In this episode, host Jess Baum interviews wine writing icon Ray Isle. Ray and Jess discuss what wine drinkers care about today, the poetry of the balance of sustainable, regenerative agriculture and the importance of big producers shifting in that direction, and how writing his book helped Ray see why the future of wine is not doom and gloom.
Ray Isle is the Executive Wine Editor of Food & Wine and the Wine & Spirits Editor of Travel + Leisure. Ray has won the IACP Award for Narrative Beverage Writing four times, has won the gold award from the North American Travel Journalists Association, and has been nominated three times for the James Beard Award in beverage writing. He is a frequent guest on national media, appearing on programs such as NBC’s Today show, CNBC’s Squawk Box, and CBS Mornings. He has hosted the Aspen Food and Wine Classic since 2005, and speaks regularly on wine at events around the country. Ray’s book The World in a Wineglass: The Insider's Guide to Artisanal, Sustainable, Extraordinary Wines to Drink Now is available in paperback this month. Learn more at rayisle.com.
Ray Isle (00:00):
Wine is sometimes seen as pretentious, and the truth is that people are pretentious about wine. And wine is more than happy to be drunk by anybody at all, all you have to do is like it.
Elizabeth Archer (00:24):
You are listening to the Soil to Soul Podcast, brought to you by Bonterra Organic Estates. Soil to Soul is hosted by Jess Baum, Bonterra's Senior Director of Regenerative Impact. Season two features accomplished and fascinating wine writers across the spectrum of outlets and backgrounds. Today's guest is Ray Isle, executive wine editor of Food and Wine, and the wine and spirits editor of Travel and Leisure. Ray has won the IACP Award for narrative beverage writing four times, has won the Gold Award from the North American Travel Journalists Association and has been nominated three times for the James Beard Award in beverage writing. He's a frequent guest on national media appearing on programs such as NBC's Today Show, CNBC's Squawk Box, and CBS Mornings. He has hosted the Aspen Food and Wine Classic since 2005 and speaks regularly on wine at events around the country. Ray's book, The World in a Wine Glass, The Insider's Guide to Artisanal, Sustainable, Extraordinary Wines to Drink Now is available in paperback this month.
(01:34):
Listen in as Ray and Jess discuss what wine drinkers care about today, the poetry of the balance of sustainable regenerative agriculture and the importance of big producers shifting in that direction. And how writing his book helped Ray see why the future of wine is not doom and gloom.
Jess Baum (01:58):
Hi Ray, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. I'm so excited for this conversation.
Ray Isle (02:05):
I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm very much looking forward to it.
Jess Baum (02:09):
You've just released a book, The World in a Wine Glass, The Insider's Guide to Artisanal, Sustainable and Extraordinary Wines to Drink Now. So I'm going to dive right in and ask why wine? How were you first introduced to the world of wine and what's kept you coming back for more?
Ray Isle (02:27):
Yeah, so it's interesting. I did not grow up in a wine drinking family to say the least. I grew up in Texas. It's not like I grew up on a farm. My dad was an English professor, but he was definitely not a wine drinker. I think we had a bottle of wine on the table at Thanksgiving and we had a bottle of wine on the table at Christmas. The sole moment of excitement around alcohol I can recall in my family was when my dad found out that Coors was going to be available east of the Rockies, and he was quite psyched about that. So there's no wine starting out. But what happened was I was in grad school in Boston in creative writing and my girlfriend at the time worked at a couple of high end restaurants, one in Boston, one in Providence, Rhode Island.
(03:09):
She was also a grad student, but as a grad student you have to make ends meet. So she knew something about wine and occasionally when I would go wait for her to get off work, someone at the restaurant would pour me a glass of something and I remember thinking, this is actually quite good. This wine stuff, it's not bad. So that kind of just spurred a slight interest. So I started buying wine and honestly, I probably would've stayed just a person who's kind of interested in wine and bought nice wine occasionally, except that my next graduate school fellowship was in the Bay Area. And that put me close to wineries. And so I started out first just doing what people do, going up to Napa, going to Sonoma. And then I found out from someone at KNL Wines in Mountain View that if you come out and work a day at a bottling, when the bottling truck comes they'll pay you for your work in wine.
(04:02):
And I was like, "Oh, cool, excellent. Sign me up." So I did that. What that led to then was I became very interested in wine and I worked harvest as a sort of volunteer intern seller rat. And I found it fascinating. I found the process of grapes turning into wine compelling, the people in the business. And I got to the end of this teaching gig I had and I was like, I'm out of here. I'm not getting out of this English department business and I'm definitely moving into wine in some context or another. And so it was kind of a combination of falling for the liquid and then just serendipitously ending up in the right place to fulfill that interest, I guess is the way to put it.
Jess Baum (04:45):
So cool that your initial foray into wine was in the cellars and in such a hands-on way experiencing the process of, as you say, turning grapes into wine.
Ray Isle (04:59):
Honestly, I think any person who wants to write about wine should spend a harvest or two just being in a winery. By being there for the entire process, you really learn kind of on a sensory level how grapes become wine. Had I not moved to California, had I gone to Iowa or Michigan or any other writing program, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. So I got very fortunate that way.
Jess Baum (05:19):
I think you chose well and we're all lucky that you ended up in California. You've spoken broadly about wine and your love of wine and what brought you there, but why focus specifically on sustainable wine in your book?
Ray Isle (05:35):
Yeah, technically it's really sustainable, organic, bio-dynamic, regenerative, that whole kind of constellation of farming practices that basically ideally help the earth rather than screw it up more. A couple of reasons, one, it's something I've been interested in personally for a long time. And it probably comes actually from my father who wasn't a wine drinker but was very interested in literature and ecology essentially. He was an English professor at Rice University and he started a multi departmental program in literature and the environment, which brought in professors from biology, professors from other regions of study. And so that was always kind of present in my, well, let's say teenage years and on when he started to get really interested in this. And then when I started thinking about doing a book, one, I was already interested in, take your pick, sustainability, organics, et cetera.
(06:23):
But also more and more as I've talked to consumers and or readers of food and wine, particularly younger readers or younger wine drinkers, there's just less interest in scores, less interest in the fact that it tastes like blueberries or blackberries, or dams and plums, or asphalt or whatever people decide to say about it. And much more interest in that series of questions of where did it come from, how was it grown, who made it, and what am I putting in my body? As I started thinking about doing a book, I knew I wanted to concentrate on producers who were kind of making wines that expressed place and expressed personal vision. And that dovetailed very well with the interest in the ecological aspects of grape growing. It's not like growing wheat or corn or rice, it's not like growing a staple. Realistically, we don't need wine to survive.
(07:10):
And so grape growing for wine has a little bit more freedom to push the envelope in terms of farming practices that benefit the earth. It doesn't have to rely entirely on production. And in fact, most grape wine comes from vines that don't produce a lot. So all of that came together in an idea for a book which then my agent, a guy named David Black, who's wonderful, helped me shape into a proposal that someone might actually want to publish, which that took some doing too.
Jess Baum (07:38):
I love the way that you bring that up, that wine might be seen as a luxury. It's not a staple or a necessity. It kind of like some people might speak that way of art. We don't breathe art, we don't require it to live, but it brings meaning to life. And some would say what would be the purpose of life without it? As somebody who has chosen to focus on wine and as you say the constellation of sustainable, regenerative, organic, biodynamic, there is a lot to be said for ecology in wine. Ecology is all about systems. And as we know the system that the wine grows in matters, and that's really what we're talking about when we're talking about these different ways of farming. How do we enable the system to thrive and to live beautifully in a way that expresses itself through the grape and through the wine and the glass?
Ray Isle (08:28):
Something that Wendell Berry who's a wonderful poet, but also an essayist about farming and about nature and about ecology has said in one of his essays is that, "Nature is nature, but agriculture there's a reason there's culture in the word, it's an interaction of humans with nature." And when it's working well, it's a give and take between nature and human influence. You support the natural environment even as you farm crops that will benefit you as a human. A lot of industrial agriculture is purely take, you use as many systemic chemicals and fertilizers and so on as you can to get as much production as you possibly can. And it's not a ideal situation to have that stripping of the land or poisoning of the land in that case. And particularly when you're looking at something like wine where ideally wine expresses place in some way. And a lot of the talk about terroir right now is kind of that concept that you can't really completely express terroir unless you've got living soil. And you can't really have living soil if you've blasted all the cover crops and additionally nuked the microorganisms in the soil.
(09:34):
I guess that way of looking at farming as an interaction of man with nature rather than a using of nature and exploitation of nature is what I wanted to get at. The other thing also, in terms of organics and sustainability and all that, I also from talking to people know that there's a tremendous amount of confusion out there. And with wine particularly, it's completely baffling how things are labeled and what might be organic and not organic. And the rules for organic viticulture are very different from the rules for organic wine making. And every single country has different rules about it. And so what I tried to do in the book was explain all that in a, I hope, relatively coherent and even kind of engaging to read way because it's really hard to parse for a lot of people.
Jess Baum (10:23):
Bonterra Organic Estates gets a special mention in the introduction of your book, and thank you for that. As a larger scale winery that is farming organically and conscientiously, we are, in fact all of our estate vineyards are regenerative organic certified. We've been a player in this field since the 1990s. What evolving role has sustainability played in wine and how do you see this continuing to evolve in the future?
Ray Isle (10:52):
There's no question at least in terms of doing the research for the book, that there's certainly more adoption of sustainability and organic farming in wine than there ever was before. I think that there's been a growing awareness among winemakers, at least in the kind of realm of winemakers who are present on the land that they're farming, that maybe industrial or chemical farming is not the way to go. If you just look at percentages of land that's devoted to organic grape growing, it just keeps going up and up. I think you're seeing regenerative farming which has only recently been codified, people are very interested in it very rapidly. You guys are one of the early adopters of the certification process for that. Bonterra's interesting. I also think that when you look at people like Bonterra or you look at the Jackson family or Torres, when you get very big producers who are shifting in this direction, in some sense that's even more influential than small producers because it kind of validates the economics of working that way.
(11:54):
There is no question that farming in this way, regeneratively at scale is tremendously valuable not just to the land itself, but in terms of as a model for other people to contemplate shifting this way. And I think some of the interesting things, just like I was talking to Jason Haas at Tablas Creek and he said, "If you talk to an average Midwestern farmer and you start talking about biodynamics, they're going to look at you like you're out of your mind." But if you start talking about the basic tenets of regenerative farming, that actually makes a lot of sense to people who aren't necessarily inclined towards the kind of astral woo woo of biodynamics. But regenerative kind of borrows from aspects of biodynamics that make a ton of sense and borrows the aspects of sustainability that make a ton of sense.
Jess Baum (12:34):
Biodynamics is something you can dedicate years and years of your life to studying and still not fully comprehend or be able to explain clearly. And I love biodynamics. And also I think Regen Ag has a simplicity that translates perhaps. And I think that you're right that larger scale producers do have a responsibility to be making these choices that pave the way for others because that's how change happens.
Ray Isle (13:03):
Yeah, I think that's true.
Jess Baum (13:11):
What is the biggest change that you've seen over the last 20 years in wine writing? And what kinds of stories are resonating with food and wine readers today that might not have when you started?
Ray Isle (13:23):
There's been a lot of change both in wine and in wine writing, and I think wine writing changes as wine changes to some degree. I'm not sure there's been a huge shift in the language of wine writing. I personally would love to see it get away from, there's a lot of talk about the kind of exclusivity of language and wine. And honestly, most of the talk is about tasting notes and kind of using words that, let's say, not everybody has access to truffles. And so if you say it tastes like truffles, then you're excluding people. But honestly, I think that tasting notes are about the least interesting aspect of wine and the language of wine is much more than just tasting notes. And additionally, the kind of pile on of adjectives is pointless to a certain degree. I think what's happened with wine writing is on a social level you've got many more people writing about wine, partly because of the advent of the internet and so on.
(14:13):
You've got massively more people who are out there committing words to screens or pages about wine. You've got much more representations for certainly of women compared to when I started, which is fantastic. That's true across the wine business as a whole. And you've got more representation of different ethnicities, different backgrounds, and that's really wonderful because the more people you have from everywhere and from every background in wine, the more people you have who will drink wine. And I'm a big fan of wine itself. Wine is sometimes seen as pretentious, and the truth is that people are pretentious about wine. Wine itself is fermented grape juice, and it's been made for 9,000 years. And the first people who made it lived in stone or mud huts and they were certainly not pretentious about it. And so pretension is something we add to it. And wine itself is more than happy to be drunk by anybody at all, all you have to do is like it.
(15:06):
So the gates have opened a lot in the wine world, and I think that that's affected the way wine is written about too, which is really super. I think there's much more interest and emphasis in wine writing on things like organics and so on than there was before, certainly than when I started. There was not much talk about biodynamics. There was zero talk about natural wine as a category. I think those combined with the kind of democratization of access to writing about it has helped or changed things.
Jess Baum (15:43):
You've had such an impressive career. You've written books, you've regularly appeared on national television. You speak at wine and food events across the globe. You even became an Instagram celebrity during the pandemic by drinking your cellar wines on camera. And you've hosted the Aspen Food and Wine Classic for the past 20 years. What are you most proud of having accomplished?
Ray Isle (16:07):
In terms of wine, I'm quite proud of this book that just came out. I've been in my career for a long time and I hadn't published a book because I hadn't had a book that I really wanted to write. And I finally did have a book I wanted to write, and sure enough it now has covers and it's out there in the world. And so I'm very happy about that. But I'm also, as someone who's an editor as well as a writer, part of my job is giving or allowing new writers to have a voice. And I feel like I've been at least generous with my time and I've done as much as I can to help some writers who are younger get started, or at least publish a couple of things when they didn't maybe expect it was going to work out. I think that the community of wine which includes the community of wine writers, is really important. And I think supporting the community is a really important thing.
(16:51):
But I do try and do things like talk, I hope intelligently at the Napa Wine Writers Symposium, which is for writers starting their career. I try and assign stories as I can to writers I haven't worked with before, and you can't be selfish about it. You have to have the doors open for other people too, which writers are not normally the most generous people. They like to sit in a room by themselves and write about their stuff. But wine is a little different in that it's kind of a very social world. I think of myself as being a wine person as well as a writer, I guess.
Jess Baum (17:24):
The way that you talk about cultivating the next generation and creating a healthier and stronger community is so resonant of growing regenerative organic grapes. It's about creating a healthy system, so I think it's such a beautiful full circle vision that you've brought here, the way that you are approaching the wine community and the next generation.
Ray Isle (17:48):
Thanks.
Jess Baum (17:50):
When you think about the collective future of wine, what excites you most?
Ray Isle (17:54):
Oh, gosh. Well, it's funny there's been a lot of talk lately about basically a lot of doom and gloom about the future of wine, which I'm not sure I buy into... Markets are cyclical. Wine's been around for 9,000 years, I don't think it's going anywhere. I do think there are moments when different generations have different approaches to it. I'm excited about the kind of growing interest in an awareness of and care for the environment and the context of growing grapes for wine. I think that's really heartening and significant. And also, it honestly dovetails with making wines that are really exciting to drink. I think that you do get more expression of a place if your treatment of the place is better. Plus the people I know who are working this way seem to be really interesting. The book I wrote is full of profiles of people.
(18:46):
It's a lot of people in their own words, and I think they're fascinating. I got some shade in one review from a reviewer who felt that they were too earnest, and I was like, man, I'm sorry that they're not feeling ironic and negative about what they do. They're earnest because they believe in what they do. Passion is not a bad thing, so I'm optimistic about that. I'm optimistic about the kind of growth of who's represented in wine. I think it's really significant and important. And wine, I'm also optimistic that I just will keep being interested in it because I've been working in this business for a long time. And one thing about wine is it's never boring. It changes with the seasons. It changes with the years, new places come into view, old places come into view again after a long time.
(19:35):
It's a fascinating realm, and so I don't think it'll be replaced by non-alcoholic drinks anytime soon. The things that I'm not optimistic about which is climate change and so on, unfortunately are bigger issues for humans as a whole than they're for wine. They're certainly huge issues for wine, and everybody I talked to in the book is concerned about climate change.
Jess Baum (19:55):
So true. Thank you so much for taking the time to come speak to us today and for sharing a bit about your experience in your long, amazing career. We really appreciate having you here with us today.
Ray Isle (20:08):
Thanks, Jess. I had a blast. It's really fun talking about all this stuff. I hope people enjoy it.
Elizabeth Archer (20:31):
Thank you for listening to the Soil to Soul Podcast, hosted by Jess Baum and produced by me, Elizabeth Archer, right here in Mendocino County on behalf of Bonterra Organic Estates. The largest regenerative organic winery in the United States. To learn more and to get 20% off your wine order, visit bonterra.com and use the promo code soil to soul. We're especially proud of our estate collection, comprising four affordable and exceptional regenerative, organic certified wines from our Hopland Vineyards in Mendocino County. Original music for the podcast was composed by Mendocino County musician, Julian Sterling. Thanks again to today's guest, Ray Isle. To learn more about Ray, visit Rayisle.com. If you liked this episode, please rate, review and share our podcast to help others find it too. Next week on the podcast we'll talk with Meredith May, owner of The SOMM Journal and The Tasting Panel and a former Monster Truck driver. See you then.