Wine for Good Times

Today, my second book, Wine for Good Times, officially becomes available for pre-order.

Which is a sentence I’ve been waiting a long time to write.

I haven’t written here in a while. More than a year, actually. And before disappearing, I had built some real momentum with this Substack. So it feels appropriate that the thing bringing me back is something that has taken up an enormous amount of my life over the last few years.

A book about wine.

The funny thing is, for a long time I wasn’t convinced the world needed another one.

When we first started talking about this book, I kept coming back to the same thought: haven’t all the definitive wine books already been written?

There are encyclopedias. Atlases. Reference books. Books about regions and grapes and producers and vintages and everything else you could possibly want to know. I own a lot of them. I’ve learned from a lot of them. There isn’t one book that taught me wine. It’s always been pieces from all of them, collected over time.

So what the hell was I going to add?

Then I started thinking about my DMs.

Every week, I get thousands of messages from people asking me questions about wine. And what struck me wasn’t how complicated the questions were. It was how basic some of them were.

What bottle should I buy?

Why does this wine taste like this?

Does the glass really matter?

What does this word mean?

Am I supposed to like this?

How do I know if a wine is “good”?

Questions that people sometimes seem almost embarrassed to ask.

That was when it clicked for me.

Maybe the definitive books had already been written. But they hadn’t been written in my voice.

That distinction became even clearer to me through World of Wine. The success of that series taught me something I probably should have understood much earlier: sometimes people don’t need different information. They need a different person telling it to them.

Wine has had no shortage of authorities. What it has sometimes lacked are enough different voices explaining why any of this shit should matter to you in the first place.

That became Wine for Good Times.

I wanted to make a book that you could actually use. Something you could pick up because you wanted to understand Burgundy, but also because you were standing in a wine shop staring at 400 bottles wondering what the fuck you were supposed to buy. I wanted it to give you information without making you feel like you needed permission to participate.

Because ultimately, wine belongs to the person drinking it.

The journey from that idea to an actual book has been wild.

When the proposal went out, I met with nine publishers. Nine.

There was eventually a bidding war for the book, which is still a strange sentence for me to type.

I remember exactly where I was when my literary agent called me with the results. I was in bed at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, recovering from the first night of Tales of the Cocktail.

And that hotel means something to me.

Years earlier, when I first started going to New Orleans trying to sell my wine, I stayed there. Back then, paying for that room was a stretch. I was hustling cases of wine, trying to convince people to believe in something that mostly existed because I believed in it.

Now I was lying in a room in that same hotel while my agent was telling me that publishers were fighting over the opportunity to publish my second book.

I had to sit with that one for a minute.

Life doesn’t give you a lot of perfectly constructed full-circle moments. That was one of them.

And from the beginning, I knew I didn’t want this book to be a monument to myself.

I wanted to manage the project. I wanted my fingerprints on everything. But I also know myself well enough to know that I needed somebody who could hold me accountable, to deadlines, to getting the ideas out of my head and onto the page, and sometimes simply to finishing the damn thing.

That person was Oset Babür-Winter, who came on as my editor and co-writer.

Oset and I had worked together before, so there was already trust there. But there was something else that mattered to me. She’s building an amazing career of her own, and somewhere along the way I realized this book didn’t have to be a selfish moment. If I had been given this enormous opportunity, then maybe part of my responsibility was figuring out how that opportunity could become a jumping-off point for other talented people too.

That thinking extended to the entire creative team.

Camilo Huinca created the illustrations, and Ed Anderson photographed the book.

And I didn’t want either of those things to feel like decoration.

Wine books have a visual language just like they have a written one, and if I was saying that Wine for Good Times was going to approach wine differently, then it needed to look different too. Camilo’s illustrations and Ed’s photographs became another way of telling the story, another voice in the book alongside mine and Oset’s.

That’s one of the things I’m proudest of when I look at the finished book.

Yes, my name is on the cover. But this thing exists because a group of incredibly talented people brought their own ideas, eyes, experiences and points of view to it.

That’s how the best things get made anyway.

You start with an idea that belongs to you.

And if you’re lucky, you find the right people and eventually it becomes something bigger than anything you could have made alone.

And then we had to actually make the damn thing.

It took longer than we thought.

Deadlines moved.

Then they moved again.

Ideas changed. Pages changed. Things that seemed brilliant one month looked completely different three months later. We kept pushing, rewriting, rethinking and figuring out what this book actually wanted to be.

But we finished it.

And maybe that is the part I find most remarkable.

Not the bidding war. Not the advance. Not seeing my name on another cover.

It’s creation.

I still think there is something miraculous about the fact that something can begin as an idea inside your head, something that literally does not exist anywhere else in the world and through enough work, conversations, mistakes, collaboration, missed deadlines, revised deadlines and perseverance, eventually you can hold it in your hands.

That never gets old to me.

I make wine, so maybe I’m predisposed to believe in that kind of transformation. Grapes become wine. An idea becomes a business. A sketch becomes a label. A conversation becomes a television show.

And somehow, a thought becomes a book.

Wine for Good Times isn’t meant to replace the great wine books that came before it. Those books helped make me who I am. Bits and pieces of dozens of them have followed me throughout my career.

I wanted to add another voice to that shelf.

Mine.

And hopefully, somewhere along the way, yours too.

Because the point of learning more about wine isn’t to become the person at the table who knows the most.

It’s to appreciate what’s in your glass a little more.

To understand why you like what you like.

To become curious about something you never noticed before.

To drink better. Differently. More confidently.

And maybe to realize that wine can take you places you never expected to go.

I know it did for me.

Today, Wine for Good Times goes up for pre-order.

I can’t wait for you to see what we made.

PRE-ORDER NOW

If you’ve never had Barbacoa, let me paint the picture.

It’s Sunday morning. The sun’s barely up. Your tío or your dad swings by the carnicería and picks up a steaming foil-wrapped bundle of beef cheek meat, slow-cooked to fall-apart tenderness, fatty in all the best ways, and deeply seasoned with salt, garlic, and love. The kind of thing you eat with fresh tortillas, a squeeze of lime, maybe some chopped onion and cilantro if you’re feeling fancy.

Then you wash it down with a cold can of Big Red, a bright red, bubblegum-sweet soda that tastes like cream soda collided with cotton candy. It’s not subtle, but it doesn’t need to be. Big Red is loud joy in a can. And if you're from South Texas, you know it as gospel: Barbacoa and Big Red go together like peanut butter and jelly. Like Selena and Corpus Christi. Like San Antonio and the Riverwalk.

For those who didn’t grow up around it, Barbacoa might look intense. It’s not brisket. It’s not pulled pork. It’s something deeper, ancestral, a dish rooted in Mexican tradition and lovingly adopted by generations of Tejanos. And Big Red? You probably won’t find it in a Manhattan bodega or at your local Whole Foods. But if you’re ever lucky enough to taste that pairing together, Barbacoa in one hand, Big Red in the other, you’ll understand a little more about what it feels like to be from South Texas.

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We met for lunch at L’Artusi, and it was everything I hoped it would be. The food, the wines, the stories. But more than anything, it was a chance to sit across from Giorgio Rivetti again, a man I’ve admired for nearly two decades.

Giorgio is a force. A visionary. A sushi-and-Champagne fanatic. And someone whose wines have always felt personal to me, thoughtful, alive, and full of soul. I’ve been a supporter of La Spinetta since way back, long before it became shorthand for modern Italian excellence.

In fact, I reminded Giorgio of the first time we ever had lunch together. It was 2007. I snuck out of work with a good friend, also my sales rep at the time, and we met Giorgio at Blue Ribbon Sushi at Columbus Circle. Giorgio was already in full gear. He ordered two massive wooden boats, one stacked with sashimi, the other with sushi, and we washed it all down with copious amounts of Champagne.

At one point, after we’d decimated the sushi like it was the last supper, a waiter tried to clear the table. As he went to lift one of the boats, a little dish of soy sauce slid off and landed, perfectly, on Giorgio’s head.

Chaos.

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Date: June 3rd
Location: Banville HQ, NYC

Earlier this week, I found myself in a quiet townhouse tucked behind trees in Manhattan’s Upper East Side for an intimate seminar hosted by the inimitable Randall Grahm. The occasion? A deep dive into the ever-evolving Popelouchum Estate and a tasting of rare gems from the Banville portfolio.

The room was small, deliberately so. There’s something about tasting wines in a space that feels less like a seminar and more like a salon. It invites questions. It rewards curiosity. And with Randall at the helm, curiosity is always the right move.

Randall Grahm doesn’t just make wine, he thinks wine. His Popelouchum project, a sprawling, deeply experimental estate in San Juan Bautista, CA, is more than a vineyard. It’s a philosophical exercise, a genetic sandbox, a living document of what California wine could be if it stopped chasing models and started writing its own.

But before I ever tasted a Randall Grahm wine, I saw him.

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If you know me, you know I love barbecue and I live for bubbles. So when I got the invite to this year’s BBQ & Bubbly, I already had my corkscrew in my hand.

Set against the backdrop of North Carolina’s rising food and wine scene, BBQ & Bubbly is the creation of sommelier and wine educator Matthew Weiss and his wife, Sarah Weiss. What started as a bold idea, to bring sparkling wine into the world of smoke, fat, fire, and sauce, has now become a genre-bending food-and-wine festival that feels part block party, part master class, part Champagne fantasy. And it works. Brilliantly.

This year’s event took place at Fenton in Cary, NC, and the lineup was serious: smoked brisket ravioli, pork belly, lechón, puffy tacos, and wings glazed with Sweet Baby Ray’s. More than a dozen pitmasters and chefs from across the South came to represent, and we poured everything from Prosecco Superiore to Grand Cru Champagne to match.

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In this installment of Between the Lines my series unpacking the songs that shaped my life; we’re looking at Junior’s 1982 groove “Mama Used to Say.” This one hit different. Not just because of the beat or the era, but because it felt like my mother’s voice wrapped in melody, reminding me who I was and who I could become.

When the Music Speaks for You

Back then, I’d be posted up with my Walkman, headphones on, world turned down low. My mom would be across the room on the couch, saying nothing but I could feel her in that song. It was as if she’d chosen it for me, played it through the air just to get the message across. She knew I was ambitious. Always pushing. Always reaching for something just out of sight. I was impatient, even as a kid. And this song? This was her way of telling me, gently but clearly, Slow down. Life isn’t going anywhere. But when it shows up, you better be ready. That’s how I took it. Like preparation was the point. Not just waiting around, but becoming someone who’s ready when the opportunity arrives. That was the real lesson.

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The other day, I saw a photo of Katy Perry wearing a T-shirt that read, “They don’t build statues of critics.” And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

It’s catchy, sure but it’s also one of those rare one-liners that cuts right to the bone. Because that sentence is more than a clapback. It’s a philosophy. A mindset. A quiet manifesto for people like me and maybe people like you, too. Who wake up every day determined to create something where there was nothing before.

See, I’ve never been the kind of person who needed outside competition to drive me. I’m not chasing the person in the next lane; I’m chasing myself. The only race I’m in is the one between who I was yesterday and who I know I can be tomorrow.

I live by a simple rule: build, don’t bark.

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I was riding shotgun when I first heard the San Francisco Chronicle’s article about Thomas Keller and their own restaurant critic, MacKenzie Chung Fegan. My wife and I were listening to the piece, and by the time we pulled into the driveway, we were deep in conversation because something about the article just didn’t sit right.

It wasn’t just the incident itself: Keller recognizing a critic who came in under an alias, pulling her aside, expressing concern and then serving her a full tasting menu with a $1 bill at the end. It was how the story was told, framed like it belonged in a gossip column, not a serious piece of food journalism. The article had the tone of a juicy scandal but missed the deeper opportunity to explore what’s really going on between chefs and critics today.

So let’s break it down.

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Can’t Stop How I Feel
Take Seven – “Can’t Stop” x Poggio di Sotto”

The song playing when we first sat down was Can’t Stop by After 7. A smooth, tender R&B anthem from 1990 that took me all the way back to being sixteen. It was the kind of song that defined a mood; vulnerable, honest, melodic. The kind of track you’d hear at school dances, on late-night slow jam radio, or looping through a Walkman as you tried to figure out what feelings were even for.

That same year, Poggio di Sotto was just beginning; founded in 1989 in the southern hills of Montalcino. A different kind of slow jam was taking shape there too: textured, expressive, emotional. They both arrived at a moment of cultural shift, between the glitter of the '80s and the depth of the '90s. And now, decades later, they still move me.

As Can’t Stop played through the speakers at the Crown Club, I looked around the room and realized this wasn’t just another wine dinner. It was a living mixtape of memories, taste, and emotion.

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I’ve always believed that great wine isn’t just for white tablecloths and multi-course dinners. It’s for the moments we live every day even those nights when we’re eating out of a takeout container. So when Access Hollywood asked me to pair wines with classic New York City takeout dishes, I knew we had something special.

By now, I’ve become somewhat of a de facto resident sommelier for Access Hollywood. I’ve probably done around 13 episodes most of them filmed out in California at their studio but this marks only the second time I’ve gone live, outdoors, at NBC Studios at 30 Rock. There’s something electrifying about it. I love working with Mario, and I’m always intrigued by this style of recording because it’s so in-the-moment. It’s one take. What you see is what you get. Very different from the kind of content I shoot for Bon Appétit, where we have the luxury of resets and retakes. These live shoots keep me on my toes and I’m always excited to do them.

Here are my three takes, delicious, accessible wines that elevate three iconic NYC eats. All retail for under $50.

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(Presented by your favorite sommelier who wears his heart and his label on his sleeve)

Recently, I had the pleasure of co-hosting a press lunch at the iconic Boathouse in Central Park: a collaboration with Vins de Provence to highlight the depth, range, and actual diversity of one of the world’s most celebrated wine regions.

My role? To guide guests through a curated lineup that proved a simple point: Provence is more than just a pretty rosé.

Sure, rosé is the calling card but even within that category, there’s a spectrum: from pale and polished, to structured and savory, to the kind of textured, age-worthy bottles that flip the script entirely. Add in a coastal white for good measure? Now you’ve got a full-on masterclass in terroir expression.

To make it easy and keep it fun I broke it down like this:
Three appellations. Three personalities. One unforgettable region.

Let’s set the stage.

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Listening to All My Life by Lil Durk and J. Cole with my six-year-old son recently sparked a moment I’ll never forget. What started as a simple question about a lyric opened up a bigger conversation about where I come from, what I carry, and what I hope to pass on. This is about music, memory, and the legacy we’re building; one song, one story, one life at a time.

All My Life: A Song, A Story, A Legacy

A few weeks ago, something small but deeply significant happened.

I was riding around with my son, six years old, all heart and curiosity. When the song All My Life by Lil Durk featuring J. Cole came on.

I love that song.
Not just because it sounds good, but because it feels good because it feels true.
Because in a lot of ways, it tells my story.

And then, from the backseat, my son asked me:

“Pop, what does it mean when they say, 'they been trying to keep me down'? Who's 'they'?"

I froze for a second.
How do you explain the weight of the world to a six-year-old who’s still light as a feather? How do you honor both the world you come from and the childhood you're trying to protect?

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Between the Lines

“A Sunday Smile” – Beirut (covered by Kishi Bashi)

Selected Lyrics:
“A Sunday smile / We wore it for a while”

Listen on Spotify:
Kishi Bashi – A Sunday Smile (Beirut Cover)

It Began at a Wedding

I had never heard of Kishi Bashi until yesterday. I was at my assistant Kevin’s wedding watching two people profess their love in front of the world. The ceremony was simple and beautiful. And as they turned to walk back down the aisle, a song played. It was delicate, orchestral, and just strange enough to feel personal.

I opened Shazam.

The artist? Kishi Bashi.

It wasn’t this particular song “A Sunday Smile” but discovering him in that moment cracked open something unexpected. I found myself at the reception, half engaged in conversation, half lost in the music. I slipped in an AirPod and started listening through his catalog. That’s when I found this cover.

This one hit different.

Maybe it was the setting. Maybe it was the emotion of witnessing a fresh commitment. But this song put me deep in my feelings. I started thinking about my own wedding, my own marriage. But more than that, I thought about that time; that era when things were still being built. When love, work, life… all of it was fragile and still forming. That stretch of life where nothing was guaranteed but everything felt possible.

That’s what this song reminded me of. That’s what made it stick.

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I was in San Francisco for a meeting with some folks at Salesforce; big ideas, big energy, the kind of meeting that makes you want to stick around for the weekend and ride the high. So I did.

With the meeting on Friday, I extended my stay. I linked up with some friends, brought a couple of buyer-friends to the Warriors game because if you know me, you know I’m an avid NBA fan. That night was already weird in the best way. Mid-game, the fire alarm blares, lights flashing, an evacuation message blinks across the Jumbotron. But none of the players moved. Not a single one. So I stayed put too.

By the time the game ended, I was both buzzing and starving. I didn’t want anything too heavy, but I wasn’t about to skip the chance to eat at Zuni Café, an all-time favorite. It was pushing 8:30. The kitchen closed at 9:30. For a restaurant veteran, sliding in late isn’t exactly polite. But we made it by 9.

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When the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 2025, ushered Popeye the Sailor Man into the public domain, I don’t think any of us expected that it would only take a few weeks for his bulging forearms to be soaked in blood. But here we are. The spinach-gulping, muttering mariners, once a Depression-era hero who socked fascism and corporate greed in the jaw and has been reborn in a form that is grotesque, gory, and utterly fascinating.

What we’re witnessing isn’t just the repurposing of a childhood icon; it’s the latest frontier in the Public Domain Horror Boom. A trend that began with Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has now landed in full swing on the docks of Sweethaven. But unlike Pooh Bear’s jarring debut, the Popeye horror subgenre feels oddly… earned. There’s something inherently uncanny about Popeye’s world, even before you add a meat cleaver.

With my family away in Vermont for spring break, I had the rare gift of a quiet house and zero obligations after dark. Instead of diving into work or pretending to be productive, I gave in to one of my lesser-known guilty pleasures: watching offbeat, borderline terrible horror movies.

So I leaned in, popcorn, hoodie, couch blanket and over a few late nights that felt like a solo slumber party, I binged all three Popeye horror flicks: Popeye the Slayer Man, Popeye’s Revenge, and Shiver Me Timbers. What started as curiosity quickly turned into a wildly entertaining descent into the absurd and occasionally, the unexpectedly brilliant.

So here’s my best attempt at being Siskel and Ebert and for my younger readers think: vintage Rotten Tomatoes with better suits.

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I can honestly say that my love for fast food was born from two things: the relentless barrage of 1980s television commercials and my own firsthand experience working in fast food. I was fully indoctrinated. But 20 years after clocking out of my last shift, something new was emerging in the United States something that blurred the line between fast food and fine dining.

In 2004, just as I moved to New York City, the legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer known for his white-tablecloth establishments and front-of-house finesse turned his attention to a different kind of dining experience. It wasn’t quite labeled fast food, but it absolutely was. It was called Shake Shack a little hut propped up on the corner of Madison Square Park, serving up smash burgers that would soon take the city by storm.

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Why I’m Afraid of Mortality, But Not Planning My Funeral

There’s something most people don’t know about me:
I’m afraid of mortality. Deathly afraid.

It’s not the pain or the finality - it’s the mystery. The unknowing.
The fact that one day, everything I think, feel, remember, and imagine will just… stop.
No more thoughts. No more awareness. No more me.

I can’t quite wrap my head around that.
There’s something about the emptiness of it that rattles me.

And yet
I have absolutely no problem planning my funeral.

I know that sounds backwards.
But what I’ve found comfort in; what brings me a surprising kind of peace is imagining what I’ll leave behind.

The vibe.
The energy.
The experience.

I don’t want a somber, gray gathering with whispers and tissues and silence.
I want a party.
A proper celebration of life.

Music playing. Wine poured.
Stories being told across friend groups who’ve never met.
People dancing, hugging, laughing.
I want it to feel like a sendoff and a reunion.

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Martin Lawrence gave us a whole universe of unforgettable characters on Martin, each with their own style, attitude, and energy. So, what if we paired each of them with the perfect wine? Something that captures their essence—whether it’s flashy, smooth, bold, or just straight-up chaotic.

Let’s pop some bottles and get into it.

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A few days ago, I found myself explaining to my kid, Pickle, that Lenny Kravitz’s 1998 hit Fly Away wasn’t just the sample for some new song he liked—it was the original.

He looked at me like I was trying to convince him water used to taste different.

“But the Quavo version is the song,” he said, baffled.

And that’s when it hit me: for his generation, Fly Away is Quavo. It’s ad-libs, 808s, and a new car commercial. For mine? It’s Lenny. Distortion pedals, dreadlocks, and a song that felt like rolling the windows down and driving off with no destination.

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In the ‘90s, Martin Lawrence gave us some of the most iconic TV characters of all time on Martin. From the flashy, gold-toothed hustler Jerome to the self-proclaimed martial arts master Dragonfly Jones, each one of them had their own cult following. And yet, while Saturday Night Live was spinning off characters into full-length movies—Wayne’s World, The Ladies Man, A Night at the Roxbury—none of Martin’s alter egos made it to the big screen.

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