I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, Kevin Pike of Shazzi wines on the show. Hello sir, how are you? I'm very well. How are you? How are you?

How are you? Very nice to see you again. So you used to work for Skernic and when you were working for Michael Skernick you came and you gave a really cool interview and now you're back, but this time you have your own company.

Yeah, I worked for Skernick for 14 years as I think you know and when I decided to move on a long dream of mine had been to have a farm my grandparents had a farm in Iowa and

When I was a kid I would go out there for the summers and spend a lot of time out there and this idea I've had for

for years and years and years I just couldn't figure out how to do it where to do it what

I would be doing and one idea was making cheese and you know I was like because I'm fascinated by cheese I love

cheese and then I was like okay but I know nothing about cheese making and I

don't know anything about you know kind of raising the types of animals I would need

to have to to make the type of animals I would need to have to make to make

but that was one long pipe dream that never really came to be and then because of part of my

personal life circumstances I kind of ended up in the Hudson Valley so I wanted to look around up there and I was able to find a farm in the Hudson Valley about a hundred miles north of the city and I was able to buy 78 acres up there and I decided that

wine really wouldn't be I didn't think I could ever be very happy with the

type of wine that I could make there because I didn't know what the Teruara was like what grave

varieties to plants I just I didn't know enough but there's a long tradition in this part of the Hudson

Valley and throughout the Hudson Valley of bourbon and spirits making and then also cider making and so that was kind of the idea so I bought the farm and then when I kind of saw the horizon at Skernic I was like okay I'm gonna invest kind of everything I have into this farm project and Johannes Lites who's a good friend of mine as I think you know he kind of I told him I said look I just want you to be prepared I'm I'm gonna resign and leave and he kind of said in his typical way, you know, Kevin, you're an idiot, this is ridiculous,

you should think about a way to make money while you get the farm going, I think we should

talk about doing something together. You've talked a long time about different ways to import wine, different models that might work.

Why don't you think about that a little bit and maybe we could do something together.

And so that was kind of the impetus for the idea to start

Shazzi so I thought about it and came back to him with some ideas and tried to break down how I sold ways in which

...