I'm Levy Dalton and this is all drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the wine business. Oh, Kevin McKenna shows up today to tell us a little bit about his partnership at

Louis Dresner McKenna where he forged several things including a wonderful Italian wine selection.

Nice to see you sir. Nice to see you too. You started in restaurants.

So I was working in restaurants and actually the first time I got the wine bug I was working during

college and summer at a resort up in Lake Champlain in Vermont.

It was sort of a cruise ship that never left land.

Very moneyed old guard and the crew came up in the summers from from Boca Raton from the coral gables I think were the g gables in Florida and the first year I was there the

the sonnier was a guy named Waleed who was Lebanese and went to the Sorbonne in France and was really, really well-versed in wine.

But what he liked to do most was play backgammon and smoke joints.

Oh, okay. Bongs. So we hit it off really well.

Yeah so you had some things. And he loved to talk about wine and so I started to learn things from Walid

with a small group of friends.

We became more interested.

I ended up working at a restaurant in Western Massachusetts, whereas in college, which was probably one of the best restaurants in the region.

And they started

giving a seminars on wine on wine and I sort of got more and more interested in it.

And so it was always something that I was very interested. I sort of got more and more interested in it.

And so it was always something that I was very interested in.

I worked in restaurants in New York, Manhattan Market,

Windows on the world, which were high wine culture, restaurants at the time.

What was the vibe like at Windows at that time?

The vibe at Windows was, well, you know, it was very interesting.

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