This week's guest is Rick D'Argelli, who joined us live and in person for an interview. Rick Knoxboat is entry into the industry, first as a dishwasher, eventually a cook, before becoming a waiter and Somalia. We talk with Rick about his exit from the industry for nearly a decade for his virtual return. Rick then discusses his entry into the world of wine and the different avenues he took to grow his knowledge.
Rick worked for over 20 years at canoe in Toronto and has currently recognized as Somalia at the Elora Mill. Rick is also a sales representative for the Case for Wine. Make sure you check out the wine portfolio at thecaseforwine.com and you can contact Rick directly to inquire about the wines at Rickatthecaseforwine.com. Enjoy the show.
We're back with another episode of the industry podcast. I can't believe we're back. It's been a little spotty lately. My name is Kip.
This is Dan. How are you doing buddy? I'm doing well. Thanks.
You're done. You're done. You're done. You're done.
You're done. You're done. You're done. You're done.
You're done. You're done. You're done. You're done.
You're done. You're done. You're done. In 2017, which means, election night is a week from tonight.
Do not forget to vote. I'd love to if you voted for me, but just come out and vote. The turnout sucks, I mean as well. I shouldn't be meeting to change that.
October 24th. All right. The next voting was actually on the 8th. I know they actually had a couple more advanced polls actually as well.
Yeah. Well, definitely Dan just left the room. He just left. That's it.
The podcast is over. He found that when he was not. Oh, what do you got there? All the other advanced polls.
I actually get started, that's not here. It will be over, because the last advanced poll is Sunday, October 16th. Right. The best falling is over.
The election is October 24th. Come out and vote for all your municipal candidates. That's regional municipal counselors, chairs, and mayor. And I am your friendly neighborhood mayor of Canada.
So don't be afraid to check that out. In addition, we should mention that Dan's been traveling all over the world for work. So between these two, the campaigning and the traveling, that's why we have not been dropping our usual weekly episodes. I apologize for that.
I wish you back to regular cadence by the end of October. Yes. Or early November, actually, because we got the other elections on normal night that we record as well. Yeah, we'll see what happens.
We're doing our best here. Early November, we're back to normal, more or less. But you were just in Luxembourg? I was.
I was in Luxembourg for a week. It was in Belgium and in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is a beautiful place. Very expensive place.
It's not like you went to some cool spots. Yeah, good time. I had a very good time over here once again. Did you drop up any guests for a show?
I don't know. I drank a lot of beer. You went to fucking go there. Oh, but you know what?
I did try to speak on topic with this evening. I did try some Lebanese wine when I was there. Oh. Because there happened to be a bunch at the Mediterranean restaurant in Wind You.
We used to have a really good Lebanese wine at Sugar Run. But then I lost my rep for that. You moved to a different company. I know I don't know if it doesn't.
But that doesn't matter. Because we have a great guest on this show coming up. And just a minute, who is also a wine rep. Or you'll be familiar with from his many ads on the industry.
Podcast Rick Berencell is going to join us in just a second. I should mention this will drop before Halloween. So you should be coming to Sugar Run to see Brown and Al E. trio do the entire thriller record.
Oh, nice. Saturday night of the Halloween weekend. So I think that's the 29th of the 30th. It might be the 29th.
But I should probably check that before I guess it's 29th. So the Friday of the Saturday. 29th of the you want to check that out. You can also check out the big things happening at Babylon Sisters Wine Bar.
We'll have DJ Nana that weekend as well at Babylon Sisters also on the 29th. So I'm going to try and be in two spots at once, I guess. OK, we have DJ Dan every Friday night. We should mention that as well.
OK, what else we need to talk about? Let's covers it all. Subscribe, review. You want to do all of those things?
Yeah, and always anything we talk about in the show. You can find the links in the show notes as well. Right. And if you want to be a guest on the show, you're going to DM us at the industry podcast.
Or you can also email us directly info at theindustrypodcast.club. There's always a big shout out to Zach Hannah at ZachHannah.co. And who does our artwork for the Instagram page? So many thanks to him as always.
Enough about us. Let's bring in Rick at thecaseofwind.com, which I've gotten used to saying. Rick Aaron, tell you how you doing, buddy. Good evening.
Yeah, thanks for joining us. Thanks very much. This is exciting. And thanks for all the support for the podcast, we should say.
You're very welcome. Very welcome. Really exciting to be here and to talk. Yeah.
So let's just jump right into it. You started. Like, how old were you when you got your first industry job? Oh, wow.
Was that a place called the Waterlot? And this was in New Hamburg. I would have been 14 years old. I got my first dishwasher job.
So yeah, Waterlot was a busy place and really did well in the busy summer season. Stratford. I don't know whether Stratford was a busier town then, than it is now. But it was really a busy restaurant for the festival, I climbed also.
Yeah, as a dishwasher. Nice. Yeah. I was looking at the start.
You learned. So did you ever do any cooking? I did. I did.
I was there for a couple of years. And then I went to a place called Angie's Country Kitchen in St. Agatha. And I cooked there.
Oh, nice. And I did that for a couple of years. And I did that. I'm curious.
The cooking part. You just get promoted over the years? I just needed money. I just needed money.
So I heard that Angie's was hiring. I knew a few people that worked there. And they said, hey, we need a cook. And it would have paid more a couple of bucks more an hour.
And in these days, we're talking in the late 70s. Let your guests know that I'm 59. We're not going to go to die. We're not far from home.
No. So in these days, it was like seven bucks an hour. So I was going to college at the time. And I remember working at Angie's.
And I would drive for Brampton. And I knew I would have doubles on Saturday and Sunday. And that I'd be making slightly more than $200, working 12, 14 hour days. So it was a lot of hard work.
Then I had back to the Sheridan College. And yeah, it was just really, really hard work. And also in that time, one of the summers, I worked at the water lot again as a cook. Yeah.
And that's when I met two restaurants or two guys that were servers at the water lot. And they bought the Avrofoil Mill, Bob and Ray. And they said, Rick, do you want to? You got a great personality.
You're fun to work with. Why don't you come and work as a busser at the Avrofoil Mill? So I went out and I worked at the Avrofoil Mill probably for two weeks. And there was a server there that said, hey, right, come and work at the Millcroft Inn.
We need waiters. You can serve breakfast and lunch. And I saw how much the waiters are making. So I went out.
I worked maybe a week worth of breakfast and lunch and then a waiter called in sick for a dinner shift. Now I know nothing about wine, really. I know nothing about food. And now all of a sudden, I'm serving dinners.
And what kind of a place was that a little bit more fine dining? I know Croft Inn would have been more upscale. It's still there. They're still there.
They're owned by the outfit that owns the Prince of Wales and Niagara. I think it's called vintage hotel. So this is, while I was thinking about what we're doing tonight and speaking of, I thought, what are the key pivotal moments in my life that created my decisions? Well, it's this first frickin' night.
So an eight top comes in. As I said, I'm so hungry about this. And we had a really good wine list, very good wine list there. And he was an Austrian guy.
And he was entertaining a bunch of Russian oil people. Yeah. And so he comes in. There's eight of them.
He orders two bottles of a Grunk fruit burgundy. This isn't going to end with a broken core, is it? No. OK, good.
Any order? I just got nervous for you. No. And this is in the late 70s.
He ordered a couple, two or three bottles of first-growth bordoi. He ordered a couple bottles of La Fite and some Lutant. So we're talking very close to a $7,000 bill. My first night.
And I could feel the other staff were a little bit irked that I'm serving this guy because he knows he's a good tipper. My first night serving, I made over $1,000. Oh, I was saying you're thinking, this is just how it's going to be. This is the best thing ever.
The best thing ever. And I made over $1,000 every now and then, but it's not the norm. It's far from the norm. Yeah.
If it was, I never would have moved to the ownership side. There you go. You know what I mean? So it's like, I got the money's really good.
So I ended up working for three years at the M.O. Croft Inn. It was like, it was like, it was way up to that $100,000 night to come through. But it was good.
That put me through university, really. The M.O. Croft Inn. Yeah, I'd work three nights a week.
And it was the hidden jewel. We'd make $800. We're going to three nights back in those days. It's really good money there.
Yeah. And we're doing university again? York. York.
York. He's a fellow polyside grad. Yeah. Three political sciences around this fucking rock and rock table.
Middle Eastern, I apologize to you. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's not.
Yeah, it's not. Middle Eastern, but it's American. What is your stand? Hanging out.
Actually, I can attest to that. Yeah. Well, not much, especially, because I ended up getting a minor geography. That's actually how I went up with kind of the job I'd do down there.
Yeah. And I was all of a sudden that exposure to money from a guy that, you know, we grew up with very little money. We weren't poor poor, but we didn't have a lot. And we had to work hard.
And then all of a sudden I'm doing okay. So, you know, you go into York University, it can be a little bit of a fashion show there. So, all of a sudden the old Highthouse in Acton became a go-to place, because all of a sudden I've got six different leather coats. I got the Highthouse in Acton.
I got the other coat. I got the other coat. I got the commercial. I got the commercial.
Yeah. That's what I was going to do. Yeah. That's what I was going to do.
I was going to do that. Yeah, I took probably an eight or nine year period of being in the car business. So I worked in Brampton and I was in the service department of a Honda franchise and also the same group, Onde, Mazda and De Suzuki. In the service, you were actually fixing the car?
No, I was kind of a service manager. Oh, okay. So, man, what a stressful job that was. Like, when I eventually left, you know, Mary, my daughter's young, like I had so much stress.
One of the last weeks I was working, I had, when I got stressed, I'll get the muscles inside the canker's source. I went to the doctor and say, man, my mouth is killing me. I have like nine canker's source and guy goes, what do you do? And I'm a service manager at a Honda franchise.
And he goes, man, this dress is killing you. You got to get out of there. And I wasn't eating while I was eating. There's a, the Kelsey's right up the road and.
Please, please, are the fryer every day. Oh, baby, it was good stuff. But man, I was not a healthy dude and just stress. Because we're going to Kelsey's.
Dude, yeah. That was interesting. Insighted to how that whole chain restaurant stuff works. But yeah, go ahead.
Oh, there's this white guy. I've never forget I'm sitting there eating my, you know, my horrible lunch, you know, fries, protein with the burger and whatever. And this big guy comes in. It's kind of this big horseshoe shaped bar right in the middle of the restaurant.
And this big burly guy comes in and he, yeah, wonder what the sunshine girl is looking like today. And he's, and you seem fiddling with the paper, trying to get the page three, but he can't separate the newspaper. Right. Of course, yeah, he's just Christ.
I can't separate the paper and I haven't even looked at the sunshine girl. Yeah. But I did a lot of, you know, that yeah, really like bad, you know, I'm not much of a drinker or a smoker, but bad eating lifestyle in those days for sure. That was stressful because you took it from, you took it from customers who couldn't afford to get worked on on the car.
I had this one lady come in, he came into the shop, she needed four tires because the steel belts are hanging out of her car, her tires. And she's got a little baby on her side and we're looking at her. I'm so, you need tires like this is so dangerous. And she's like crying.
So I'm dealing with her. I'm dealing with the mechanics who, who, you know, want me to sell the work that these cars need, taking it from the owner who wants to see sales. So it was really a stressful job. So that's why I kind of after working at Milcroft, then I work at a legitimate job.
That's why I went back to the restaurant business and that's how I got into all of the Vangajini restaurants. Right. So was Can you be your first one? No, I was at a bearish for a bit.
Went to Italy for a bit and then Can you? So when did you start getting into wine? That's what you wanted to focus on a little bit. I would say it was with working with Ruben, who's the boss at one of the owners at the Case for Wine, he was the pom at a bearish upon me.
And I never knew much about wine. Like I, there was so much bullshitting that I did. Like before that period of working at Can you and getting into the car business, I worked for a very short period of time at some pretty good places. One place was called Centhro in Toronto.
And that was a Franco-Promedello restaurant. I worked there in the heyday of Centhro. And the Chef Rafaela Ferari was still alive and he passed away talking about what a fast paced joint that was. It was great, beautiful Italian restaurant.
And Franco is one of these iconic old school restaurateurs. And yeah, so I worked there for a little bit. We had a great wine list. I had no clue about the wine.
And eventually I left there because I probably, I think they wanted to demote me to a busser because of the lack of wine. Because of the lack of wine. Yeah, I told somebody that a certain meal didn't have cream and it was just laced with cheese. And I told them, oh yeah, what's this amorone like?
And I said, that's a lovely light-bodied wine. I had zero clue, even working at Milkraff. And those days to me, what mattered more was making really good tips and really learning about the wine because I did not learn about the wine. So yeah.
Did you feel like you were getting good at the serving part? Yeah, yeah, my timing was good. I was good at hustler. I like working.
And I was driving. Time was good. But it was really cool as moving forward. I worked for a very short period at Leinden at Leinden Hall.
And it was really funny because I saw Bill Benatou's, who used to own Milkraff Den. He was one of the partners there. And I said, Bill, do you remember many, many years ago, this would have been in the late early 80s, the Toronto Zoo held something up at Milkraff Den. And it was, oh yeah, I remember that.
What the Toronto Zoo did is they held a big fundraiser. And they had all these people on the Alber patio. Have you been to Milkraff? It's a beautiful water, beautiful kind of pond.
Right beside the patio. And then there's a waterfall. The water falls just above it is an area called, I think they used to call it the pond. I don't know what they call it anymore.
And they're all fiddable at 12 people and you're overlooking the falls. It's really pretty. Well, they brought animals. The Toronto Zoo brought animals for all the people that came to this fundraiser.
And they brought two elephants. Pretty cool. So I'm saying to Bill, Benatou, remember the elephants went in the water and it's walking in this pond right beside the patio at the Milkraff Den. And the elephant starts blasting the people with water.
It was hilarious. That was one of my great memories of Milkraff Den. I can't get away with that these days. Shut down in a second.
So then you get to the job. And somewhere in here you realize, okay, they're about to demote me because of lack of wine knowledge and I want to know we have to figure this out. I started taking W-SAP. Right.
And how far did you get all the way? No, not all the way, but what would have been considered the advanced level. So that's what I did. I took a lot of W-SAP.
I took a lot of courses with the Italian trade commission. So my schtick is more Italian wine and they would hold these month long kind of seminars where you'd go to taste wines from all the regions. It was really good. And in those days, I think it was John Zabbo who was running a lot of those things.
And then I thought, oh, do I want to get certified through a different avenue? And that's when I did the Quartermaster. Yeah, explain those the difference between W-SAP and that. Yeah, the Quartermasters is a little bit different because they really reward your work experience and your knowledge based on years of service.
So at that time, when you said who influenced you, Rubind did for sure. Will Freedom did. You probably have some pure Freedom wines as well as my Psalms. All of these guys really influenced me in my wine journey, tasting some amazing wine and you want to learn about it, taking courses.
And so over the course of the years, doing the Quartermaster Psalms, you could go, they give you credit for your knowledge and they assume if you've been in a business for 10 or five or 10 years, you should know something about proper etiquette and service. So the Quartermaster, you go for a weekend, the first night, the first day you sit in on classes, then you do an exam and then if you pass that, you pass the introductory. And then over the next few days, you listen, you sit in on more classes. Then there's a, I think it's on the Monday morning, they do a, I think it's a 45 question exam right at eight o'clock and then you will do, then you do blind tasting.
It goes the other way around blind tasting first, then you do the 45 questions and then you do a service element. So I've had some tough goes with that. And the main thing with me, my theory is very strong. My service is very strong.
My blind doing as long as I've served, I've done very, very little blind. My blind sucks. It's like, I can, I mean, there's certain things that if I had three different things in front of me, I would probably figure it out. But I just, sometimes you discover that no matter how much you study and how much wine you drink, your palate only develops to a certain level.
And there's some people who have that palate where they can, they can determine whatever, right? But that, it's some of that shit you can develop it a lot of it you're just born with. Yeah. Like, well, and it's so evident because during my training, one of the best, one of the best learning things that I found during my studies was it's called what wine am I tasting?
And I think it's the wine enthusiast. That does it. It's like a, it's like a, no, it's the wine spectator. And you go onto this site or you go onto this, um, their magazine and it'll be a one sentence, or two sentence description of a wine.
So for example, this red wine starts off, Racy has a purplish tone to it and is light bodied and blah, blah, blah. So then you look at the first set of possible answers. What are the possible varietals? And it'll give you five options.
It's a Cabernet Sauvignon. Is it a barbera? Is it a zinfandel? Is it a malbecor?
Is it a gamet? Right? So you think, okay, based on what I know, I'm going to guess that it's possibly a gamet. Next will be country of origin.
Third, third option will be vintage. Fourth will be regions and so on. So you basically based on that description, you're guessing varietal region, country and age and it goes back for years and years and years. And this is why it's awesome.
Yeah, it's awesome. But it's also like, I'm just never going to like, I am super into wine. I love it. I've taken W6 courses, but I'm just like, I'm never going to be so nerded out about it.
Did I give a shit about being able to tell what vintage it is? Like it's cool to know the grape and the region. I think that's a pretty cool thing to be able to tell by drinking it. But like the vintage, like, come on.
And people can do it. I understand that. But like, to me, it just doesn't matter. Well, people get really frustrated when they're, you know, at the, I'm at the Elora Milne now as one of the Psalms there and people get, then I train or get very frustrated very quickly about damn, I can never pick that up.
I can never, and I say, hey, I've watched videos of the best Canadian Psalms and any Psalm sitting around six of them at one table. And yeah, I remember watching one, Jen, who there was there, John Zabo, Will Freedom, all the best tasters, right? And they, they, all of them got it wrong. Some of them got varietal wrong.
That's the way he tastes things go. He's really tricky. And it's like, darn, I didn't get that. Like, well, it was a fantastic taster, but he just like darn, I didn't get that.
What it is is educated guesswork. Yeah. Right. It's a detective story.
Really. You're building your case. Right. Yeah.
Which is cool. I like that part about it. I'm going to go get it wrong. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. You got to let it go and realize shit, like you're only going to go so far with this. Yeah.
Yeah. It's funny. And like, so Rick has done some, does these blind tasting, what which golden events like the events that you do once a month now? Or like, yeah, I haven't, we've taken a couple months off.
Yeah. Just the busy summer. Yeah. I'm not doing it in October because just extra work that I'm doing, but November, I'll pick it up again.
Right. And so you did one if I was this, and I sat in on that one, like not as someone who was part of the club, but just like to see how it went. And it's interesting. It's like, it's a cool thing to sit through because I haven't done blind tasting since W said and, and I had just come off COVID.
So I still had like, oh, yeah. So I was literally, I didn't even try and guess because I was just like, I, I gave everything some other cost. So it's like, but I was interested to sit there and see like even like, and there were a lot of good wind nerds in the, at that tasting there, like some of the best ones in the city. Yes.
That come to this club. And they're still, it was hard. Like now, Rob Miller was the one who was curating it, right? Yeah.
So he did pick some tricky ones for sure. But he also picks some that you, that I remember thinking afterwards, like, oh, that, I feel like that's one that more people should have got. True. Yeah.
So it's again, at the end of the day, it's just like he say, it's like, it was like following the detective story, but sometimes we do another, but he also like, do you find whites much harder than reds? I find whites easier than reds. Okay. Yes.
I find whites easier than reds. And yeah, it's, it's, it's such a strange thing. It's building that case. There's, and I, I really do think, I think there's a method you can really train yourself to be good at tasting, but it's a matter of spending time at it and developing a method and that method has to have a sequence.
And Rob, you know, Rob is, you know, he's, as far as I know, he's one of the top dogs, if not the top dog in this area at the blinds. And he always says, like, look at, look at the substance. What are the phenolic notes? What are the, what's the structure of the wine?
What's, what's it telling you? And I've always, I've always, when I've been really wrong, I've always wanted to jump to conclusions really early in a tasting, tasting a certain wine and go, oh, what is this going to be? Blah, blah, blah. And then it's got, you know, it's got, you know, really, you know, bright, bright, bright mouthwatering notes to it.
Okay. This is going to be a seven-year block. And I jumped right away. Well, I don't delve deeper into it.
And then you catch other type of notes that could be, you know, bright and mouthwatering, but then you get some peppery notes to it and you miss the fact that it would be a greener velocleener. You and I had that beautiful bottle at Babylon. You have that great, that they still have that on that. Oh, right.
I got all that. You drank? We actually put it in the flight for a while, but the stuff that we did today, that was so good. So, so, so, so get this.
I was scheduled, or I did one year. I did my song exam. And two nights before the exam. So I told you the sequence, you, like you sit in on one night and then you go a couple days and then you'll do the exam.
Well, I had attempted to get certified, but I didn't get it one year because of my blinds. So then I go to do it again. So all I got to do is come in on the Monday and do the exam. On the Saturday night, my dog gets sprayed by skunk.
Oh. So you know those old cartoons when, you know, Wylie Coyote bites into a stick of dynamite and he's got this for all back like this. Well, my dog looks like that with skunk gunk, right? And that's all you can smell.
It's just, yeah. And I had several pets sprayed by skunk gunk for weeks. I thought, you know, how it smells like it? You're pet smells like it.
It's all you can smell. So I contacted the court. I said, Hey, all I could smell is skunk. I got, I got to the four right and I thought it'd be decent notes, but man, but I went all on taste because I could smell shit.
Yeah. You're just like, well, it has notes of marijuana. Yeah. And they said, no, because they said no, we can't do anything because if you, you know, if we did it for, you know, if we can say that, I guess, right?
We have to do for colds and whatever. Well, the reason I was talking about whites, I find more difficult is that because there's very subtle differences, like you said, between a greener and a soap law and like very subtle differences. And a lot of them, a lot of like the really good whites, especially the ones that you have at a tasting tend to be like high acidity. So you can't really determine it from that.
Yeah. You know, and like, and a lot of them, like, certainly if you get something that's more like citrus than stone fruit, maybe you can determine one from like stone fruit, more like it'd be a soap law or whatever, right? Yeah. But like I just find like there's so many different varietals in the whites that are very similar in flavor.
But maybe not as much in nose, but maybe that's why I'm not good at it. But at the red, at least it's like, I find that you can determine a lot by coloring, right? Yes. So that's like you can get a lot just by looking at it that you don't get necessarily by smelling or tasting it because you get like a garnet color.
It's more likely to be from a certain region or if it's like really dark ruby, then it's like, okay, it's probably probably talking about something in the capsule, their bordo sort of area, right? Yeah. My, my go to always is to look for any type of purple tinges, if I see purple tinges then usually, and again, this is, this is where you can trip yourself up by, by making an assumption too early in a tasting and you see, oh, I see some purple notes in that and my, my three grapes that usually have those purple notes are kind of gam, hate purple color to a gam, see raw and malbec. Right.
So when I see that, if I've got a real bright kind of orangy, tawny colored wine, you know, most likely I'm leaning towards something Italian, but if, but if I see something a little darker with those purple notes and I'm probably thinking one of those three and then I look for other characteristics of the wine that will lead me in a different direction. But, you know, it's easy to talk about it, but when I'm doing the blind, you know, I'm like, I have not been doing well with my group, right? With the group, you know, there's the one, the one week when raw brought in three of the same varietal crazy, three of the same, I think was three chardonnay. That was just a mind fuck.
It was so different. It was like, oh, they were so different. Everyone got messed up. But chardonnay can be very different, right?
Like that's the thing about the expression of chardonnay, right? Like there's certain grapes and what are some of the other like, we kind of just take this conversation where I really go, but now that we're talking about wine, I like to nerd out about it. Like, what do you find some of the other grapes that are that can just taste very differently based on the expressions? Well, I think the aromatics, like the Viognet is in the diverse demeanor.
I cannot stand diverse demeanor. Yeah. Yeah, to me, don't like it. One of my favorite grapes, I love it.
I love a vuvera or a shining blog. Yeah, I love them. But it's so funny because there is what you say, you know, the mind fuck about when you know what a wine is. When I know what a wine is, I will like it.
So I'll go to the LCBO. I don't think we wouldn't have any of the raise on the case of a wine list, but I'll go now. If I'm a final producer and I like it, I will buy vuvera and I will love it. Me, they're just really clean and the stone fruits.
I love stone fruits. On a blind tasting, I will usually not pick out a shining blog. And I don't know what it is. And I have to go to psychotherapists and get them to figure out why do you have a problem with shining blog?
Yeah. I'm just making some wine notes for myself. Yeah. But you know, when I do the kind of the allureme, we do a level course tasting menu.
My whole life is built. Eleven courses? Yeah. And I do a great job.
You know, my whole life has been tasting menus, right? Even at canoe. I was at canoe for 20 years. And for probably my last 10 years there, I would fill in as a song there when either Billy was away or Will was away or Emily was away.
And it wasn't that often, but for years I would do it. So you're dealing with, you know, some, you know, really to say we were, we had the biggest spenders at canoe restaurant on wine. No, we probably did. And because our clientele was very high end, but they were business people.
I want to talk about your clientele in a second, but I do want to mention something about the canoe and your pairing experience is that like, is that what you would say your specialty is now is like pairing food and wine? Yeah, that's just cool. Because I think, you know what that, I think that's a lot harder than people think it is because it's very easy for me. I've never been super good at it because I, again, I just don't think like I love drinking wine.
I love to eat good food. I'm a vegetarian. So that eliminates a lot of the pairing options, right? Which are natural.
And like I just don't even, I literally have been a vegetarian for so long that I don't remember what some meat tastes like. Oh, why? So I'm going to pair it. The other side of that is that I don't know like pairing wine with the food is very easy to be like, oh, fish, white wine and fish, right?
Like I think people just tend to fall back on, they just fall back on the standards, right? So it's very easy to bullshit your way through a food and wine period. And like white wine does, most white wine tastes pretty good with most food, right? Yeah.
But if you're really going to zero in on like what tastes, and like obviously most red wine is going to taste like a good thick juicy red wine is going to taste great with a steak. Like most people know that part of it. And so you can bullshit the rest a lot. So talk to me a little bit about how you have become a specialist in sort of doing the pairing because I, at front of ours, like we were talking about earlier before we started recording West Class and who's now on the show is also really good at that.
Yeah, it's very good. Yeah. So like, and I'm always, I always marvel at that. It's something I would always better add.
So yeah, to talk to me about it. I always, I always try and follow three, three different approaches. Number one is I look to balance whether I'm balancing flavors. So if I've got a dish that's really acidic, like in the beginning of a tasting menu, usually your food preparations are going to be lighter, fresher, crisper, more type of dishes where you're squeezing lemon on rather than like you're not going to have as your first course of a multi course tasting menu, approach salmon with a cream sauce on it.
You're not, it's not going to. It's probably going to be something raw and fresh where you're going to squeeze a lemon or lime onto it. And that's, so that's where the French wines are brilliant for it. So it should be or a saunce or a muscade.
I look at those type of things right away. So I look at balancing acidity with acidity or salty and sweet. So one of the great pairings, and this is moving into the meal, one of the great pairings is like a real salty blue cheese or an aged gouda with a port. Actually, there's one of the best, best pairings I've ever had and I love this stuff and it is not high end is a, is the cookie, cookie.
You would have cookie if removed on your. So coke will produce is a D O C G barola, which is your highest level of barolo wine, nebiola based grape and they make a vermouth. I also know this gets crack. And they whack, they hit it with all these different herbs and whatever.
And it's so it's called barolo, quinato and it's coke and they've produced this to have with a bitter type of chocolate. So you have a chocolate moose, dark chocolate moose or chocolate tort and this vermouth and it is, it is, it is fantastic. It's one of the best things I've ever tasted that barolo and the certain bittery herbal notes of that. But they're weird things.
If you have them by themselves, they're hard to drink. Like most, most, not many people will drink a, will drink a vermouth, you know, on the rocks or whatever. They're just a little weird, right? Yeah, but it's like, when you get a good one, it's like, fuck it, like, when you get a good vermouth, they taste so good.
Really? I've taken the drinking a lot of vermouth on its own now. Yeah. The antique, for me, like, that one's really cool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so good. But, you know, getting, getting back to what you're asking me also, you know, I'll look at the whole thing, food and wine that grow together, you pair together. So a lot of people ask me about that and I'll say, well, hey, let's look at France, for example, and as you travel down through the central part of France, through Burgundy and you're heading down south and you go into the Rhone and then you're going into the south of France, as you motor down, your food is getting a little bit more rustic, a little bit heavier, a little bit more tortillaires and that type of thing.
And your wine is the same. You're not getting, you know, light, fresh, acidic Pinot Noir, you're getting cheddignan and you're getting cabernet solvignon, where, you know, somebody was asking me about one of our wines from Provence and I know it's really ultra-tantic. And I say, you know that movie, Silence of the Lamb, in Hannibal Lecters wearing that face mask because, you know, you don't want to, well, the tannins are so big on this, it's just like you're wearing the Hannibal method. That's so rich, right?
Yeah. So, so tannic and that's what some of the wines are like, brilliant. But with fish, you got to stay away from tannins. Right.
And what you do, like, so what you were talking about like the blue cheese and the port, would you do that in the middle of a pairing dinner or you always wait until the end? So because the craft of it, like in the art of it is also, you also need to, because you could easily eat like some blue cheese in the middle of a dinner, but like if you're pairing wine with it, then like the crazy thing about wine, I'm trying to say this probably is that like the order on which you drink it matters so much because if you drink something really sweet or really tannic, then it's going to overwhelm the next thing that you might drink. Yes. Right.
It's very true. Like the order, that's why the order of how your food is presented is very important. And yeah, like if a chef, if a chef doesn't have the right order of operations or the right, that you know, a logical order of sending out stuff, then you've got a problem for the person pairing it. Have you ever worked with a chef who's fucked that up?
Yes. Yeah. You know who I mean? I think so.
Yes. I think I do. Yeah. Where you're starting with, oh yeah, let's start with Vlogra and then we're going to go to Scallops of Echa and then let's do a salad and then let's do some smoked salmon and now we're going to do a butternut squash soup.
And you're all over the place. And like, we were growing up in like sort of the more classic style of like old school restaurant touring where the chef is the king. Like you, you can't really say shit, right? Like you just got to kind of take, or do you ever like talk back to me like, look, you're fucking this up.
You know, I really would never end. And there's only one instance where I really had that difficulty. Yeah. And there's not a lot I could do.
And basically when you have a situation where things are messed up like that, it can really affect your pores. Because when you're doing lots of courses, you have to be careful with how much you're pouring. And ultimately, if somebody's having a 10 or 11 or a 15 course tasting menu, you want certain wines to be consumed over a couple of courses. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right. And usually you don't want to look chintzy where you're pouring an ounce per course. You want to usually go two and a half, three ounces in my eyes. Yeah.
So you're not giving 11, six ounces glasses on one. No. Damn. Right?
So you got to be really careful. Otherwise somebody's going to just be pie-eyed. You can't do it. So that's why you want certain wines.
If you have a really small course, that's like light and bright and fresh. You know, maybe some fresh tomato with watermelon, you want a little bit of that. And then you're going into some tuna tartar to follow. So you can kind of pour the same thing, the same wine for two courses.
And you only pour three ounces. Well, the fish chef messes that up. You're pouring three ounces there and then three ounces again. And then you're bouncing back and forth.
And if your fourth or fifth course is a raw, lightly, lightly produced dish, you're looking at a really light wine and you're pouring heavier wines in the start of your tasting. So you got to, yeah, there's a lot of thought that has to go into it. The tasting menus, I love the tasting menus at Canoe. They were brilliant.
Chef Walsh and Chef John Horn did great stuff. And what was so cool about those tasting menus is they always had a theme. And one of my favorite ones was taste, taste, mare times. So it was all east coast.
So we did, we had such a strong business client out there and a lot of people were always coming from Europe and the states. So had no idea of Eastern Canada culture. So a lot of the different people. We did a lot of the Newfoundland dishes.
So yeah, we got some. What's figgy Duff? What's figgy Duff? And he explains we had figgy Duff.
We had peas put in. We had five or six different things, bubble and squeak, all of these things. I don't know any other thing. The stories, the stories and people just love the stories.
We did, this is one of my best screw ups at a table. We did a, it was called Taste, Hide of Light. So East, or West Coast. And Chef had a lot of game on this.
A lot of kind of weird forced floor things like mosses and cedas and wild berries. And so, so for dessert, for lack of a better word, the dessert was like a crumble, a wild berry crumble. So, so what he did is he had this cedar plank. He warmed up the cedar plank, made it nice and hot and then he put a nice mixture of like, you know, crumble with wild blueberries, wild blackberries and all of these things and then put a nice cedar ice cream with it.
Really tasty dessert. It was really nice. It looked really nice on the, this warm cedar plank. Well, I delivered to a table and I blank out.
Can't remember what the hell. So I put it down and I stare at it and I go, I looked at it and they're looking at me. It's a couple. Here's your dessert.
See, berry crumble on a warm board. And I walk away. I can't remember what the heck it was. Berry crumble, warm board.
So this kind of, this is what I'm asking, is there any kind of food that can't be paired properly with wine or wine just goes with pretty much anything? Oh, that's a good one. Geez. You're probably not cereal or something like that, but like.
Certain things, I think certain things are really tough, but there's always, there's always wines for everything. I think, what would I, like, I think really bitter foods, I think are difficult, right? Like the Andy Line type of things. Yeah, yeah.
I think bitter salads. So you get a nice acidic dressing with it or mouthwatering dressing. There's certain words that you shouldn't use when you're describing wine flavors to your guests, right? And acidic is one of those words.
Oh, it's a acidic wine because it almost has a negative connotation. Right, but it's like, when you're narrative on wine, you realize acidity is one of the things you're looking for. It's the key thing, right? A lot of acidity.
So I always try and say mouthwater and retire into it. Mouthwatering, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I remember one of the first things I learned in, like probably W said level two was like how to determine if a wine was acidic was the test where you like swallow it and then you put your head down and just hold your mouth and if all the saliva runs to the front of your mouth and that was a super acidic one. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's always stuck with me. It's like, it's a way of telling. Like, no, why is that?