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, You're not the type of guy that would be in a place like this at this time in the morning,

Jay McInerney.

But here you are.

But here you are at the podcast.

That's, yeah, well, it's good to be here and I love to talk about food and wine writing. Which of those came first for you?

Well, I suppose.

I was a writer before I was a writer about wine and in fact it never occurred to me that I would or could write about

wine but in 1996 a friend of mine took over housing garden as the editor-in-chief.

And she felt like the kind of consumer that she was after

was interested in food and wine as part of the good life.

And she did some research and she really didn't like as a

Wine lover she didn't like what she read about once you didn't like that sort of

you know wine spectator kind of technical slash travel log

approach and she didn't like the, you know, the sort of English, this wine

smells like high viscous approach and she just felt like there wasn't much out there that spoke to her and

so she can see this idea of getting a writer to write about wine as opposed to a wine expert.

And when she first approached me, I said that,

you know, I just didn't, I just don't know nearly enough about wine

to write about it.

And she felt that could be a strength if you know

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