if it’s farm-raised or not?

Needless to say, there’s a lot of mis-information out there. Which is why transparency is good. Knowledge is good. And then, once you get the full story, does it actually taste good. Do I want to eat it? Does my family want to eat it? What’s the best way to cook it or prepare it?

It’s a lot of questions for what should be a simple product.

Safe Catch is trying to solve a lot of these problems.

So I was excited to receive a Safe Catch package. I feel like they read my mind, because they share (over-share) a ton of info. And I loved browsing through all of it.

So let’s talk about Safe Catch, how healthy they are, how tasty it is and what I really think.

How is Safe Catch’s Tuna is Caught

Their tuna is traceable from catch to can and they reveal they only buy from captains whose fish come from managed and sustainable tuna stocks as part of their Sustainability Policy and Socially Responsible Sourcing Policy.

How They Test Their Tuna

They use proprietary technology to test every single fish for its mercury content. If it doesn’t meet their purity standards we don’t buy.

(They stress it still might be a good tuna, it’s just not ‘good enough’ for Safe Catch.)

How it’s Packaged

Safe Catch explains other canned tunas lose flavor and Omega 3 healthy fats from machine processing. Instead, Safe Catch hand packs pure, raw tuna steaks to retain maximum nutrients and then slow cook them to perfection.

Other canned tuna companies precook their tuna and use additives and fillers to artificially enhance their fish. Safe Catch doesn’t add anything, except salt where it’s been noted.

I found Safe Catch’s Recipes section pretty cool.

I’m a foodie. My family are different levels of foodies. But if I make it a game (we call cooking ‘games’) then everyone will at least have a bite. After one bite, you get a very, very honest response immediately. But it’s also been a great way to add (or disguise) flavors for anyone how may night life “fishiness” as much

What are Safe Catch’s current Tuna products

Elite Wild Tuna

Wild Pacific Pink Salmon

Wild Pacific Pink Salmon, No Salt Added

Elite Wild Tuna, Chili Lime

Elite Wild Tuna, Citrus Pepper

Elite Wild Tuna, Garlic Herb

Wild Ahi, Yellowfin Tuna

Wild Ahi, Yellowfin Tuna in Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Wild Ahi, Yellowfin Tuna in Avocado Oil

Wild Albacore Tuna

Wild Albacore Tuna, no salt added

Wild Pacific Pink Salmon, Citrus Dill

Wild Pacific Pink Salmon, Italian Herb

Wild Pacific Pink Salmon, Rosemary Dijon

Sardines in Water, Skinless and Boneless

Sardines in Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Skinless and Boneless

Wild Mackerel in Olive Oil, Skinless and Boneless

Do I recommend Safe Catch?

Yes. You have to admit, they’re going above and beyond with transparency, safety and health. That’s what we need more of.

How does Safe Catch Tuna taste?

I loved it. Their taste is even a little subtle if you appreciate fresh seafood brine. Try their recipes and you might even convert the pickiest eaters in your family.

Visit Safe Catch’s website here.

Find Safe Catch on Instagram

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NYC Wine: Malek Amrani The Vice Wine Invites a new Generation of Wine Lovers to Open a Bottle

By Joe Winger — 1 year ago

Winemaker Malek Amrani’s The Vice Wine is about as personal of a brand as it gets. Each batch is crafted from single grape varietals sourced from hand selected Napa Valley vineyards that best express the grape varietal and the region.

Passionate labor, sustainable farming, a long expertise of the wine industry and a current understanding of the consumer’s wine trend.

The Vice Wine’s Winemaker Malek Amrani

Today I sat down with The Vice Wine’s Malek Amrani for a conversation about luxury sales, Napa Valley’s legendary grapes, following your passion and inspirations and the future of wine for the next generation.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The full conversation can be found on our YouTube channel.

I just want people to understand how busy you are sharing your wines with the world. Can you share a little bit about your average calendar week?

Sure, thank you. First of all, thank you so much for having me today. I just literally just walked in three minutes ago I was in Miami. So I landed in San Francisco a couple hours ago and just got in here So speaking about travel, a lot of what we do is travel because you can make the best wine in the world, but it’s really the ability to go out and sell it that makes us successful or not.

It all comes down to sales. On average, for me, for the last eight years, I average about five, six nights a month at home. A lot of my time has been spent on the road. Although this year I’m trying to shift gears a little bit and spend more time here in Napa Valley and less time on the road.

Got it. So what inspired you to get into the world of wine? Any memorable celebrations?

What inspired me to get into wine was my love for it. I was fortunate enough to start tasting wine at an early age with my father. And I graduated high school at 16 in Casablanca, Morocco.

Went to Senegal, West Africa for med school. I did a year there and realized that it wasn’t for me. And speaking of celebration, I really wanted to do something that was quite celebratory on a daily basis and fun. I moved to New York and the first six months in New York I really just tried to survive and bounced around and did all types of jobs.

Winemaker Malek Amrani tasting Vice Wine barrel samples

But then I quickly realized that I needed to get my hands on wine and not have to pay for it and then meet people as well, because I was new to New York and I had no friends, no family. So I wanted to meet people. I realized that working in the wine industry, wine bars, and restaurants would be ideal to fulfill the two needs that I had at the time.

I dove into the wine industry early on at the age of 18. And between 18 and 21, I worked in the restaurant world a lot. I was working 2-3 jobs consistently. I was fortunate that when I was 21, I got a job in distribution representing Diageo and Moet Hennessy Brands in Manhattan to on-premise accounts, basically restaurants, bars, hotels, and whatnot.

And during that time, I also got inspired to start importing small batch boutique wines to New York and selling them too, selling them to people I knew and make a name for myself in the industry through imports as well, beyond the territory that I had at my first job.

Then in my mid twenties, I was doing it. I realized I had done it all in the wine business, except to make wine. The wine region that I’ve always been a big fan of was Napa Valley. So I looked for a brand that kind of was a solution to what I was looking for one, a Napa Valley winery that made wine for that everyday occasion that I can afford accessibly and to a winery that made more than the classic three or four varietals: Cabernet, Sauvignon Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot and there aren’t many really.

And lastly a winery that kind of broke down Napa Valley to the sub regions that there are because Napa has such a very diverse terroir and sub regions, 16 in total today. Wow. So I couldn’t find one. So I decided to make one, start one, create one.

You worked at the biggest wine company in the world. How did you go about getting that job?

And then what kind of lessons did you learn while being there?

It was out of luck. I was a buyer for a restaurant on Park Avenue in Manhattan. And I was talking to my sales rep. I asked him if he liked his job and I really didn’t think about applying or anything. He thought that I was interested in a similar position and out of luck, they had open positions and he spoke to my first manager at the company and she called me and she asked me to meet with her.

I honestly didn’t know what she wanted to meet about. I thought she wanted to meet about the restaurant where I was working; and work on some program or something. And in less than 48 hours, I had a job. So I was quite lucky.

But how intense and how it is working at Moet Hennessy or LVMH is a big umbrella.

It’s the number one luxury company in the world. They certainly do a lot of things, they are number one for a reason. And at the same time, I was with the sister company that also owns part of the Moet Hennessy Diageo. Diageo is the biggest liquor supplier in the world and at the time they had wine as well.

So in a way it is easier to walk in anywhere and say I have Johnny Walker or Veuve in my portfolio. But at the same time, from a sales perspective, it was very not aggressive, but very goal-driven. And I found myself that out of 116 months of employment, I was a top quarter performer for 112.

So it was extremely competitive and I wanted to be the best at what I did. All the time. A lot of it really has to do with building relationships and working harder than the competition and doing a lot of things right and never promising something and not delivering.

Is there a major lesson that you learned while working at that global luxury company that has helped the Vice wines?

Yes, I think, many things. My first, probably my most important lesson was to intertwine your personal life and your professional life in this industry. You can’t really separate them and be successful at it. I think it’s just making it work. It is a fun industry, we do go out a lot and get to enjoy a glass of wine during the day or two or three.

At the same time it is work and finding the balance between the personal and the professional and making one feed the other in a sense. It’s one of the biggest advantages that one can do to succeed in this industry.

I think you fulfilled two fantasies that a whole lot of wine people dream about doing. One being rockstar salesman at these amazing companies. The other becoming a winemaker.

Any advice for someone who wants to be who you were a few years ago?

Advice? Yeah, absolutely. One, it takes time. You have to be patient; and persistent and consistent.

To build relationships and establish and build a territory and build certain sales revenue. It doesn’t happen overnight. You first gotta establish relationships and relationships come down to trust. The second thing is it really comes down to being patient and consistent.

Outlasting the competition because there’s such a huge turnover in the industry. So if you trust the process that if you stick around long enough and do certain things right for a long time, people will turn over in the industry and there will be opportunities that will pop up left and right and they will be yours for you to capture.

Personally, one of the things that really made me successful, and a lot of people may not do it, is that for 10 years in Manhattan, I commuted on a motorcycle 12 months a year. The subway was fast, but I never wanted to miss a phone call.

When the average salesperson is probably seeing 5, 6, 7 accounts a day, I was seeing consistently 15 to 20. So I was able to have a bigger territory and see my clients on the regular without appointments. I was on a motorcycle. I was the guy just going to show up and just say hello and I was in and out, just checking on you, see if you need anything versus I have to make an appointment, find parking, all that kind of stuff.

The work ethic definitely, 15 in a day is a very deliberate choice with time and energy.

Your wines are called “Vice”. Was there a “Vice moment” where you knew it was time to move on and become a winemaker?

That moment probably lasted a couple of years. There was a lot of self questioning and self doubt on the daily because I had, at one point, two very successful businesses.

One, I worked my job on a W-2 and the other one, my own business, my imports business. And I was doing pretty well at the time in my mid twenties and, within three, four years, I may have paid a little bit over a million dollars in taxes. How do you let all this go and jump into the vice and, basically not have a revenue?

Especially in the beginning stages, it took me a couple of years to really decide what to do but The Vice, the idea started in 2013.

Winemaker Malek Amrani

We really became a business in 2016. And I let everything go for The Vice in 2018. It took some time. At one point I was having three businesses happening all at once, and it was very stressful.

So that “Vice Moment, it wasn’t like sudden. It wasn’t quick. It was a long vice moment.

Tell us about the regions that The Vice grapes are sourced in and equally important, how the heck did you get grape sourced from these in-demand areas?

So I chose Napa Valley because Napa, one, is their vice to me, hence the name of the Vice Wine, name of the brand. My vice is wine, but their vice is Napa. And I’ve always been a huge fan of Napa.

And Napa is the apex of the American wine industry is what set the tone for us, what opened, it’s what really led this American wine revolution in a sense. It all started really with Napa back in, in the 60s and 70s. So I wanted to shoot for the top because of that aspect.

And also, it’s just part of the American dream. As an immigrant, there is nowhere on the planet, I can’t imagine myself going to France, Italy, or Spain, and walking right into their top wine region and say, I’m going to do what I do today. I have no doubt I wouldn’t be welcomed.

Napa did just the opposite and welcomed me and gave me an opportunity, not just as a wine region, but as a community.

The second thing, how I got into having access to these grapes, a lot of it is street work. Putting in the time, coming a lot to Napa and hanging out at a lot of places where winemakers hang out for lunch or dinner and talking to the bartenders and doing my due diligence and investigating on my own and really networking and knocking on doors. Not being afraid to knock on doors and introduce myself to people and tell them about what my plans are and see if they’re willing to sell me some grapes.

In this industry, when you buy, when you contract to somebody, you pay a little bit of what the grapes are worth when you first pick the grapes and then the rest within time in the new year or so.

A lot of what I’ve done in the beginning was pre paying. So I pre paid for the grapes while they were still hanging on the vines. It’s almost like buying the fish while it’s still swimming in the ocean. So in that sense, they owed me versus I was at the mercy of a lot of the growers to sell me grapes. They already had the money, they already got paid.

So they had to work with me in a sense and again, being honest, not being late on payments and having good relationships with the growers goes a very long way.

Can you share your Napa Dream with us that you put on your bottles and let us know what that means to your family?

Yeah, so I’m sipping right now batch number 100, the Napa Dream. So we make our wines in batches. Every single wine, and I made a little bit over 130 wines to date. Every single wine has a number.

It started with number one, which was a Chardonnay 2013 vintage. And when I first started The Vice, I had this long term vision, but I didn’t envision myself to be here today with batch number 100. So batch number 100 is an homage to batch number 1.

I named it The Vice and not my last name. As you see, most of the wine industry, it’s someone’s name on the label. I didn’t want to do that. The Vice to me is what wine is: a Vice. Napa is my vice. So it’s very personal.

But at the same time, the craft beer industry really had a boom in 2008 – 2020. What made it really successful were the names. Craft beer has some really wild names. You look at the name and packaging, and it’s what probably draws you to open the can, you buy it and try it.

At the time in 2013, there weren’t many un-conservative names in the wine business. It was still very conservative names and people’s last names. There was 19 crimes and there was The Prisoner.

I thought The Vice would be a very good name, One, because it meant something to me and Two, it’s very edgy and it’s borderline bad.

It’s not bad. It’s not bad unless you do too much of it. That’s what vices are. If you overdo it, then they become bad. They become addictions, a lot of things, and it’s an easy name to remember.

I’m going to assume almost every wine lover knows Napa Valley. Touch a little bit on the region of Napa, the soil your vineyards are using, and how that influences your aromas and your tastes as we actually get into the bottles themselves.

When people talk about Napa Valley, most of the time we talk about how this perfect Mediterranean climate that we have here, its location about 35 miles east of the Pacific Ocean, the Bay, San Pablo Bay, which is an extension of San Francisco Bay, the microclimate.

We talk a lot about the microclimate, but one thing that I think makes Napa the best wine region in the world, in my opinion, is that Napa has half of the world’s recognized soil.

It’s a paradise for someone who is really into soil because there’s so much diversity here. More than anywhere else when it comes to soil diversity, we make wine from 14 out of 16 sub regions of Napa, but within the same AVA. Within the same sub region, we have different soils.

So a lot of the wines that we make are single vineyard wine You do get to taste the purity of the terroir from a specific soil type. It’s something honestly that we can talk about for days and it’s fun for most people.

Going a little deeper in that for a moment.

We picture you in Manhattan, probably very well-dressed at that old job. Now you’re working a farm. What was it like the first time you stepped onto that vineyard.

What that experience was like for you?

For me, honestly, I always felt that my calling was to be in the countryside. Although while Napa is the countryside, it’s like the Hamptons of the West. It’s still probably the most expensive agricultural land in the world.

It’s very beautiful. But being in touch with nature and being a little isolated from the hustle and bustle of civilization, which is usually in the cities. I find a balance when I’m here in Napa because I do travel a lot. I’m on the road and I’m back to the cities trying to sell wine across the U S and also across the world.

Vineyard life, farm life, it’s my balance. It’s my happy place being in the vineyard. I’m sure you can’t picture me, but I do wear a lot now. I never thought I would ever be wearing cowboy hats a lot. But I do wear them because it covers my head pretty well from the sun.

Walk us through your favorite wines. Let’s talk about aromas and flavors and color and what you love about them so much.

First thing, I don’t have favorites. All my batches are equal to me. Every single batch has a story; is a labor of love. But the wine of the moment right now is my orange wine.

So I started making orange wines in 2020. Orange wine is the oldest winemaking style in the world. Five, six thousand years ago, when they started fermenting grapes to my knowledge, they were white wine grapes.

Today, all white wine, we take the varietals, we press or break the skin of the grape and capture the juice immediately, discard the skin. Orange wine is basically pretending to make red wine with white wine grapes. So there’s skin contact.

So we basically ferment the juice out of the grapes with their own skins and what you get in return, you get some type of orange hue in the wine. The wine I’m opening right now is my Orange of Gewurztraminer and it’s called Brooklynites because that’s where I got the inspiration out of Brooklyn. And we’re doing really well with it. It’s just been very successful for us. It’s up and coming.

This wine, Orange Wine, reminds me of Rosé of 15 years ago when Rosé just started to make a comeback or just started to grow in sales and popularity.

I also feel like with orange wine, I feel like it’s a generational thing.

If you look at Sauvignon Blanc, for example one of the top white wine varieties right now, 20 years ago, no one was really drinking Sauvignon Blanc, but it was really the Gen X that made it popular.

Same thing with Rosé I feel like Orange is just at its infancy stages right now, and it’s having it’s moment. Driven by millennials and Gen Z’s also Gen X and boomers when they see it on a wine list and they see it in the store, they get curious, maybe a little embarrassed that they haven’t had an orange wine.

They’ve been drinking wine for decades already. So there is a little sense of curiosity when it comes to orange. So it’s doing really well for us. It’s 3,000 case production right now. Our total production of The Vice is 27,000.

And Gewurztraminer, the varietal means spicy. I won’t call it spicy. I’ll call it flamboyant. Because it just pops out of the glass with so much roses, lychee, peach, apricot.

It’s a really pretty varietal and this orange wine of Gewürztraminer is certainly a treat. Very well said.

The 2020 Chardonnay. The mouthfeel, the balance, when you were creating it, how did you decide what it was going to be like?

It is an homage to batch number one, Chardonnay.

So I really wanted to create something almost like there’s a legacy and a celebration for reaching that milestone of making a hundred wines. I wanted to go back to very traditional winemaking. The birthplace perhaps of Chardonnay is Burgundy. And in Burgundy, a hundred years ago, they were not bottling every single year.

They bottled when they needed to. They had good vintages, bad vintages. So it wasn’t this cycle.

Now, the majority of the industry doesn’t age Chardonnay for more than 12 months in oak. Most people have a misunderstanding of oak and malolactic fermentation in wine.

I hear it all the time, people saying, I hate oaky chardonnays because they’re too buttery, too oaky. There’s two different things. Oaky and buttery are two different things. So the malolactic fermentation, the conversion of malic acid into lactic acid, is what gives you that creaminess in Chardonnay.

And predominantly, all red wines go through it. But in white wines, Chardonnay is the only one that goes through malo. And it is a style that’s fading. It’s boomers who love the buttery Chardonnays.

But when it comes to oak you really don’t find anybody aging Chardonnay for 30 months.

It’s a little bit crazy to do, but this was my vision as a celebration. And the funny thing is that I just came back from Miami and the joke, everybody that tasted it. They’re like, wow, what a delicious wine and how did you get the idea? And I was like the joke here in the cellar in Napa was when I was making this wine, everybody here was like, who’s going to drink this wine?

And the joke was Florida will drink it because they love big oaky Chardonnay. But the reality now in the valley and other markets too. The younger consumer is actually loving this wine because it doesn’t have much malolactic fermentation. Only 25% of the wine went through malo. So there is a little kiss of butter.

Almost like buttered popcorn, but without being too buttery, without having greasy hands. And then the oak flavor here is just amazing. Because it just pops with butterscotch and vanilla and full spices and it’s a super long finish. You take a sip and five minutes later, it’s still sitting in your palate which is quite unique for a Chardonnay.

You had a vision before you produced the bottle. How close to reality did it become, and what were the challenges to get it there?

To explain that I have to give you the background. Everything I do is not out of just because I decide to.

Everything I do is it backed by the marketplace. Most winemakers, they have an idea, they go apply it. I have so many ideas. All my ideas actually are based on creating demand that’s already in the marketplace or about to be. So a lot of what I do is research and development.

I’m not going to wait to get a market watch article last year to tell me that this varietal or this segment is trendy. I’m seeing it live in the marketplace. I’m seeing it live with the consumer. I am doing tastings in stores. I’m doing tastings at restaurants, hosting dinners, and seeing what the consumer wants.

So I’m seeing it before the rest of the industry. Everything I do is based on where the trend is going before it even becomes a trend. And it is a gamble because not everything comes to fruition. But that’s the basis of what I do is based on the wine enthusiasts, people that drink wine, their interests and what they want to have in the, what they wanna see.

Let’s talk about your Pinot Noir.

This is my house Pinot Noir. We call it the house because this is what I envision to be the house Pinot, basically a Pinot Noir that you open and whether you drink a glass or finish the bottle. If you drink a glass, you can put the cork back on it and it will be good for at least four or five days.

All our wines are made in a traditional style and they’re exposed early on to oxygen. So they’re oxygen resistant compared to conventional wines. When you open the wine; conventional wine by the second or third day, they already flatten out and turn into vinegar cooking wine. The Pinot Noir here is for the everyday occasion and it doesn’t require any food, although this pairs well with everything.

This is the only red I’ll probably pair with any type of fish. It really is a very good wine on its own. Doesn’t really require food. I make a lot of big Cabernets and big heavy varietals like Petite Syrah and certain Malbecs. Very good. You drink a glass and you start begging for food because some wines really require that.

The House Pinot is my go to wine for that everyday, anytime occasion. It is from Carneros, so it’s Southern Napa, and it’s made in a traditional Burgundian style.

What makes this wine actually unique is that a huge amount of of Pinot Noirs now in California are laced with something else to be a varietal on the label, like Pinot Noir or Cabernet. All you have to be is 75% to 85% based on the county. So there is a lot of blending and we’ve seen a lot during the past few years.

The emergence of jammy Pinot’s. It’s all cut with something big and heavy. Pinot is supposed to be lean. A beautiful aromatic varietal with high acidity. It’s supposed to age really well. So we’re going back to that traditional burgundy style.

The wine next to it is a red wine blend.

We make 14 different cabs, so many different red wine varietals. All these wines I make are 100% single varietal. I don’t like to blend. I just love to showcase the true expression of the varietal from the terroir that it comes from of Napa Valley.

I made this wine and I called it Millennial. This is batch number 96 Millennial. And this wine is a blend of different varietals. It’s like a world blend almost. It’s 63% Petite Syrah, 22% Malbec. 8% Tempranillo, Spanish varietal, 7% Primitivo, an Italian varietal, and 1% Charbonneau which is a very rare varietal that we have here in Napa. So multiple varietals, I called it the Millennial because, I found that the millennial consumer is looking more for a style when it comes to a red wine, something that’s medium body, fruit forward, softer tannins. And they’re not really much into what vintage is it, what’s the region, what’s the AVA, they are still very price conscious.

So the retail price for is $29. It’s our least expensive red wine that we make. And it’s a really mouthful of a wine. It’s very juicy. It’s like lava cake in a glass. Although it’s dry, it’s got no residual sugar. It’s still so fruit forward. And there are so many flavors from lava cake to blueberry compote to raspberry jam.

We did not put anything. No vintage, no AVA, no nothing. We just wanted to focus on the blend itself and, that’s a red wine, it tells you exactly who it’s made for.

I’m not sure if you see yourself as a foodie. Any food pairings that you recommend with your wines?

Yeah, I certainly consider myself a foodie. Half of my time alive is spent going from one restaurant to another. Granted, I don’t eat at each one of them all the time, but I do try to eat a small dish everywhere I go and try different things, different cuisines, and I love, as someone that was born in Morocco, I love flavor.

Maybe part of my success in winemaking has to do with my palate. And my taste for my open mind, the taste for food also, and being willing to try different flavors.

When you say Napa, people think Cabernet right away. No one would ever think of orange wine first. Maybe not anytime soon, hopefully one day, but as of now, everybody thinks Cabernet. And. Cabernet to me or some red, big red varietals I think the best friend for our big wines.

My favorite pairing right now is this orange wine. I find myself drinking a lot of Orange lately. And this orange gewurztraminer, favorite companion to Southeast Asian cuisines like Thai, Vietnamese does really well with it. I’ll say Indian cuisine with curries and or even Middle Eastern cuisines. The orange gewurztraminer does really well with them.

I really like to keep it simple. I love to cook with a lot of herbs and spices.

You don’t want to overwhelm it. You don’t want to ruin the taste. You want to enjoy it by keeping actually the food that goes with it simple. Just 1, 2, 3, 4 herbs or spices just to enhance the dish. and bring out the flavors of the wine.

Talking about the Vice team, you have a world class CMO and you have a genuine superhero. Can you talk a little bit about your team?

We met in 2008. We actually worked together and we’ve been together now since 2008. We’ve been married 10 years. Tori is my partner, but life partner and business partner, of course.

Her background is fashion. So she was a creative director at her last job. And she went to Parsons in New York for fashion. Her entire life she knew she wanted to be in fashion.

I wouldn’t be here today, The Vice would not exist if it wasn’t for Tori. She was crucial, especially for the creation of The Vice, the label, the marketing aspects of it. And today she’s 100% on board with The Vice. She has no other job. She’s the CMO of The Vice.

My assistant winemaker; he’s the joy of every day life. His name is Bruce Wayne and he’s an eight year old Tibetan Terrier. He’s got a better nose than any of us. He loves to be in the cellar because of the cool temperature. And as I said probably in the beginning, intertwining personal and the professional. Having him around most of the day when I’m here in the Valley, or just having him come with me, he’s a very good boy. It certainly adds a lot of happiness to what we do and it, it helps with the craft of The Vice.

You mentioned that Tori has a fashion background. What was the transition from fashion to to wine like?

Her transition was similar to mine. It was more of a hobby, part time fashion project and part time helping The Vice. And then last year, we had a baby, our first baby. After she went back to work after her maternity leave, she realized that she wanted to focus on the baby a little bit and also full time on The Vice.

Where do you see The Vice in 5 years? What can we look forward to?

Thank you for asking. The vision since day one was to be an international brand. Today we are in four international markets and 14 states in the U. S. But this secret fantasy that I’ve had since day one about creating The Vice was for the French to drink The Vice.

The French don’t drink American wine. In fact, if you are from Burgundy, you probably don’t even drink Bordeaux, or you don’t drink Sancerre, or you don’t drink Provence. They’re into their own wine regions.

Globally where we will be 5, 10, 20 years, I don’t like to really put deadlines and time limits because the passage of time does things that, it’s very subjective.

The last three years were great for our business. If anything, it spurred us to grow more than we expected. Our long term goal with The Vice is to leave a legacy in the valley and for the brand to inspire the next generation of people to be the voice for a fresh voice in Napa.

From a sales perspective, we are at 27,000 cases. We want to be at 100,000 cases. We want to be in a million cases. But most importantly, we want to maintain the quality and the integrity of the wine that we make.

Younger audiences are booking for healthier wines

There is a lot of formula wine. Wine that has probably 30 ingredients you and I can’t pronounce because it’s not FDA regulated and you know they make it taste consistent year after year and there’s a lot of chemistry that goes into it.

Our wines are very simple. There are two ingredients, grapes and a little bit of CO2 to maintain stability. So long term for us is to continue to be a true craft wine, real wine that’s good for you if you drink it in moderation.

How can we shop your wines? How can we find you?

Thank you for asking how you can help. I see myself as an ambassador of Napa Valley, so I encourage you to please discover Napa and keep it as the leading wine region in the world. We are a one stop shop for Napa Valley. We have the most diverse portfolio of Napa Valley wines at a great price point.

Please check us out, www.TheVice.com. Please follow us. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. Fun fact is that our corks have my phone number on them. You can text me, call me, DM me, FaceTime me. If I’m not in an awkward situation, I’ll pick up. But I’m very accessible. I’d love to I’d love to hear from you.

I’d love to answer your questions. I’d love to help you discover the wine industry, but specifically Napa. I’d love to help you not only discover it and enjoy it as well.

That is incredible. So thank you. I really appreciate your time.

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NYFW Spring/Summer 2024 is Revealed! Find the Schedule and Details

By Joe Winger — 1 year ago

NYFW Spring/Summer 2024 is Revealed! Fashion lovers get excited. You can find the full schedule and details below.

It’s almost autumn in New York and what does that mean? It’s time for the annual New York Fashion Week (NYFW).

Fashion is cyclical, so what does that mean this year? We’ll see plenty of new ideas debuted, but we’ll also see many returns. Returns of old favorite designers bringing refreshed favorites. We’ll also see new designers finding fun ways to revisit traditional idea.

NYFW Spring/Summer 2024 is Revealed! Find the Schedule and Details

One thing is for sure, there will be plenty to talk about and plenty of hits (and misses). But those during swings it was makes the setting so exciting. And no one knows until it hits the spotlights.

New York Fashion Week Highlights

Peter Do’s debut show as creative director of Helmut Lang will formally kick off the American Collections on Friday, September 8.

Raul Lopez, the 2022 CFDA Fashion Awards winner for Accessories Designer of the Year, will close the week with the LUAR show on the evening of Wednesday, September 13, 2023.

Ralph Lauren makes his comeback to the New York runway.

Jonathan Cohen and 3.1 Phillip Lim also return to the week.

First-time additions to the schedule include Advisry, Chan Chit Lo, FFORME, Grace Ling and Sho Konishi.

NYFW Spring/Summer 2024 Show Schedule*

Friday, September 8th

9 a.m. – Cinq à Cept (by appointment)
10:30 a.m. – A. Potts (presentation)
10:30 a.m. – Kent Anthony (presentation)
10:30 a.m. – Terry Singh (presentation)
10:30 a.m. – Clara Son (presentation)
10:30 a.m. – B | M | C (presentation)
12 p.m. – Mirror Palais (runway)
2 p.m. – Helmut Lang (runway)
4:30 p.m. – Sebastian AMI (presentation)
4:30 p.m. – The Salting (presentation)
4:30 p.m. – SKYCO (presentation)
4:30 p.m. – Raleigh Workshop (presentation)
5 p.m. – Prabal Gurung (runway)
6 p.m. – Collina Strada (runway)
9 p.m. – Private Policy (runway)
All-day appointments: Kobi Halperin, Bugatchi, Et Ochs, Hérve Léger

Saturday, September 9th

10 a.m. – Theory (runway)
11 a.m. – Bevza (runway)
12 p.m. – Proenza Schouler (runway)
1 p.m. – Sami Miro Vintage (runway)
2 p.m. – TIBI (runway)
4 p.m. – PATBO (by appointment)
4 p.m. – Alice + Olivia by Stacey Bendet (presentation)
7 p.m. – Khaite (runway)
8 p.m. – Eckhaus Latta
All-Day Appointments: Chan Chit Lo, Nicholas Raefski

Sunday, September 10th

11 a.m. – Studio 189 (runway)
12 p.m. – FFORME (runway)
1 p.m. – Colin Locascio (runway)
2 p.m. – Jason Wu Collection (runway)
3 p.m. – Advisry (runway)
4 p.m. – Adeam (runway)
5 p.m. – 3.1 Phillip Lim (runway)
6 p.m. – AREA (runway)
9 p.m. – Who Decides War (runway)

Monday, September 11th

10 a.m. – Michael Kors (runway)
1 p.m. – AKNVAS (runway)
3 p.m. – Dennis Basso (runway)
8 p.m. – Tory Burch (runway)
All-day appointments: Kate Barton

Tuesday, September 12th

9 a.m. – Naeem Khan (runway)
1 p.m. – Wiederhoeft (runway)
2 p.m. – Bach Mai (runway)
3 p.m. – NIHL (digital activation)
3 p.m. – Pamella Roland (runway)
4 p.m. – Carolina Herrera (runway)
5 p.m. – Tanner Fletcher (runway)
6 p.m. – LoveShackFancy (presentation)
9 p.m. – Dion Lee (runway)
All-day appointments: Interior, Teddy Vonranson

Wednesday, September 13th

9 a.m. – KallMeyer (presentation)
10 a.m. – Ashlyn (runway)
12 p.m. – Frederick Anderson (runway)
1 p.m. – Puppets and Puppets (runway)
2 p.m. – Bibhu Mohapatra (runway)
3 p.m. – PH5 (runway)
5 p.m. – Badgley Mischka (runway)
6 p.m. – Willy Chavarria (runway)
7 p.m. – The Blonds (runway)
8 p.m. – Luar (runway)

*This schedule is subject to change.

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Guitar Legend Al Di Meola at NY’s Patchogue Theatre on Friday, October 27

By Rocco Delfino — 1 year ago

Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts announces Al Di Meola on Friday, October 27 at 8pm.

Tickets, on sale Friday, August 11, are $49-$79 including fees and can be purchased in person at 71 East Main Street in Patchogue, by phone at 631-207-1313, or online at: https://ci.ovationtix.com/34780/production/1175598?performanceId=11342539

World-renowned guitar hero Al Di Meola is a living legend celebrated for pioneering a unique style of impeccable guitar technique combined with a sophisticated global musical language that’s captured the hearts of audiences across the world.

A Grammy Award-winner, he’s garnered three gold albums while selling more than six million albums in worldwide sales.

His collaborations with artists such as Paul Simon, Phil Collins, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Page, Santana, Steve Winwood, Herbie Hancock, Frank Zappa, Luciano Pavarotti, and others have elevated Al Di Meola to become a household name.

Traversing divinely across multiple genres including flamenco, Latin, fusion, jazz, rock, and world music, Al Di Meola is a vivacious tour de force always redefining the boundaries of what’s possible on a six-stringed instrument.

Al Di Meola welcomes a new decade with an homage to the Beatles, entitled Across The Universe. Al Di Meola’s exquisite mastery of the fretboard is equal only to his appreciation of the Beatles’ legacy that has inspired generations of both musicians and music fans with their famed recording catalog.

A retrospective of Al Di Meola’s nearly 50-year acclaimed career expressed through his virtuosic arrangements of 14 Beatles songs, Across The Universe journeys alongside one of America’s foremost guitarists as he revisits classic hits and more obscure tunes written by the ingenious Fab Four who have helped define the man he is today.

Adding to his lauded recording collection of more than 30 solo albums and numerous acclaimed collaborations, Across The Universe showcases Al Di Meola’s fascination with complex rhythmic syncopation combined with provocative lyrical melodies and intricate harmonies. Beatles fans, guitar-heads, and music lovers alike can expect the unexpected upon venturing into the live show put forth by Al Di Meola.

Presented in conjunction with The Bowery Presents

Box Office Hours

Wednesday – Sunday from 12-6pm and later on show nights.

(631) 207-1313 | 71 East Main Street, Patchogue NY 11772

Tickets can always be purchased online at PatchogueTheatre.org

For a complete listing of shows visit PatchogueTheatre.org.

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You’ve been in the wine world, the hospitality world, the restaurant world for many years. Tell us about a celebration in your life that inspired you to join these industries?

The fact that you grew up behind the scenes in the back of the house makes me curious.

For a couple – whether it’s a date night, an anniversary or a business dinner,

do you have any tips for how to take that fine dining experience and make it really truly memorable

We’re going to stick with the restaurant for a second, but move toward the wine list.

What are some tips for someone who wants to have a nice bottle out at dinner and they just don’t even know where to start?

I know you love Italian wine, you’re an expert in Italian wine. Are there some Italian wine regions that deserve more attention?

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Is it fall and spring, or what’s the schedule?

It sounds like this might be the most in-depth Italian class you can find in Manhattan.

Because it’s so deep with knowledge, it’s great for trade. New York City is a huge foodie and restaurant dining scene.

What are the goals for the New York Wine Studio? What’s the future for you? What’s the future for the studio itself?

Tell us where we can find more. Websites? Social Media?

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Do you have a favorite dish?

Brian, can we touch on your background and how how you ended up with TurboTruster?

A huge majority of people cook chicken and turkeys the wrong way. That’s my assumption.

When we compare your final chicken to a poorly done chicken what’s the difference?

Is it the ego of the grill master? Or how do we help people realize they can have a better bird?

Can we talk a little bit about the process going from zero to where we are today?

Can you tell us a little bit about from prototype one to seven? How did we get there?

It’s a lot of detail.

Kirk, between your chef skills and your contractor skills. A perfect combination of bringing those two skill sets together.

Can we just talk through in the most simple, basic steps, how to use the Turbo Trusser?

How do we get that strong-willed Backyard Grillmaster to give the Turbo Trusser a try?

As we wrap up, tell me about the Shark Tank experience.

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I found Safe Catch’s Recipes section pretty cool.

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Got it. So what inspired you to get into the world of wine? Any memorable celebrations?

You worked at the biggest wine company in the world. How did you go about getting that job?

And then what kind of lessons did you learn while being there?

Is there a major lesson that you learned while working at that global luxury company that has helped the Vice wines?

I think you fulfilled two fantasies that a whole lot of wine people dream about doing. One being rockstar salesman at these amazing companies. The other becoming a winemaker.

Any advice for someone who wants to be who you were a few years ago?

The work ethic definitely, 15 in a day is a very deliberate choice with time and energy.

Your wines are called “Vice”. Was there a “Vice moment” where you knew it was time to move on and become a winemaker?

Tell us about the regions that The Vice grapes are sourced in and equally important, how the heck did you get grape sourced from these in-demand areas?

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I’m going to assume almost every wine lover knows Napa Valley. Touch a little bit on the region of Napa, the soil your vineyards are using, and how that influences your aromas and your tastes as we actually get into the bottles themselves.

Going a little deeper in that for a moment.

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What that experience was like for you?

Walk us through your favorite wines. Let’s talk about aromas and flavors and color and what you love about them so much.

The 2020 Chardonnay. The mouthfeel, the balance, when you were creating it, how did you decide what it was going to be like?

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