NYC demands a better cocktail, Monkey Shoulder whisky Responds

NYC demands a better cocktail, Monkey Shoulder whisky Responds with Refreshed Bottle, Flavor and Style

Award-winning Monkey Shoulder whisky, the 100% malt whisky made for mixing, is revealing a fresh new look and feel to its bottle, the first major change to the brand’s hero bottle since it started shaking up the traditional whisky category in 2005.

The changes include a bold refresh of the label and a lighter bottle – up to 25% in glass reduction – providing an even better cocktail-making experience.

Get ready to party with a new look.

Monkey Shoulder bottle slims down for an easier pour

The new and improved Monkey Shoulder bottle will be implemented across both The Original and Smokey Monkey varieties of the whisky and is more than just a glass reduction.

Refreshingly light, the new look includes a longer neck for an easier pour, for both bartenders and consumers making whisky cocktails at home.

The bottle is perfect for shelf display

The new look matches the liquid within; the new split-label design and the enlarged brand logo oozes premium and is perfect for being displayed proudly on the whisky shelf or back bar. Fans of Monkey Shoulder’s “three monkeys” badge need not fear, as it still features pride of place on the new label.

The innovations to the design were delivered thanks to an AI-powered visual analysis to test key features and label viewability, followed by rigorous consumer testing. This led to a new look bottle and label that not only maintained its premium cues and distinctiveness but was approved by fans of the brand.

Everything remixed but the recipe: Inside the bold new bottles is the same award-winning liquid loved around the world. Made with single malt whiskies from the Speyside region of Scotland, selected in small batches then married together, Monkey Shoulder Original Malt Whisky retains its rich, smooth, and fruity flavour.

Ifan Jenkins, from Monkey Shoulder says: “Just like our cocktails, we wanted to mix things up when it came to our look. The eye-catching, new-look bottle has been designed not only to improve the cocktail-making experience with its glass-reduction, but also stand out from the crowd (just like the liquid inside). It’s with this bold new look that we’re looking forward to shaking up the drinks’ cabinets of Monkey Shoulder fans around the world, as well as grabbing the attention of those starting to explore the world of whisky for the first time.”

The newly packaged bottle will be available in mid-2024 in countries where Monkey Shoulder is sold, available in the best bars and retailers globally.

Monkey Shoulder, the world’s first made for mixing blended malt whisky

In 2005, Monkey Shoulder, the world’s first made for mixing blended malt whisky, burst into the world of whisky, and it has been breaking the conventions of the category ever since. Developed as the ultimate mixing whisky for cocktails, Monkey Shoulder Original Blended Malt Scotch Whisky is blended in small batches of Speyside’s finest single malt whiskies then married together. Rich, smooth and fruity, the original blend is bold enough to be mixed, yet balanced enough to enjoy neat. This unique blend gets its name from when turning the malting barley was still done by hand.

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Can NYC get Somm-Approved wine from a Can? We Tasted with Kristin Olszewski from Nomadica Wines

By Joe Winger — 2 weeks ago

Can NYC get Somm-Approved wine from a Can? We Tasted with Kristin Olszewski from Nomadica Wines

Sommelier Businesswoman Kristin Olszewski brings Michelin quality to Canned Wines with Nomadica Wines

Nomadica offers sparkling, rose, white, red and orange options — both canned and bag in a box.

Nomadica Wines ‘s Owner Kristin Olszewski

Nomadica Wines are sourced from vineyards with responsible farming practices and winemakers who engage in low intervention wine making.

Wine-lovers can be 100% confident you’re drinking serious sommelier-approved wine.

Nomadica Wines ‘s Owner Kristin Olszewski; Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Today’s conversation with Sommelier / Businesswoman Kristin Olszewski from Nomadica Wines has been edited for length and clarity. For the full, un-edited conversation, visit our YouTube channel here.

Joe Winger: We’re here today with Kristin Olszewski from Nomadica Wines.

What’s the most important message you want to share today with our audience?

Kristin Olszewski:

I think the biggest message that I want to get across is that everyone should be drinking more wine. That’s my mission in life to just bring consumers back to the wine category.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Joe Winger:

Outstanding. And how how are you trying to get that done?

Kristin Olszewski:

I’ll give a little context on my own history and how I came here.

My undergrad degree is in sustainable agriculture and I ended up dropping out of Harvard Medical School to become a sommelier – typical journey.

I just really fell in love with wine. I worked in restaurants to pay for school and wine was always the thing that captivated my interest.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

I feel like it’s the intersection of history, agriculture and gastronomy. And then also there’s something so fun and communal and – you’re getting a little tipsy. It’s everything.

But I spent a decade-plus in Michelin restaurants all over the country, everywhere from three Michelin stars, Saison in San Francisco, Husk in Nashville, Osteria Mozza here in LA.

When Nancy Silverton was on a Netflix show called Chef’s Table, I started noticing a different customer coming into the restaurant. Usually as a sommelier, you’re talking to a very specific demographic of people. I would say 45 plus male white wine collector. That’s my demo. And when Nancy was on Chef’s Table, young people started coming into the restaurants, a lot of women, and I noticed they didn’t want to drink wine.

They would drink tequila, beer, cocktails, like anything but wine.

That always felt like such a missed opportunity because wine, it’s the most ancient beverage. Our people have drank wine for millennia. It’s also in an age where we care about what’s natural, what’s minimally processed, what’s better for you.

Great wine is literally just grapes, yeast, water, and time, so I started digging into why aren’t you drinking wine? And I found out a few things.

One, people felt like wine wasn’t a good value. If you weren’t going to spend a lot of money on wine, you couldn’t get a great wine, which is untrue.

The other one is people feel like they needed a PhD or some level of education or knowledge in order to access wine, which, again, is not true.

I want to be people’s guide, hold their hand and walk them into the world of wine. So I started Nomadica to do that on a larger level.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Joe Winger:

That’s beautiful.

You mentioned two things. We’re going to go into both. Your background in Michelin restaurants. I’ve heard heavenly amazing stories. I’ve heard horror stories.

Can you share an experience and what you learned from?

Kristin Olszewski:

Everyone always asks me if I watch The Bear or not. And I’m like, no, I can’t.

Some positive stories, Michelin restaurants have changed a lot from when I started working in them. I think work has changed a lot for the positive. I remember one of my first serious jobs in a scary restaurant. You have your hair pulled back because you don’t want it to get in the food.

I had one small piece of hair hanging down above my face and the chef takes a match from the stove, lights a piece of my hair and says don’t ever have a hair hanging down in your face again.

Some of the wonderful stories are having the opportunity, especially at Mozza, you taste each bottle you open there.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

When I was at Mozza, it was a $5 million dollar all-Italian cellar with 90 pages of the best Barolo, Brunello, Etna Rosso’s, just things that like collector’s dream about tasting.

And I feel so lucky to have tasted things like Conterno Monfortino, which is the type of wine that you want to smell for three hours before you drink it.

When you have a wine like that, it makes you realize why collectors obsessively chase bottles, there’s something so romantic and intangible, and having a wine like that, you realize you’ll never have A wine that tastes the same at any moment in time ever again.

It’s just such a lucky experience.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Joe Winger:

I’m curious about how that experience inspired you to open Nomadica.

Kristin Olszewski:

My entry point into wine was always through farming. I majored in sustainable agriculture.

I was an avid farmer. I ran our community garden in college and was focused on permaculture. I lived in India and farmed for a while there.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

And I always say great wine is made by great farmers, great wines made in the vineyard, not the cellar.

So when I was looking at starting Nomadica, that sustainability ethos, it was always my starting point, but I was really shocked when I found out how bad glass bottles are for the environment.

30% of glass is recycled in the US. The rest just goes into a landfill. It’s highly energy intensive to make, to ship, because it’s so heavy.

The fact is, most wine does not need to be in a glass bottle.

Yes, that Barolo I mentioned absolutely needs to be in a glass bottle. That needs to be aged for years before it even comes into its own.

But for a $20 – 30 bottle of wine that you’re going to pop open and drink it on a weeknight or on a not special weekend does not need to be in glass.

So that’s how we started.

Cans at 70 % reduction in carbon footprint. Our newly launched bag and box wine is almost a 90% reduction in carbon footprint.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Joe Winger:

I sampled your sparkling white, your white, your red and your rose, they were dangerously drinkable.

Can we talk about where the fruit is sourced from?

Kristin Olszewski:

Absolutely.

The name Nomadica is really a fun double entendre because you can take it wherever you want to go. Of course, cans and boxes can be found in places that bottles can’t.

We source our fruit from all over.

We’re truly a nomadic winery.

Our head winemaker spent time at some of the best wineries in California, like Eric Kent Cellars, which makes award winning Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and also Kosta Brown.

Before that he spent 10 years doing vineyard management in California. So through Corey, we’ve really got a handle on some of the best fruit. A lot of our wine comes from Mendocino. A lot of our grapes come from Mendocino or Lodi. I’m such a Sonoma girly. Our winery is located in Sonoma, and so I always find myself drawn back to that region.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Joe Winger:

Are there any vineyards you’d recommend us touring when we come to Northern California?

Kristin Olszewski:

I think the Sonoma Coast is the best wine region in California. They’ve fought very hard to become designated as their own AVA, which is very important in terms of quality.

The oceanic influence, what we call a diurnal shift, the extreme temperature change between night and day, like Hirsch and Littorai.

I think if anyone ever wants to see proof in the pudding of what great farming can do, you need to go see Littorai.

Ted Lemon was one of the first Americans to ever be a winemaker in Burgundy and he brought all of his practices back, was one of the first people to practice biodynamic agriculture in California and really brought that style of farming onto a larger scale.

When you go visit his vineyards, it’s like teeming with life. You look next door at a conventionally farmed plot, which is just like dead and sad looking. And then you taste the wines and you’re just knocked on your butt because they’re so good.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Joe Winger:

Nomadica Wines has several varieties. White, Sparkling white, Rose, Red, Orange.

Can you walk us through the taste profiles of any of your favorites – what’s the aromas, what are the profiles?

Kristin Olszewski:

Something really cool about our wines is everything’s practicing organic. No pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers, all of our wines are fermented dry. Naturally zero grams of sugar per serving. They have nice fruit notes, but none of the wines are sweet.

Crushable bright flavor.

Across the gamut, our entire portfolio has a brightness and a freshness to it. All of our wines are like slightly aromatic because I love an aromatic variety, but part of the thought that we put behind the brand is that I wanted to take that sommelier curation and put it in the restaurant, on the retail shelf so that when you’re serving Nomadica at your home, at parties and the beach, 99% percent of people will love it.

I’m doing the work on the back end on blending, sourcing, creating these flavor profiles that’s really taking that wine experience, that decade plus of developing my own palette and giving it back to the consumer.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Joe Winger:

Are there any favorite wine and food pairings for you with your wines?

Kristin Olszewski:

I love an aperitif. Our sparkling rosé is definitely my favorite wine in our gamut. In a can you always have the perfect pour because sometimes you don’t want to open up an entire bottle of wine.

When we do that in my house, it usually gets drank. It doesn’t go back in the fridge.

Sometimes you just want a glass of sparkling. And I love that.

I love that with a charcuterie board and cheese. I also love Rose with green salads.

I think one of the best things about living where we live [Los Angeles] is we have the best produce on the planet.

I still run some wine programs in Los Angeles and I’m actually opening up a restaurant in Silver Lake next year, an Italian restaurant. Orange Wine is like the hottest trend.

I was doing the wine list at a restaurant in Hollywood called Gigi’s and I noticed I was selling more orange wine by the glass than all other colors combined, which was just mind blowing to me.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

We made what I think is the best orange wine coming out of California.

There’s a lot of talk about natural wine, orange wine. They’re not all created equal. My winemaker and I tasted through my favorite Italian skin contact wines and decided on a really concrete flavor profile source.

My mother in law in Orange County is drinking her orange wine with her friends. So I really feel like I’ve achieved something. That with sushi is a mind blowing pairing.

Then our red. We found Teroldego growing in Northern California, which is a grape that’s indigenous to Northern Italy from the Alto Adige.

It’s really Alpine, like dark fruit, like a Zinfandel, but really refreshing and bright acidity and a little bit more tannin than a Zin [Zinfandel] has.

There’s a perception that we had to overcome about can and boxed wine. People think that it’s low quality.

Whenever I pour our red for somebody, the response is always, “Wow, oh my god, that’s so good.”

No matter your level of wine knowledge, you can see what I’m trying to do when you taste our red wines.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Joe Winger:

What’s next for you and Nomadica?

Kristin Olszewski:

Right now we’re in hardcore expansion mode. We were the first people to do fine wine and can, and I grew really slowly at my own pace.

I wanted to build the brand.

A lot of people just run to retail shelves and they want to be in every grocery store on the planet. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be, at the Four Seasons, at the Ritz Carlton, at music venues.

I wanted to be in places where people don’t typically expect to see wine in cans and boxes.

We are one of the highest velocity items at Whole Foods in our category.

We just launched all of our box wines at Total Wine in California, Texas, Florida, Colorado, and New York and got some really big plans for next year.

So keep your eyes peeled. People are about to see me everywhere.

That’s my goal.

Source: instagram.com/nomadica

Joe Winger:

Having a canned wine at some of these nicer hotels is a challenge.

What lesson did you learn by accomplishing that rather large challenge?

Kristin Olszewski:

That’s the best thing about how we’re positioned. Not only am I a sommelier, my VP of sales is a sommelier. My winemaker has an incredible reputation. Every person on my team comes from the wine industry and we have the best product.

When we’re sitting down and tasting with these buyers, these people that are in our industry. They recognize it. I always say taste out of a wine glass. Everything tastes better out of a wine glass. The second that they taste it, these are people who taste wine all the time and they taste a lot of bad wine.

So that has been amazing.

We’ve always had the industry behind us. It’s a huge differentiator for us. So I think it was slow build. Everything takes a lot more time than you think it will, which is I think the biggest lesson that I’ve taken away from this business over the last seven years.

But you got to build your brand first.

Joe Winger:

You seem like a deep-souled individual. Whether it’s wine or otherwise, is there an overall message that you want to share to inspire the audience?

Kristin Olszewski:

We are in a time where sustainability is more important than it ever has been. You can’t base your entire brand about it, but I think it’s an absolutely necessary component to any consumer product that’s coming out today.

One of my missions in life is to have that conversation about sustainability and have it with other brands because it needs to be convenient.

Otherwise, consumers will not buy it, care or participate or choose a sustainable option. That’s my big thing.

Joe Winger:

What are the best ways to follow your journey and to learn more about you?

Kristin Olszewski:

You can buy Nomadica online and our new rosé yuzu spritz, which is delicious at ExploreNomadica.com. And then our socials are at Nomadica on Instagram.

And if you want to follow me. I’m at Kristin__O.

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Culinary Sensation Tieghan Gerard of Half Baked Harvest Announce Summer Harvest July 24

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The Hamptons: Culinary Sensation Tieghan Gerard Delivers on Delicious at Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner July 24

By Joe Winger — 1 month ago

The Hamptons: Culinary Sensation Tieghan Gerard Delivers on Delicious and Delight In The Hamptons at Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner July 24

Culinary Sensation Tieghan Gerard from Half Baked Harvest delivers on delicious and delight at Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner July 25

Tieghan Gerard was welcomed by a crowd of excited, curious and hungry fans looking forward to a memorable dinner at a beautiful setting.

Happy crowd at Half Baked Harvest Announce Summer Harvest

Getting a selfie with culinary star Tieghan Gerard

Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner team

The Team with Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner

Beautiful crowd at Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner

Time to eat, Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner

Tieghan Gerard selected the perfect dinner menu to pair with exceptional wines

It was an enchanting evening of culinary artistry and exceptional wines at the summer’s most anticipated Hamptons event, Summer Harvest: Grilling with Roman Meets Half Baked Harvest.

Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner

Wölffer’s esteemed winemaker and partner, Roman Roth collaborated with Tieghan to create an unexpected pairing menu and special installment of his highly sought after series “Grilling With Roman.”

Summer in a Bottle Sauvignon Blanc

Featuring the newly released Summer in a Bottle Sauvignon Blanc, among other exquisite selections, this sophisticated yet whimsical event promises an unforgettable farm-to-table menu.

Late Harvest Chardonnay

Salad at Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner

Proscuitto at Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner

Scallops at Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the iconic Summer in a Bottle series, the menu showcases the freshest local produce, expertly prepared and perfectly paired.

Fun and delicious end to a night, Scallops at Wölffer Estate Vineyard Harvest Dinner

Wölffer Estate Vineyard is located at 139 Sagg Road, Sagaponack, NY 11937.

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The Hamptons: Wölffer Estate Vineyard and Culinary Sensation Tieghan Gerard of Half Baked Harvest Announce Summer Harvest July 24

By Joe Winger — 2 months ago

Hamptons: Wölffer Estate Vineyard and Culinary Sensation Tieghan Gerard of Half Baked Harvest Announce Summer Harvest July 24

Wölffer Estate Vineyard and Culinary Sensation Tieghan Gerard of Half Baked Harvest Announce Summer Harvest July 24

Prepare for an enchanting evening of culinary artistry and exceptional wines at the summer’s most anticipated Hamptons event, Summer Harvest: Grilling with Roman Meets Half Baked Harvest.

On Wednesday, July 24th at 6:30 pm, the picturesque Wölffer Estate Vineyard and NY Times #1 Bestselling cookbook author and Instagram sensation, Tieghan Gerard of Half Baked Harvest, are presenting a bountiful summer harvest experience. Wölffer’s esteemed winemaker and partner, Roman Roth collaborated with Tieghan to create an unexpected pairing menu and special installment of his highly sought after series “Grilling With Roman.”

Featuring the newly released Summer in a Bottle Sauvignon Blanc, among other exquisite selections, this sophisticated yet whimsical event promises an unforgettable farm-to-table menu. In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the iconic Summer in a Bottle series, the menu showcases the freshest local produce, expertly prepared and perfectly paired.