43 | Matthew Luczy on the Pleasures of Wine

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2019

⏱️ 106 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Some people never drink wine; for others, it's an indispensable part of an enjoyable meal. Whatever your personal feelings might be, wine seems to exhibit a degree of complexity and nuance that can be intimidating to the non-expert. Where does that complexity come from, and how can we best approach wine? To answer these questions, we talk to Matthew Luczy, sommelier and wine director at Mélisse, one of the top fine-dining restaurants in the Los Angeles area. Matthew insisted that we actually drink wine rather than just talking about it, so drink we do. Therefore, in a Mindscape first, I recruited a third party to join us and add her own impressions of the tasting: science writer Jennifer Ouellette, who I knew would be available because we're married to each other. We talk about what makes different wines distinct, the effects of aging, and what's the right bottle to have with pizza. You are free to drink along at home, with exactly these wines or some other choices, but I think the podcast will be enjoyable whether you do or not. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Mattew Luczy is a Certified Sommelier as judged by the Court of Master Sommeliers. He currently works as the Wine Director at Mélisse in Santa Monica, California. He is also active in photography and music. Mélisse home page Personal/photography page Instagram Ask a Somm: When Should I Decant Wine?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and this is
0:04.8	another special episode of Mindscape. We're having enough special episodes that you might begin to
0:09.0	think that every episode of Mindscape is special and you might be right about that. But this one
0:13.7	is a departure. I've always wanted to get into not only sort of academic kind of things but also
0:19.1	the realm of ideas out there in the real world involving things like music, which we've already
0:24.8	talked about, movies, and also food and drink. So I always thought it would be fun to have an
0:29.8	episode of Mindscape devoted to the idea of wine. Now wine obviously is a huge topic. There are
0:34.9	many many things you could talk about, but ideally we'd be able to sort of start at the beginning,
0:39.3	give useful information to people who knew nothing about wine or even had had some and hated it,
0:44.1	but also gives some useful insight to people who are experts in connoisseurs. I think that we
0:48.8	have achieved that. This is a very fun episode. Happily, I happen to know Matthew Lutzie, who is
0:54.6	today's guest. He is the Somalia at Melise Restaurant here in Los Angeles. For those of you who are
0:59.7	not locals, Melise is two Michelin-starred restaurant, probably the most sophisticated, traditional,
1:07.3	fine-dining white tablecloths, French-American cuisine restaurant that you can find here in
1:12.8	Los Angeles. There's really not that much competition in fact. So Matthew's job is both to
1:18.1	curate the wine list at Melise and then to serve the wine in the restaurant. So he's a very
1:24.4	influential person in the Southern California wine world. As you'll see, he's a quite a young age.
1:30.0	He's also very approachable, very knowledgeable in very much of the opinion that everyone should
1:35.1	enjoy wine in their own way. So when I asked him to be on the podcast, he was very enthusiastic.
1:40.9	And he said, of course, I have to bring wine. So yes, we will actually be tasting wine in real time
1:46.3	here on this episode of Minescape. And because we did that, I thought it would be fun to do another
1:51.4	experiment and bring in a third person for the podcast. My lovely wife, Jennifer Willatt, who is a
	...

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