June 24, 2025 • 50 mins
I keep an eye on this girl. She makes this happen. As a college athlete, mom and wine brand manager, Monika is always "shaking the tree."I am inspisred by her tenacity and I am impressed with her no-nonsense approach to branding wine.
Monika Elling doesn’t just swirl her wine—she stirs the conversation and upends what you thought you knew about what’s in your glass (and your grocery cart). She brings both a sharp palate and a sharper intellect to Wine Talks, joining Paul Kalemkiarian for an episode that pulls no punches on food, drink, and health. You’ll plunge into topics most winemakers and marketers avoid, like the disquieting truth that Americans are less healthy than ever before and what’s really behind those glossy ‘healthy’ labels in the supermarket aisles. Monika, part nutritionist, part entrepreneur, and always a provocateur, shares her journey from understanding food as fuel for athletes to scrutinizing every hidden ingredient in products she once trusted. Expect to learn why military-aged youth are falling short of basic health standards, what’s lurking behind the flavor in your favorite Gatorade and even your salt, and how family, convenience, and industrial-scale food have conspired to compromise our collective well-being. The conversation travels from the origins of breakfast cereal to government-mandated food pyramids, the controversial rise of GMOs, and the labyrinthine world of non-alcoholic wine—pulling back the curtain on marketing hype and voluntary misinformation. You’ll get the inside scoop on how Prosecco can be reinvented for health-conscious palates and why nutritional labels on vino might become a movement, not just a curiosity. If you’ve ever wondered how to really eat—and drink—for wellness in a sea of modern confusion, or if you’re curious how industry insiders are fighting back against processed “sugar bombs” in wine and food, listen in. By the end, you’ll come away not just with a new understanding of wine, but with the intellectual tools to decode what’s really going into your body, one label at a time.
✅ Are we really eating and drinking ourselves into a health crisis?
✅ Monika Elling joins Paul Kalemkiarian on Wine Talks podcast to unravel the hidden dangers in today’s food and beverage world.
✅ With her deep expertise in nutrition and decades in the beverage alcohol industry, Monika exposes what’s changed in our food, why our health is suffering, and how smart choices in wine—like her new zero-sugar Prosecco—can make a difference.
✅ Want to know what’s REALLY in your glass and on your plate? Listen to this episode and discover the surprising truth! 🍷✨
#WineTalks #MonikaElling #PaulKalemkiarian #PodcastEpisode #WineIndustry #HealthyLiving #Nutrition #BeverageTrends #LowSugarWine #Prosecco #ConsumerHealth #NonAlcoholicWine #WineMarket #FoodTransparency #WineLabeling #OrganicWine #WineInnovation #WineAndHealth #SmartChoices #WellnessLifestyle
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The reality that we've never been in worse health as
a society than we are today. We have
75% of the young people.
Military age cannot qualify for the military because they can't
pass the test, the physical test. We have spiking
cancer rates. You name the disease, we've got it.
(00:22):
Sit back and grab a glass. It's Wine Talks
with Paul K. Hey, welcome to Wine
Talks with Paul Kane. We are in studio today in beautiful Southern California about
to have a conversation with Monica Elling way out in foggy New York.
Introductions in just a moment. You have to go online
and check out an interview I did with Zaya
(00:44):
Unan. This guy's story is crazy.
He came to America at 13 years old, had earned enough money to
fly to America by painting bicycles in Iran,
and he established his career here. And now he's
trying to take down or at least compete with lvmh. It's an
amazing story. Have a listen, but not while we're here today. Here to talk to
(01:07):
Monica Elling. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Paul. Good to be
here. Good to see you again. Monica is the CEO+ founder,
fractional CMO of CPG, brand architect
and growth strategist. Is that accurate?
I'm the CEO and founder of FMG and I am
a fractional CMO for companies in the beverage alcohol
(01:30):
space. Okay, this is an interesting thought and I want you
back on the show because you've been posting a lot of interesting things and there's
a lot of scuttlebutt about what's going on in the industry
and there's all kinds of press and there's the non alk movement and the low
elk movement and there's the nutrition side of this. And it seems to
get pretty congested out there as to
(01:52):
what's happening in the marketplace. I'm not sure anybody really knows what's going on in
the marketplace, but you did post something recently about was it a
low elk prosecco you're working on? It is
more than that, but I think to give a
background to the entire topic
would be a good place to, you know, to start
(02:15):
because things have evolved for, I think,
the global marketplace. And I'm not just talking about wines and spirits. I'm
actually talking about consumer health. So I have a background in
nutrition fitness along with 20 plus years in the beverage
alcohol space. And as a
former athlete and raising
(02:37):
two out of my three children were nationally ranked athletes. The
reality was I had started to
truly look at food as fuel early on.
So some of the things that are called today, keto, low
carb, intermittent fasting, all these buzzwords, branded
buzzwords, I was just instinctively doing
(02:59):
because I being in tune with my body
for optimal performance, it helped me
to gauge what the inputs were and how I felt.
And in that part, I researched the nutrition
in what I was consuming, realizing that there were
so many unnecessary and hidden ingredients
(03:22):
that I wasn't even aware of. And not to mention that
during the decades as I was growing up and then having my own
children, I saw so many of the core staple products
that we're all used to changing by way of
ingredients. So the feeling was that I would,
as a, you know, teenager, have a certain type of a product,
(03:45):
and then decades later, I would have the same product, have a bad reaction.
And I didn't understand why. It wasn't that I
changed. The products have changed. And
all these reformulations on the food side, the additives,
for whatever reason, have gotten to the point where
(04:05):
certainly Americans are feeling not
that well these days. And health has become a big issue.
Do you think? I mean, this approach by rfk,
which. Yeah, I have to tell you two stories. One is
you're talking about athleticism and what parents think and what they've heard
and what they've decided is good and bad. And I'm talking about a few years
(04:28):
ago when my daughter was in eighth grade, my wife was doing
the graduate graduation party for the eighth graders. And this
woman wanted. She was very upset that there was going to be Coke
served, which is fine, I get it. But she
insisted that Gatorade be sold because her
son was an athlete. And I thought, well, you know,
(04:50):
that stuff full of crap, I mean, there's nothing
healthy about Gatorade. And if you think your son's an athlete and this is going
to be a part of his regiment, I think that's. You make
a mistake, and obviously that's all changed. But do you think our Kay's on the
right track then, when it comes to what he's proposing
to the American palate public? Before I
(05:12):
answer that, I want to address the Gatorade point, because that's so interesting.
It's exactly what I'm referring to, actually, because
the original ingredients in Gatorade were simple.
There was salt, there was citrus, and a little bit of sugar
water. That's it. And it has since
been reformulated so many times, it's unrecognizable
(05:35):
as a drink. And you're right, it. It is the furthest thing from
something that a premier athlete should be Having
so just to. That is so aligned with exactly
where I'm going. But as far as the
RFK situation and the Maha movement,
I think parents, especially over the last
(05:58):
several decades, have been vigilant about the type
of reactions their children are having and
deaths to food, environment, what have you. From the
standpoint of the allergies, the
uptick in allergies. You know, I grew up in
Europe. I had no idea what an
(06:21):
allergy was until I got here. Never heard of it. Never heard
of it. Nobody I knew had anything like it. I thought it was some very,
very strange, obscure American thing. But then, you
know, I've learned and.
Interrupted for a second. When you. When you order a drink by the
(06:41):
color that has to be. There has to be something wrong with that. All
right, like, I'll have the blue one. That's. That doesn't seem right.
I want to add on to that anecdote about Gatorade. When I was
cross country in high school, my coach, you know, felt that was too
expensive, so he made Kool Aid and threw salt in it.
And that was horrible. But it was
(07:04):
the same thing, right? It was water, sugar and
flavoring and salt. That's all it was back then nowadays.
Except Gatorade was clean flavorings back then. It is not
now. But the difference was that was definitely
Kool Aid was definitely artificial even back then. Artificial flavors and
colors were coming to fore. But it was an
(07:26):
evolution, so it didn't happen overnight. And the intention wasn't for
every product to. To be that compromised, if you will.
But back to the comments about RFK and
the Maha movement. First of all, I will just point
out the reality that we've never been in
worse health as a society than we are today. We have
(07:50):
75% of the young people.
Military age cannot qualify for the military because they can't
pass the test, the physical test. That's
just one indication. Then we have obscene rates
of obesity, people. 75%
of the country is overweight and then obese. We have metabolic
(08:13):
disease through the wazoo. We have spiking
cancer rates. You name the disease, we've got it.
And at the same time, the narratives are being
twisted in so many ways away
from some of the obvious, very logical
root causes of what we're dealing with.
(08:38):
I want to point out that if you, if, based
on what Monica's saying, if you, as a. To the listeners,
if you go to Disneyland, which we did
three times this last winter, you will see the
amazing difference in the health of the people that go there.
Just in the last few years, the number of scooters, electric
(09:01):
scooters required to get people around
blew my mind. This is about two months ago. I couldn't believe it. I just
thought this is ridiculous that these people have come,
that the population, I don't think these people, it's not their fault in the sense
of they're eating what they've been given to eat.
Buffets like Hometown Buffet and those kinds of things with this horrible food.
(09:25):
I'm shocked at that. Do you think it can have a
positive impact? Do you think that the movement at least giving people the
options to eat more healthy is a functional
approach? 100%. Because they're
starting with the food pyramid, which has been upside down for the longest time.
This is my first and most obvious commentary about government
(09:47):
mandated direction, nutrition direction,
or for some people, the seeming infallibility
of some of the data coming out regarding wine and beverages
and so forth and so on. Question all of it, because
we have decades of the pyramid
where I think Fruit Loops is pretty much at the top of the
(10:10):
category and or at the bottom of the category.
So it's the most amount of food that you're supposed to eat.
So low fat and essentially full
of carbohydrates, where meat and good fats are
being reduced to minuscule amounts, which is the polar opposite
of what this needs to be for human nutrition.
(10:33):
It's not like we've invented this. This is how our bodies
were meant to function. And it's always been
protein first and protein priority.
Everything else is secondary or
non essential. We don't actually need carbohydrates to
function ever. And do you think that this
(10:54):
progression to the point we are today, I mean, if you think about it,
and I talk about those with the wine trade all the time, they talk about
pesticides, insecticides, organic farming, biodynamic, et cetera.
It always was that and we screwed it up
and now we're trying to. Go back and we need
to because we are damaging not just
(11:16):
ourselves, but our children. Everybody's so worried about,
I guess, all sorts of carbon
footprint and all this. I actually don't care
because what I care about starts,
begins with the children that I see that
(11:36):
are having the worst health outcomes ever.
So any other topic for me is so, well,
much later in the conversation because we're not addressing
the core health of generations to come. And
how can we as a society and as a race, as a global human
race, how can we even continue to thrive if,
(12:00):
if everything that we are putting into our Bodies is
compromised. One of the comments made early on when I started to
read about this, and I have Steiner's book here, and
the book the Third Plate by Dan the Chef
was that organic farming. And we all know that
(12:21):
organic necessarily on itself isn't all that great if it's not properly
done. But let's just take it, let's just assume that all organic farm is good
for you, that it couldn't sustain itself in
the world's population of consumption because you can't grow enough. And I don't think that's
accurate anymore. I think you can grow enough. And then
is it more difficult today or less difficult today to. To
(12:44):
eat the way you're proposing to turn the pyramid upside down?
Is it more accessible or is it becoming more accessible?
It was always accessible. But the rhetoric was in a complete
different direction, away from what our bodies really
require. And we are undoing
that psychology. And
(13:07):
that's a tougher call than actual accessibility
to the right foods. It's choices that are to
be made upon going to the grocery
store. And I've always made it relatively easy for my
family because things just didn't enter the household
that weren't screened, if you will.
(13:29):
And I hated to have to look at every single
thing. But it became so necessary
when I found that the ingredients were being changed.
Additives were being put into products I regularly
purchased for years. And all of a sudden they were not
what they appear to be. The misinformation on
(13:51):
labeling. And I know that there is all sorts of government
regulatory and we're talking food products, not even wine and spirits yet.
So when you see a salad dressing, first of all you go to
Whole Foods because you're assuming all sorts of things about
what you have available for yourself, as in
better for you or higher quality, more organic, biodynamic,
(14:14):
what have you. So cleaner products overall. That's an assumption.
You go into the store, you go and grab
an olive oil based salad
dressing and it says extra virgin olive oil made with
extra virgin olive oil. And that's great.
And you get home and you're about to put it on your salad and just
(14:36):
have this gnawing feeling that you should look
at the back label and, and guess what? The olive oil
is the seventh or eighth ingredient in there. Meanwhile,
it's all sorts of seed oils that are first up and
then other additives and so on. So yes,
technically there's olive oil, but it's not an olive oil based dressing. So
(14:58):
I don't even buy dressings anymore. I don't know why anybody
does. It's so easy to make convenience, occasional
convenience. I mean, it's so easy. I know, I know. Well, that's where
I am and I've always made it. But I always had
a couple of different options. But I think
the compromise is tricky. Bless you. The
(15:21):
other thing that I've noticed, and it was a recent
discovery I was cooking, I had three
different types of salts and again, I just had
this feeling I should look at the back label. Guess
what? Dextrose in the salt. What
really? Sugar. Salt. Exactly.
(15:43):
Sugar by many names in
our salt. These are major brands. And
seeing it not in one, and then I looked at the next one
and that had it. And then the next one had it.
You know, there was a product when I was, when I was a kid, when
I was in high school and I was playing baseball, my buddy and I went
(16:04):
to my dad's pharmacy, my dad of chain of pharmacies and
we, he used to sell a thing called dextro Energin
and it was a block of sugar basically.
And you would, I mean, I can't now that you talk about it, because I
haven't heard the word dextrose in a long time. And I just triggered this thought
that we'd go take them from my dad's store and chew on these things.
(16:27):
It was like worse than a sugar cube, right? It was, it was, it was
supposed to provide some level of energy. But again,
your body processes energy from two sources. It's
glucose or ketones. So your body is really meant to
be driven by ketones and
glucose is secondary. So when
(16:49):
you are actually in ketosis,
you're sharper, your functioning is better, everything is
better and your metabolism is better.
But the sugar culture that we're seeing in
food, unexpected food items,
it's very daunting to have to navigate
(17:12):
all of this. But across the board,
I think the sugar levels in
all sorts of products from bread to like I said, salt
is a disconcerting feeling and
it's hard to control, it's hard to navigate. It's
also changing our palates. I want to touch on that
(17:34):
dressing real fast and I want to move into this how America got this way.
But our go to dressing just for the listener's
sake is from a very famous New York based
restaurant. Who. And the gentleman the chef just passed recently, his name
was Andre Sultner and it was Lutece. Yes.
And it's, you know, it's avocado oil, olive oil,
(17:57):
some mustard, garlic, salt and a little tarragon. Or tarragon
vinegar. And that's it. It takes like 30 seconds to make it. And it's so
much better and tastes so much fresher. So just for the listeners.
But part of this process, I mean, it's even
referenced in a Rolling Stone song, right? Frozen steak. So somewhere
along the line, America decided that yields in the
(18:19):
farm or manipulated
DNA of wheat to make more or taller or
whatever character they were trying to find
moved us into this area in the 60s, particularly where there was frozen foods
and all this stuff was just doctored up. And the idea of convenience was very
important. And all of a sudden, even, like I said in the Rolling Stone
(18:42):
song, the Housewives making a frozen steak, which is like, big
deal. Why can't you make a regular steak if you can make a frozen steak?
Is that big food? Where were we as
Americans as a culture
that we went into this direction compared to Europe?
Yes. So we are a huge country
(19:06):
for one that's a separator. Europe is a
continent and the United States is an
enormous country. So we do things on a big
scale. European nations with 10, 20 million people,
15 million people, they approach it differently because they can.
They can manage the size. And
(19:28):
it's definitely a different approach in the US
but does it have to be? So let's look at why some of
this stuff happened and what really
went wrong. And that's an
entire conversation itself. But
there were movements that created
(19:52):
a momentum for big food and
cheaper costs of food and so forth and so on. That's
not just food. That happened across all industries, really.
It's just an evolution of a society to some degree.
But where it started damaging,
(20:13):
I guess, Americans first. There were
other cycles happening at the same time that drove this ready to eat
food. And part of it, women going to
work. Whereas you've had families where the mom
would stay at home, the father was the provider, and
so just a different societal structure. Women going
(20:36):
to work force the situation of easier
to prepare food, faster food
available food, and still
within whatever the family budgets were. So
all of our daily, I guess,
marketing and shopping had
(20:59):
to be reduced to a very different dynamic
where you could purchase product for a week or so,
have it available in your kitchen, have it readily
accessible, hence the frozen steak. Because
now that mom is
potentially at work. And it didn't happen
(21:20):
overnight in the 60s, but that was a preparation and a push towards
women. And with the advent of
the pill, all these things were happening basically
simultaneously. And actually,
that's interesting from the food supply angle, none of it for the
(21:41):
better it's all hurt all of us.
But if you think back even before then, the
birth of the cereal and Post
company versus Kellogg and how that happened, that too
was about quick preparation for
a breakfast meal. That's why that
(22:04):
entirety took off. It was no
longer a complicated production. It
really was centered around speed. That's a really interesting part
of the story, and I think you've probably watched or seen on TV one of
the history channels. I read the book in post,
you know, really started as a serial for
(22:28):
recovery in a sanitarium. Yep. You know, this
is an interesting thought, because are we able to go back
to that type of thing? I was. I had this conversation, I think, with my
daughter, since one of my daughters did not lose her house in the fire,
but they were transplanted to our home. They've been there since January
as they clean up. And so I've seen how they. How
(22:51):
she manages her lifestyle. She works for Apple. She's been working all
the time, and her husband as well, and. And the kids are at our house.
And so they still tend to grab towards
simple, fast things, though it seems like they're picking
wiser choices. But one of the conversations we
had was that if you're going to buy organic, whether it's Whole Foods
(23:13):
or Gelson's, whatever else, you do have to shop
more often because it does not last as long. And we'll get into the
alcohol side of this in a second. And so that does require you to change
how you manage your life because you were going to the market more often.
And then I thought, okay, that's interesting. You've got a Whole Foods right there in
Columbus Circle, right in, you know, an office building with a
(23:35):
hotel attached to it. Is that part of the
movement to get. I mean, it's obviously corporate
America doing this, but to put a market
in. In a very urban part of New York and Los
Angeles, is that a positive thing for us to do?
Absolutely. But it doesn't have to be Whole Foods.
(23:57):
And the whole organic labeling and
conversation is challenging because to me,
it should just be food
and then GMO food or whatever that is
biochemically prepared mess.
So it really should just be food. And we should
(24:20):
be able to be secure that our food
is clean, organic, et cetera. That
should be the baseline assumption to me.
So we've gone reverse, and
everything is labeled, and unless it says non GMO
and whatever else 10 stickers the product
(24:43):
has on it, you have to navigate each one understanding
what it is that you're actually buying when all you Want is,
is clean food. So it's interesting. I
stop you there for a second because the GMO thing, I had this conversation many
times. I don't know the answer to this necessarily. I did have one
scientist sort of give a better answer than another, but it's not a quiz
(25:05):
here. And that is, I had on the show
a gentleman who created gmo, I mean stated it says
gmo, you know, on the thing. It was a
recovery alcohol recovery shot. And so you take it before
you start drinking. And this genetically modified
probiotic would affect the way your
(25:28):
body process the alcohol. And then you wake up, you feel better. And the
next day I had a non GMO
tequila manufacturer or something, some distilled spirit. And the
question was, how is a GMO different than
naturally hybrid wheat? For instance? Let's say we, we go
(25:48):
to the lab and we, we make a GM GMO
wheat strain of wheat versus, you know, one of the
40,000 strains of wheat that were made through natural
hybrid selection. They're both doing the same thing, they're both trying to address
the character of the wheat that they're trying to maximize. But
one is done in the lab and one's done, you know, through natural sources. Is
(26:10):
there a difference? Your body thinks so, your body
reacts differently. So one of the biggest
issues that we're all facing at the root of not just
metabolic disease, but a lot of different diseases. And mind you, I'm not
a doctor, I have a nutrition background
and so on, but I'm not going to get into
(26:31):
exactly the difference between GMO and non
gmo. What I do know for a fact is
that your body is processing the GMO in a
way, as it would a foreign. There are
things in there that create an automatic
inflammation. And it's not necessarily just a one
(26:53):
time thing. These things build up in your system,
hence they become part of the root of
disease. Because these things are cumulative.
Except for the part that now so much of our food product
is compromised that that cumulation is happening much earlier,
much faster, much broader. That's why children
(27:16):
are having unprecedented levels of disease,
Obesity, cancer, I mean, you name it.
And this is where I started my
journey at looking at this topic heavily
with respect to beverage alcohol and the narratives out there.
(27:37):
Because we've always had beverage alcohol, we've never seen these kinds
of health markers anywhere.
And children are not drinking alcohol.
So how is it that doctors are
seeing cancers and diseases that
they've never ever encountered in children?
(28:01):
That's an interesting point that you're making.
So it leads to two things that we should talk about. Some of these products
you come up with, but one of them is this book, as you probably read
before, the French Paradox, which, yes, sort of contrasts American
lifestyle with, with the European and Mediterranean lifestyle. But
I want to say something, you said I'm not a doctor, and that's an important
(28:22):
point. There are some nutrition based doctors
out there who've left the medicine field and, and
gone strictly to nutrition. And, and one of the comments that she, one of the
women made that I was listening to, and it's very compelling, was
she was a Stanford grad, a PhD, MD. The whole thing. She said, I never
took one nutrition. Class and I'm not a
(28:45):
doctor, but my brother is a doctor and he's at the Mayo
Clinic. And I can just say that he also confirmed that
he had one semester of nutrition and he will tell me,
you know, way more about this than I do. So
doctors are there to treat the symptoms that the patient
walks in with. And it's a process of elimination. But
(29:08):
from the nutrition, nutrition side of things,
we do know that our bodies function in
response to how we provide it with
nutrition. And it's, it's an
immediate correlation. And lastly, I
would also add. And we can go down the rabbit hole, but
(29:29):
I, I think we want to get to the wine side here.
The other part is there are chemicals in our
environment. There are things that we're not doing well
because for decades we were told about sunscreen. Second,
you know, you see the sun or even think about the sun, you should
lather up in 15, 30, 50,
(29:51):
200, a thousand SPF. Because, I don't know,
because somebody wanted to sell more of those products. The reality is
the sun is the greatest activator of health and
we're blocking it. Not to mention two years ago in January,
I think it was two years ago, maybe three. But
all the sunscreens were recalled from the shelves in
(30:15):
January when people weren't looking. And it was this huge class action
suit about all these chemicals that we're spraying on our children or
rubbing into our babies, rubbing into our skin that
do what? Cause cancer. So
the very thing we're being sold to prevent
cancer is exactly what's driving
(30:36):
upticks that we've never seen before either. That's
really interesting. I know, I did not notice that either. We have a house
near the beach here in Southern California. At the beach, actually I said grew up
at the beach. I never use those things. In fact, we used to put on
Hawaiian Tropic, which is basically Oil. Yeah, it was just oil. And it would
glisten. Exactly.
(30:59):
So into this, we'll start the conversation with
alcohol, with this book, which. The Mediterranean lifestyle, which was
the types of oils you're talking about that are healthier than others
and the pace of life. And then a moderate
consumption of alcohol, primarily wine. And
you said something interesting. There's even a poster which I have somewhere,
(31:21):
actually, I'm trying to find the original. And this is from 1936.
It was a small public service. Now it was post in
Bezier, France, in the south. And it said, drink
wine, it's healthier than the water. And it was in French. In fact, I
had the artist paint on my wall the whole, the whole
poster because. And it was okay to give children at 4 years
(31:43):
old a little wine with that's been cut a little bit. So.
But it was saying there's too much bleach in the water and wine's healthier and
it's not going to make you an alcoholic. That's basically what the poster said.
But there's a huge movement now in this direction
of non alk, low alk. You know, I've tasted,
I've had the pleasure of tasting a Pinot Noir picked from
(32:07):
one vineyard in the central coast. And I've also got to taste its non
alk counterpart from the same grapes. I mean, you can't compare them.
It's almost impossible to drink the Nalan elk. Tell me
where this is coming from and if this is a
valid solution to some of these problems. First of all, I would just say
that the water and wine conversation is a
(32:29):
really interesting one because water was the
root of so many of those massive diseases,
societal wipeouts through the centuries. Because the water
sources were easily compromised and spread disease
readily, rapidly, which is why throughout
history water was cut with wine.
(32:52):
And that was done on purpose to
disinfect essentially the water source
itself. But still it wasn't a foolproof
process. And those diseases,
insane diseases, came through the water sources
(33:12):
because society didn't know how to treat. Know
how to treat the water in order to be safe for human
consumption. And if somebody poisoned the water
or compromised it with something or there were wars and
the water source got impacted, then you have a
spread of massive disease and wipeout of population.
(33:35):
So that wasn't due to wine. And the
reality there are good news.
The other part is that in terms
of this whole non alcohol, wine and spirits
movement, or what have you,
(33:55):
as a marketer, I understand what they're doing. They're
classifying something and they're branding
something that's existed throughout
decades and in fact centuries
non alcohol anything has existed. There have always been
non alcohol choices and, and we never called
(34:18):
them non. I'm not having a non alcohol water or non alcohol
Pepsi or you know, it's sort of
again a branded category
established. Yes. So that they can really identify and then try
to push products through there. The
choices for people are there all the time. I
(34:41):
regularly make really nice spritzers
from teas and whatever types
of products, non alcohol products that I can find that are
interesting, creative and delicious and I do that
all the time. Now why would I instead choose to have
a poorly, poorly made,
(35:04):
sugar laden product
that is now called a non alcohol gin
or a non alcohol wine? At 30, $40
this past weekend I had seen where
people were buying both the non alcohol and the alcohol.
But I can tell you, I can assure you Paul, I blend wine
(35:26):
around the world for clients. I can make non alcohol wine in
my kitchen using white wine
vinegar, a little bit of sugar, some apple juice,
some lemon and a little bit of water
and you know, sugar and get the same
mouthfeel and impact. So that sounds
(35:49):
delicious. Exactly. So the
reality that we have to go through all this trouble to get something called
non alcohol wine. I do appreciate the experience of
having something bottled that looks like wine and then pour the, pour
the sensation of pouring something in a glass and holding
it where it's supposed to feel like a wine
(36:11):
experience but from a product
quality level, price point alignment,
taste, I can't, I can't
see it, I haven't found it. They're either
sugar bombs or they lack
balance. There is no purpose to actually
(36:33):
drink them. I would rather buy a good, you know, seltzer that's
flavored and be done. You know, there's
a. Years ago and I was on this diet called the Scarsdale
and it was a, I guess it was a low
carb thing but he, he claimed at the
time, this is the 70s or 80s, early 80s that he had created,
(36:56):
you know, what is currently just a soda water with a lime twist. Because if
you, if you go to the bar and you order a gin and tonic with
a lime, no one's going to know the difference that if there's
no gin in there and you're just holding that same highball that you would have
held if it was gin, it's no big deal. And I remember, I
think in the mid-80s they, they started making non alcoholic
(37:17):
wine at Rodney Strong. It's called Ariel. It's still out There. Yes.
And the point I'm making is when we went to the fancy food show in
Vegas, the primary
character of the beverages at the fancy food show were
non elk. And I couldn't understand why I would spend
$30 a bottle at Whole Foods for a fake bourbon.
(37:40):
I mean, why would you do that? Because they taste horrible and it's just
brown. Whatever. And I think
you would remember when, when they came out with non fat everything.
Yes. It was basically adding sugar to it to mask the lack
of character. Yes, right. That's what happened. And that
seems like that's what they're doing with this non alk champagnes and wines. And in
(38:02):
fact, yeah, one of my, the vendor that
I used to buy a lot of my juice from when I bottled wine just
bought the largest dealkylization company in America.
And he was telling me that let's say you made a wine, which you have
to start with a wine and let's say it's 14 alcohol and you want to
dealcoholize it, you actually remove another percent.
(38:24):
So you lose 30% of your volume. That's right. By de
alkalizing the wine. You can't survive
by giving up 30% of your inventory right out of the chute. So
you add back something and this is what you're talking
about. Maybe, maybe it is white wine vinegar, maybe it's water, maybe it's sugar. But
you got to add back that volume to get to make a margin even in
(38:45):
the non alk world. So. But you're a marketeer
and your job is to do what the client wants and to formulate what they
want and to provide a strategy for what they want. And do
you have a lot of non alk, low alk clients right now?
I actually am moving away
from doing that part because
(39:08):
I don't fundamentally believe in the category and
don't want to be a part of it because I like
high quality tape, amazing tasting products. And
I also see a different market gap. So to me,
I've talked about this for some time. This topic has been front and
center for me and I've been looking at it. So the first thing I did
(39:31):
was actually create a brand and a product for myself
because I am, I think, not alone
in looking for wine. That that is a
better experience. And for me, that spelled low
sugar, no sugar. I didn't say alcohol.
And the funny thing is that people naturally
(39:54):
attribute all the negative impacts of
whatever they're drinking to the alcohol side. I would argue
very often your impact is the combination
of the sugar Levels and the alcohol
and to that. And I've created my own brand
and we are launching the wine early July.
(40:18):
I made it in Italy. It's a zero sugar
Prosecco called Losecco. Wow.
Oh, clever. Lo Secco Prosecco.
And the brand will be available via e
commerce in 40 plus markets and then on the
ground is rolling out in 10 and internationally also.
(40:41):
We're going to be numerous countries.
Yeah. And this is,
that's the next conversation piece. Was going to be almost that time though already.
But which is. It's very not
simple, I'm going to say. But there's certainly wonderful wines that are real
wines that are just low alk and don't have to have residual
(41:03):
sugar or very small amounts because
it's just growing conditions and climatic conditions can change the
alcohol content of the wine very, very naturally and have
a positive effect on your health and a positive
feeling when you drink it. I mean it's. I don't think that's a huge
step. Instead of bastardizing what you started with,
(41:26):
I'm with you. And there's a reason why
fresh aromatic white wines are part of
the long term trend. And even in places that
didn't used to have that, as in China. But for me,
I think I'm not even tampering with
the alcohol at all. It's standard 11% just like any
(41:49):
other Prosecco. It's just as a.
When I, when I blend wines, when I make wines, I always
find that if I withdraw
or reduce the sugar levels, the aromatics
are popping. And that's exactly the case of
this particular product. And when you do
(42:13):
it in a lineup and you just take the glasses and
you smell them and the aromatics of Glara don't
pop in most Prosecco's because you have so
much sugar in there for the most part. But I did come
across something the other day and this is a great
time to mention it because I'd love your input.
(42:35):
So we make it very challenging for consumers in general
on every part of the wine universe.
One of the ridiculous things that we do and
I believe this should change and needs to change
is to realign the classification
of what the brutes and the
(42:59):
extra dry and all these categories actually mean because
we know that extra dry is anything but.
So why are we calling it extra dry? It's a good question. Trying to
totally confuse the consumer.
It's actually a really fun thing to tease people with,
(43:20):
like what's drier, extra dry or brut? And then like, like, oh, of course,
extra dry. I Don't know the answer. I have to go research that why that
happened. But Prosecco is not generally
labeled that way. Yes, it is. Yes it is.
So if, if it's brutes, which hardly any are
the real. The reality is most of them have very high sugar levels.
(43:42):
People don't realize, but they're between 16 and 40 grams of
sugar per liter. Wow. Very high. Very high. And then
they add Aperol or whatever and now you've got a sugar
bomb. So what? The reason they're
not labeled is because they don't meet the criteria. But the ones
where you see a brute, then okay, it's
(44:05):
out there. And some have taken to labeling extra dry,
but that is the exact opposite of what that particular consumer
would be looking for because they haven't been educated on all these categories.
Losecco happens to be Brut Natur. We have
a nutrition label. Wow, that's
(44:25):
bold. Absolutely. It's normal when you're
communicating about a better for you product. And
we want to make sure that people understand that they're going to have a
better experience drinking this and not
feeling any kind of negative impact. So no blood
glucose rise, none of the after effects really.
(44:47):
Because as I said, a lot of the things that they're attributing
to the alcohol percentage is about the combination
of sugar and alcohol in the drink. You're not seriously thought.
Because you'd think that. Yeah. Okay, let's say we're talking about the
confusion between extra dry Brut and other
various demisec and all those kinds of things. People
(45:09):
don't know. But how many people that, that maybe
are diabetic or have on the border of being diabetic or pre diabetic,
go down the market aisle and grab a bottle of Cabernet or
Apothec red or something and they're consuming, you know, almost Saturn
like sugar levels. Exactly. And thinking,
not even really thinking about this. Probably a huge percentage of the people that
(45:33):
buy those wines don't realize because they're. And
the point, the reason I came to that thought was
when you're talking about the sugar levels of these brands.
And why? Well, because a. The palate.
It's comfortable to the palate to have sugar and it
masks other problems as well, bitterness. You know,
(45:55):
if you're making pasta sauce and you've
it's too bitter, you would probably throw a little sugar in it just, just to
soften a little bit. So it's being, it's being put in there for a
reason and the American public probably is
not ignoring it. But doesn't really realize it there. And here you are. If you've
got a product with I love this idea with the nutrition label because
(46:17):
that's an argument going on right now. And you voluntarily are doing it
to prove to the public that this is what's in here.
We want to inform the public and I think we
in the wine space have cryptic information, enough
cryptic information as is. I'd like to be as transparent
as possible with what we're communicating to our customers.
(46:40):
And all I care about really is the consumer. So
that consumer that you just described, prebiabetic, diabetic,
what have you metabolically challenged in
whatever stage that they are in. I had a
buyer at a restaurant, we were showing the wine in advance
of the shipment arriving and she said right
(47:03):
away, oh, I'm diabetic. I'm constantly looking for something
that will work for me. This is phenomenal. And
not that we created a product, but given how many people in this
nation are in that zone, this is a
factor. And then we can talk about the Ozempic fad where,
oh, we're not going to be interested in drinking. Not true.
(47:25):
They are rebelling. And the flavor profiles, or
rather the palate is rejecting the sugar
load. We have, if you will, the Ozempic
wine because it's not
impactful in that way. It's fresh and clean and
bright and none of this sugar
(47:47):
reaction that people who are on those GLP
ones are experiencing. You should use
AI and find all the Ozempic users in America
and target them. We don't have to. It's word of
mouth and we're not even in the market yet. And I have to
say the reaction has, has been epic to the wine from
(48:11):
consumers, from retail, on premise distributors.
I've never ever experienced this kind of reaction. One of the
things that showed me
immediately that we are going to have that path that I already
envisioned but didn't have proof of yet.
It was just the second it
(48:34):
was described, it wasn't even tasted by anyone. But when
we were describing it to just
wine lovers across the board, the reaction
was not only do I want it, I want to tell all my friends about
it because we're having this conversation
and it's going to roll out. July, July, early July,
(48:57):
early July. And you said 40 markets. So where's
that start? It's. It starts online. So
the first and most important thing is for anyone interested to
sign up online for the pre
sell because we are going to activate the
second the wine arrives. So we're going to be fulfilling.
(49:19):
We're going, we're going to be in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut,
down south, and those will be the first markets that we're
rolling out. Also there will be a couple of
spots in the middle of the country. And who's doing the fulfillment and the direct
to consumer stuff. So we have a platform that
we're working with, a compliant platform that ships in multiple states.
(49:42):
Compliant.
I wish it were easier, but it's not. It should
be called indirect to consumer because it's not direct to
consumer. I really, I don't know who came up with that language, but
I find it troublesome. And again, it's bad wine speak. It's
indirect to consumer. We're still maintaining three tier system.
(50:07):
Yes, we get the computer, the consumer data, but it's anything
but direct to consumer. I don't, Yeah, I don't and I don't think it changing
soon. It's been tried many times. This has been a fascinating conversation.
Monica, it's always a pleasure to see you and I always follow what you're
doing on LinkedIn, et cetera, to see what's going on in
your camp. But certainly if we get back to New York,
(50:30):
we'll go up to the Baccarat Hotel bar and have a drink. Love to
have you here. Thank you so much, Paul, for
having me. It's my pleasure. It's good to see you again. Thank you.
Likewise. Take care.
The reality that we've never been in worse health as
a society than we are today. We have
75% of the young people.
Military age cannot qualify for the military because they can't
pass the test, the physical test. We have spiking
cancer rates. You name the disease, we've got it.
(00:22):
Sit back and grab a glass. It's Wine Talks
with Paul K. Hey, welcome to Wine
Talks with Paul Kane. We are in studio today in beautiful Southern California about
to have a conversation with Monica Elling way out in foggy New York.
Introductions in just a moment. You have to go online
and check out an interview I did with Zaya
(00:44):
Unan. This guy's story is crazy.
He came to America at 13 years old, had earned enough money to
fly to America by painting bicycles in Iran,
and he established his career here. And now he's
trying to take down or at least compete with lvmh. It's an
amazing story. Have a listen, but not while we're here today. Here to talk to
(01:07):
Monica Elling. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Paul. Good to be
here. Good to see you again. Monica is the CEO+ founder,
fractional CMO of CPG, brand architect
and growth strategist. Is that accurate?
I'm the CEO and founder of FMG and I am
a fractional CMO for companies in the beverage alcohol
(01:30):
space. Okay, this is an interesting thought and I want you
back on the show because you've been posting a lot of interesting things and there's
a lot of scuttlebutt about what's going on in the industry
and there's all kinds of press and there's the non alk movement and the low
elk movement and there's the nutrition side of this. And it seems to
get pretty congested out there as to
(01:52):
what's happening in the marketplace. I'm not sure anybody really knows what's going on in
the marketplace, but you did post something recently about was it a
low elk prosecco you're working on? It is
more than that, but I think to give a
background to the entire topic
would be a good place to, you know, to start
(02:15):
because things have evolved for, I think,
the global marketplace. And I'm not just talking about wines and spirits. I'm
actually talking about consumer health. So I have a background in
nutrition fitness along with 20 plus years in the beverage
alcohol space. And as a
former athlete and raising
(02:37):
two out of my three children were nationally ranked athletes. The
reality was I had started to
truly look at food as fuel early on.
So some of the things that are called today, keto, low
carb, intermittent fasting, all these buzzwords, branded
buzzwords, I was just instinctively doing
(02:59):
because I being in tune with my body
for optimal performance, it helped me
to gauge what the inputs were and how I felt.
And in that part, I researched the nutrition
in what I was consuming, realizing that there were
so many unnecessary and hidden ingredients
(03:22):
that I wasn't even aware of. And not to mention that
during the decades as I was growing up and then having my own
children, I saw so many of the core staple products
that we're all used to changing by way of
ingredients. So the feeling was that I would,
as a, you know, teenager, have a certain type of a product,
(03:45):
and then decades later, I would have the same product, have a bad reaction.
And I didn't understand why. It wasn't that I
changed. The products have changed. And
all these reformulations on the food side, the additives,
for whatever reason, have gotten to the point where
(04:05):
certainly Americans are feeling not
that well these days. And health has become a big issue.
Do you think? I mean, this approach by rfk,
which. Yeah, I have to tell you two stories. One is
you're talking about athleticism and what parents think and what they've heard
and what they've decided is good and bad. And I'm talking about a few years
(04:28):
ago when my daughter was in eighth grade, my wife was doing
the graduate graduation party for the eighth graders. And this
woman wanted. She was very upset that there was going to be Coke
served, which is fine, I get it. But she
insisted that Gatorade be sold because her
son was an athlete. And I thought, well, you know,
(04:50):
that stuff full of crap, I mean, there's nothing
healthy about Gatorade. And if you think your son's an athlete and this is going
to be a part of his regiment, I think that's. You make
a mistake, and obviously that's all changed. But do you think our Kay's on the
right track then, when it comes to what he's proposing
to the American palate public? Before I
(05:12):
answer that, I want to address the Gatorade point, because that's so interesting.
It's exactly what I'm referring to, actually, because
the original ingredients in Gatorade were simple.
There was salt, there was citrus, and a little bit of sugar
water. That's it. And it has since
been reformulated so many times, it's unrecognizable
(05:35):
as a drink. And you're right, it. It is the furthest thing from
something that a premier athlete should be Having
so just to. That is so aligned with exactly
where I'm going. But as far as the
RFK situation and the Maha movement,
I think parents, especially over the last
(05:58):
several decades, have been vigilant about the type
of reactions their children are having and
deaths to food, environment, what have you. From the
standpoint of the allergies, the
uptick in allergies. You know, I grew up in
Europe. I had no idea what an
(06:21):
allergy was until I got here. Never heard of it. Never heard
of it. Nobody I knew had anything like it. I thought it was some very,
very strange, obscure American thing. But then, you
know, I've learned and.
Interrupted for a second. When you. When you order a drink by the
(06:41):
color that has to be. There has to be something wrong with that. All
right, like, I'll have the blue one. That's. That doesn't seem right.
I want to add on to that anecdote about Gatorade. When I was
cross country in high school, my coach, you know, felt that was too
expensive, so he made Kool Aid and threw salt in it.
And that was horrible. But it was
(07:04):
the same thing, right? It was water, sugar and
flavoring and salt. That's all it was back then nowadays.
Except Gatorade was clean flavorings back then. It is not
now. But the difference was that was definitely
Kool Aid was definitely artificial even back then. Artificial flavors and
colors were coming to fore. But it was an
(07:26):
evolution, so it didn't happen overnight. And the intention wasn't for
every product to. To be that compromised, if you will.
But back to the comments about RFK and
the Maha movement. First of all, I will just point
out the reality that we've never been in
worse health as a society than we are today. We have
(07:50):
75% of the young people.
Military age cannot qualify for the military because they can't
pass the test, the physical test. That's
just one indication. Then we have obscene rates
of obesity, people. 75%
of the country is overweight and then obese. We have metabolic
(08:13):
disease through the wazoo. We have spiking
cancer rates. You name the disease, we've got it.
And at the same time, the narratives are being
twisted in so many ways away
from some of the obvious, very logical
root causes of what we're dealing with.
(08:38):
I want to point out that if you, if, based
on what Monica's saying, if you, as a. To the listeners,
if you go to Disneyland, which we did
three times this last winter, you will see the
amazing difference in the health of the people that go there.
Just in the last few years, the number of scooters, electric
(09:01):
scooters required to get people around
blew my mind. This is about two months ago. I couldn't believe it. I just
thought this is ridiculous that these people have come,
that the population, I don't think these people, it's not their fault in the sense
of they're eating what they've been given to eat.
Buffets like Hometown Buffet and those kinds of things with this horrible food.
(09:25):
I'm shocked at that. Do you think it can have a
positive impact? Do you think that the movement at least giving people the
options to eat more healthy is a functional
approach? 100%. Because they're
starting with the food pyramid, which has been upside down for the longest time.
This is my first and most obvious commentary about government
(09:47):
mandated direction, nutrition direction,
or for some people, the seeming infallibility
of some of the data coming out regarding wine and beverages
and so forth and so on. Question all of it, because
we have decades of the pyramid
where I think Fruit Loops is pretty much at the top of the
(10:10):
category and or at the bottom of the category.
So it's the most amount of food that you're supposed to eat.
So low fat and essentially full
of carbohydrates, where meat and good fats are
being reduced to minuscule amounts, which is the polar opposite
of what this needs to be for human nutrition.
(10:33):
It's not like we've invented this. This is how our bodies
were meant to function. And it's always been
protein first and protein priority.
Everything else is secondary or
non essential. We don't actually need carbohydrates to
function ever. And do you think that this
(10:54):
progression to the point we are today, I mean, if you think about it,
and I talk about those with the wine trade all the time, they talk about
pesticides, insecticides, organic farming, biodynamic, et cetera.
It always was that and we screwed it up
and now we're trying to. Go back and we need
to because we are damaging not just
(11:16):
ourselves, but our children. Everybody's so worried about,
I guess, all sorts of carbon
footprint and all this. I actually don't care
because what I care about starts,
begins with the children that I see that
(11:36):
are having the worst health outcomes ever.
So any other topic for me is so, well,
much later in the conversation because we're not addressing
the core health of generations to come. And
how can we as a society and as a race, as a global human
race, how can we even continue to thrive if,
(12:00):
if everything that we are putting into our Bodies is
compromised. One of the comments made early on when I started to
read about this, and I have Steiner's book here, and
the book the Third Plate by Dan the Chef
was that organic farming. And we all know that
(12:21):
organic necessarily on itself isn't all that great if it's not properly
done. But let's just take it, let's just assume that all organic farm is good
for you, that it couldn't sustain itself in
the world's population of consumption because you can't grow enough. And I don't think that's
accurate anymore. I think you can grow enough. And then
is it more difficult today or less difficult today to. To
(12:44):
eat the way you're proposing to turn the pyramid upside down?
Is it more accessible or is it becoming more accessible?
It was always accessible. But the rhetoric was in a complete
different direction, away from what our bodies really
require. And we are undoing
that psychology. And
(13:07):
that's a tougher call than actual accessibility
to the right foods. It's choices that are to
be made upon going to the grocery
store. And I've always made it relatively easy for my
family because things just didn't enter the household
that weren't screened, if you will.
(13:29):
And I hated to have to look at every single
thing. But it became so necessary
when I found that the ingredients were being changed.
Additives were being put into products I regularly
purchased for years. And all of a sudden they were not
what they appear to be. The misinformation on
(13:51):
labeling. And I know that there is all sorts of government
regulatory and we're talking food products, not even wine and spirits yet.
So when you see a salad dressing, first of all you go to
Whole Foods because you're assuming all sorts of things about
what you have available for yourself, as in
better for you or higher quality, more organic, biodynamic,
(14:14):
what have you. So cleaner products overall. That's an assumption.
You go into the store, you go and grab
an olive oil based salad
dressing and it says extra virgin olive oil made with
extra virgin olive oil. And that's great.
And you get home and you're about to put it on your salad and just
(14:36):
have this gnawing feeling that you should look
at the back label and, and guess what? The olive oil
is the seventh or eighth ingredient in there. Meanwhile,
it's all sorts of seed oils that are first up and
then other additives and so on. So yes,
technically there's olive oil, but it's not an olive oil based dressing. So
(14:58):
I don't even buy dressings anymore. I don't know why anybody
does. It's so easy to make convenience, occasional
convenience. I mean, it's so easy. I know, I know. Well, that's where
I am and I've always made it. But I always had
a couple of different options. But I think
the compromise is tricky. Bless you. The
(15:21):
other thing that I've noticed, and it was a recent
discovery I was cooking, I had three
different types of salts and again, I just had
this feeling I should look at the back label. Guess
what? Dextrose in the salt. What
really? Sugar. Salt. Exactly.
(15:43):
Sugar by many names in
our salt. These are major brands. And
seeing it not in one, and then I looked at the next one
and that had it. And then the next one had it.
You know, there was a product when I was, when I was a kid, when
I was in high school and I was playing baseball, my buddy and I went
(16:04):
to my dad's pharmacy, my dad of chain of pharmacies and
we, he used to sell a thing called dextro Energin
and it was a block of sugar basically.
And you would, I mean, I can't now that you talk about it, because I
haven't heard the word dextrose in a long time. And I just triggered this thought
that we'd go take them from my dad's store and chew on these things.
(16:27):
It was like worse than a sugar cube, right? It was, it was, it was
supposed to provide some level of energy. But again,
your body processes energy from two sources. It's
glucose or ketones. So your body is really meant to
be driven by ketones and
glucose is secondary. So when
(16:49):
you are actually in ketosis,
you're sharper, your functioning is better, everything is
better and your metabolism is better.
But the sugar culture that we're seeing in
food, unexpected food items,
it's very daunting to have to navigate
(17:12):
all of this. But across the board,
I think the sugar levels in
all sorts of products from bread to like I said, salt
is a disconcerting feeling and
it's hard to control, it's hard to navigate. It's
also changing our palates. I want to touch on that
(17:34):
dressing real fast and I want to move into this how America got this way.
But our go to dressing just for the listener's
sake is from a very famous New York based
restaurant. Who. And the gentleman the chef just passed recently, his name
was Andre Sultner and it was Lutece. Yes.
And it's, you know, it's avocado oil, olive oil,
(17:57):
some mustard, garlic, salt and a little tarragon. Or tarragon
vinegar. And that's it. It takes like 30 seconds to make it. And it's so
much better and tastes so much fresher. So just for the listeners.
But part of this process, I mean, it's even
referenced in a Rolling Stone song, right? Frozen steak. So somewhere
along the line, America decided that yields in the
(18:19):
farm or manipulated
DNA of wheat to make more or taller or
whatever character they were trying to find
moved us into this area in the 60s, particularly where there was frozen foods
and all this stuff was just doctored up. And the idea of convenience was very
important. And all of a sudden, even, like I said in the Rolling Stone
(18:42):
song, the Housewives making a frozen steak, which is like, big
deal. Why can't you make a regular steak if you can make a frozen steak?
Is that big food? Where were we as
Americans as a culture
that we went into this direction compared to Europe?
Yes. So we are a huge country
(19:06):
for one that's a separator. Europe is a
continent and the United States is an
enormous country. So we do things on a big
scale. European nations with 10, 20 million people,
15 million people, they approach it differently because they can.
They can manage the size. And
(19:28):
it's definitely a different approach in the US
but does it have to be? So let's look at why some of
this stuff happened and what really
went wrong. And that's an
entire conversation itself. But
there were movements that created
(19:52):
a momentum for big food and
cheaper costs of food and so forth and so on. That's
not just food. That happened across all industries, really.
It's just an evolution of a society to some degree.
But where it started damaging,
(20:13):
I guess, Americans first. There were
other cycles happening at the same time that drove this ready to eat
food. And part of it, women going to
work. Whereas you've had families where the mom
would stay at home, the father was the provider, and
so just a different societal structure. Women going
(20:36):
to work force the situation of easier
to prepare food, faster food
available food, and still
within whatever the family budgets were. So
all of our daily, I guess,
marketing and shopping had
(20:59):
to be reduced to a very different dynamic
where you could purchase product for a week or so,
have it available in your kitchen, have it readily
accessible, hence the frozen steak. Because
now that mom is
potentially at work. And it didn't happen
(21:20):
overnight in the 60s, but that was a preparation and a push towards
women. And with the advent of
the pill, all these things were happening basically
simultaneously. And actually,
that's interesting from the food supply angle, none of it for the
(21:41):
better it's all hurt all of us.
But if you think back even before then, the
birth of the cereal and Post
company versus Kellogg and how that happened, that too
was about quick preparation for
a breakfast meal. That's why that
(22:04):
entirety took off. It was no
longer a complicated production. It
really was centered around speed. That's a really interesting part
of the story, and I think you've probably watched or seen on TV one of
the history channels. I read the book in post,
you know, really started as a serial for
(22:28):
recovery in a sanitarium. Yep. You know, this
is an interesting thought, because are we able to go back
to that type of thing? I was. I had this conversation, I think, with my
daughter, since one of my daughters did not lose her house in the fire,
but they were transplanted to our home. They've been there since January
as they clean up. And so I've seen how they. How
(22:51):
she manages her lifestyle. She works for Apple. She's been working all
the time, and her husband as well, and. And the kids are at our house.
And so they still tend to grab towards
simple, fast things, though it seems like they're picking
wiser choices. But one of the conversations we
had was that if you're going to buy organic, whether it's Whole Foods
(23:13):
or Gelson's, whatever else, you do have to shop
more often because it does not last as long. And we'll get into the
alcohol side of this in a second. And so that does require you to change
how you manage your life because you were going to the market more often.
And then I thought, okay, that's interesting. You've got a Whole Foods right there in
Columbus Circle, right in, you know, an office building with a
(23:35):
hotel attached to it. Is that part of the
movement to get. I mean, it's obviously corporate
America doing this, but to put a market
in. In a very urban part of New York and Los
Angeles, is that a positive thing for us to do?
Absolutely. But it doesn't have to be Whole Foods.
(23:57):
And the whole organic labeling and
conversation is challenging because to me,
it should just be food
and then GMO food or whatever that is
biochemically prepared mess.
So it really should just be food. And we should
(24:20):
be able to be secure that our food
is clean, organic, et cetera. That
should be the baseline assumption to me.
So we've gone reverse, and
everything is labeled, and unless it says non GMO
and whatever else 10 stickers the product
(24:43):
has on it, you have to navigate each one understanding
what it is that you're actually buying when all you Want is,
is clean food. So it's interesting. I
stop you there for a second because the GMO thing, I had this conversation many
times. I don't know the answer to this necessarily. I did have one
scientist sort of give a better answer than another, but it's not a quiz
(25:05):
here. And that is, I had on the show
a gentleman who created gmo, I mean stated it says
gmo, you know, on the thing. It was a
recovery alcohol recovery shot. And so you take it before
you start drinking. And this genetically modified
probiotic would affect the way your
(25:28):
body process the alcohol. And then you wake up, you feel better. And the
next day I had a non GMO
tequila manufacturer or something, some distilled spirit. And the
question was, how is a GMO different than
naturally hybrid wheat? For instance? Let's say we, we go
(25:48):
to the lab and we, we make a GM GMO
wheat strain of wheat versus, you know, one of the
40,000 strains of wheat that were made through natural
hybrid selection. They're both doing the same thing, they're both trying to address
the character of the wheat that they're trying to maximize. But
one is done in the lab and one's done, you know, through natural sources. Is
(26:10):
there a difference? Your body thinks so, your body
reacts differently. So one of the biggest
issues that we're all facing at the root of not just
metabolic disease, but a lot of different diseases. And mind you, I'm not
a doctor, I have a nutrition background
and so on, but I'm not going to get into
(26:31):
exactly the difference between GMO and non
gmo. What I do know for a fact is
that your body is processing the GMO in a
way, as it would a foreign. There are
things in there that create an automatic
inflammation. And it's not necessarily just a one
(26:53):
time thing. These things build up in your system,
hence they become part of the root of
disease. Because these things are cumulative.
Except for the part that now so much of our food product
is compromised that that cumulation is happening much earlier,
much faster, much broader. That's why children
(27:16):
are having unprecedented levels of disease,
Obesity, cancer, I mean, you name it.
And this is where I started my
journey at looking at this topic heavily
with respect to beverage alcohol and the narratives out there.
(27:37):
Because we've always had beverage alcohol, we've never seen these kinds
of health markers anywhere.
And children are not drinking alcohol.
So how is it that doctors are
seeing cancers and diseases that
they've never ever encountered in children?
(28:01):
That's an interesting point that you're making.
So it leads to two things that we should talk about. Some of these products
you come up with, but one of them is this book, as you probably read
before, the French Paradox, which, yes, sort of contrasts American
lifestyle with, with the European and Mediterranean lifestyle. But
I want to say something, you said I'm not a doctor, and that's an important
(28:22):
point. There are some nutrition based doctors
out there who've left the medicine field and, and
gone strictly to nutrition. And, and one of the comments that she, one of the
women made that I was listening to, and it's very compelling, was
she was a Stanford grad, a PhD, MD. The whole thing. She said, I never
took one nutrition. Class and I'm not a
(28:45):
doctor, but my brother is a doctor and he's at the Mayo
Clinic. And I can just say that he also confirmed that
he had one semester of nutrition and he will tell me,
you know, way more about this than I do. So
doctors are there to treat the symptoms that the patient
walks in with. And it's a process of elimination. But
(29:08):
from the nutrition, nutrition side of things,
we do know that our bodies function in
response to how we provide it with
nutrition. And it's, it's an
immediate correlation. And lastly, I
would also add. And we can go down the rabbit hole, but
(29:29):
I, I think we want to get to the wine side here.
The other part is there are chemicals in our
environment. There are things that we're not doing well
because for decades we were told about sunscreen. Second,
you know, you see the sun or even think about the sun, you should
lather up in 15, 30, 50,
(29:51):
200, a thousand SPF. Because, I don't know,
because somebody wanted to sell more of those products. The reality is
the sun is the greatest activator of health and
we're blocking it. Not to mention two years ago in January,
I think it was two years ago, maybe three. But
all the sunscreens were recalled from the shelves in
(30:15):
January when people weren't looking. And it was this huge class action
suit about all these chemicals that we're spraying on our children or
rubbing into our babies, rubbing into our skin that
do what? Cause cancer. So
the very thing we're being sold to prevent
cancer is exactly what's driving
(30:36):
upticks that we've never seen before either. That's
really interesting. I know, I did not notice that either. We have a house
near the beach here in Southern California. At the beach, actually I said grew up
at the beach. I never use those things. In fact, we used to put on
Hawaiian Tropic, which is basically Oil. Yeah, it was just oil. And it would
glisten. Exactly.
(30:59):
So into this, we'll start the conversation with
alcohol, with this book, which. The Mediterranean lifestyle, which was
the types of oils you're talking about that are healthier than others
and the pace of life. And then a moderate
consumption of alcohol, primarily wine. And
you said something interesting. There's even a poster which I have somewhere,
(31:21):
actually, I'm trying to find the original. And this is from 1936.
It was a small public service. Now it was post in
Bezier, France, in the south. And it said, drink
wine, it's healthier than the water. And it was in French. In fact, I
had the artist paint on my wall the whole, the whole
poster because. And it was okay to give children at 4 years
(31:43):
old a little wine with that's been cut a little bit. So.
But it was saying there's too much bleach in the water and wine's healthier and
it's not going to make you an alcoholic. That's basically what the poster said.
But there's a huge movement now in this direction
of non alk, low alk. You know, I've tasted,
I've had the pleasure of tasting a Pinot Noir picked from
(32:07):
one vineyard in the central coast. And I've also got to taste its non
alk counterpart from the same grapes. I mean, you can't compare them.
It's almost impossible to drink the Nalan elk. Tell me
where this is coming from and if this is a
valid solution to some of these problems. First of all, I would just say
that the water and wine conversation is a
(32:29):
really interesting one because water was the
root of so many of those massive diseases,
societal wipeouts through the centuries. Because the water
sources were easily compromised and spread disease
readily, rapidly, which is why throughout
history water was cut with wine.
(32:52):
And that was done on purpose to
disinfect essentially the water source
itself. But still it wasn't a foolproof
process. And those diseases,
insane diseases, came through the water sources
(33:12):
because society didn't know how to treat. Know
how to treat the water in order to be safe for human
consumption. And if somebody poisoned the water
or compromised it with something or there were wars and
the water source got impacted, then you have a
spread of massive disease and wipeout of population.
(33:35):
So that wasn't due to wine. And the
reality there are good news.
The other part is that in terms
of this whole non alcohol, wine and spirits
movement, or what have you,
(33:55):
as a marketer, I understand what they're doing. They're
classifying something and they're branding
something that's existed throughout
decades and in fact centuries
non alcohol anything has existed. There have always been
non alcohol choices and, and we never called
(34:18):
them non. I'm not having a non alcohol water or non alcohol
Pepsi or you know, it's sort of
again a branded category
established. Yes. So that they can really identify and then try
to push products through there. The
choices for people are there all the time. I
(34:41):
regularly make really nice spritzers
from teas and whatever types
of products, non alcohol products that I can find that are
interesting, creative and delicious and I do that
all the time. Now why would I instead choose to have
a poorly, poorly made,
(35:04):
sugar laden product
that is now called a non alcohol gin
or a non alcohol wine? At 30, $40
this past weekend I had seen where
people were buying both the non alcohol and the alcohol.
But I can tell you, I can assure you Paul, I blend wine
(35:26):
around the world for clients. I can make non alcohol wine in
my kitchen using white wine
vinegar, a little bit of sugar, some apple juice,
some lemon and a little bit of water
and you know, sugar and get the same
mouthfeel and impact. So that sounds
(35:49):
delicious. Exactly. So the
reality that we have to go through all this trouble to get something called
non alcohol wine. I do appreciate the experience of
having something bottled that looks like wine and then pour the, pour
the sensation of pouring something in a glass and holding
it where it's supposed to feel like a wine
(36:11):
experience but from a product
quality level, price point alignment,
taste, I can't, I can't
see it, I haven't found it. They're either
sugar bombs or they lack
balance. There is no purpose to actually
(36:33):
drink them. I would rather buy a good, you know, seltzer that's
flavored and be done. You know, there's
a. Years ago and I was on this diet called the Scarsdale
and it was a, I guess it was a low
carb thing but he, he claimed at the
time, this is the 70s or 80s, early 80s that he had created,
(36:56):
you know, what is currently just a soda water with a lime twist. Because if
you, if you go to the bar and you order a gin and tonic with
a lime, no one's going to know the difference that if there's
no gin in there and you're just holding that same highball that you would have
held if it was gin, it's no big deal. And I remember, I
think in the mid-80s they, they started making non alcoholic
(37:17):
wine at Rodney Strong. It's called Ariel. It's still out There. Yes.
And the point I'm making is when we went to the fancy food show in
Vegas, the primary
character of the beverages at the fancy food show were
non elk. And I couldn't understand why I would spend
$30 a bottle at Whole Foods for a fake bourbon.
(37:40):
I mean, why would you do that? Because they taste horrible and it's just
brown. Whatever. And I think
you would remember when, when they came out with non fat everything.
Yes. It was basically adding sugar to it to mask the lack
of character. Yes, right. That's what happened. And that
seems like that's what they're doing with this non alk champagnes and wines. And in
(38:02):
fact, yeah, one of my, the vendor that
I used to buy a lot of my juice from when I bottled wine just
bought the largest dealkylization company in America.
And he was telling me that let's say you made a wine, which you have
to start with a wine and let's say it's 14 alcohol and you want to
dealcoholize it, you actually remove another percent.
(38:24):
So you lose 30% of your volume. That's right. By de
alkalizing the wine. You can't survive
by giving up 30% of your inventory right out of the chute. So
you add back something and this is what you're talking
about. Maybe, maybe it is white wine vinegar, maybe it's water, maybe it's sugar. But
you got to add back that volume to get to make a margin even in
(38:45):
the non alk world. So. But you're a marketeer
and your job is to do what the client wants and to formulate what they
want and to provide a strategy for what they want. And do
you have a lot of non alk, low alk clients right now?
I actually am moving away
from doing that part because
(39:08):
I don't fundamentally believe in the category and
don't want to be a part of it because I like
high quality tape, amazing tasting products. And
I also see a different market gap. So to me,
I've talked about this for some time. This topic has been front and
center for me and I've been looking at it. So the first thing I did
(39:31):
was actually create a brand and a product for myself
because I am, I think, not alone
in looking for wine. That that is a
better experience. And for me, that spelled low
sugar, no sugar. I didn't say alcohol.
And the funny thing is that people naturally
(39:54):
attribute all the negative impacts of
whatever they're drinking to the alcohol side. I would argue
very often your impact is the combination
of the sugar Levels and the alcohol
and to that. And I've created my own brand
and we are launching the wine early July.
(40:18):
I made it in Italy. It's a zero sugar
Prosecco called Losecco. Wow.
Oh, clever. Lo Secco Prosecco.
And the brand will be available via e
commerce in 40 plus markets and then on the
ground is rolling out in 10 and internationally also.
(40:41):
We're going to be numerous countries.
Yeah. And this is,
that's the next conversation piece. Was going to be almost that time though already.
But which is. It's very not
simple, I'm going to say. But there's certainly wonderful wines that are real
wines that are just low alk and don't have to have residual
(41:03):
sugar or very small amounts because
it's just growing conditions and climatic conditions can change the
alcohol content of the wine very, very naturally and have
a positive effect on your health and a positive
feeling when you drink it. I mean it's. I don't think that's a huge
step. Instead of bastardizing what you started with,
(41:26):
I'm with you. And there's a reason why
fresh aromatic white wines are part of
the long term trend. And even in places that
didn't used to have that, as in China. But for me,
I think I'm not even tampering with
the alcohol at all. It's standard 11% just like any
(41:49):
other Prosecco. It's just as a.
When I, when I blend wines, when I make wines, I always
find that if I withdraw
or reduce the sugar levels, the aromatics
are popping. And that's exactly the case of
this particular product. And when you do
(42:13):
it in a lineup and you just take the glasses and
you smell them and the aromatics of Glara don't
pop in most Prosecco's because you have so
much sugar in there for the most part. But I did come
across something the other day and this is a great
time to mention it because I'd love your input.
(42:35):
So we make it very challenging for consumers in general
on every part of the wine universe.
One of the ridiculous things that we do and
I believe this should change and needs to change
is to realign the classification
of what the brutes and the
(42:59):
extra dry and all these categories actually mean because
we know that extra dry is anything but.
So why are we calling it extra dry? It's a good question. Trying to
totally confuse the consumer.
It's actually a really fun thing to tease people with,
(43:20):
like what's drier, extra dry or brut? And then like, like, oh, of course,
extra dry. I Don't know the answer. I have to go research that why that
happened. But Prosecco is not generally
labeled that way. Yes, it is. Yes it is.
So if, if it's brutes, which hardly any are
the real. The reality is most of them have very high sugar levels.
(43:42):
People don't realize, but they're between 16 and 40 grams of
sugar per liter. Wow. Very high. Very high. And then
they add Aperol or whatever and now you've got a sugar
bomb. So what? The reason they're
not labeled is because they don't meet the criteria. But the ones
where you see a brute, then okay, it's
(44:05):
out there. And some have taken to labeling extra dry,
but that is the exact opposite of what that particular consumer
would be looking for because they haven't been educated on all these categories.
Losecco happens to be Brut Natur. We have
a nutrition label. Wow, that's
(44:25):
bold. Absolutely. It's normal when you're
communicating about a better for you product. And
we want to make sure that people understand that they're going to have a
better experience drinking this and not
feeling any kind of negative impact. So no blood
glucose rise, none of the after effects really.
(44:47):
Because as I said, a lot of the things that they're attributing
to the alcohol percentage is about the combination
of sugar and alcohol in the drink. You're not seriously thought.
Because you'd think that. Yeah. Okay, let's say we're talking about the
confusion between extra dry Brut and other
various demisec and all those kinds of things. People
(45:09):
don't know. But how many people that, that maybe
are diabetic or have on the border of being diabetic or pre diabetic,
go down the market aisle and grab a bottle of Cabernet or
Apothec red or something and they're consuming, you know, almost Saturn
like sugar levels. Exactly. And thinking,
not even really thinking about this. Probably a huge percentage of the people that
(45:33):
buy those wines don't realize because they're. And
the point, the reason I came to that thought was
when you're talking about the sugar levels of these brands.
And why? Well, because a. The palate.
It's comfortable to the palate to have sugar and it
masks other problems as well, bitterness. You know,
(45:55):
if you're making pasta sauce and you've
it's too bitter, you would probably throw a little sugar in it just, just to
soften a little bit. So it's being, it's being put in there for a
reason and the American public probably is
not ignoring it. But doesn't really realize it there. And here you are. If you've
got a product with I love this idea with the nutrition label because
(46:17):
that's an argument going on right now. And you voluntarily are doing it
to prove to the public that this is what's in here.
We want to inform the public and I think we
in the wine space have cryptic information, enough
cryptic information as is. I'd like to be as transparent
as possible with what we're communicating to our customers.
(46:40):
And all I care about really is the consumer. So
that consumer that you just described, prebiabetic, diabetic,
what have you metabolically challenged in
whatever stage that they are in. I had a
buyer at a restaurant, we were showing the wine in advance
of the shipment arriving and she said right
(47:03):
away, oh, I'm diabetic. I'm constantly looking for something
that will work for me. This is phenomenal. And
not that we created a product, but given how many people in this
nation are in that zone, this is a
factor. And then we can talk about the Ozempic fad where,
oh, we're not going to be interested in drinking. Not true.
(47:25):
They are rebelling. And the flavor profiles, or
rather the palate is rejecting the sugar
load. We have, if you will, the Ozempic
wine because it's not
impactful in that way. It's fresh and clean and
bright and none of this sugar
(47:47):
reaction that people who are on those GLP
ones are experiencing. You should use
AI and find all the Ozempic users in America
and target them. We don't have to. It's word of
mouth and we're not even in the market yet. And I have to
say the reaction has, has been epic to the wine from
(48:11):
consumers, from retail, on premise distributors.
I've never ever experienced this kind of reaction. One of the
things that showed me
immediately that we are going to have that path that I already
envisioned but didn't have proof of yet.
It was just the second it
(48:34):
was described, it wasn't even tasted by anyone. But when
we were describing it to just
wine lovers across the board, the reaction
was not only do I want it, I want to tell all my friends about
it because we're having this conversation
and it's going to roll out. July, July, early July,
(48:57):
early July. And you said 40 markets. So where's
that start? It's. It starts online. So
the first and most important thing is for anyone interested to
sign up online for the pre
sell because we are going to activate the
second the wine arrives. So we're going to be fulfilling.
(49:19):
We're going, we're going to be in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut,
down south, and those will be the first markets that we're
rolling out. Also there will be a couple of
spots in the middle of the country. And who's doing the fulfillment and the direct
to consumer stuff. So we have a platform that
we're working with, a compliant platform that ships in multiple states.
(49:42):
Compliant.
I wish it were easier, but it's not. It should
be called indirect to consumer because it's not direct to
consumer. I really, I don't know who came up with that language, but
I find it troublesome. And again, it's bad wine speak. It's
indirect to consumer. We're still maintaining three tier system.
(50:07):
Yes, we get the computer, the consumer data, but it's anything
but direct to consumer. I don't, Yeah, I don't and I don't think it changing
soon. It's been tried many times. This has been a fascinating conversation.
Monica, it's always a pleasure to see you and I always follow what you're
doing on LinkedIn, et cetera, to see what's going on in
your camp. But certainly if we get back to New York,
(50:30):
we'll go up to the Baccarat Hotel bar and have a drink. Love to
have you here. Thank you so much, Paul, for
having me. It's my pleasure. It's good to see you again. Thank you.
Likewise. Take care.
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