I'll try not to swear. No, that's the thing. I f***ing swear a lot, probably more than anybody else on this show, and he bleeps 98% of them. Oh, okay. So maybe if he just swore less. Okay. I had a friend years ago who had another friend who was in the Eighth Army in North Africa as an ambulance driver. And the Germans were pounding the hell out of them, and they were having to cannibalize ambulances that were busted to fix the ones that were running. Okay. That's the best end of that sentence. And at one point, the little Welsh mechanic who did all this had to finally say there was one he couldn't repair sufficiently and what he said was, I'm sorry, sir, the f***ing f***ers f***. Okay, we're going to have to bleep that. I just wanted to get us off on the right foot. Okay. You are listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I am Greg. I do communications at Binny's. Hi, I'm Chris. I do wine-related things. My name is Bill. I'm one of the buyers. Kind of a wine heavy episode. We have a guest, Gregory. That's it. I'm really bad against people. We have a guest. It's Gregory. You are a wine guru? Gregory from Hyde Park. I'm just a wine consultant, which is a wonderful way to describe chatting with people about the wines they wish they could drink. Yeah. I remember one time you said, don't call yourself a wine professional, because then people see that as a challenge. I'm from Hyde Park where there's lots of brilliant people with egos that are bigger than mine. So I like them to have as much room for their ego as they need. Should we say why Gregory is on the podcast? Gregory, why are you on the podcast? Because I'm about to retire after more than 23 years with the company. 23? Is that first tour of duty plus second tour of duty? No, you're not allowed to add them together. Or I'd be getting a larger pension, I guess. Roger has the same complaint. I started at Memorial Day weekend of 1981 as a cheese clerk in Hyde Park, and I was in the cheese department for a couple of years until the head person in that department moved to Carolina. Then there was an opening on the wine side, so I went to wine because all the people who were asking me at the cheese cutter was, what should I drink with this? So it seemed the sensible thing to do. Then I was in the wine department until 1985 when a secondhand bookstore in Hyde Park wanted to pay me twice as much to work for them. So I worked for secondhand bookstores for the next 15 years, came back to Binny's in May of 2000, and this is my 23rd year of my second tour. I have the greatest customers on the planet, and I can say confidently that between the readers at the bookstores and the drinkers at Binny's, everybody in Hyde Park knows who I am, even if they don't know my name. Sometimes it would be like the folks at the grocery store used to say, yeah, it's that Binny's guy. You are a Hyde Park institution. I confess, whether I like it or not, I am. It's not that you're going to continue to be a Hyde Park institution too. Well, unless I drop dead, which hopefully won't happen. Hey, Gregory, let's start out with the scandal sheets. Can you tell us some of the celebrities that have come into your store considering you are in the heart of Hyde Park? Did Barack Obama ever come in there? Barack Obama came into our store when we were still on 53rd Street. I have to tell you that the interaction between Mr. Obama and the clients and whatnot was amazing, incredible. He has the most amazing presence that I've ever experienced, except for maybe Teddy Kennedy who had the same thing. They call that charisma. Exactly. What it boils down to is he has a way of making you feel as if the only person he's listening to is you, no matter who else is in the room. That is a remarkable feeling. He would come in every once in a while to buy a bottle of wine to share with Michelle. I would sell him something good, like Ridge. Perfect. I'd say, well, I had this recently with my wife. I think that your wife will enjoy it as well. It would suddenly occur to me as I was reaching for the bottle, oh my God, that's Senator Obama. It's just like when he would first come in, he would just be like a regular guy in a black t-shirt, jeans, and a ballgap. A pack of smokes rolled up in his sleeve. I don't know if I remember the smokes, but- I mean, he was a prominent member of the Trume gang. So yeah, I've met him a few times and he's really pretty amazing. That's cool. So one of the reasons I'm in this podcast is, aside from my sparkling personality, of course, is I'm the German wine buyer and Gregory, it's devastating for me that Gregory's leaving because Gregory is the best by far, the best seller of German wine So you want to open a bottle? Well, as a matter of fact, I already did. As a matter of fact. We have a Donnhoff Spateless here from the Nye region, and because I think Gregory likes German wine. It's an audio medium, but he's giving a thumbs up. Gregory is giving a thumbs up. As I've said many times, German wines, particularly the ones that we are fortunate enough to see, German wine is a work of art. Indeed. This is Donnhoff right from the Niederhauser Hermannshohle. Can you say it all at once? Niederhauser Hermannshohle? Well, that's not all of it. Donnhoff? Donnhoff Niederhauser Hermannshohle, Riesling Spateless at 2019. 2019. This is one of the greatest vineyard sites in this region. Niederhauser. Of course, a legendary producer. Oh my gosh. It's kind of a baby at 2019. Oh, it's total baby. Donnhoff sells pretty well. We don't have a lot of older vintages lying around, so I had to grab this one. But 2019 was a good vintage and this is delicious. Plus, you could drink it every day. What's the alcohol content? Like nine? It is eight, five percent. Yeah, 8.5. So you could have it for breakfast with your pancakes. Maybe you could have it for breakfast. Certainly at 11sies. Oh my word. That's delightful. What a gorgeous thing. Spatulaser, so late picked as the word suggests. The grapes are in the vineyard a little longer. They develop additional sugar. But great Spatulaser like this, it still has compelling acidity. So the wine is not simply sweet. It's refreshing and delicious. You could drink it with a wide range of things, especially pork. Ham, pork chops, chicken, oh my god, for turkey. Turkey is hopeless. You can't, I mean, turkey needs help all the time, but Riesling tastes fabulous with turkey, which is why people drink tons of it at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And spicy food too. I love Riesling with- Thai food. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot that. I don't know how I forgot that because I eat Thai food for breakfast most of the week. Yeah. Especially fruitier wines like this Shbele is just incredible with hotter Asian cuisines. Descriptors. Fruit salad, ton of apricot, and like orange blossom. And then the sweetness, yes, it's there, but it's this sweet tart, and the whole thing just twists at your salivary gland. It really does. I mean, what a wine. But it also has that beam of iodine almost. Yeah. There's definitely maybe a hint of saline running through this. Just a teeny bit of that way at the back just to remind you to keep drinking. I can't live a bit of it on the nose too though. Yeah. Maybe a bare hint of petrol. Yeah. And that is just yummy. Yeah. How much is it, Bill? Oh, it's a lot. It's 22 or 23? No, no, no. It's around 50 something. Yeah. It's in the 50s. Yeah. Well, for 50 bucks it better be good. But like I was saying, this is the Hermannshohle Vineyard, which is considered a grand crew in this country. Okay, you didn't say that. We didn't go for the... So this is Grossgewacht or what? It is not. It's a Spateless, so Grossgewacht. They do make one out of this vineyard site. They do. And we've had it, but they make very little of it. Yeah. They don't make a lot of this either, so there's not a lot around the chain. But there's a little bit. There's some at the Lincolnwood store for sure. But those are required to be bone dry, and this is Spateless with residual sugar. But this vineyard site is right on a bend in the river, and it's directly south-facing and it has great exposure. The grapes get beautifully ripe and perfectly balanced, as this wine demonstrates in spades. Of course, this wine would last 40, 50 years. Yeah. We're hitting this on the upswing here, and it's delicious right now. But yes. I have to tell you that Bill gave me credit for being a great salesman. But in fact, the reason why we've managed to sell so much great German wine is that the producers keep giving us library vintages. Yes. That they find that they have bottles of that they thought they had sold already, and they know we want them, so they just send it to Binny's. Okay, great. So you get to have often, and we've done this recently, 20 to 25-year-old Riesling that tastes like it was made yesterday, and it is spectacular, and the prices are reasonable. Right. You sell a lot of the Anheuser stuff, right? Oh, yeah. The prices are stupid for something that old. $14.99, $16.99, something like that. Under 20, wherever toys are sold, cheapest. And the thing is, those wines are so good, you're going to want to drink them at home in the dark, and not tell anybody you've got them, because you want it all for you. Right. You have called me up and said, okay, your store has four bottles. I did. I didn't say that. And you need to go and get two of them, and take one home and drink it, and then come back tomorrow and buy the other two. I always considered you a master of finding value and nibbling around the edges of fine wine. I think you have a penchant for looking to, say, the South France or Portugal, places like this. I remember when I first started working at Binny's, I heard from Barbara that Hyde Park sells more, I think she was talking about, broadly, like Languedoc, more Southern French wine in a week than Willowbrook sells in a year. What are you guys doing? What is wrong with you? I'm like, well, you've got a freaking engine over there who just sells things by the case. I mean, maybe not by the case, but you push it out the door like nobody's business. I love to find stuff that nobody's paying attention to. I love it when they're not paying attention to it. And Bill will tell you every time we got a distro of something that was really good from Germany, the only thing I would ask him when we were done with the distro was, was there anything left? Because then I wanted all of it, whatever was left. And one time years ago, I think it was the 2000 Spatelaza from Anheuser. You know, there was a distro, it went to a bunch of stores, they ignored it, but they still had 30 cases. Well I started to take the cases five at a time. And inside of six weeks, we took all the 30 cases and sold all the 30 cases. And everybody who bought a case, after having a bottle or two, is like came back to me and said, is there more of that? Because for $14.99, how was it? It was awesome. Yeah, that was a fun one for sure. Wow. And that was one of the ones where at Anhoiser, their seller runs under their vineyard for acres. And they have all these corners where stuff is just kind of stashed. Well they discovered one time that they had zillions of bottles of this 2000. And the first time it showed up, we only got three cases. I bought one myself and I sold the other two that day. Some of these German estates we work with where we get some of that stuff, don't think Napa here. This is like these guys are farmers. Yeah. And it's like Gregory was saying. Forever. They've been there forever. The whole thing about Germany is every single scrap of arable land that's used for wine is already catalogued and has been forever. So, the people who do it for a living know where everything is. You just have to decide to go get it. What's the name of that one that's the Pistol Range? Hottenheimer Schützenhaus? Come on. Are we going to have to bleep that? No, no. Schützenhaus. Yeah. Ress, maybe. Oh, yeah. Both are Ress. Yeah. They stopped sending their stuff overseas. Because the people at home finally found out how good it was. Yeah. People probably remember that had a bright orange label, right? Yep. Wonderful. I remember the time that they sent us the test tubes full of wine. We stood them up in a little pencil box on the desk. 7.99 or something for those? Oh, yeah. I remember those. The wine was amazing. It was incredible. And we went through a ton of it. Once people knew what it was, you just have to lead them to the shelf and put it in their hand. That's all you have to do. The whole point about the wines from the south of France or right now from the Rhone is that these places are reservoirs of value. You can find great wines for practically no money. Right. As I like to say, when I sell one, you'll have money left for the roast chicken. These are beautiful things and you can have great wine, but you can't have great wine without France. So, yeah, there's that. One of the things that got me into the Portuguese wines is that I went to a dinner years ago. There was a tasting of this group of seven Portuguese wineries that was sort of barnstorming across the country doing tastings in Chicago and New York and San Francisco and Seattle and all that stuff. And I happened to sit at the same table as Pedro Anarim, who was the chief executive of Avaleda and also the Portuguese consul for Chicago at the time. And we're getting to dessert and Pedro turns to me and says, well Gregory, why don't you stand up and say something about Portuguese wines for the benefit of your colleagues in the room? And I was a little shocked that he asked me to do that. And a little frightened because speaking to a crowd is always a little scary. But I finally decided I had nothing to lose. So I stood up and what I said to people was, your customers have never heard of these wines. They know about Port, they know about Vino Verde and that's it. They've never heard of Portuguese wine. So you have to bring them to the shelf, show them what it is and hand it to them. It's as simple as that and once the wine takes over, you don't have to do a thing. Just lead them back to the shelf when they forget where they got it. That's it. Everybody goes, oh, okay. Afterwards, the wines we'd had with that dinner were fantastic and afterwards, all of the producers who were there or their reps, somebody from each one came up to me and said, thank you very much for your remarks. That's when all that crazyness started. I'd grown up with some Portuguese stuff in Southern Massachusetts when I was helping my brother-in-law build a house. So I drank Fino Verde every weekend because it was $2.99. Why not? The Portuguese want to be on our shelves, and so the prices that they offer us, by and large, are ridiculous. They are so cheap and they're fabulous. The wines are great. How much is that Azul selling for? $7.99 for that beautiful thing? That's from Dow, I think. Yep. And, you know, $7.99. What can you buy for $7.99 that you want to drink? Right. And I think the style on top of it, it's complex, but it plays into the American palate because they're soft, they're juicy, there's lots of fruit, but there's also a lot of other things going on. It's a lot of wine for the price. It'll age, too, if you want to buy it and hang on to it for a minute. Yeah, they're pretty well stuffed. I mean, we're talking about a lot of wines that are made with the classic port grapes and sometimes from the classic port houses. I have a great relationship with the Symingtons, and our favorite product of theirs, of course, is Postscriptum, which took a price increase recently. But, jeez, for a decade or something, it was $20 a bottle, 1999. And the best wine that no one had ever tasted, absolutely, because Toriga Nacional and Toriga Franca are as good as cabernet or Merlot any day of the week. No. If you drink port and you recognize the flavors in this dry wine, how unhappy you're going to be. Right. These are great grapes, and they come from what amounts to a desert that has hills. I mean, the climate in the Douro is horrible. The roots have to go down something like 20 feet to granite that's full of water. So the grapes, they take their time, and the fruit ends up being spectacular. Not to mention the exhaustion of picking on a trellis, picking on a steeply sloped. I've driven up and down those slopes in a Land Rover, and I thought we were going to topple over a couple of times. I mean, I just, I was terrified. And you're praying nobody comes from the other direction. No kidding on that track that you're on. Try it on a donkey. I, you know, one time, one time when I was there visiting a very famous wine maker named, oh, Mateusz, I forget his last name, but his dad is responsible for Ramos Pinto 20. And he's, he's a famous guy, but his vineyard was by the river at the foot of one of these slopes. And we went over to it in a horse drawn carriage. The horses, two horses, they were fighting with each other on the way over, nipping each other, flying along at like 35 miles an hour. And I was terrified. And in the distance, there was a pack of feral dogs that you could see. And, and they were looking at us like, oh, this could be a lunch. You know, I just, wow. Gregory, it sounds like your career is a lot longer than I thought it was. When was this? 1890? I actually, I went to Portugal in 2012, and I was there for six days, and we traveled 1,860 kilometers. Now, Portugal is about the size of Indiana. So, try to imagine all of Indiana in six days. The only place we didn't actually get to was Oporto, and I'm sad about that because, of course, you could sit there and soak up some more port, but the rest of the country is beautiful. Lisbon in particular is one of the most amazing places I've ever been, and the food, the quality of the cuisine, whether it's roast chicken or fish or whatever it is, is spectacular. I mean, even if you have a ham and cheese sandwich at a highway rest stop, it's going to be the best ham and cheese sandwich you've ever had in your life. I remember once I was going to the tasting for the 2016 release of Vintage Port that the Symington sponsored way up north someplace. I had to take an Uber to get there and all that. So I was a little late. And when I got there, Rupert Symington, who's in charge of US operations for them, says to me, Oh my word, Gregory, I was really going to make it. And I said, Rupert, I wouldn't miss this for the world. Gregory, what else you got? Up my sleeve? Yeah, you got anything? What else do we have that's really great? Oh, I have to tell you, the best white wine that I've come across in recent years, and I hope that they go on forever. This is a Symington product from Portugal, is the wine that they make from the Elintége, the Quinta da Fonte Souto. The red is great, but the white is absolutely spectacular. $23.99 and it's as good as any white Burgundy I ever had in my life. I could drink it every day and be perfectly happy. That Portuguese white is just thrilling, and it's just surprising because it doesn't come from the Douro, like all the other Symington products. That vineyard is in the south, in the Elintége, and it's apparently on some hill in the middle of nowhere and has fantastic exposure. So the vineyard itself has the best grapes available down there. I remember my impression of the Elintége, what little I saw of it was just acres and acres of fields of grain, and cork trees, and horses and cattle all over the place. Just amazing. Yeah. Portugal, of course, primary source of cork. For all the things that are wrong with cork, and there's plenty of things that are wrong with cork, some people insist that wine isn't great unless it has a cork finish. I don't feel that way now because there's so many good things on screw cap. There's lots of great white burgundy that has screw caps now. Chablis in particular. I don't care what you close your wine with, if the wine's good, you can do it any way you want. But my favorite thing that started out expensive got cheaper because we sold so much of it and is now creeping back up again is the Hermit Crab from Darenburg. Darenburg, yeah. What a fabulous wine. Another thing you could drink every day and be happy it's in your fridge. It's an Australian white. Yeah, from McLaren Vale. Yep. Speaking of white wines, it tastes fabulous. Can I have a Riesling, man? So, we were talking a little bit about Symington. And Symington, of course, is the company that owns Grahams, and they own Dow and Coburn, Smith-Woodhouse. But there's also another side that's not Symington, that is Fonseca and Taylor Fladgate and Croft. And we are going to try a Taylor Fladgate 30-year-old Tawny Port. We basically took the years that Gregory has worked for Binny's, rounded up a little bit. And we came up with this one. That was his best guess. And this producer, Chris, you want to talk a little bit about the Tawny Ports from Taylor Fladgate? Sure, I can do that. I think Taylor Fladgate has one of the great Tawny programs in the Dorro. And they are always spot on exactly what they should be, which is representations of a certain age, although they're not exactly that age, confusingly. Yeah, we have that fight on the show. Yeah, we're not going to go through that again. Anyway, age Tawny's generally come in 10, 20, 30, and 40 year old. That's kind of the standards. And then you can have, of course, vintage dated Tawny's, which are known as Colhetas, which literally just means vintage. So they can be of any age. But the point of Colhetas is to remind you that the aging is in wood, not in the bottle like a Ruby would be. Indeed. That's exactly right. Two years in bottle for vintage ports, and then whatever time you want to give them in bottle. But here, they're doing the aging for you. And of course, along with this aging in large oak barrels, you get oxidation. So thus the name Tawny, because the color becomes Tawny over time. Brown. Well, it's really tan. It's kind of a vibrant tan. And the only thing that is that color is this wine and certain thoroughbreds. That's about it. One of the reasons I picked this is because usually, honestly, 20 year Tawny is, I think, is like perfect. But this 30 year, and I bought a bunch of it for the stores, is just amazingly good. The one thing I'm going to add, just for fun, if you ordered a bottle of Tawny in a restaurant in Portugal, they would bring it to you in a champagne bucket. Yeah, cold. Cold. Because these things taste amazing when they're chilled. And it also means that you don't have to wait to Christmas to drink your Tawny. You can have it in the summer. Yeah. You can have it under the beach umbrella. I mean, and be happy, because it tastes like a million dollars. I think a chilled 10-year-old in the summer is delightful. Cha-cha. Well, and the other thing too is that it makes perfect sense also, because Tawny Ports will last a month, two months. So you take it home, you open it up, you don't want your night and drink a bottle of Tawny Port anyway. So you have a glass and you throw it in the refrigerator, so it's ready to go for the next time you want it. And the other thing to mention about Tawny's, like Madeira, making them involves oxidation, so they have the capacity to last your lifetime or longer. You're going to drink it before that, but you don't have to worry about anything once it's open. It's not, oxygen isn't going to affect it at all. Unlike vintage ports, which you have to drink it when you open it. Too bad, huh? Yeah. Daily, that's the day or two. People know what we're talking about here. A 10-year, and these prices have just been inching up lately like with everything else. Ten years, 30, 35 bucks. A 20-year is going to be in the 50 plus range. Then this one, I think, is $135. There's a big jump. This is a special occasion, Tony, for sure. But it's really, really good. Yeah. Here you've got full-blown rancio notes. You're all into nuts, and caramel, and chocolate. There's precious little fruit to speak of, although there's bright citrusy acidity still as a counterpoint. To all the brown sugar sweets. Yeah. It's delicious. I would just point out that these two categories that we're drinking, although we're drinking expensive versions on the world stage, these are freaking values. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's true. Underrated categories. Well, let's think about it in another way. What would you pay for a 10-year-old Scotch? What would you pay for a 20-year-old Scotch? A 30-year-old Scotch, your car isn't that expensive. Right. That's true. Yeah. What Chris is saying is so true is because, for example, this Riesling, which is $50 is also, I mean, white burgundies that come from Grand Cru vineyards are what, $300? Yeah. A white burgundy of this quality, it'd be in the stratosphere. Right. Yeah. Unfortunately. And so, what you need is a white burgundy that you can afford and there is one. Let's hear it. He's got it in his pocket. R-U-L-L-Y, especially the Bouchard Père-et-Fils. Just under 30, stellar, fabulous, yummy. Wow. A solid hidden gem of a village. We glommed on to the 2017 vintage roundabout, the beginning of things in 2020 and I tasted it. I thought it was fabulous. I brought some home for Easter and my wife said, gee, honey, can you bring it home for our anniversary in May? As soon as I heard that, I knew I had something- A permission slip. Great on my head. Well, yeah, there's that. But we ended up selling more than 55 cases of that wine over, I don't know, a year and a half, two years. That was the Bouchard. Then the Druin is out there sometimes too, and that's another one. Fabulous. Ruy is just, nobody pays any attention to it because it's little, and the wine from there can be out of this world. Well, the thing that's happening also in Burgundy, I sat in on an extensive Burgundy tasting yesterday and it was fabulous. A lot of riper, warmer vintages lately, and some of the more marginal villages that had trouble getting full ripeness maybe 20 years ago. It's like a cakewalk these days and the wines are, the quality is just unbelievable. Thank God for global warming. I don't think it's God's fault. But he could still intervene for God's sake. I think that's what Noah said, right? Something like that. Damn climate change. Gregory, what is Patty cooking? Well, yesterday, she made something that she makes when she thinks we're living a little too richly, and all it is is beans, dried beans like Navy beans or something like that. But it's probably going to be chickpeas this time around, ground turkey on broken pasta and brown rice. Right. It is out of this world. So I'm happy to have it whenever she wants to make it. This is the punishment for living fat on the hog. I am the hog? Am I blending up metaphors here? Well, she made a sort of risotto-like experience with farro over the weekend with feta and something else that I can't remember what the third ingredient was, but it was wonderful. It was just amazing. Farro is a great grain. I love how tooth-some it is. It's chewy. It is chewy. The problem was, it took her forever to make this because the recipe suggested you soak it for a little while, but it really needed like a day. Because I guess the grain is as hard as a stone until you'd prepare it that way. Well, she's working with dried beans too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She should be hip to that. And she is. In a lot of Gregory's emails, they would include, Patty cooked a simple dish. All right. A simple dish involving hot olive oil, garlic, sea salt, wilted spinach, thin sliced mushrooms that blanched just slightly. A little dash of Worcestershire sauce and so on. And eventually, it's not a simple dish anymore. Where's the rest of us? Well, I think we need to put a finer point on this. I don't know if you still do or when you last did it, but you used to put out like a newsletter. That's what started this in the first place. So here's, okay, before he goes on, I just want to say, so back before I was a buyer, this was in the 2007 through 2013. Wine manager bill? No, I was in charge of events. That's right, you were. And Gregory would send me his newsletters that he would send out that would include like telling people what wines he was going to be opening at the store that week and for years. Yeah, from 2004 until 2014 or so. Yeah, it's like for 10 years you were sending out this. They looked like they were written by a serial killer or you know. Gregory was artistic with the fonts and color choices. Well, only because you don't like that particular one. One that looks like script. Oh my God, Comic Sans. Yeah. It's the worst font. I love that. Just yesterday, Pat sent us. By the way, Pat wishes he could be here. He is saddened that he has to go to Kentucky to taste bourbon today. That's just too bad. Yes. He really wanted to be here. Then I'd have a chance to say he was a great American, which I said to him once a thousand years ago and Maloney has never let him forget it. All right. He sent a picture of a brewery's menu. It's not technically Comic Sans, but the whole thing was in that atrocious font. Oh, yeah. It hurt my eyes to look at this photograph that he texted us. Anyway, he can't make it. He's bummed. Gregory used to send these emails. He was a pioneer in email marketing. I would read some of them, but you are already hearing him talk. And his emails are written exactly like how he sounds right now, right? Including the interjections of yummy. And, oh boy, and at some point, it became my job. I would sometimes stop in the middle of the page and in some huge font, I'd say, you need this. With like 18 exclamation points, it would have wrapped down to the next slide, you know? And of course, there was always, went to the farmer's market and Patty's making this. Yeah. Yeah. Which was a great feature. I knew whenever he was having asparagus and not for the reasons that other people. Well, asparagus is one of the glories of cuisine. It's terrible for wine, but Dry Rosé works with asparagus like nobody's business. What do we like to sell in Hyde Park? We like to sell Dry Rosé. Holy cow. I'm pretty sure that along with other categories that you mentioned, that we were one of the first stores on the Dry Rosé bandwagon long before Barbara wanted to have anything to do with them. I don't think she does still. She does. She loves them. She knows what a huge moneymaker they are. Yeah. Okay. On that regard, yeah. That's why she gave the category to Bill. Right. Exactly. What can I say? I love Dry Rosé. Our favorite is from Spain. It's $6.99. Protocolo. Yeah. $6.99. Fabulous. And it is a charmer. I opened that for a cocktail on the podcast once, and Greg said, this is a terrible Rosé. I know. And literally the next day, he called and said, have you had this Protocolo Rosé? It's very good. Maybe we had a bad bottle. It was fine. My favorite probably is still Houchard, which is Provencal Rosé. It's $14.99 now. I remember when it was $10.99 and would be on sale for $8.99. And when it was on sale for $8.99, the cases used to fly out of the store. It is absolutely perfect. It's always been great. It still is. What a charmer. It is a nice example. And then of course, my other favorite for me when, you know, it's just me, Gazela Vinoverde Rosé from Portugal, $5.99. It's wonderful. It's got that, my wife doesn't like it because it has that spritz that Vinoverde has, that little fizziness. It's wonderfully refreshing and it's like 9% alcohol. So, who cares if you drink the whole bottle? Nobody. He's pitching this like low alcohol is a good thing. I guess a lot of people feel that way. It is, especially as you age and what, you know, I'm practically, well, I'm elderly now. I hate to say it, but it happened. You know, when my primary care physician entered the examination room to tell me that she'd finally put me on a Torvastin for blood pressure, she said, relax, you're an old guy. I just looked at her like, when did that happen? And that's why that low alcohol stuff is so fantastic. Plus, what could you not eat with that? I mean- Oh, you can eat anything with that. Exactly. That's the point of rosé. That's like sparkling wine. Rosé goes with everything. Anything, yeah. We had a fantastic sparkling rosé or dry rosé from Scarpe de yesterday. Wow, was it good? It was yummy. I couldn't believe it. All right. What else would you care to cover? You like bourbon. Do I like bourbon? Just a question. I like bourbon. All right. So part of the reason he wishes Pat was here, because he wants to scold Pat for making our whiskey hotline handpicks too expensive. Well, the one exception, of course, is the Barton Binny's Single Barrel. The Clark and Sheffield? Yeah. What a fabulous whiskey. It's terrific. I remember about 10 years ago, you rediscovered whiskey and ginger. I think I was just talking to you casually and you were telling me. Whiskey and ginger ale. Yeah. Because I was talking to Maloney and he has some buddies who bring ginger ale from Kentucky for him. It's a particular brand that's only available there. It's L8-1. Yeah. Because it's a late one, but it's Kentucky, so it's L8-1. Of course. Of course. He loves it more than anything. He does. I think it's fine. Yeah. I don't know why, but I just remember that highball renaissance you were having. Well, part of it is because when I went to Chile, they made us drink Pisco Sours every time we sat still. It's a great way to get protein with your alcohol. Oh, gross. I mean, he makes me drink egg somewhat frequently. You know, if you do it right, you don't have to worry, but I used to put the yolks in even. Yeah, he did that like a week ago. It doesn't hurt it one bit. And port. What was it? A port flip. We did a port flip with a whole egg and it was delightful. Of course it was. What a great way to get your protein. It's basically a health drink. No medical claims being made on Barrel to Bottle, Binny's Podcast. I was just going to say like the AMA is not listening. Indeed. We pureed a little wheatgrass in there. It's a cayenne. I think there was an acai berry too. Port flip cleanse. Yeah. All right. I have to tell you the alcohol I miss the most in this hiatus is gin and tonic. Oh yeah. And only because we carry now the greatest gin and tonic gin on the planet, which is Mahon from Mallorca. Oh yeah. Spanish gin and tonic. It's so good. M-A-H-O-N. In a liter bottle for $44.99. Okay. A liter bottle and it doesn't have like a Ratafia wrapper on it. No, but it has the little ring that you can pick it up like a jug. Right. There's something really old school about it. Yeah. Yeah. We're getting close to gin weather. You're in a room full of gin and tonic lovers, I think. True. I had four of them last night. Gin weather is all year though. You drink it in winter to remind yourself of warm weather. Exactly. And to hydrate. So, Gregory, what the Mahon gin, what style is it in? It's much more complex than London Dry is. Okay. Okay. And I like the fact that it's not too far away from Yenever, which I adore. So there is this intense juniperiness from it. And I used to complain about the fact that vodka made from grapes. What is it? Ciroc. Okay. We have the melon expression, the brand new melon flavor over here. It turns out that Mahon is made from grapes from Penedis. So I can't complain about things made from grapes anymore. I was going to say, do we mention this is a Spanish gin? Yeah, absolutely. And do you drink Spanish style gin and tonics? Or do you make a classic kind of? I didn't know there was such a thing as a Spanish style gin and tonic, but it's something I willingly investigate. You should. I like lots of other gins. I grew up on Gordon's and that's wonderful with some of that Koval Gin Liqueur in it. Yeah, the cranberry one. The cranberry one? Best thing that ever happened to cranberry boy. I don't know. I'm sensing a theme here with cranberries. Give that guy a medal. Wow. I think it's a lady. That's fine too. That Mahon is fabulous. And the only other things I like as much as that are, what's the one from Holland? Nolette. That is a very complex and aromatic. Oh, it's so good and so smooth. You're working your way through the bottle in no time. It goes down faster than Hendrix does, and Hendrix goes down way too fast. So Gregory, tell us, what are some of your plans for retirement? What are you going to do? I don't know what I'm going to do. I always enjoyed writing what I wrote. Because you had to say something catchy and succinct at the same time. As you got to each item, you had to figure out a way to describe it in a few sentences. My problem with the reviews from famous wine critics is, one, I don't have any use for the litany of adjectives. To describe fruit or something. Okay, so it has fruit. It has to have fruit. So why spend a whole lot of time talking about pears and peaches when you can just leave it at fruit and keep going? I also like to bear in mind that what separates us from the Europeans with regard to wine is that for them, wine is an article of diet. Nobody would ever offer you a meal without a glass of wine. And so it's important to think of it as integrated into a meal. When somebody says we're not going to eat anything with it, I think, but you're missing out on so much. Because of how well this particular wine, whatever it is, goes with food. So I'd like to keep writing things about stuff like that. I don't know who writes the copy for our wines, but I see a lot of stuff from producers that's, some of it's on the money, some of it isn't. There's some reviewers that I do like, James Suckling for one, because he's been at this forever. He must be like 99. And I first started to pay attention to him because of course he reviews port. But there's a little Bordeaux out there called LaFont-Fourquat, that he gave a great review to five years ago. And every year we get more of it. And it's 11 bucks or something and it's awesome for 11 bucks. All right. We all have this Riesling. No, we don't. Oh, I'm sorry. I'll pretend like we all have this Riesling. Okay. Here's a toast to an amazing career in touching a community. And, you know, thank you all for your part in it. I couldn't have done it myself, by myself. And I was also inspired by things that other people had to say. The greatest thing about going to those wine meetings was how collegial the tastings were. And how inspiring and knowledgeable everybody is. Well, it was great that everybody had their two cents to throw in. Indeed. Well, I think we've said it all. I think we got a show here. These guys were worried that without a solid outline, we wouldn't fill time. But I wasn't worried about that. You know, between us, we all have a ton of stories. True. Really. True. What I'm so impressed by, and I always have been, is that every time I meet a new producer, I learn something else. Yeah. I mean, I think of all the great dinners I've been to, and half of what made those dinners great was to be able to hear comments from the producer themself. How do you feel about the wine you make? There's nothing like that. That's true. Gregory, thank you for taking some time out of your busy schedule to hang out with us this morning. It was a blast. To all of our listeners, thank you for listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. We'll be back in your feed next week. I don't know, Roger makes pie. I don't know. Until then, I'm Greg. I'm Chris. I'm Bill. And I'm Gregory. And I say, keep tasting. And yeah, I'll continue to taste, and I hope that all of you will too. That is the least succinct reading of keep tasting we've ever gotten. Do you want to keep tasting or do you want to leave it at that? Well, I think I'll leave it at that. He got it. All right, we're done.