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

[00:00:01] Mary Ewing Mulligan is the guest for the episode you're about to hear, and in her career she has made several important contributions to wine education, evolving the Wine School in Manhattan of which she is the president, bringing the Wine and Spirit Education Trust courses

[00:00:30] to the United States at both her own school and then encouraging other programs in the states to offer the WSET curriculum, and in co-writing the Wine for Dummies book series with her husband Ed McCarthy. To appreciate these accomplishments, it's also important

[00:00:45] to realize what the situation for wine education in New York was before Mary did these things. And for this reason, I want to play for you a clip from Karen McNeil's episode of Ill Drink to That, which is number 315. Karen McNeil is the author of wine education books

[00:01:03] herself, and this is what she had to tell me. 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 could go to. Retail stores certainly

[00:01:18] didn't taste their customers on wine. And so as much as I wanted to learn about wine, it was a completely blocked road. Wine was sort of controlled by five men. All of the

[00:01:32] European producers would fly in and do tastings for just these five guys. And those five guys wrote about wine for every single publication, from New York Magazine to the New York Times.

[00:01:44] Every publication was 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 isn't a glass ceiling, but it's a complete

[00:02:00] dead end. There were also no women in the wine business back then, except for one. And we've moved into the 80s? Yep, we've moved into the 80s now. So as luck would have it, one of these men knew that I

[00:02:13] was desperate to learn about wine. And kind of on the pretext of my being young and kind of a guppy about all of these things. Like you were into it and you'd sucked up the information and you seemed excited about it.

[00:02:27] I was very excited about it and he knew I was desperate to taste. So he convinced the other guys that they should let me taste with them. That seems like a big thing for him to do.

[00:02:38] It was huge. And for the next eight years, I tasted with these guys. And of course, I was desperate to ask them questions. But kind of the silent agreement was, no, you can be present, but you may not. Don't talk, don't ask questions, don't do anything like that.

[00:02:54] Just be there and be invisible. You had to know your place. Right. So I did. And it was okay with me, even though I was really desperate to ask them questions. I'll drink to that, where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business. I'm Levi Dalton.

[00:03:11] I'm Erin Scala. And here's our show today. Mary Ewing Mulligan, Master of Wine and also of the International Wine Center in Manhattan. Hello, how are you? I'm great. It's very nice to see you. So you went to school in the University of Pennsylvania. Yes.

[00:03:42] And that was the late 60s into the 70s. Yes. Well, it matters because your first job, you got in 71. I got my first job in 71, right? So that's correct. And how did you get that job?

[00:03:55] I had no idea what I wanted to do. I needed to get a job because my then husband, I had married six months into my senior year, and he was going to law school and I had to support

[00:04:08] him. So I needed a job for two of us. And I went to the placement office and they sent me on an interview to the Italian Trade Commission, which was sort of the commercial office of

[00:04:18] the Italian consulate in Philadelphia. I got the job. And then a couple of months after that, I found out that the office was closing and moving to New York. And honestly, I hated job hunting so much that I decided that I might as well try commuting from Philadelphia

[00:04:42] to New York, which I did every day for about eight, nine years. You're not Italian and you were working for the Italian Trade Commission during a kind of a pivotal time for Italian goods entering to the United States.

[00:04:59] I think that the secret to my getting the job was specifically that I'm American and also that I had studied journalism. And also being American, I could write press releases and I could bring expertise in the English language that the rest of the office didn't have.

[00:05:22] And that office was concerned with selling all kinds of Italian goods. It wasn't just wine. Right. Promoting all sorts of Italian products. Over the years, I worked on promoting Italian machine tools like printing machinery and things like that. Handicrafts, fashion, cheese, wine, all of those things.

[00:05:47] I imagine fashion was a big thing for the Italians. It was. There was a point when half of my time was spent working on Italian fashion and a lot of hot designers were getting into it. It was when Versace was first starting,

[00:06:05] it was when Armani was first starting. And I was spending half of my time doing fashion shows and things like that. And half of my time doing wine tastings to promote Italian wine.

[00:06:19] And eventually you move more into the wine side. And so I guess the question then is why? Because it sounds like the fashion thing would be really exciting too. I love fashion and I'm a fabric fiend. I was sewing a lot of my own clothes then.

[00:06:33] I'm just crazy about fabric and design. But for me, the issue was that I didn't like the people in the fashion world as much as I liked the people in the wine world.

[00:06:44] The people in the wine world were so happy to help you to help you understand, understand what you're tasting or understand why this is different from that. And they were encouraging. And just wonderfully supportive. And in the fashion world, I was dealing with a lot of

[00:07:04] fashion press, for example, and I felt inferior. I almost said they made me feel inferior, but I felt inadequate. And that probably says more about me than it says about them. But I guess it's a more cutthroat environment, competitive environment than wine is, or at

[00:07:27] least more so than wine was in those days. And it's interesting because you did stay with the Italian Trade Commission for almost a decade, which is a long time for a young person. I mean, you could have done all kinds

[00:07:38] of different things with an English degree from the University of Pennsylvania. I was qualified to do anything and nothing in particular. It's not as if I saw all that other opportunity out there. And also in those days, it wasn't like it is today. Today you're

[00:07:55] in a job for two years and you say, okay, what's my next opportunity? And of course, this is, it's not just generational, but it's our whole culture today where people change careers, you know, two, three times in their life. But in those days, it wasn't like that.

[00:08:10] You went into a job and you stayed in the job as long as you were happy in it. The way I looked at it is I should pick one of the skills that I need to practice, or

[00:08:23] I should pick one of the products that I'm involved with, and the product was wine. And so it would have been advertising public relations on the one hand as skills, or it would have been wine as a product. And I just did the wine thing.

[00:08:39] That was kind of a key time for Italian wine in the United States because you're there as there's a lot of transition in the seventies. And so what did that look like? It's interesting because I was just mentioning all the renowned designers,

[00:08:55] fashion designers that were emerging at that point. And I think it was a little bit different in the wine field. I mean, there were great producers that existed and that were emerging, but you didn't see them generally in the big picture of Italian wine in this country. Instead,

[00:09:16] there was Bola, there was Fresco Baldi, Antinori of course, Antinori was always there, Fazio Battaglia, Verdicchio, brands like that. And they were very dominant. And the Italian government would organize a wine tasting and offer it to all of the importers out there,

[00:09:35] and there were not very many compared to how many there are today. And the importers would come, and often it was the biggest brands. You didn't see Gaia participating, but you didn't see Vietti participating. So it was mainly institutional. It was the virtues of Italian wine,

[00:09:54] how many regions of wine Italy has, the great vast variety of Italian wines. These are some Italian grapes, that kind of thing. But the manifestation of those types was the big brands. There was a question of whether to sell to Italian-Americans or to promote to Italian-Americans,

[00:10:15] or to promote to Americans in general, but to promote Italian products. And how did you look at that in the 70s? Obviously there was the Italian-American community that felt very legato, tied, very connected to the promotion of anything Italian. They identified with it,

[00:10:38] they felt very, very involved in it. So for example, there were Italian-American newspapers, and they would look to get advertising of Italian wines in their newspapers for their readers. And the magazines might even be, or the newspapers might even be in Italian, or they might be in

[00:11:00] English. And I really didn't see the point because coming in as the neophyte that I was, as the American that I was, I saw that the future for Italian wines was not an ethnic audience. And

[00:11:18] I had plenty of friends who were Italian-American, and I could see, especially with the older generation, that the attitude that Italians had to wine, and I don't mean to say just Italian-Americans

[00:11:36] because this was an attitude that I saw also in Italy when I traveled to Italy, the commonplace attitude toward wine is that it's abundant, it's local, and it's cheap. So now you take

[00:11:51] that attitude and you bring it to New York City or you bring it to New Jersey, and what is abundant, local, and cheap? Jugs of California red. And so I imagine that that is the wine

[00:12:09] profile that would fit that kind of thinking. And even if the mainstream Italian wines of that day were not the most elite examples of Italian wine, they were still good wine.

[00:12:30] I mean, I believe to this day that Suave is a fine wine, and maybe the Suave of that era was a little more dilute or had a little less character than the Suave of today has,

[00:12:43] but it was wine of a place and of a tradition, and that put it kind of into the realm of better wine, not jug wine. I think I got this idea when my husband and I were writing Wine

[00:12:58] for Dummies, and I found myself writing to the Dummies neophyte reader trying to justify why wine is so complicated. You know, why can't you just open a screw cap and pour it

[00:13:13] into a jelly jar and drink it? And so the way that I was able to explain it, the view that I developed was that wine is two products. Wine can be beverage wine, pour it in a jelly

[00:13:27] jar and drink it and don't even think about it while you're drinking it. You don't need to, it's a beverage. And wine can be fine wine. And all of the rigmarole, all of the paraphernalia,

[00:13:39] all of the complication and complexity comes with fine wine, and yet everyone who makes beverage wine, they want you to believe that their wine is fine wine. And so they put a grape variety name on it. This is not everyday red, this is Cabernet Sauvignon.

[00:14:06] At the same time, most of the wine market in New York at the time would have been French and then some American and very little Italian, right? Italy even in those days was producing more quantity of wine than France was. And France

[00:14:21] owned the reputation and probably the distribution, but Italy was making very serious inroads. And you know, you have to of course always credit Italian restaurants because they were and they are so pivotal in bringing Italian wine to people. But French wines owned the

[00:14:41] reputation and certainly we viewed France as the competitor. And what else? There was some Blue Nun, there was some Sangria, and then there was California wine at that lower level of jug wines. But fine California wine was only just beginning. Fine California wine,

[00:15:08] at least to me in the circles that I was in in New York City, was about at the same place that elite Italian wines were, about to emerge but not quite emerging yet. So California

[00:15:25] was a non-issue and the Italians were not thinking in any way about competing with California. They weren't thinking about, can we put Grape Namus on our label because then we can compete better. California was a non-entity. So it was basically Italy versus France. Bordeaux,

[00:15:45] for example, was on the market, was well entrenched in the market. And France was very elite, for food and for wine. And so there would be those special occasions when you would go to

[00:16:00] a French restaurant and you would drink French wine. But Italian wines were the new kid on the block, so they were more exciting. They had more variety, more diversity. I remember

[00:16:12] we used to say, and it's so funny in hindsight, that if you look at a map of France and you look at the wine regions of France, you see Bordeaux here and you see Burgundy there,

[00:16:23] and you see Champagne and you see Chablis, and you see these spots on the map that are the wine regions. But if you look at a wine map of Italy, you see all of Italy because every part of Italy grows grapes to make wine.

[00:16:40] When you look back to what was going on in the 70s, what's different about the Italian wine sector, both in terms of the writing side, the communication side, and then in terms of the wines in the market?

[00:16:54] I would add also in terms of the industry. Because in those days there were co-ops. Now there are co-ops of co-ops. There is a gigantic co-op that controls many, many other co-ops within Italy. And so the big have gotten bigger in Italy, and the small people have

[00:17:22] succeeded. The very small producers in Piedmont, for example, they're selling to collectors in this country. Did some of that family production of wines end up appealing to you when you started traveling more to Italy?

[00:17:37] In Italy you cannot separate the wine from the people that made it. And of course there are parts of France where you can't also. But in Italy it's just part and parcel of the territory. I've met amazing people, some of whom are dear friends to this day, particularly

[00:17:56] the Corrados of Vietti. When I first visited them, Luca, who is now the winemaker, he was a shy 12-year-old. And I remember he was called down to have dinner with the family, and he

[00:18:12] was very quiet. And you meet these people, you meet their families, you become part of their families. That's how they operate. The Corrados would always sit you down at their family table, and there usually would be three generations at the family table. And sometimes

[00:18:30] you might wish that there weren't kids crying, but it was very real and wonderful. And this is what they did not just for me. I can probably think of countless people that have had that

[00:18:41] experience with that family. And they were not the only family, there are other families like that in other regions of Italy too. It just happens that Piedmont is one of the places that I've been to the most. Did you have siblings? Yes, I have two brothers in Philadelphia.

[00:18:55] So being around the family is normal for you? Not really. Our father died when I was young, and so it wasn't, no, there wasn't the culture. You know, the Irish, they don't, well, I don't know, in my experience, they don't gather

[00:19:11] at the table, you know? They're not Italian. I think what happened is that through getting involved in Italian wines, I think I became a little Italian at heart. Yeah, it's the warmth and the caring and the genuineness of it all. And then the food doesn't hurt,

[00:19:32] and the wine doesn't hurt at all either. But maybe you found something that you hadn't necessarily even realized that you were looking for? I'm willing to accept that. It's not something that I've thought about, but I think you could

[00:19:45] very well be right. And I will say that to this day, I like to sit down to dinner, and I like to have wine with dinner, and when we get together as a family, we do that now. We have family meals. So yeah.

[00:20:04] What was Alfredo Corrado like? I never had the opportunity to meet him before he died. He was a prankster. He joked. He loved to tell funny jokes, and he did not speak English.

[00:20:17] He was very serious about wine. When it came to telling the history of the family, and when they bought these vineyards, when they sold these vineyards, and that kind of thing, well, it was Luciana's father's company, the Vietti Company. She's Luciana Vietti. And

[00:20:37] because she spoke English, she would often be the one who would tell the tales and the history, and Alfredo would chime in. He loved art, as Luciana did. Their home is filled with art. They had many artist friends. I remember one time going to visit an artist

[00:20:57] friend. He said, let's go to Doljani. And I said, why would we go to Doljani? He said, that's where Gianni Gallo lives. So Gianni Gallo, he did etchings, very, very fine etchings,

[00:21:10] and he did a lot of the labels for Vietti wines. And he said, let's go see my friend Gianni. And Gianni was sort of a hippie, looked like a hippie. He was not living the high

[00:21:24] life. He was living an artist's life. And so we went to the town bar in Doljani, and Gianni met us there. And the bartender said to Gianni, he said, will you have your usual?

[00:21:40] And Gianni said, yes, my usual. And Gianni Gallo's usual that we had with Alfredo was a bottle of Billicard-Simon champagne. And we forget how much the Italians love champagne, and that was another thing. Alfredo loved champagne. And we traveled with him. So Ed

[00:22:00] and I would go with Alfredo and Luciana to Champagne together. We went to Burgundy together. We visited Domaine della Roma Neconti together. We visited Alsace together. We were getting something out of it because we got to see these fine French wines through the eyes of fine

[00:22:21] Italian producers. I remember once we went with Luca and Luciana to Champagne, and we visited Krug, and Remy Krug was still there. And so we're doing this tasting, and Luca took one of the

[00:22:45] glasses, and he's smelling it, smelling it, and he moves over to the far corner of the room just to be free of distraction, just to smell this wine. And then he lets out under his breath,

[00:22:58] which I thought was hilarious. I don't know. It's probably not that funny. He lets out under his breath. He says, mama mia. In the meantime, his mama was right there in the room. But the expression

[00:23:08] that he came up with was like of disbelief at the quality of this wine. Hey, it's Levi. And I just want to stop the interview here for a moment because I actually have a recording of Luca Corrado from Vieti talking about this same trip to Champagne with

[00:23:24] Mary and Ed. And let me share his memories of that with you right now. I was getting dressed after a trip that I did in Champagne, and I went to the cellar. It was again

[00:23:36] with Ed McCarthy and Mary Mulligan. They took me because it was the only chance to go with a writer to go to this great house. And we are down in the... One time we are in the cellar of

[00:23:50] Bollinger, and there was Monsieur Mongolfier. Incredible. His great grandfather was the inventor of the balloon. I think so. Oh, I didn't know that. He told me. They had paper, a very famous house of Mongolfier, something like with the balloon in top.

[00:24:09] Anyway, and we are in the cellar. We open in the courtyard, open the door, we go downstairs. I was younger, winemaker, and I didn't know anything. I know that Champagne is the bubble.

[00:24:21] That's all. So we go in the cellar, and he was talking about Erdi wine. And there was this pile of bottles. I think it was something that was the early 90s when I was there. And I think it was

[00:24:38] something from 70, because at the time Erdi was more than 10 years, I think so, if I remember well. Bollinger Erdi. Yes, Bollinger Erdi. The late release on the Lise. Exactly. Where they keep on the Lise for a long, long time, and then they do late the Gourgement.

[00:24:54] And he said to Erdi, we are 10 years, let's say, 10 years on the Lise. And I said, interesting. He said, but how a white wine can age so long? And he looked at me and said, young Italian, you

[00:25:09] don't trust me. I know that sometimes, you know, bullshit. And I said, OK. I remember there was my mother was with me. She wanted to kill me, you know, when I said that. So he took a dirty glass in

[00:25:26] the cellar that was there and he washed it on the hose. And he took one metal key and he took one bottle from that pile and he put it in the cellar. And he gave me a glass, said, taste it, then you

[00:25:44] tell me what you what you look like. It was fantastic. It was incredible. And I started to turn in my mind a light. I said, why? How is it possible? And then I started with a million of questions to

[00:25:58] him. Why is the Lise? What does the Lise do to the wine? How is it possible that they can keep so fresh a white wine like this? And then I went home and I experimented on the Barbera. And it was one funny, funny.

[00:26:12] What was the result of that? That was very, very interesting because I think Lise in the wine and now I do in all the wine. We do also in the Nebbiolo, the long, long content of the Lise. But it's different for each crew, right? Like the timing?

[00:26:26] Si, si. Some of them like Ravera, they stay 18 months on without racking or Rocke sometimes 12 months. Depends when is that we do not have a timeline when the wine needs to be racked, we rack

[00:26:40] but some of them they stay two years on the Lise without racking from the Malaracchi. As Luca explained, this realization about Lise contact was something that he integrated into his

[00:26:51] own winemaking and it is not a stretch to say that his thoughts on this topic have become a key aspect to his own evolution as a winemaker. If you listen to I'll Drink to That episode 342 with Luca Corrado, he addresses this point really

[00:27:07] at some length and it all started with a trip to Champagne with Mary Ewing Mulligan. Mary shares more of her feelings about the Corrado family in this interview, which will continue right after a brief message.

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[00:28:20] Ready to ensure the lifespan of your wines? Go to dm-closures.com forward slash IDTT to learn more. That's D I A M dash closures with an S dot com forward slash IDTT for more information. So we got to see these French wines through the eyes.

[00:28:45] We got to experience them as if for the first time through the eyes of these great Italian winemakers, Alfredo and Luca. And I knew Alfredo for 30 years. And so it's hard to capsulize his qualities. He was very generous. He was funny. He was a serious winemaker.

[00:29:07] But he would share anything with anybody. He loved wine. But you know what it was? Because they traveled to the U S they knew so many American producers whom they met because American producers would come out to meet them too. And through him, I met Joe Swan.

[00:29:29] I met Bob Long. So there was this cultural exchange going on. That would have been the same time that he was reviving Arnace, the grape variety as a white dry wine. The interesting thing about his revival of Arnace was that it was a white wine and he

[00:29:50] was not making any white wines at all. And you know, you need a white wine sometimes on the dinner table, you know? So he would tell this story and I've actually read it written in a book also about how they

[00:30:06] started to revive Arnace because there were various growers in the Roero, so on the other side of the river who had a few Arnace vines mixed in with their Nebbiolo vines. But no one had enough Arnace to make an Arnace wine.

[00:30:25] So they went to a local church in the Roero and they talked to the priest and the priest said, OK, come to Mass tomorrow. And so on Sunday they went to Mass and at the Mass the priest made an announcement and

[00:30:44] he said we have two friends from Barolo here and they are very interested in making an Arnace wine but they need to get enough Arnace. And if you grow Arnace, would you talk to them after Mass and see if you can make an

[00:30:59] arrangement to sell them your Arnace? And as a result he got enough quantity to make Arnace and then the rest was history. In the early 80s you shifted from the Italian Trade Commission and you went to work for PepsiCo, NPR. And what was that experience like?

[00:31:18] Oh it was very enlightening to go from a governmental organization which was very structured, had a lot of procedures and regulations etc. because it was government. To go from that into a Fortune 500 company, although a small division of that Fortune 500 company. It was great.

[00:31:40] I mean I had my own secretary. The challenge for me was the portfolio. Some of it was very interesting and there was a lot to work with such as Trachia Bulgarian wines and Premiat Romanian wines. And as a result of that I got to visit in the 1980s.

[00:32:05] I spent a week in Bulgaria and a week in Romania behind the Iron Curtain. But the sameness of the food in Bulgaria every day, every meal we ate the same thing. And the Romanians I discovered that they're Latin. They're not Eastern European.

[00:32:24] They perceive themselves as being Latins and they don't use the Cyrillic alphabet. And so suddenly in Romania I could see the word cinema. I don't know how you would pronounce it in Romanian but it was the same word and I knew what that building was.

[00:32:38] Whereas in Bulgaria you have no idea. And those wines were fantastic value for the money. I mean they were remarkable value and they were new and different and that was something to talk about. There was Iago Sangria which is a great success story of its own until society

[00:32:59] outgrew it I suppose. And there was Stolichnaya Vodka. The big competition was Smirnoff and I remember that Smirnoff created an organization that was called something like the Vodka Institute or something. Because under the name the Vodka Institute they could get all sorts of articles published

[00:33:33] everywhere about vodka and vodka's American origins and this kind of thing. And it was something that Stolichnaya had to work against. And then there was the on my tenure there was the invasion of Afghanistan by Russia

[00:33:52] and that certainly didn't do anything to win fans for a Russian product. So it was a very interesting time but actually in those days so International Wine Center was founded in 1982 and I worked at PepsiCo from 82 to 84.

[00:34:13] So just at that time there was this emerging wine school and at this point I had been involved in wine for many years. And I had gotten outside of the Italian wine ghetto if you will and I had gotten into French wines and European wines and Spanish wines.

[00:34:33] And Ed was a collector and we got to taste some great old French wines together and started going to tastings. He had entree into collector circles. I tasted old Bordeaux. I tasted old Burgundy. It was wonderful. And my eyes opened to what fine wine really represents.

[00:34:52] And so it was a wonderful expansion period for me. And I really loved wine. It came back to me like not wine as a job but wine as a product. And I realized and I've given this advice many times to people who have asked me about

[00:35:14] getting into the wine business that the more that you need to make money, the more that you're going for the money of the job, the less pure wine satisfying it is. And the more that you want to remain pure and unbiased and to have no opinion other than

[00:35:42] your own opinion and not to have a corporate opinion that you have to espouse, the less money you will make. So I was making good money at Pepsi but there was a portfolio to promote and it was that portfolio.

[00:35:59] And off hours I was going to a tasting with Angelo Gaya. I was going to a tasting with Piero Antinori coming to International Wine Center on 55th Street and doing a tasting. And Mansant Lafleuve coming to a tasting and doing the Bain Bourguignon in honor of the

[00:36:18] people in the room and things like that that were amazing. Wine people, culture, gustatory and heart experiences. And I decided I wanted to be back in that part of wine.

[00:36:35] And when I was at PepsiCo for a year and a half, I started looking and it was not my instinct to do that. But I remember saying to myself, because I was a big feminist, big, big feminist, I still am.

[00:36:49] And I remember saying to myself, all these guys that are working around me, what would they do? They would go and interview for another job even as they're in this job. And they would interview for lots of jobs over many months and work this job that they're in.

[00:37:04] And then they would say, oh, I found a job and I'm leaving. So I thought, that's what you do. You know, that's what the business world does. And I, being the loyal female, was not looking at it that way.

[00:37:14] So I decided I'm going to start looking at other jobs. So I looked for other jobs in the city that were wine jobs with wine companies. And then an opening came up at International Wine Center. And I interviewed and I got the job.

[00:37:28] And I got a big pay cut, big, big pay cut. But I was doing what I loved. I joined the company as an employee and a few years later became an owner. What was the original arrangement with Al Hodgkin? He was an owner of the school.

[00:37:51] And there was this wonderful tastings restaurant, a wonderful wine bar restaurant. It was in the days when wine bars were just coming to New York. There really weren't very many. There was Lavin's on 36th Street in the Garment District and there was tastings on 55th Street.

[00:38:11] And that building actually I learned from the accountant who is still my accountant to this day, who was Al's accountant and went there with Al to look at the property when they were thinking of renting it. It had actually been a brothel.

[00:38:26] And then it became a wine center and a restaurant. So the idea was you go to the restaurant. There were two cruvenes, one for white wines, one for red wine. So there are about 12, 14 white wines by the glass, 12, 14 red wines by the glass.

[00:38:41] And that was exotic at that time. That was a big thing. Oh, it was very much a big thing. People got excited about wine. And of course there was always literature about come upstairs and take a course and

[00:38:50] then people would go upstairs or the people who are upstairs for a class or a tasting would go downstairs and have dinner. It was a wonderful situation. Things changed during that period because so this was 1982 to 1987 or 88. And during that period was the emergence of the celebrity chef.

[00:39:13] So to be recognized as a restaurant, it wasn't enough to be that little interesting wine place. You had to have a chef, a named chef if possible. And that got expensive. That changed the economics of a restaurant.

[00:39:30] Now I was never part of the economics of the restaurant, but I understood why it had to close. And Al kind of had this idea because of the economics of on premise in those days, he decided that he wanted to go into a wine shop.

[00:39:50] He wanted to develop a wine shop and he was head over heels with Burgundy. That's where his wine love took him. So he opened Burgundy Wine Company, which exists to this day. And I decided that I wanted to keep the wine school going.

[00:40:05] He gave us notice, gave us a small severance. He said, the wine school is closing. So I said to Ed, okay, what am I going to do now? Okay, I have to get a job because we didn't have money. Ed was teaching and he had a wine habit.

[00:40:19] What are we going to do? So I thought about what kind of job I wanted. And I still had this desire to have this wine thing in my life. I knew that the kind of jobs that I could get were not going to do it for me because

[00:40:35] they were going to have a portfolio. And it wouldn't be, just wouldn't be the same. So I went to Al and I said, suppose I get a day job and I keep International Wine Center open in the evenings just as a sideline.

[00:40:51] And then we had a conversation and I ended up becoming half owner of the company and I took it from there. So I found new premises for International Wine Center and I kept the classes going, kept the wine club going.

[00:41:07] The wine club was what we would go to every Wednesday night. There would be a visiting winemaker. And I really think that these decisions, you know, like, well, I love wine. I'm going to quit PepsiCo. Well, I love wine.

[00:41:23] I'm going to try to keep International Wine Center open. These decisions helped me become a master of wine because there were not four formal courses then of the sort that there are now. The courses that we were doing, they were valid courses,

[00:41:40] but they were directed at wine lovers. They were not directed at people who wanted to be in the trade and they couldn't have trained me. They couldn't have given me anything of the sort of foundation that I needed to pursue master of wine studies.

[00:41:57] But those weekly tastings with wine lovers, visiting winemakers did it. That was my wine school. Learning from each of them, you know, different opinions from different folks tasting different kinds of wines. I think what struck me was the truth of individual experience in wine.

[00:42:21] The realization that you can't take what any one person says as truth and fact and principle. You can only take that as the truth of his individual experience. And then when you collect all of these individual truths,

[00:42:42] then your mind is able to form a collective truth out of it, which is called understanding. But certainly I was inspired by the Brits. I mean, my goodness, Jancis Robinson and Serena Sutcliffe, and of course I will mention the females, you know, they were heroes.

[00:43:02] They were masters of wine and Becky Wasserman who would come and do some tastings and what an inspiration she was. She personified the truth of the individual experience, representing individual growers of Burgundy. But I had heard about masters of wine and you had to be British.

[00:43:30] You had to be British. And I know one woman who worked for an importer and she left and she emigrated to the UK because she wanted to become a master of wine. And so she went over there because you needed to take the WSET courses.

[00:43:47] So she went over there to take the WSET courses so that she would then qualify to get into the master of wine program. And I mean, I wasn't able to do that. I wasn't able to up and move to a new country. She was,

[00:44:03] but it was October of 1988 and the Institute of Masters of Wine had gotten a sponsorship from the Madame Bollinger Foundation, which survives to this day as the principal sponsor of the Institute. And that sponsorship enabled the Institute to open its doors to people outside of

[00:44:29] the UK. So they came over, it was a lunch and a tasting. It was an invitation. It was at the Four Seasons and it was filled with people from the trade. They invited individuals like me, Ed, Al Hodgkin, and they announced that the Institute was opening its doors.

[00:44:51] And so then there was a process to apply to get in. So you had to write an essay. So I wrote an essay and my essay passed and then there was a tasting, a blind tasting and Michael Cliff put it on. And there were a few of us,

[00:45:07] there were about eight or nine of us and we had to do this tasting thing. And I must say, tasting has always been my weak link. My strong suit has always been the thinking, the concepts, the ideas.

[00:45:21] Well you passed theory on the second try and tasting on the fifth. Exactly. I found out that I had qualified to sit the exam in London and I went over, there were six of us sat the exam in London and nobody passed in 1989. But then in 1990,

[00:45:39] the six of us went back and I passed the theory, which was considered the hard part. And I was head over heels. I mean, I, it was an amazing moment for me. So all I had to do was concentrate on the tasting.

[00:45:58] And yet I would sit the exam and I would get terrible grades on my tasting. You needed a B to pass for the three papers. You needed B, B, B or some A thrown in there somewhere. And my three grades in 1991, my three grades were D, E, D.

[00:46:17] And I joked to people, to friends, I said, that's dead without the A. And then the next year I went to C, E, D, still not passing even one of the tasting papers. And I just got angry because everybody's telling me

[00:46:36] I can do it. I can do it. But I said to myself, I'm not sure if I'm going to sit the exam or not. I might not because the hell with them. And then, you know, at one point I said, well, all right,

[00:46:48] I'm going to give them one more chance to recognize that I'm a master of wine. And if they don't think so, then the hell with them. You know, this, it was anger. It was what I needed in my own personal growth.

[00:47:00] The Master of Wine process is not necessarily a personal growth process. It is a test of your mastery, your knowledge, your mastery, your skills. And there are people that can come in and can sit down and can do that.

[00:47:17] But for a lot of candidates, it is a self growth, a personal growth struggle. And for me, that was it. It was building up the anger to say, I know I'm worth something. For all my feminism, I think that inside I didn't have enough belief in myself.

[00:47:43] And this was the moment when I gained that belief and I passed the exam. And one of the things that you said to me is that you were just trying to pass the exam, but when you do it as the first woman from North America to do it,

[00:48:00] inevitably there's some symbolic parameters to that as well that kind of follow along. As a result of my becoming a Master of Wine, after trying for a couple of years to bring the WSET programs to the United

[00:48:15] States, I wanted to get them into the United States where they were not available. And I just wasn't getting anywhere with the people in London. But when I met them at my MW induction ceremony, they said, you know, we could talk about this if you like.

[00:48:35] And so I flew back the next month with Ed and I met with them and I made a deal to bring these courses into the US. And in 1994 we started offering the courses in the United States.

[00:48:48] And it wasn't just that I was an example to people of someone who had struggled through this exam and study and come out the other end. But now I was someone who had done that, who said, here's a roadmap for you and now you can take these programs.

[00:49:13] And by the way, I wish that I had had these programs to take. But I was trying to spread the word because I believed in these programs. I really did. And I thought that this was the future for the professionalism of the wine trade.

[00:49:31] And of course it's wine and spirits, but I was always on the wine side of that for the wine trade in the United States. And now it is, it is so strong. It's amazing. It's growth is about 26% a year, year after year. It's wonderful.

[00:49:54] And it's really very gratifying to see. There are now 16 MWs that have studied at International Wine Center and became masters of wine. So when it comes to teaching whatever you found to work, you can't teach them information. They have to learn the information from the study materials.

[00:50:19] I have no interest in teaching people information. The important thing to me is taking the information and rearranging it in ways that creates concepts for people. And I find that the tasting part of any wine class is a wonderful opportunity to

[00:50:41] teach because that wine is not just there so that you can all agree that this is an example of high acidity, and this is an example of medium tannin. It's there because, look, what kind of climate does this come from?

[00:50:59] Cool climate. Can we see that in the wine? Does the acidity maybe tell you cool climate? Right. Okay. Now, do you get any oaky character? No. Well, you're right. This was not produced or aged in oak. Yet, notice the texture of the wine. Is it rich? Yeah,

[00:51:19] it's kind of rich. Despite the high acidity, is there a fleshiness and a weight to the texture of the wine? What might that be? Lease contact and stainless steel. You know, that kind of thing.

[00:51:33] Using the wine as an example of where it's from or how it's made to help people understand the wines because then future wines that they taste can continue to teach them. It turned out in the early nineties that you had a kind of fateful moment on an LIRR.

[00:51:54] After I stopped my commute from Philadelphia to New York every day and moved to Long Island, and then I became a Long Island railroad commuter. And once I was going to work and I had with me to read on the train a book called Max for Dummies.

[00:52:15] And this was probably either late 93 or 94. And I got this book Max for Dummies quite by mistake. I got it because I belong to a computer book of the month club for Macintosh. And I would get these books,

[00:52:33] I would forget to return the postcard saying do not send this month's selection. So this book comes Max for Dummies. But there was one thing that I needed help with what had to do with fonts. There was this Adobe font suitcase or something like that.

[00:52:49] When you wanted to use different fonts than the Mac had built in your own you had to go to this Adobe application to get the other Macs or something like that. So I needed some training in that.

[00:53:03] So I was reading the book and I opened it up to fonts and there's David Pogue who was the author of Max for Dummies. He's giving the inner scoop about the feud between Apple and Adobe and why you

[00:53:19] have to use this fonts suitcase transition in order to get these fonts. And you can't just have them available to you. And giving me the inside scoop and I said, Oh, this is amazing.

[00:53:31] This light bulb went off. I said, Ed and I have to do this for wine. We have to write wine for dummies and we have to give people the inside scoop, but also help bring people along who don't know anything and tell them about wine

[00:53:45] to the point that we could give them the inside scoop on some things that are a little more technical. So I just thought that this was such a, an important idea that I didn't breathe a word of it to anybody.

[00:53:58] I was afraid I would jinx it. It just felt powerful. It was the surest proof that I've ever had in my life that you can manifest something, making something happen because you hold the idea in your head as a goal. So at one point someone put,

[00:54:21] I had a couple of ideas for books because of course I'm a master of wine now. What should I do? I should write a book. And I knew someone whose father was an agent, but an agent who had come through the ranks of traditional publishing,

[00:54:36] having worked for Simon and Schuster and had a very traditional idea of the book market and the dummies books were published by an upstart publisher. So he came in and I met with him and he said, you know,

[00:54:52] tell me about your ideas. What's your first idea? And I said, wine for dummies. And he said, who's that publisher of the dummies books? And I told him and he'd never heard of it. And then he said,

[00:55:02] thought about it for a moment. He said, intro books don't sell. What's your second idea? And then I told him my second idea and he said, well, maybe we can go somewhere like that.

[00:55:11] Let's see if we can try to develop it for me a little bit and then, and then we'll see. And I was a little disappointed. I wouldn't say I was crestfallen, but I was disappointed that he didn't like the wine for dummies idea,

[00:55:24] but I still loved it. I thought it was a great idea. And then I got another computer book of the month club for Max and it was called personal finance for dummies. And I thought that this was a book to teach you about

[00:55:43] personal finance applications on a Macintosh computer, but no, it was a book to teach you personal finance. And it was the first non-computer book the dummies had ever published. And I only had the postcard. I didn't get the book.

[00:56:01] And I put it in my briefcase and I went to work and I said, I'm going to call that agent. And I'm going to tell him that the dummies people have crossed the line and they're now publishing non-computer books.

[00:56:15] And of course being a bit of a procrastinator and a bit fearful, I didn't do that first thing in the morning. And as the day wore on, I got a call from a fellow that I didn't know. And he said,

[00:56:27] I have an idea for a wine book in a self-help series and I need a coauthor and maybe you could be that coauthor. And I, I remember that moment so clearly. My mind was going like I was rehearsing what to say because I had an idea

[00:56:47] for a wine book in a self-help series and I'll be damned if I'm going to tell this guy what my idea is. So what can I say to get him to say what his idea was? And I was thinking to myself, maybe I'll ask him,

[00:56:59] does your series have bright yellow covers? So as I'm thinking all of this in my pregnant pause, he said, do you know the For Dummies series? The book would be Wine for Dummies. And I said, that's my book. And he said,

[00:57:15] what do you mean that's my book? And I said, this is meant to be, that's my book. It's my idea. And it turns out he was David Pogue's fiction agent and David Pogue was the connection to the Dummies thing.

[00:57:34] So it turned out that the fellow who called me became our agent and that Ed and I became the authors. And so this was in October of 1994 and then we signed the contract in February of 1995 and the book was out by the fall of

[00:57:55] 95. It was an intense, intense experience. We wrote it in, I mean, thank God there were two of us. We wrote it in about five months. This was without the internet. This was without email. We would send floppy disks back and forth by FedEx to

[00:58:21] the publisher in Indianapolis and we wrote it in five months. And you went over the first chapter like a number of times, right? We decided to call it Wine 101. Thank you, David Pogue. That was his idea. And I thought that in the first chapter we would tell people

[00:58:41] what wine is, how wine is made, and that there are all these different grape varieties. And it was a quantity of information that we ended up putting into three chapters. And chapter one, the Wine 101 became how wine happens, not how you make it, but how it happens naturally.

[00:59:06] Wine can be red, white, or pink. Wine can be sparkling or still, or it can be fortified. And that was the entire first chapter. And it was such a revelation to me that you could simplify wine down and if you had included more,

[00:59:27] it would have been too much to realize what the bite-sized piece was. Because there were relatively few intro books at that time that were actually meant for a general consumer. There was Kevin Srelly's book, but his was in the form of kind of a Q&A.

[00:59:47] The only book that I was aware of as a general book was Alex Bespaloff's, and it was fine print and tons and tons of information about all the wine regions of the world and everything.

[01:00:01] And that was basically what you had if you wanted an introduction to wine book. And there was nothing that really respected the lack of knowing, the lack of experience of many people in wine. And thereafter there were many.

[01:00:18] So I got a big chuckle out of the fact that the agent said to me, intro books don't sell and how many intro books have followed on from there. And now we have seven editions of Wine for Dummies and translated into

[01:00:33] 36 languages and millions of copies sold and intro books don't sell. Well, there you go. But here's my question. If you write a book about wine and it sells millions of copies in 36 languages and then you write several follow on books because of that first book,

[01:00:54] which becomes hugely successful in the series, it becomes one of the most successful in the Dummies series. What degree of financial security does that then bring? Back in the day, somewhere along the way, pre-Dummies,

[01:01:05] I heard people say that you could expect in royalty about a dollar per book that you sold. So that would be a million dollars for a million books. So that's not bad. But this was a fairly large amount of money that you could expect in royalty

[01:01:23] for a million books. So that's not bad. But this was a franchise. And as a matter of fact, on the first edition we had the copyright, but thereafter if we wanted to write other books and we did because it was a great company,

[01:01:40] they were taking risks and they were doing great things and it was so much fun. I mean, it was a startup is what it was. Um, that if we wanted to write a second edition and other books, we had to let them retain the copyright.

[01:01:55] So we don't own the copyright. So that is something that to this day is a financial asset that we don't have. Also, when something is a franchise as a franchised series, you don't get as much in royalties, but you can make it up in sales.

[01:02:16] They were very aggressive in sales and it was great. So you sacrifice a little and you get something else in return. So it was lucrative. And I think that how lucrative depends on where you're coming from. And remember the recession in the early nineties, my goodness,

[01:02:38] I was paying myself less money in those days than my secretary at PepsiCo made back in the mid eighties. So it was not a plush time for us. And I was paying fees to take the master of wine exam and all of that and trying

[01:03:01] to keep the wine school alive because it was pre WSET. So on a level of personal finance, dummies did change things. Absolutely. But on a corporate level, WSET changed things because we got a leg to stand on.

[01:03:22] What did you do to find wording and an approach beyond the template for dummies to reach a general reader who may not be a wine specialist? Well, I will say that the editors were wonderful because they would edit the book as if they were a reader.

[01:03:39] And I remember there was in the Italian chapter, a section on Chianti and Chianti Classico. And we talked about between Florence and Siena and they wrote as a, editor query, what is Siena? And we're like, these idiots, could they be more stupid? They never heard of Siena.

[01:04:00] But actually it was a prompt to get us to say between the cities of Florence and Siena. So we came to understand that. But to answer your question, really one of the things that I did is I just got very literal.

[01:04:16] You can read anything about wine and if you read it, for the literal meaning, you don't know what it says. This producer in Champagne owns 40% of his own vineyards, which is high on the average for Champagne. Well, what do the others own? Someone else's vineyards?

[01:04:45] It's just a question of being literal. And that's what I did. I tried to avoid jargon. I tried to say juice instead of must. I would sometimes describe the wine in progress with hyphens as, you know, this is not yet wine, it's wine in progress.

[01:05:06] But things like that, I mean simple things. But I remember reading another book that was talking about the process of fermentation and it said, this is the whole process. This happens, this happens, this happens. And then finally, finally the wine is made. Well, wait a minute.

[01:05:26] So finally you start making the wine? No, get rid of that past tense. Finally the juice is wine. When you get literal about it, you simplify things. You wrote the book with your husband, Ed McCarthy. And how did you divide that? Ed is an information and numbers guy.

[01:05:50] And I'm more a concepts person. So the earlier chapters were more my effort. The later chapters were more his effort in some cases, but we would write the chapters individually and then we would edit each others.

[01:06:07] So I would edit his chapter and he would edit my chapter and then I would edit his editing of my chapter and he would edit my editing of his chapter. And out of it all flowed a common voice. And we use the word we a lot. I mean,

[01:06:23] we wrote it in the first person plural. I wonder if that's a different impression on the reader to say we rather than to phrase it as a single author. I wonder if that has a different effect when you read that as a beginner. In fact,

[01:06:40] when you write a dummies book, you must be on the side of the reader. So there's no such thing as a collective we like we wine experts, we people in the wine trade or we who have learned this much.

[01:06:52] There's only the we or the I that is on the same level as the reader. And it's a little bit of a tap dance because you have to empathize with the reader who knows nothing. And at the same time you have to not deny your own expertise.

[01:07:08] So we would often talk about when we first got into wine, we thought this or we thought that. And when we wanted to use a collective, we would say wine people sometimes say this. We made it clear that it was a collective.

[01:07:26] It was almost a them because the dummies experience is us, the author and the reader against them. Those people trying to complicate things. And that's probably one of the hooks that really sells the books. That. Yeah. Yeah. Jancis Robinson once said to me, Oh,

[01:07:46] is that going to be like a bluffers guide? You know, and a bluffers guide is just really how to bluff your way through wine. It doesn't give you real knowledge. It doesn't give you real insights the way that the dummies book did.

[01:08:00] An element of professional pride for me is having written wine for dummies and all those other four dummies books. Professional pride because they're successful, but also professional pride because they've helped people. And yet I'm a master of wine and I wrote wine for dummies and I help people

[01:08:24] become masters of wine. And yet I wrote wine for dummies. It's, it's a little bit of an identity crisis. How do you feel about wine and who you are in the wine world right now? I, I simply have to feel that I'm in my own position,

[01:08:46] that I embody what I personally embody. I'm still trying to make it easy for people, but now there are people who are in the wine trade or might want to get into the wine trade or consumers who want to take a professional course.

[01:08:59] I'm still trying to make it easy for them in a different way. I still don't believe in jargon. I still don't believe in bullshit. I still believe in explaining things clearly and literally. You know, in Italian,

[01:09:24] the word for why in Italian is perche and the exact same word for because. In Italian is perche. And I remember once the first time that I visited with Mauro Mascarello, he was going on a mile a minute in Italian and he would pose questions and then

[01:09:42] he would answer them and he would say, perche? Perche. Why and because. And when you think about it in the English language, I'm making things easy for people. That's why I wrote wine for dummies. No, that's because I wrote wine for dummies.

[01:10:01] And if I were more of a self-promoting type, I would sit myself down and I would say, you need to emphasize your expertise more. You need to set yourself in a particular position of authority and leadership or you need to develop a niche.

[01:10:27] You need to have your own website, which I don't. It's kind of unbelievable to me that I don't, but I guess my identity has been subsumed into International Wine Center. And frankly, that's fine with me because of all the good that we're doing for so many people

[01:10:48] and WSET in a broader sense, in other wine schools around the country through my having brought WSET programs to the United States. So I'm doing so much good and that's, that's enough for me. If that's what's on my headstone, that's enough for me.

[01:11:06] And I'm not looking to write articles on websites where I will be recognized as the authority who explained what I was doing. Who explained why diurnal variation actually does have an impact on acidity. That's actually our next episode, so if you could just stick around.

[01:11:34] But you know what I mean? I am, I'm happy to do what I do, incorporate the simplifying end of the spectrum into the professional end of the spectrum. And I think you've made a great niche of that in a time when it was really

[01:11:51] needed and there wasn't enough servicey pieces. And now there's quite a few, so I think the market's changed a lot. The market has changed completely because now you can look up anything on the internet. And that's, I think one of the reasons also,

[01:12:04] why I'm not that interested in information. Can't stand there and teach people information. They can Google it. They Google it and they learn more about it that you could tell them in the time that you're standing there. I guess for me the thing is you became an insider,

[01:12:20] but then you kind of refuse to be an insider. You kind of were like, well, my real people are over here. They're the ones that aren't insiders and I'm going to level with them. You kind of crafted your identity that way, which most people don't do that.

[01:12:35] I like that. Thank you. I'm going to remember that. Well, I'm going to remember this interview. Thank you very much for being here today. Thank you. This has been so much fun. Mary Ewing Mulligan. She wrote wine for dummies, a number of them actually.

[01:12:48] And she is the director of the international wine center. I'll drink to that is hosted and produced by myself. Levi Dalton Aaron Scala has contributed original pieces. Editorial assistance has been provided by Bill Kimsey. The show music was performed and composed by Rob Moose and Thomas Bartlett show

[01:13:07] artwork by Alicia to Nguyen t-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and so much more, including show stickers, notebooks and even gift wrap are available for sale. If you check the show website all drink to that pod.com that's I L L

[01:13:21] drink to that pod.com which is the same place you'd go to sign up for our email list or to make one of the crucially important donations that help keep this show operating. You can donate from anywhere using PayPal or stripe on the show website.

[01:13:38] Remember to hit subscribe or to follow this show and your favorite podcast app, please. That's super important to see every episode and thank you for listening. Well, you know, I took a lot of risks and um,

[01:14:06] these things that I've been saying about leaving my high paying job at PepsiCo and following the wine instead of following the money, that was one risk. Becoming an owner of international wine center was another risk.

[01:14:21] Going for the MW was a risk going for sole ownership of international wine center and giving up everything that we were doing. So in 1997 or 98 we gave up everything that we were doing that was not WSCT and we started doing only WSCT and that was a gamble.

[01:14:49] But at the time I didn't, well I guess I perceived that as a risk, but I knew, I knew that it was going to work. The others, I didn't see them as risks, I just saw them as the right decisions at the time.