477: Mary Ewing-Mulligan Says Intro Books Don't Sell...More Than Several Million Copies

I'll Drink to That! Wine Talk

Levi Dalton

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4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2020

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mary Ewing-Mulligan is the President of International Wine Center, located in New York City, and a co-author of the "Wine For Dummies" books.

Mary discusses her introduction to working with wine, employed by an Italian government agency responsible for promoting Italian wine. She explains the situation for Italian wines in the United States at the time, the 1970s, and how the Italian wines in the market went about competing with wines from other countries. She also contrasts that situation for Italian wine to the situation for Italian wine in the United States today, and points out what has changed. Mary then talks about her own experiences traveling to Italy, and her friendship with the Currado family of the Vietti winery in Italy's Piemonte.

Mary goes on to explain a key decision in her own wine career, leaving a high paying job in public relations to take a more modestly paid position at a wine school. She talks about her struggles to pass the Master of Wine exam, and her eventual triumph as the first woman residing in North America to earn a Master of Wine title. She then discusses her introduction of the Wine and Spirit Education Trust curriculum to the United States.

Mary's career takes another turn as she and her husband Ed McCarthy write the very successful "Wine For Dummies" book that led to a number of other wine books in the "Dummies" series being authored by the couple as well. She talks about how she and Ed went about writing the "Dummies" books, in terms of approach. And Mary grapples in this interview with being on the one hand the author of "Wine For Dummies," while on the other hand also being a Master of Wine. She explains how she feels about the pairing, and what her motivations were at each point in her career.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Mary Ewing Mulligan is the guest for the episode you're about to hear and in her
0:20.0	career she has made several important contributions to wine education, evolving the wine
0:24.8	school in Manhattan, of which she is the president, bringing the wine and spirit education
0:29.4	trust courses to the United States at both her own school and then encouraging other programs in the
0:34.6	states to offer the WSCT curriculum and in co-writing the Wine for Dummy book series with her husband
0:41.5	Ed McCarthy to appreciate these accomplishments, it's also important
0:45.8	to realize what the situation for wine education in New York was before Mary did these things.
0:52.4	And for this reason, I want to play for you a clip from
0:55.6	Karen McNeil's episode of All Drink to that, which is number 315.
1:00.8	Karen McNeil is the author of wine education books herself and this is what she had to tell me.
1:06.0	In particular, wine was really hard to learn about in the 1970s. There were no wine schools in New York. There were no tastings that anyone in the public
1:16.0	could go to. Retail stores certainly didn't taste their customers on wine. And so as much as I wanted to learn about wine, it was a completely blocked road.
1:27.5	Wine was sort of controlled by five men. All of the European producers would fly in and do tastings for just these five guys.
1:37.0	And those five guys wrote about wine for every single publication, from New York magazine to the New York Times every publication was
1:45.4	sewn up. So there was no way to learn, no way to break in, no way to taste. And I thought, wow, this is really, this is, this is, this is
1:58.8	isn't a class ceiling, but it's a complete dead end. There were also no women in the wine business back then except for one.
2:05.0	And we've moved into the 80s?
2:06.8	Yep, we've moved into the 80s now.
2:09.1	So as Luck would have it, one of these men knew that I was desperate to learn about wine, and kind of on the pretext
2:17.1	of my being young and, you know, kind of a guppy about all of these things like you are into it and you sucked up the information and you seem excited about it.
2:27.4	I was very excited about it and he knew I was desperate to taste.
2:30.9	So he convinced the other guys that they should let me taste with them.
	...

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