Mother’s Day in Los Angeles: AOC presents Brunch and Dinner at West Hollywood and Brentwood Locations
A.O.C., Los Angeles’ ground-breaking small plates restaurant at the forefront of the city’s best dining since 2002, celebrates Mother’s Day, May 14, 2023, with its acclaimed brunch and dinner menus at both 3rd Street and Brentwood locations.
Spacious seating is offered on outdoor patios and indoor dining rooms.
Brunch features favorites of Dungeness Crab Omelette with Watercress, Basil Pistou, Burrata & Crème Fraîche; Shrimp and Buttermilk Biscuit with Celery Sofrito, Pea Tendrils & Shrimp Gravy; Spanish Fried Chicken & Cornmeal Waffle with Chile-Cumin Butter, Jamon Serrano & Maple Syrup;
Vanilla Bean French Toast with Harry’s Berries & Santa Barbara Pistachio Aillade; Stout-Braised Brisket Hash with Horseradish Cream, Poached Egg & Pickled Red Onion; Scrambled Egg Focaccia Sandwich with Hook’s Cheddar, Hill’s Bacon & Chive Crème Fraîche; Roast Turkey Focaccia Sandwich with Mozzarella, Green Harissa, Avocado & Castelvetranos; the A.O.C. Burger with Gruyère, Dijon, Caramelized Shallots and Crispy Onions, served with French Fries.
Don’t miss Suzanne’s indulgent Sticky Buns
Don’t miss Suzanne’s indulgent Sticky Buns with Munak Walnuts and some other special treats for the table, including Lemon Blueberry Oatmeal Streusel Muffin and Cinnamon & Brown Sugar Coffee Cake.
Three new tempting spring desserts by Pastry Chef Tristyne Frutos
There are three new tempting spring desserts by Pastry Chef Tristyne Frutos– Meyer Lemon Bar with Blackberry Compote, Almond Streusel and White Chocolate Ice Cream; Ode to the Samoa Cookie with Chocolate, Dulce De Leche & Coconut Sorbet; and Harry’s Berries & Cream Coupe with Strawberry Sorbet, Vanilla Ice Cream & Diplomat Cream.
Mother’s Day Dinner menu
For Mother’s Day Dinner menu, try the wood-oven focaccias of Bottarga, Red Onion, Cippolinis, Calabrian Chili & Meyer Lemon or Jamon, Sheep’s Milk Cheese, Cherry Tomatoes, Marconas & Salbitxada. Suzanne’s newest salads include Spring Greens with Broccoli Kibbeh, Avocado, Fava & Feta; Arugula with Blood Orange, Pickled Rhubarb & Fresh Ricotta; and Endive with Radishes, Meyer Lemon Cream & Oil-Cured Olives. Other dinner highlights for the season are Lobster & Kanpachi Ceviche with Cara Cara, Urfa & Pistachios; North Pacific Halibut with White Bean Brodo, Nettles, Black Olive & Artichoke Salsa; Prawns with Saffron Pasta, Fennel Sofrito, Spinach & Sourdough Crumbs; and Harissa-Spiced Lamb Chops with Fava Bean Purée, Cumin Yogurt & Pickled Carrots.
Enjoy an inspired selection of Caroline Styne’s curated wines and beers and expertly mixed market cocktails by Head Barman Ignacio Murillo, featuring spring drinks – Kingdom, with Suntory Toki Whiskey, House Strawberry Aperitivo, Rhubarb Bitters & Orange; Sugar Daddy with Gin, Lime Juice, Sugar Snap Pea Syrup & Kiwi Puree; The Fulton with Bourbon, Lemon Juice, Oat & Banana Syrup; Ruta Oaxaca with Mezcal, Tequila, Lime Juice, Pineapple & Opal Basil; Molcajete with Tequila, Lime Juice, Cilantro-Avocado Syrup, Orange Juice & Jalapeño Juice and the award-winning Green Goddess– Green Tea-Infused Vodka, Cucumber, Arugula, Jalapeño & Absinthe Rinse (also available as a mocktail).
Brunch is served from 10:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Dinner is offered from 5:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.
Reservations are available on OpenTable, and takeout can be ordered online at www.aocwinebar.com for pickup. Delivery is available from DoorDash.
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Weekend Wine Trip to Colorado: Winemaker Ben Parsons from The Ordinary Fellow reveals wine, food and nature in Palisade CO
Weekend Wine Trip to Colorado: Winemaker Ben Parsons from The Ordinary Fellow reveals wine, food and nature
Today’s conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For the full, un-edited conversation, visit our YouTube channel here.
Joe Winger:
Just to touch on background a little bit, you were the winemaker and founder of a very successful urban winery, the Infinite Monkey Theorem.
Then you chose to move on to where you are now at The Ordinary Fellow.
What was that transition like for you?
Ben Parsons:
The Infinite Monkey Theorem was really about disrupting the wine industry and trying to make wine fun and relevant and accessible.
We were the first ones in the U.S. to put wine in the can. We started kegging in 2008.
It was really about creating these urban winery spaces, just a tap room for a craft brewery in a city where everyone could come down and enjoy.
After 11 years of taking that to a 100,000 case production distributed in 42 states, there was a really good opportunity for me to get back to what I wanted to do, which is being in a vineyard.
Even though that might sound like a cliche, there is something quite romantic about farming and being surrounded by nature and really trying to make the very best wine you can from Colorado fruit that you grow and putting it in a bottle versus buying someone else’s wine and putting it in a can, they’re like two very different things.
I had an opportunity to take over a vineyard in southwest Colorado down in the Four Corners just outside of Cortez, where the Four Corners meet.
It was in disrepair and hadn’t been pruned in four years. So I got back in there and now it’s looking really good.
So that’s taken 4 years. Yeah it’s relatively small. It’s 13 acres of Riesling, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon.
Sits at 6,000 feet elevation. So very high for a commercial vineyard. And it’s beautiful.
It sits on a national monument called the Yucca House, which is an un-excavated ancestral Pueblan ruin from between the 10th and 12th century.
Starts at Mesa Verde, which most people are familiar with for the ancestral cliff dwellings from the Pueblans down there. It’s just a beautiful location.
Yeah, two very different things, but kind of coming full circle almost as to what I got me into the industry in the beginning, back in the late 90s.
And now back there, but doing it on my own.
Palisade Colorado Winemaker Ben Parsons takes a Vineyard Tour
Joe Winger:
Your famous quote in the wine world: “I miss being in the vineyard”
So for our audience, who’s going to go to wine country this weekend or this summer, when they take a vineyard tour, what should they be looking at?
Ben Parsons:
As to how wine gets from a vineyard and a grape to a bottle. Most people think it just ends up on a grocery store shelf and that is not the case.
It’s really the idea that you could grow something from rootstock, farm it, suffer the vagaries of agricultural production, deal with all of those challenges, do it in a sustainable way.
Determine when you’re going to pick that fruit. Take it into the winery. Ferment it. Turn it into wine. Age it in a barrel. Bottle it. Decide on the branding. Decide on the naming. Come up with a label design.
Take it to all of those small awesome restaurants that everyone wants to hang out at because they’re making great food and getting good press.
You see my wine or I see my wine on someone else’s table, drinking it and to think where that came from.
And how many times those grapes got moved from a to b and then back, from b to c and then c to d whether it be like shoveling grapes with a pitchfork for a destemmer.
Or shoveling fermented grapes into a press with a Home Depot bucket.
Or picking that case up and taking it from here to here, that got handled so many times, so much went into that, that I think there’s a huge disconnect amongst most consumers.
Palisade Colorado Winemaker Ben Parsons on the Area’s Natural Beauty
Joe Winger:
You chose to be in Palisade, Colorado making your wine.
Tell us a little bit about the region and why someone should come visit you in Colorado?
Ben Parsons:
Palisade is beautiful. It’s on the Western slope of Colorado. It’s about a 4 hour drive West of Denver over the mountains.
About 4 1/2 hours East of Salt Lake City.
It’s an American Viticultural Area designate called the Grand Valley and it’s pretty stunning.
You come through this Canyon called the Back Canyon on the North side, you have these book cliff mountains that rise above you on the South side, you have the Colorado River, and it’s a very niche microclimate. It’s definitely an agricultural community.
What a lot of people don’t realize, because they just drive straight past on I-70 is it’s proximity to all things good, outdoorsy.
Within 28 minutes I could be at a local ski resort called Powderhorn. It got 32 feet of snow last year
I’m an hour and a half from Aspen.
I’m an hour and 20 minutes from Moab.
I’m a 10 minute drive from Fruita, which has the best mountain biking in the world.
It’s all old Indian territory. There’s wild mustangs up on the book cliffs.
It’s known for its fruit. It’s actually known for its peaches, believe it or not. Some of the best peaches grown anywhere in the United States. Arguably the best.
But it’s a very small microclimate.
Palisade is around 4,500 feet elevation. There’s about 26 wineries you can tour and visit. Take a few days, spend a weekend.
There’s some good local restaurants, growing their own produce and making real good farm to table food.
Grand Junction is a city that in the last 5 years has really exploded.
And Grand Junction is 10 minutes from Palisade. It went through a series of boom and busts during the oil shale boom business back in the day, but now it’s strongly focused on tourism.
Lots of people are leaving the front range of Denver, Colorado Springs and moving to the Western slope for a kind of quality of life.
Also we have a lot of California transplants because it is cheaper to live. You are outdoors all the time. You can travel long distances very quickly. I put 42,000 miles on my car this year delivering wine all over the state of Colorado.
I feel like the state and this particular area has a lot going for it. Definitely more than enough to fill a long weekend or a week’s trip.
Exploring vineyards, food, farms, outdoor opportunities.
Taking a trip to Moab, it’s really pretty. It’s one of the reasons I moved here.
I’d been in the city for a long time. I grew up just South of London in England, but I lived in London for some time and I loved it when I was young. I love Denver as well.
When I started the Infinite Monkey Theorem, that was really when a lot of people were moving to Denver and it was becoming something substantial.
It was one of the fastest growing cities in the country at that time.
I feel like we were a big part of pushing that growth and in tandem with the other food and beverage scene, like craft breweries and good restaurants.
Joe Winger:
You’ve mentioned different restaurants and food and dinner. Our audience primarily are foodies. We’re in Colorado for a wine weekend, we come to the Ordinary Fellow for a wine tasting.
Can you suggest a few places and different cuisines that are a must visit within 20-30 minutes of you?
Ben Parsons:
In Palisade there’s a good restaurant called Pesh. One of the former line cooks at a linear in Chicago started it with his wife, maybe 5-6 years ago. It’s excellent.
In Grand Junction, where most people stay there’s a few good restaurants started by this guy, Josh Nirenberg, who has been nominated for James Beard award several times for best chef and has one called Bin 707, Then he just opened a third called Jojo’s. He also has a kind of trendy taco spot called Taco Party, which is a fun name.
If you like craft cocktails, there’s a new place that opened called Melrose Spirit Company. Guy opened it in a hotel that was recently renovated. Really cute, really excellent cocktails.
Joe Winger:
Let’s get into the wine geek stuff now and talk about your vineyards. You have Colorado Box Bar, Hawks Nest.
So let’s talk through terroir, soil type, elevation.
Ben Parsons:
So Box Bar, It’s in Cortez, sits around between 6,000 feet elevation.
It’s on this weatheral loam that has some clay in it, which has these water retention properties. It is essentially a desert. So you do have to drip irrigate, there’s less than 7 inches of precipitation a year.
So very little rainfall which is good in some ways in that there is very little disease pressure.
You’re not having to spray. There’s no necessity to spray for powdery mildew or anything down at our vineyards.
It’s essentially farmed very minimalistically.
Lagging very sustainably, which I know people appreciate.
Riesling, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay. We’re just planting some Chenin Blanc and some Charbonneau, which is an italian red varietal as well.
Hawk’s Nest is not my own property, but I work with a grower called Guy Drew who planted four different kinds of Pinot Noir and two different kinds of Chardonnay there.
That vineyard is at 6, 800 feet and that is the highest commercial vineyard in North America.
Similar soil properties as the Box Bar. Making some really good Pinot Noir.
I think what’s interesting about Colorado is we have a very short growing season, 155 – 165 days. Napa has 240 days. That’s frost free days.
So the thing is that we have such high sunlight exposure because of the elevation and the ultraviolet light that we have the same number of degree days as Napa Valley. So we can ripen like Cabernet Sauvignon, but we’re ripening it in a shorter period of time. That’s fairly unique.
The Ordinary Fellow is really focusing on traditional French varietals from Chenin Blanc Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah.
Most recently we took over a vineyard in Utah so I’m actually farming a vineyard about 1 ½ hour drive from Moab called Montezuma Canyon Ranch.
That’s this ancient sandstone with a little bit of clay in there that was planted in 2007. 12 acres of Chenin Blanc, Merlot, Riesling Chardonnay. We made an awesome Utah Rosé vineyard last harvest 2023, which we just released.
You don’t see that many wines from Utah so that’s why I’m excited about it.
I think there’s only 6 wineries in Utah and I’m not sure that many of them get their fruit from Utah.
Joe Winger:
You mentioned that you have one of the highest peak elevation commercial vineyards in North America.
What are the benefits and the disadvantages to such a high elevation?
Ben Parsons:
If you think about spending any time on a mountain, it can be really warm, but as soon as the sun goes down, it gets very cold.
So having high elevation vineyards, even though you might be in a quite a hot growing region as soon as the sun goes down, the temperature does drop.
You have a large diurnal temperature shift.
So in Cortez, in the growth, during the growing season or during ripening, say late September, mid September, late September. We could be 85 to 90 in the day, but 45 to 50 at night, which is a really big temperature swing.
It basically means that the vine has a kind of chance to just shut down and rest.
From an enology perspective, you can retain more natural acidity in the fruit because it’s not being metabolized by having a lot of sunlight constantly and higher temperature. So we don’t have to make any artificial acid additions or anything like that you may have to do in more established wine regions in the United States.
Our wines all have really great balance to them and really good acidity. None of them are overdone. They’re not big, jammy, overly alcoholic.
They’re all well balanced between acids, tannin, alcohol, sugar, but they’re all bone dry.
There is no fermentable sugar in any of them, which leads to palate weight and mouthfeel, but but they’re not sweet per se.
Even my Riesling is bone dry.
Joe Winger:
During the Infinite Monkey Theorem days you led the canned wines movement.
How does it feel seeing it become so incredibly popular and any big lessons you learned from that experience?
Ben Parsons:
I genuinely believe that [we led with canned wines]. In 2009 we entered into a R and D project with Ball Corporation, the largest supply of aluminum cans in the world.
To figure out how to can wine and everyone thought it was stupid and everyone just turned their noses up at it and thought that RTD wine and RTD drinks were stupid.
It’s a tough question because I think that canned wine is good because of its use application, primarily. Where you can take it and where you can drink it.
Now, very rarely do I see people putting the best wine they’ve ever made in a can. So I think it’s all about where you want to drink it, who you want to drink it with. There’s definitely this kind of utility aspect to it.
Also price point wise, you don’t see that many canned wine, four packs above $16,
I would say so. Yeah, price wise, it’s fairly economical from a sustainability perspective. It makes a lot of sense.
But from an absolute quality perspective, you’re probably still going to be buying bottled wine over canned wine.
It’s all about where you’re going to consume it.
Sometimes when I see it I think about when you start any category, there’s always those people that are out there doing it way before anyone else is doing it. It’s those people that usually don’t reap the benefits of it because they put all of the effort into it.
I look at LinkedIn occasionally and I’m just baffled by people that think that it’s a new thing. It just blows my mind.
Joe Winger:
You have an excellent sparkling wine and you’ve mentioned England’s excitement about the sparkling.
Why is England falling in love with sparkling wine? And why should all of us be falling in love with sparkling wine?
Ben Parsons:
Historically, England has consumed a lot of sparkling wine.
But in terms of actually growing grapes and making their own sparkling wine, that’s happened in the last 20 years.
That’s one of those unfortunate advantages of global warming in a kind of isolated geographical area that previously, you wouldn’t have been able to ripen Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier.
It would have been a challenge making really good sparkling wine in Kent and Sussex and Southeast England where a lot of it is made.
But with a few degrees temperature rise, that’s now possible. And it’s the same chalk escarpment as champagne. They’re very close to each other.
They’re just separated by 24 miles of the English Channel, right?
So they’re actually geographically very close to each other a little further than 24 miles, but climatically very similar.
So actually, a lot of French champagne houses have bought up land in Kent and Sussex over the last 20 years and have been planting that, and now some of the bubbles are coming out.
Joe Winger:
When I have an opportunity to speak with an Oregon winemaker, we often talk about the challenges based on their region. Do you feel like you are also in a region [Colorado] that’s more problematic?
Can you share a lesson you’ve learned from solving some of those problems?
Ben Parsons:
The whole industry because of the shortness of the growing season, it’s always on a knife edge because you can have late spring frosts that can come through a bud break and just wipe you out.
But you can also have these freak-like early winter freezes in October where there’s there’s still fruit hanging or maybe it’s just come off and it goes from 70 degrees in the day to 8 degrees suddenly, and the sap still flowing in the vines and then all of the vines, the trunks split, the cordon split.
That’s what happened in Palisade maybe 3 or 4 years ago now.
Then in Cortez where Box Bar is, last year we had a hailstorm come through just after the bud break. So our Chardonnay was out and got wiped out. Then the secondary buds pushed and we went from a crop of 36 tons to 10 tons overnight.
That’s just agriculture anywhere. Unfortunately that’s just one of the risks.
Joe Winger:
Let’s talk about wine. Their flavor profiles. The different bottles you offer.
When we come visit your tasting room in Palisade, Colorado any hints about what they should be excited to taste?
Ben Parsons:
Blanc de Noir
Yeah the sparkling wine, that’s Blanc de Noir, so that’s 100% Pinot Noir. That’s about as geeky as it gets, because that’s single vineyard, single grower, single clone of Pinot Noir. only 8 months in barrel. The base wine was barrel aged for about 6 months, and then it was entourage, lying on its utilise in a bottle for six months.
Then it’s put on a riddling rack and hand riddled one bottle at a time. Then disgorged by hand, just take the top off, put your thumb over the top of it so nothing comes out and then no dosage.
So again, just super geeky, like really bone dry, like really crisp, great acid. So that is that wine is super hands on.
It’s delicious. It still gets those more developed, brioche-y notes. Texturally it’s very pleasing on the palate. I think we make really good method champignons, bottle fermented sparkling wine.
Chardonnay
A lot of people these days think it’s trendy to not like chardonnay, because they heard somewhere about that, but there are actually some really good Chardonnays out there, which aren’t all aged in new French oak and haven’t all gone through like a creamy buttery secondary fermentation. And I think mine is one of them. It was aged in 8 year old barrels. So there’s really no influence on it at all.
It’s all hand harvested or whole cluster pressed. I think that wine has a really pretty texture, like this palette coating texture but it has really good acidity and it smells like a ripe peach or a dried apricot. It’s really pretty.
Pinot Noir
Our red pinot noir. Again that spent just 9 months in neutral barrels so I think there was a trend like 20 years ago to put everything in a brand new barrel and every winemakers thought it was cool, but you know in the last 5 – 6 years, I think that has changed
Winemakers are really trying to let the soil and let their vineyards speak for themselves.
Minimal kind of intervention to a certain extent. It is the trend.
Our Pinot Noir has done really well. It’s on the much lighter side. I would say it’s more like a German style Pinot Noir, like lighter with really good acidity, firm tannin. Beautiful aroma.
I think all of our wines are just very well balanced. Very food friendly, very clean. They’re not funky. I’m very proud of that.
Joe Winger:
I’m assuming balance and the clean is a style choice by you?
Ben Parsons:
Balance is easy because it’s done in the vineyard because of the elevation and the retention of acidity. It’s just about when you pick it. So you’re tasting [the grapes] for flavor and like phenolic ripeness and the seeds being brown, et cetera, but you’re also testing a few for your pH, your titratable acidity and your sugar levels. Then you make an informed decision as to when you’re picking it.
The cleanliness part of it really just comes down to the fact that I feel like winemakers, even though this doesn’t sound very romantic, you’re almost just like an insurance manager in that you don’t want to mess it up.
So you make informed decisions, preemptively. You top your barrels, like every 2-3 weeks, you do things to make sure the wine, does not end up flawed through a secondary characteristic developing.
Sometimes that’s a flavor enhancer and sometimes that’s good, but when it’s overdone… I believe there are a lot of wines that they get away with it these days. To me it’s just bad winemaking.
I’m definitely kind of a minimal interventionist
Joe Winger:
I always feel like white wine doesn’t get enough love and respect. People love talking about the complexities of reds. You make a phenomenal Riesling.
Ben Parsons:
Interestingly I really don’t drink red wine anymore. Occasionally I’ll drink some Pinot Noir, but I much prefer drinking white wines. I think a lot of people in the industry crave acidity, and yeah, my reasoning is a good example.
The general consumer in the U. S. still thinks that all raisins are sweet. I think that’s just a common misconception, that’s purely a stylistic choice from the winemaker, and my choice is to allow the yeast to ferment all of the sugar until there is no residual sugar.
To have a wine with high natural acidity that pairs well with food. That’s my choice as a winemaker. Those are the wines that I enjoy most that kind of just leave your palate just like this rasping acidity. Take the enamel off your teeth, and but have beautiful aroma.
Our Riesling is starting to show some characteristics from being in the bottle for 18 months. Where it gets those kind of, it’s tough to say about making it sound bad, but those more kerosene-y , kind of petroleum, kind of eraser like notes, which are very typical of Riesling, intertwined with really nice citrus and green apple.
Yeah, and like really just good structure. That benefits from growing at elevation here for sure.
Joe Winger:
Petit Verdot is probably lesser known, less popular, but it deserves all the love anyway.
Ben Parsons:
Petit Verdot, interesting, like one of the six red Bordeaux grape varieties. Bordeaux is maritime climate. It’s much cooler than Colorado.
It doesn’t really get the chance to ripen as well as it does here. So when it can ripen, it doesn’t just need to get blended into Cabernet Sauvignon or something to just give it more tannin and more structure.
Here it can stand alone as a single varietal.
The greenness is gone. The tannin is not like just rip your face off tannin. It’s well developed. Like silky, velvety, firm, but not like really dry and like Petit Verdot can be. Aromatics are very lifted on it, and it’s not a massive red wine by any means.
That’s grown at a vineyard about half an hour from Box Bar called Canyon of the Ancients and that vineyard was planted in 2006.
Unfortunately we only made about 99 cases of that wine. It’s fun to introduce people to wines that they probably haven’t heard of, but wines that that can stand up to any good red wines that you may have heard of.
Palisade Colorado Winemaker Ben Parsons reveals his Favorite Food
Joe Winger:
Do you identify yourself as a foodie? Can you pick 1-2 of your bottles and your favorite dish for dinner tonight?
Ben Parsons:
Yeah I would definitely pair my Riesling with a Thai curry or even a panang curry. I think it does really well with oriental food that has some level of heat to it. But also I think it does really well with a charcuterie plate, some almonds and some cheese. I think you can’t go wrong with that.
Then my Petit Verdot, for example I think there is more tannin in there. For those of us that like the light grilling you couldn’t go wrong with serving that with a ribeye. It’s delicious. Or if you’re cooking a little heartier food in the winter, maybe a lasagna. Something that can really work with that tannin.
I think my wines do well with a lot of different food just because of the balance that they have, they’re not going to overpower the food and vice versa, which is what it’s all about.
But I also enjoy them, just having a glass on its own, to be honest. When I get home from work, sometimes I love that.
Joe Winger:
I’m watching your Instagram videos quite a bit, and it seems like you’re having a lot of fun sharing knowledge, showing your vineyard, showing what it’s like day to day.
Ben Parsons:
The one time that I do enjoy social media is when you’re in the vineyard or you’re doing something that seems that other people might never have seen before.
I’m in awe of where I am because I feel like it comes across in those videos. It’s pretty down here today, and those are beautiful vineyard sites.
Or if you’re filtering a wine or racking a wine or, trying or shoveling grapes.
Just the imagery comes across and really shows how much work is involved in it. I always struggle when it’s like go take a photo of a bottle of wine in front of a restaurant. I don’t know how you make that look cool.
Find more about Ben Parson’s The Ordinary Fellow website, instagram
More about Palisade, CO
Stuck in LA Dating App Hell? Dating Expert Andrea McGinty makes it easy with 33000Dates.com
Stuck in LA Dating App Hell? Dating Expert Andrea McGinty makes it easy with 33000Dates.com
We’re with Andrea McGinty, dating expert from 33000Dates.com
Today’s conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For the full, un-edited conversation, visit our YouTube channel here.
So often we talk about food and wine and it’s usually for dates, romantic nights out, date night, anniversaries, vacations.
Today we’re going to get to the source of what those date’s are actually about. So with us is a dating expert, Andrea McGinty from 33000dates.com.
Joe Winger:
So just to start things off, what inspired you to become a dating coach?
Andrea McGinty:
You mean what inspired an accounting / finance major to become a dating coach?
I started this when I was in my 20s. So this is the 1990s.
There’s no Google yet. There’s no online dating. It’s going to happen in the late 90s, but it hasn’t happened yet. At that point I was living in Chicago and I was getting married and five weeks before the wedding, he called it off and it was like – boom!
What do you do? First I cried, of course…
Anyway my friends started fixing me up on dates, still in your 20s and you know how those dates go,
They know someone that’s single, so they think you should like them, blah, blah, blah…
After some of those dates I was really thinking about it and I thought, it’d be great if there was a place you could go, like an executive recruiter for your professional life.
The same thing for your personal life.
And of course, there was nothing like that at the time. Even in high school and in college I fixed up two of my suitemates. They’re still with their husbands that I fixed them up with.
I was already good at this and I thought I could start this.
Anyway, fast forward.
I started a company in Chicago called It’s Just Lunch. Where people meet for lunch. We do all the work.
Fast forward, 15 years later, it’s still the same.
[At my first dating company, It’s Just Lunch] we had 110 locations globally and then I sold. Timing was perfect because online dating was coming out of its infancy and it was a mess it at first, just the scammers, the crazies, the horrible stories,
I thought, “Oh, wow, there’s a need. People have no idea what to do online and how to date.”
Dating Expert Andrea McGinty makes it easy with 33000Dates.com
Joe Winger:
Is there one big lesson to learn how to be more successful with dating in today’s world?
Andrea McGinty:
I think there’s a couple, there’s probably two lessons to learn.
#1 is you need to understand how to navigate online dating because there’s over 1400 sites out there.
#2 you’ve got to be really careful that you don’t give up too quickly.
Most people give up in the first 2-3 weeks because they go online, see a bunch of people, they probably went on the wrong site by the way too, like not the right site for them at all. Then they see these people who like them and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is online dating, forget it, I’m done, gone.”
And it goes back to they didn’t do it right, they had no idea what they were doing.
Joe Winger:
Can you bring some clarity to that and help somebody understand what are the first few steps are and how to do them correctly?
Andrea McGinty:
Absolutely. With online dating you need…
#1 you need to be really careful that you’re choosing the right site.
When we’re talking about 1,400 sites out there, I tend to work with the top 25 sites. When I’m working with a client I start initially with a zoom call with a client and get to know them what they’re looking for.
I work primarily with the 40 – something 50- something, through the 60s age group. Second time around, second acts in life type of thing.
Back to the right site…
When I’m choosing a site for a client after the zoom call, I’m thinking about. “Okay, what sites do I think they belong at?” And it’s very different if you’re in Los Angeles versus Houston versus Washington versus New York City or Orlando, Florida.
[The sites are] so different, how the sites function and the type of people that are even on the site.
I’m strategic too. I use three different large companies for research. I use Gallup, Pew and Statista. I pay to get research on a monthly basis and it really tells me the percentage of men to women on a site.
Some sites that are 80% men. Some sites are 80% women
You might be having an awful time on a site because you’re a woman and you’re at a site that’s 80% women. You’re in the wrong place.
So I do the homework with the research. Geographically where you live, level of education, income. Is that site’s membership increasing, decreasing?
#2 Your pictures.
Oh my gosh. I’m like a crazy person with photos because you have to have really great photos. I don’t mean LinkedIn photos, I don’t mean glamour shots, and not selfies.
The candids are nice because it’ll show you and your friends. Out playing pickleball, out playing tennis, out having drinks with your girlfriends. The professional shots. Depending on where you live, you’re just gonna get some great shots up against a graffiti wall in Brooklyn or a nice shot by the beach that are just a little more.
You want a couple full body shots.
You want the photos to be current, within the last year. Just like you don’t want to be surprised when you show up on the date and there she is. She has a few more wrinkles and a few more pounds than what I saw online.
It’s like you’re not being truthful about the whole thing.
Online dating is a visual medium. You’ve got to be presenting yourself. My LA and Orange County market, Dallas market, they get that. But there’s other parts of the country. I’m like no, we are not putting that picture of you online. There is absolutely no way.
#3 Your profile
Once they look at your photos online, if they like what they’re seeing, they’re going to read about you. It can’t be the same old stuff. Like I like to walk on the beach and I look as good in a tux as I do…. it puts me to sleep.
So a short, sweet, interesting, quirky profile sells.
A lot of times it’s hard to write about yourself. That’s why it’s nice to have somebody like me, write about you.
[Summarizing] You’re on the right site. The right photos. Your profile. Now it’s looking through high potential dates for you….
#4 Looking for High Potential Dates
Putting in algorithms, putting in search filters. That’s something I teach people how to do because otherwise it’s like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack and you want it like a needle in a little Easter basket.
Once we throw those filters and algorithms on, it gets rid of 80% of the people. Now we’re down to some of these people that look like high potential people for you.
#5 Send messages
We found 10 “someone” ‘s and now we send messages.
We don’t send them a weak heart or any of that kind of junk because men get so irritated. Because half my clients are men, they get so irritated with this.
Why are these women sending likes and hearts and no message?
That’s my constant battle with women.
Hey, you’re in your 40s, you’re not 90 when women had to wait to be pursued. We’re not living in our grandparents era, right? We’re equals. We can reach out to the men too.
The men totally appreciate when a woman sends a well crafted, interesting, short three sentence message.
The messaging is super important because you don’t want the: “Hi, how are you?” – or this is horrible. “Hi, you’re so good looking.” “Hi, you’re so beautiful.”
It was like, copy paste, they threw that out to the world, they sent that to everybody.
So now you’ve sent a message, hopefully he / she messages back.
#6 Schedule a date
The next thing is let’s get that date scheduled. This can all be done with just a couple texts on both people’s part:
“Okay, yeah, I’m totally interested. How’s Friday, at 5:30p at Bistro 110. Let’s meet for a glass of wine?
Because chemistry only takes place in real life.
Joe Winger:
In reality, do most dates get set up that quickly? It seems like there’s more delays and game-playing?
Andrea McGinty:
From the time you first send a message to someone, if the date has not been scheduled within five days of that initial text. There’s a 90% chance the date will never occur.
I’ll say to my client, “We’re going to go right for it right now.”
Write a couple of cute lines that are just for that person and then be like:
“You know what? I don’t really need to text you anymore or talk to you anymore because I’m ready to meet you. I’m super interested. How’s Friday night…?”
Sometimes you’ll get back a reply, what’s the rush?
I think to myself, what isn’t the rush here?
What do you want to talk about? Can’t you just get dressed?
We both live in Beverly Hills for goodness sakes. How long would it take us to get together and meet, right? We’re both in New York City. C’mon. Let’s do this in person.
If you’re getting those people that are drawing out the process, you either just cut bait. Just block them, goodbye, gone.
Or you say, you know what, if you don’t reply, you’re going to end up on my waiting list.
And you do it with a little humor, add an “LOL”
That can work too, where people crack up and they’re like, yes, I would love to meet you Saturday. Let’s grab lunch.
Joe Winger:
In today’s world of different levels of politically correct, cancel culture, different levels of sensitivity, regardless of whether you’re in a very conservative culture, progressive culture, etc.
How do we deal with any level of uncomfort when it comes to online dating?
Andrea McGinty:
First of all, you’re not in the workplace dating right now. Cause that’s where a lot of that happens, right?
This is where I say “Women, you’ve got a big advantage right now because you can feel very comfortable and free reaching out to men and get over that whole thing”.
Women wait to be pursued. There was this book that came out in the 90s: “The Rules.”
Wait to be pursued by the man and then don’t respond to him for three days. What the heck is that about?
No. Reach out to men.
Now for men, you’re not going to send stupid messages like, “Oh, you’re so gorgeous and sexy and blah, blah, blah”
Nobody wants that message.
You would find that offensive too.
As far as men reaching out to women, just do it in good taste.
Women are there to meet men. Creepy doesn’t happen very much online anymore. We’re out of that 2000 – 2010 era where more of that stuff happened.
There’s so many more hoops. Both parties jump through [hoops] on top notch dating sites now and dating apps now that verify that you are who you say you are and verify some information about you.
Joe Winger:
Most of the people watching this, they’re into food. That means fine dining. They’re into wine and cocktails and collecting wine.
What kind of a goal can they look for if they come to 33000Dates.com?
When they approach and connect with you, what should they be thinking about and preparing so they know how to best represent themselves in that first conversation with you?
Andrea McGinty:
Just be real with me and, people that are foodies and wine collectors, there’s a lot of us out there. There’s a lot of people out there that will find that very attractive.
There’s a lot of people that like to try different wine bars, they like to go up to Napa. Maybe that’s your third or fourth or eighth date,
Be real with what your interests are and… talking about food.
This goes back to when I’m writing your profile, when people just say, “Oh, I like Italian food.” I’m like no. Give me something here.
“I like carbonara with peppers and from Trattoria is amazing.”
It doesn’t have to be written in a snobby or snooty way, but it’s just like fun. Like you’re describing what you like to eat or your favorite foods or it could be talking about, you like this vintage of wine.
Be very specific with me because that’s how I can help you the most and be really upfront no, no PC woke stuff with me because this is your personal life.
Joe Winger
What are some realistic goals for your online dating experience?
Andrea McGinty:
We’ve got to make sure that we’re not listening to all the noise out there. We’re not listening to our negative friends about dating and friends and family can be two really negative forces because you get one of one of two things.
If it’s family, maybe a lot of them are married and they’re like, Oh, you’re good looking. You’re so awesome. You don’t need to do online dating. That is like for losers.
That is so not the story anymore.
You’ve got friends that are like, “Oh, I just tried Bumble. It was horrible”. “I did hinge. It was horrible.”
A lot of dating is going in with a good attitude. I’m not talking about rainbows and unicorns; and everything’s perfect or anything like that.
We spend a lot of our 20s and 30s becoming successful and working on our careers.
By the time we’re 40s, even 50s we’re there career-wise. So now, it’s time to focus on our love life.
That could be two very different pictures: it could be a second act because you’re divorced.
Or it could be you’ve been single and just all your efforts have been going into career and friends and travel and all this other stuff, good stuff you’ve got going on.
But you wake up one day and you’re like:
“Hey, I’m 45 and I’m single. What’s up with this?”
Go into online dating, approaching it the way you did your career. Strategically. It’s no fun to think about your love life, like strategically, hire somebody, think about how you play golf.
You didn’t just go out on the golf course. You took a bunch of lessons.
Everybody’s playing pickleball now. But you didn’t just go out on the court, even if you played tennis before. You took a couple clinics, right?
That very quickly threw you into the intermediate range all of a sudden because you put some effort into it.
Same with dating.
But if you want to do it effectively and pretty effortlessly, just like you did with golf, hire the pro to do this stuff for you.
My typical male client tells me I take 80% of the workload off him because he doesn’t have to think about it anymore.
I’m coming up and presenting ideas to him, presenting women to him and just getting them through. All of the hoops and the messaging and all that stuff. Getting them to the good dates because they’re out there.
There’s some markets, like Los Angeles and New York, that can be big complainers about dating. I think because they’re trying to do it on their own.
When I get online and go on the good sites in those two markets, there are so many good people on there.
It’s just a matter of having somebody doing a good portion of the work and pushing you.
And oh, here’s the other thing, accountability.
When you’re working with me, you have accountability because you’re going to talk to me next week. And I’m going to say:
“Okay, Tell me what happened to you last week.”
“How’d that date go?”
“Did you call back that other one that we talked about?“
I did text her after the date you said you were going to, what happened?
So that little push along the way and keeping you on track too.
Because we’re in a culture where, we’re educated, we’re taking great trips, we’re dining out. We’ve got a nice group of friends that we love to hang out with.
It can be really easy to sweep this all, to the wayside. There’s no reason because there’s a loneliness epidemic in the U.S. and we all know if you’re with somebody, that you really enjoy hanging out with you’re going to live longer and you’re gonna live happier too.
Right.
Joe Winger:
You’re offering great dating tips. Thank you.
Let’s say you’re someone who’s done the work on your protile, messaged all those people, asked for a date, and they’ve all disappeared.
What’s that person doing wrong?
Andrea McGinty:
You kinda gotta take responsibility for it. You’re doing something wrong.
Here’s the deal. You don’t know what you’re doing wrong.
But that’s stuff I can fix.
That’s another thing. You have to stay away from those free sites or sites that have free people on it because there’s no skin in the game there. They’re just dilly-dallying around, playing around on there and not really serious.
Part of it is recognizing the statistics that you’re going into up-front that for every 5 texts you send, 1 person is going to respond back.
I give my clients homework on a weekly basis, two sessions. That’s all I ask of them.
During those two 30 hour sessions they have to send out 8 messages. So I know by the time I’ve talked to them, they’re going to at least have gotten back 3 responses.
If their photos are really good, they might have 8 responses back.
If they haven’t already booked the date, craft the email, craft the text, craft the message that’s going to get that date in person. And get us there. Get us there.
Joe Winger:
Andrea McGinty from 33000Dates.com dating expert.
Any requests from the audience watching and listening?
Andrea McGinty:
I would just say, take a look around my site, maybe take the dating quiz that I have on the site. It’s fun. And it’s really fast. It’s 10 questions, and it goes right to me. It doesn’t go to any of my people. And. I can rate you and what you’re doing and tell you whether or not I can help you too.
So if you do take that quiz, give me as much info as you can. I don’t mean personal info, but like where you live, your age, but that’s all going to be on there. But take that quiz because that’s a good way to contact me and see if we might be a good fit and maybe I can help you if you really want to meet somebody.
George Gallagher Gets Lucky with Law in BET+ Perimeter TV Series from Tyler Perry, Armani Ortiz
George Gallagher gets lucky with the law in BET+ Perimeter TV Series from Tyler Perry, Armani Ortiz
We’re with actor George Gallagher. He’s currently on BET+ new show, “Perimeter”.
Today’s conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For the full, un-edited conversation, visit our YouTube channel here.
Joe Winger:
Talk a little bit from an actor point of view. All the different characters you’ve played, what’s your preparation process like?
George Gallagher:
It tends to vary from role to role. I utilize a lot of different disciplines. But for example, on Perimeter I play an attorney who takes on cases that others wouldn’t necessarily.
He knows where his bread and butter comes from, but he likes to challenge and, when dealing with that, I’d watched a lot of different things.
I watched Better Call Saul.
I watched different lawyer shows and I consulted with some attorneys and did some research and, I have a relative who’s an upper echelon attorney in the tri state New York area. I spoke with her in some detail about different things and went through the script actually, and to try to make it make sense for me in a very real, visceral way.
But also honor the world that Armani Ortiz and Tyler Perry had created.
So it varies quite a bit. I like to be really spontaneous and instinctive with everything. I like to go off the moment of what I get from the other person and what happens in the moment.
How I respond to things 12 words or less, unfortunately is not my specialty, but that’s why we have writers to give me dialogue.
Joe Winger:
Talk about Lance, the character you play in Perimeter.
George Gallagher:
Working on the show is one of the gifts of my creative, professional career.
Armani Ortiz is the young writer-director visionary, who has created the show and put it forth with Tyler Perry as executive producer. And he also directed the Tyler Perry documentary, Maxine’s Baby, about Mr. Perry’s life that’s doing quite well right now.
He’s really an extremely talented young guy. He really invited me into his world, to create whatever I wanted within certain parameters. He was very collaborative with the actors. He allowed us to rehearse, work through things, but also give it our own flavor.
I come from the theater and actors that work in that studio tend to have that background because we can work quickly. We’re autonomous. We have some process and technique and I believe that we’re able to collaborate with others in a way that’s immediate, and in theater, you’re out there in the unknown and there’s no one to cut you out.
If you have a bad moment, the audience sees it.
So actors really learn how to hyper focus in real time. That was a bit of the experience. Once the cameras were starting to roll, but we did have an incredible cast.
Most of the people came from California, some from New York. I’m really drawn from both coasts that came to Atlanta to film and work on the show.
It’s a great story. It’s period. It takes place in the nineties surrounding Freaknik, which was a really popular hip hop festival in Atlanta. The Olympics is in the backdrop, when they had them here in the early 90s. The whole city, the airport expanded. It really put Atlanta on the map as a major metropolitan city. So that’s all happening in the backdrop. They had the first black mayor at the time.
My character, Lance, is a high end attorney who has a very private clientele that pays him very well. Their cases might be a little more challenging.
He represents people who are, sometimes stepping outside of the law and in the criminal world and which makes it all the more challenging.
But back to your earlier question, I was researching lawyers that had taken on different civil rights cases that are a little more controversial in terms of dealing with the system and upholding a belief in the system.
Someone like Alan Dershowitz, I watched Reversal of Fortune.
He took on a lot of civil rights cases and then went and defended someone that everyone thought was a murderer.
But the reason why he did those things and which was an underlying, or rather an overtone of that novel and the film Reversal of Fortune. It’s really about if you believe in the legal system and making sure that everyone has a fair and just defense, regardless of their socioeconomic background.
My character, Lance, is from a different world than I am.
Malcolm, who’s one of the main characters on the show, that I defend and I represent. I don’t want to give too many spoilers away, but it’s a really exciting world.
People should check out the show and see where it takes everybody.
Joe Winger:
When you talk about the cast there’s a range of different names.
Any specific lessons you learned from any of the cast?
George Gallagher:
There’s one scene in particular where my client’s brother ends up getting arrested. He’s looking at some serious charges and we have to go visit him and give him some reassurance and get more information about his case.
Both of the actors, Malcolm Xavier, who plays Malcolm on the show and Jalen Gilbert, who plays his brother were extraordinary.
We shot in a visitation room in a police station and when this actor walked in, I felt like he was really in jail or in prison.
The guy transformed.
I’d met him [before] and we rehearsed the scene and everyone’s nice and we’re in hair and makeup and shooting the crap and talking. Then you get on set and it’s not the same human being, which is such a gift as an actor when you have.
It forces you to really respond and you’re just in the moment. The three of us had a really exciting dynamic and I thought it translated really well on film.
It reminded me of things as an actor, which is if you believe it, if you really believe it, the audience will believe it too. Everybody around you on that set will believe it.
If you don’t. then it’s kind of luck of the draw and you’re hoping for the editor [and music score] to help you.
If an actor is really meant to be an actor, and they’re worth their grain of salt, it comes from them living in this danger zone. And this guy, he came out, he was dangerous. You felt like anything could happen.
He reminded me of a young Denzel Washington.
And Malcolm was also exceptional. It was impossible to not believe they were brothers. You could feel the affinity, but also the sort of rage that was brewing between the two of them.
Joe Winger:
That vibe helps inform your performance as well. It just makes the whole scene more alive and in the moment for you.
George Gallagher:
Absolutely. You just feel like you’re there with another human being having an experience and you forget you’re an actor and that you’re in a story and you just really like suspension of disbelief.
As actors, we get to live many lives, which is what I love the most about acting.
Armani Ortiz really set the stage for that to happen to us.
Also making it feel authentic and real. The art direction, the cinematography, every department was really on point.
Joe Winger:
You’ve played some really intense roles. After a day on a set that heavy, as a human being, as an actor, how do you relax?
George Gallagher:
That’s a really good question. A different film that I did, called “Altered States of Plaine” is about a guy who falls asleep and wakes up in different parts of the world. He doesn’t know why it’s happening to him and he resorts to drug induced insomnia to stay awake.
It’s very bizarre film and it balances a lot of psychological aspects.
Sometimes in a role you do immerse yourself and you work to within an inch of your life. [Afterwards] you come out and shake it off and sometimes you’ve got dings in the fender that aren’t going away.
But as an actor generally I just laugh and shake it off. The camera eats all that stuff up, hopefully we all can shake hands and go out for a drink later on and bury the hatchet.
Joe Winger:
It sounds like on your current show Perimeter, it does have a more congenial vibe.
George Gallagher:
Absolutely. I’ve worked on two projects there [Tyler Perry Productions] now. It’s one of the most positive environments you could ever step into as an actor. Tyler Perry Productions hires the very best of the best of people.
I remember in California walking on the Paramount [lot] for an audition and everybody looks so happy. They had a twinkle in their eye.
[I mentioned it to a friend and they replied] “They’re all winning the game.”
I was like, you’re right. There is that gratitude, you get a job for that week. You’re part of the 1%. You’re very lucky. It’s a privilege.
Joe Winger:
You’ve been outspoken about the future of Hollywood, digital storytelling, AI. You’ve had publicly a very positive outlook on what the future looks like.
George Gallagher:
I don’t believe the human soul will ever be duplicated and replicated.
I think they’re going to get interesting products and effects that are going to look really cool and fascinating, but there’s still going to be a storyteller that’s a human being behind that.
But I still think that writers, storytellers, actors, and people in the visual, there’s still going to need to be human beings manning this.
There’s always going to be a need and a desire for communal experience. A human being telling stories and artists, but it is probably going to alter a lot.
The audience determines at the end of the day, it’s about what they want.
Joe Winger:
Our audience is very food based, wine based, cocktail based, I’m not sure if you identify as a foodie.
What’s your favorite dish? What do you love to cook?
George Gallagher:
My pronouns are asparagus, broccoli, and spinach. [George laughs]
I love food. I’m big into real food, raw foods organically grown, supporting local farmers, salads greens.
There was a dish that I used to make, sausage and pepper penne.
I use turkey sausages because I like it a little healthier. I would make it with fusilli because it soaks up the sauce better. Getting the oils and the fats into the sauce, and then the fusilli just grabs it and soaks it all up, and then I would add almonds into that dish.
Maybe some spinach. Definitely have to have green peppers and some spicy peppers, bright colored rainbow diet.
If I cook it too much, then it’s a mess. But I’ve gotten better at it over the years. It’s edible.
Joe Winger:
You finished shooting “A Heart for Christmas” in Los Angeles. Can you talk about the movie and what you play?
George Gallagher:
Absolutely. I just wrapped “A Heart for Christmas”. I play Dr. Carl, who’s really driven, sort of type A person who is engaged to the protagonist in the film, breaks it off early on and because he’s got his own sort of, he’s a quasi McDreamy meets McDouchey sort of doctor. A little bit of a God complex, and he’s quite pleased with himself.
It’s a Christmas film and it’s fun and has a lot of humor and charm.
We shot for a few weeks in LA and all around Pasadena. We got to experience Christmas in the summertime.
It should be out sometime before this Christmas.
Joe Winger:
Anything in the future we should be looking for you?
George Gallagher:
On Netflix, the new film Six Triple Eight starring Kerry Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Dean Norris, and Sam Waterston.
That was also directed by Tyler Perry.
I play a character named Levi who’s a business executive and it takes place around the Second World War.
Part of the film was shot in Atlanta, some in Europe: England, Germany, all around the world.
It’s one of the biggest productions I’ve ever personally been involved in with a lot of great actors and had a terrific script. I think people are going to really like the story.
Joe Winger:
You’ve made the unorthodox choice as an actor of leaving Los Angeles, having a family life somewhere else. What inspired that move?
George Gallagher:
It’s been a blessing in so many ways I can’t even tell you.
We live in a suburb of Atlanta north of the city. Having my children be born in Los Angeles and being from the New York area, I’ve never not lived in a major metropolitan area.
You really just can provide a better quality of life for your family. I moved here [from the New York area]. I heard Tyler Perry was quarantining and was going to keep production going.
I thought nothing stops that guy. Those are the kinds of people I want to work with. I said to my wife and family, “Let’s go to Atlanta. We can always come back to New York later.”
It’s just amazing. It was like everything that I had wanted and planned for.
Very rarely in my life have everything unfolded exactly the way I’d hoped and envisioned it. But this was one of those situations and it’s an hour from New York.
It’s green, it’s beautiful, and people are friendly. You get great organic food and there’s farmers everywhere. We have, of course, Georgia peaches everywhere.
Joe Winger:
As we wrap up any social media, any websites? What’s the best way to follow you, find out more about you?
George Gallagher:
Feel free to follow me on Instagram. It’s GeorgeGallagher7. Facebook is George Gallagher.
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Napa Wine: Malek Amrani’s The Vice Wine Invites a new Generation of Wine Lovers to Open a Bottle
Napa Wine: Malek Amrani’s The Vice Wine Invites a new Generation of Wine Lovers to Open a Bottle.
Winemaker Malek Amrani’s The Vice Wine is about as personal of a brand as it gets. Each batch is crafted from single grape varietals sourced from hand selected Napa Valley vineyards that best express the grape varietal and the region.
Passionate labor, sustainable farming, a long expertise of the wine industry and a current understanding of the consumer’s wine trend.
Today I sat down with The Vice Wine’s Malek Amrani for a conversation about luxury sales, Napa Valley’s legendary grapes, following your passion and inspirations and the future of wine for the next generation.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The full conversation can be found on our YouTube channel.
I just want people to understand how busy you are sharing your wines with the world. Can you share a little bit about your average calendar week?
Sure, thank you. First of all, thank you so much for having me today. I just literally just walked in three minutes ago I was in Miami. So I landed in San Francisco a couple hours ago and just got in here So speaking about travel, a lot of what we do is travel because you can make the best wine in the world, but it’s really the ability to go out and sell it that makes us successful or not.
It all comes down to sales. On average, for me, for the last eight years, I average about five, six nights a month at home. A lot of my time has been spent on the road. Although this year I’m trying to shift gears a little bit and spend more time here in Napa Valley and less time on the road.
Got it. So what inspired you to get into the world of wine? Any memorable celebrations?
What inspired me to get into wine was my love for it. I was fortunate enough to start tasting wine at an early age with my father. And I graduated high school at 16 in Casablanca, Morocco.
Went to Senegal, West Africa for med school. I did a year there and realized that it wasn’t for me. And speaking of celebration, I really wanted to do something that was quite celebratory on a daily basis and fun. I moved to New York and the first six months in New York I really just tried to survive and bounced around and did all types of jobs.
But then I quickly realized that I needed to get my hands on wine and not have to pay for it and then meet people as well, because I was new to New York and I had no friends, no family. So I wanted to meet people. I realized that working in the wine industry, wine bars, and restaurants would be ideal to fulfill the two needs that I had at the time.
I dove into the wine industry early on at the age of 18. And between 18 and 21, I worked in the restaurant world a lot. I was working 2-3 jobs consistently. I was fortunate that when I was 21, I got a job in distribution representing Diageo and Moet Hennessy Brands in Manhattan to on-premise accounts, basically restaurants, bars, hotels, and whatnot.
And during that time, I also got inspired to start importing small batch boutique wines to New York and selling them too, selling them to people I knew and make a name for myself in the industry through imports as well, beyond the territory that I had at my first job.
Then in my mid twenties, I was doing it. I realized I had done it all in the wine business, except to make wine. The wine region that I’ve always been a big fan of was Napa Valley. So I looked for a brand that kind of was a solution to what I was looking for one, a Napa Valley winery that made wine for that everyday occasion that I can afford accessibly and to a winery that made more than the classic three or four varietals: Cabernet, Sauvignon Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot and there aren’t many really.
And lastly a winery that kind of broke down Napa Valley to the sub regions that there are because Napa has such a very diverse terroir and sub regions, 16 in total today. Wow. So I couldn’t find one. So I decided to make one, start one, create one.
You worked at the biggest wine company in the world. How did you go about getting that job?
And then what kind of lessons did you learn while being there?
It was out of luck. I was a buyer for a restaurant on Park Avenue in Manhattan. And I was talking to my sales rep. I asked him if he liked his job and I really didn’t think about applying or anything. He thought that I was interested in a similar position and out of luck, they had open positions and he spoke to my first manager at the company and she called me and she asked me to meet with her.
I honestly didn’t know what she wanted to meet about. I thought she wanted to meet about the restaurant where I was working; and work on some program or something. And in less than 48 hours, I had a job. So I was quite lucky.
But how intense and how it is working at Moet Hennessy or LVMH is a big umbrella.
It’s the number one luxury company in the world. They certainly do a lot of things, they are number one for a reason. And at the same time, I was with the sister company that also owns part of the Moet Hennessy Diageo. Diageo is the biggest liquor supplier in the world and at the time they had wine as well.
So in a way it is easier to walk in anywhere and say I have Johnny Walker or Veuve in my portfolio. But at the same time, from a sales perspective, it was very not aggressive, but very goal-driven. And I found myself that out of 116 months of employment, I was a top quarter performer for 112.
So it was extremely competitive and I wanted to be the best at what I did. All the time. A lot of it really has to do with building relationships and working harder than the competition and doing a lot of things right and never promising something and not delivering.
Is there a major lesson that you learned while working at that global luxury company that has helped the Vice wines?
Yes, I think, many things. My first, probably my most important lesson was to intertwine your personal life and your professional life in this industry. You can’t really separate them and be successful at it. I think it’s just making it work. It is a fun industry, we do go out a lot and get to enjoy a glass of wine during the day or two or three.
At the same time it is work and finding the balance between the personal and the professional and making one feed the other in a sense. It’s one of the biggest advantages that one can do to succeed in this industry.
I think you fulfilled two fantasies that a whole lot of wine people dream about doing. One being rockstar salesman at these amazing companies. The other becoming a winemaker.
Any advice for someone who wants to be who you were a few years ago?
Advice? Yeah, absolutely. One, it takes time. You have to be patient; and persistent and consistent.
To build relationships and establish and build a territory and build certain sales revenue. It doesn’t happen overnight. You first gotta establish relationships and relationships come down to trust. The second thing is it really comes down to being patient and consistent.
Outlasting the competition because there’s such a huge turnover in the industry. So if you trust the process that if you stick around long enough and do certain things right for a long time, people will turn over in the industry and there will be opportunities that will pop up left and right and they will be yours for you to capture.
Personally, one of the things that really made me successful, and a lot of people may not do it, is that for 10 years in Manhattan, I commuted on a motorcycle 12 months a year. The subway was fast, but I never wanted to miss a phone call.
When the average salesperson is probably seeing 5, 6, 7 accounts a day, I was seeing consistently 15 to 20. So I was able to have a bigger territory and see my clients on the regular without appointments. I was on a motorcycle. I was the guy just going to show up and just say hello and I was in and out, just checking on you, see if you need anything versus I have to make an appointment, find parking, all that kind of stuff.
The work ethic definitely, 15 in a day is a very deliberate choice with time and energy.
Your wines are called “Vice”. Was there a “Vice moment” where you knew it was time to move on and become a winemaker?
That moment probably lasted a couple of years. There was a lot of self questioning and self doubt on the daily because I had, at one point, two very successful businesses.
One, I worked my job on a W-2 and the other one, my own business, my imports business. And I was doing pretty well at the time in my mid twenties and, within three, four years, I may have paid a little bit over a million dollars in taxes. How do you let all this go and jump into the vice and, basically not have a revenue?
Especially in the beginning stages, it took me a couple of years to really decide what to do but The Vice, the idea started in 2013.
We really became a business in 2016. And I let everything go for The Vice in 2018. It took some time. At one point I was having three businesses happening all at once, and it was very stressful.
So that “Vice Moment, it wasn’t like sudden. It wasn’t quick. It was a long vice moment.
Tell us about the regions that The Vice grapes are sourced in and equally important, how the heck did you get grape sourced from these in-demand areas?
So I chose Napa Valley because Napa, one, is their vice to me, hence the name of the Vice Wine, name of the brand. My vice is wine, but their vice is Napa. And I’ve always been a huge fan of Napa.
And Napa is the apex of the American wine industry is what set the tone for us, what opened, it’s what really led this American wine revolution in a sense. It all started really with Napa back in, in the 60s and 70s. So I wanted to shoot for the top because of that aspect.
And also, it’s just part of the American dream. As an immigrant, there is nowhere on the planet, I can’t imagine myself going to France, Italy, or Spain, and walking right into their top wine region and say, I’m going to do what I do today. I have no doubt I wouldn’t be welcomed.
Napa did just the opposite and welcomed me and gave me an opportunity, not just as a wine region, but as a community.
The second thing, how I got into having access to these grapes, a lot of it is street work. Putting in the time, coming a lot to Napa and hanging out at a lot of places where winemakers hang out for lunch or dinner and talking to the bartenders and doing my due diligence and investigating on my own and really networking and knocking on doors. Not being afraid to knock on doors and introduce myself to people and tell them about what my plans are and see if they’re willing to sell me some grapes.
In this industry, when you buy, when you contract to somebody, you pay a little bit of what the grapes are worth when you first pick the grapes and then the rest within time in the new year or so.
A lot of what I’ve done in the beginning was pre paying. So I pre paid for the grapes while they were still hanging on the vines. It’s almost like buying the fish while it’s still swimming in the ocean. So in that sense, they owed me versus I was at the mercy of a lot of the growers to sell me grapes. They already had the money, they already got paid.
So they had to work with me in a sense and again, being honest, not being late on payments and having good relationships with the growers goes a very long way.
Can you share your Napa Dream with us that you put on your bottles and let us know what that means to your family?
Yeah, so I’m sipping right now batch number 100, the Napa Dream. So we make our wines in batches. Every single wine, and I made a little bit over 130 wines to date. Every single wine has a number.
It started with number one, which was a Chardonnay 2013 vintage. And when I first started The Vice, I had this long term vision, but I didn’t envision myself to be here today with batch number 100. So batch number 100 is an homage to batch number 1.
I named it The Vice and not my last name. As you see, most of the wine industry, it’s someone’s name on the label. I didn’t want to do that. The Vice to me is what wine is: a Vice. Napa is my vice. So it’s very personal.
But at the same time, the craft beer industry really had a boom in 2008 – 2020. What made it really successful were the names. Craft beer has some really wild names. You look at the name and packaging, and it’s what probably draws you to open the can, you buy it and try it.
At the time in 2013, there weren’t many un-conservative names in the wine business. It was still very conservative names and people’s last names. There was 19 crimes and there was The Prisoner.
I thought The Vice would be a very good name, One, because it meant something to me and Two, it’s very edgy and it’s borderline bad.
It’s not bad. It’s not bad unless you do too much of it. That’s what vices are. If you overdo it, then they become bad. They become addictions, a lot of things, and it’s an easy name to remember.
I’m going to assume almost every wine lover knows Napa Valley. Touch a little bit on the region of Napa, the soil your vineyards are using, and how that influences your aromas and your tastes as we actually get into the bottles themselves.
When people talk about Napa Valley, most of the time we talk about how this perfect Mediterranean climate that we have here, its location about 35 miles east of the Pacific Ocean, the Bay, San Pablo Bay, which is an extension of San Francisco Bay, the microclimate.
We talk a lot about the microclimate, but one thing that I think makes Napa the best wine region in the world, in my opinion, is that Napa has half of the world’s recognized soil.
It’s a paradise for someone who is really into soil because there’s so much diversity here. More than anywhere else when it comes to soil diversity, we make wine from 14 out of 16 sub regions of Napa, but within the same AVA. Within the same sub region, we have different soils.
So a lot of the wines that we make are single vineyard wine You do get to taste the purity of the terroir from a specific soil type. It’s something honestly that we can talk about for days and it’s fun for most people.
Going a little deeper in that for a moment.
We picture you in Manhattan, probably very well-dressed at that old job. Now you’re working a farm. What was it like the first time you stepped onto that vineyard.
What that experience was like for you?
For me, honestly, I always felt that my calling was to be in the countryside. Although while Napa is the countryside, it’s like the Hamptons of the West. It’s still probably the most expensive agricultural land in the world.
It’s very beautiful. But being in touch with nature and being a little isolated from the hustle and bustle of civilization, which is usually in the cities. I find a balance when I’m here in Napa because I do travel a lot. I’m on the road and I’m back to the cities trying to sell wine across the U S and also across the world.
Vineyard life, farm life, it’s my balance. It’s my happy place being in the vineyard. I’m sure you can’t picture me, but I do wear a lot now. I never thought I would ever be wearing cowboy hats a lot. But I do wear them because it covers my head pretty well from the sun.
Walk us through your favorite wines. Let’s talk about aromas and flavors and color and what you love about them so much.
First thing, I don’t have favorites. All my batches are equal to me. Every single batch has a story; is a labor of love. But the wine of the moment right now is my orange wine.
So I started making orange wines in 2020. Orange wine is the oldest winemaking style in the world. Five, six thousand years ago, when they started fermenting grapes to my knowledge, they were white wine grapes.
Today, all white wine, we take the varietals, we press or break the skin of the grape and capture the juice immediately, discard the skin. Orange wine is basically pretending to make red wine with white wine grapes. So there’s skin contact.
So we basically ferment the juice out of the grapes with their own skins and what you get in return, you get some type of orange hue in the wine. The wine I’m opening right now is my Orange of Gewurztraminer and it’s called Brooklynites because that’s where I got the inspiration out of Brooklyn. And we’re doing really well with it. It’s just been very successful for us. It’s up and coming.
This wine, Orange Wine, reminds me of Rosé of 15 years ago when Rosé just started to make a comeback or just started to grow in sales and popularity.
I also feel like with orange wine, I feel like it’s a generational thing.
If you look at Sauvignon Blanc, for example one of the top white wine varieties right now, 20 years ago, no one was really drinking Sauvignon Blanc, but it was really the Gen X that made it popular.
Same thing with Rosé I feel like Orange is just at its infancy stages right now, and it’s having it’s moment. Driven by millennials and Gen Z’s also Gen X and boomers when they see it on a wine list and they see it in the store, they get curious, maybe a little embarrassed that they haven’t had an orange wine.
They’ve been drinking wine for decades already. So there is a little sense of curiosity when it comes to orange. So it’s doing really well for us. It’s 3,000 case production right now. Our total production of The Vice is 27,000.
And Gewurztraminer, the varietal means spicy. I won’t call it spicy. I’ll call it flamboyant. Because it just pops out of the glass with so much roses, lychee, peach, apricot.
It’s a really pretty varietal and this orange wine of Gewürztraminer is certainly a treat. Very well said.
The 2020 Chardonnay. The mouthfeel, the balance, when you were creating it, how did you decide what it was going to be like?
It is an homage to batch number one, Chardonnay.
So I really wanted to create something almost like there’s a legacy and a celebration for reaching that milestone of making a hundred wines. I wanted to go back to very traditional winemaking. The birthplace perhaps of Chardonnay is Burgundy. And in Burgundy, a hundred years ago, they were not bottling every single year.
They bottled when they needed to. They had good vintages, bad vintages. So it wasn’t this cycle.
Now, the majority of the industry doesn’t age Chardonnay for more than 12 months in oak. Most people have a misunderstanding of oak and malolactic fermentation in wine.
I hear it all the time, people saying, I hate oaky chardonnays because they’re too buttery, too oaky. There’s two different things. Oaky and buttery are two different things. So the malolactic fermentation, the conversion of malic acid into lactic acid, is what gives you that creaminess in Chardonnay.
And predominantly, all red wines go through it. But in white wines, Chardonnay is the only one that goes through malo. And it is a style that’s fading. It’s boomers who love the buttery Chardonnays.
But when it comes to oak you really don’t find anybody aging Chardonnay for 30 months.
It’s a little bit crazy to do, but this was my vision as a celebration. And the funny thing is that I just came back from Miami and the joke, everybody that tasted it. They’re like, wow, what a delicious wine and how did you get the idea? And I was like the joke here in the cellar in Napa was when I was making this wine, everybody here was like, who’s going to drink this wine?
And the joke was Florida will drink it because they love big oaky Chardonnay. But the reality now in the valley and other markets too. The younger consumer is actually loving this wine because it doesn’t have much malolactic fermentation. Only 25% of the wine went through malo. So there is a little kiss of butter.
Almost like buttered popcorn, but without being too buttery, without having greasy hands. And then the oak flavor here is just amazing. Because it just pops with butterscotch and vanilla and full spices and it’s a super long finish. You take a sip and five minutes later, it’s still sitting in your palate which is quite unique for a Chardonnay.
You had a vision before you produced the bottle. How close to reality did it become, and what were the challenges to get it there?
To explain that I have to give you the background. Everything I do is not out of just because I decide to.
Everything I do is it backed by the marketplace. Most winemakers, they have an idea, they go apply it. I have so many ideas. All my ideas actually are based on creating demand that’s already in the marketplace or about to be. So a lot of what I do is research and development.
I’m not going to wait to get a market watch article last year to tell me that this varietal or this segment is trendy. I’m seeing it live in the marketplace. I’m seeing it live with the consumer. I am doing tastings in stores. I’m doing tastings at restaurants, hosting dinners, and seeing what the consumer wants.
So I’m seeing it before the rest of the industry. Everything I do is based on where the trend is going before it even becomes a trend. And it is a gamble because not everything comes to fruition. But that’s the basis of what I do is based on the wine enthusiasts, people that drink wine, their interests and what they want to have in the, what they wanna see.
Let’s talk about your Pinot Noir.
This is my house Pinot Noir. We call it the house because this is what I envision to be the house Pinot, basically a Pinot Noir that you open and whether you drink a glass or finish the bottle. If you drink a glass, you can put the cork back on it and it will be good for at least four or five days.
All our wines are made in a traditional style and they’re exposed early on to oxygen. So they’re oxygen resistant compared to conventional wines. When you open the wine; conventional wine by the second or third day, they already flatten out and turn into vinegar cooking wine. The Pinot Noir here is for the everyday occasion and it doesn’t require any food, although this pairs well with everything.
This is the only red I’ll probably pair with any type of fish. It really is a very good wine on its own. Doesn’t really require food. I make a lot of big Cabernets and big heavy varietals like Petite Syrah and certain Malbecs. Very good. You drink a glass and you start begging for food because some wines really require that.
The House Pinot is my go to wine for that everyday, anytime occasion. It is from Carneros, so it’s Southern Napa, and it’s made in a traditional Burgundian style.
What makes this wine actually unique is that a huge amount of of Pinot Noirs now in California are laced with something else to be a varietal on the label, like Pinot Noir or Cabernet. All you have to be is 75% to 85% based on the county. So there is a lot of blending and we’ve seen a lot during the past few years.
The emergence of jammy Pinot’s. It’s all cut with something big and heavy. Pinot is supposed to be lean. A beautiful aromatic varietal with high acidity. It’s supposed to age really well. So we’re going back to that traditional burgundy style.
The wine next to it is a red wine blend.
We make 14 different cabs, so many different red wine varietals. All these wines I make are 100% single varietal. I don’t like to blend. I just love to showcase the true expression of the varietal from the terroir that it comes from of Napa Valley.
I made this wine and I called it Millennial. This is batch number 96 Millennial. And this wine is a blend of different varietals. It’s like a world blend almost. It’s 63% Petite Syrah, 22% Malbec. 8% Tempranillo, Spanish varietal, 7% Primitivo, an Italian varietal, and 1% Charbonneau which is a very rare varietal that we have here in Napa. So multiple varietals, I called it the Millennial because, I found that the millennial consumer is looking more for a style when it comes to a red wine, something that’s medium body, fruit forward, softer tannins. And they’re not really much into what vintage is it, what’s the region, what’s the AVA, they are still very price conscious.
So the retail price for is $29. It’s our least expensive red wine that we make. And it’s a really mouthful of a wine. It’s very juicy. It’s like lava cake in a glass. Although it’s dry, it’s got no residual sugar. It’s still so fruit forward. And there are so many flavors from lava cake to blueberry compote to raspberry jam.
We did not put anything. No vintage, no AVA, no nothing. We just wanted to focus on the blend itself and, that’s a red wine, it tells you exactly who it’s made for.
I’m not sure if you see yourself as a foodie. Any food pairings that you recommend with your wines?
Yeah, I certainly consider myself a foodie. Half of my time alive is spent going from one restaurant to another. Granted, I don’t eat at each one of them all the time, but I do try to eat a small dish everywhere I go and try different things, different cuisines, and I love, as someone that was born in Morocco, I love flavor.
Maybe part of my success in winemaking has to do with my palate. And my taste for my open mind, the taste for food also, and being willing to try different flavors.
When you say Napa, people think Cabernet right away. No one would ever think of orange wine first. Maybe not anytime soon, hopefully one day, but as of now, everybody thinks Cabernet. And. Cabernet to me or some red, big red varietals I think the best friend for our big wines.
My favorite pairing right now is this orange wine. I find myself drinking a lot of Orange lately. And this orange gewurztraminer, favorite companion to Southeast Asian cuisines like Thai, Vietnamese does really well with it. I’ll say Indian cuisine with curries and or even Middle Eastern cuisines. The orange gewurztraminer does really well with them.
I really like to keep it simple. I love to cook with a lot of herbs and spices.
You don’t want to overwhelm it. You don’t want to ruin the taste. You want to enjoy it by keeping actually the food that goes with it simple. Just 1, 2, 3, 4 herbs or spices just to enhance the dish. and bring out the flavors of the wine.
Talking about the Vice team, you have a world class CMO and you have a genuine superhero. Can you talk a little bit about your team?
We met in 2008. We actually worked together and we’ve been together now since 2008. We’ve been married 10 years. Tori is my partner, but life partner and business partner, of course.
Her background is fashion. So she was a creative director at her last job. And she went to Parsons in New York for fashion. Her entire life she knew she wanted to be in fashion.
I wouldn’t be here today, The Vice would not exist if it wasn’t for Tori. She was crucial, especially for the creation of The Vice, the label, the marketing aspects of it. And today she’s 100% on board with The Vice. She has no other job. She’s the CMO of The Vice.
My assistant winemaker; he’s the joy of every day life. His name is Bruce Wayne and he’s an eight year old Tibetan Terrier. He’s got a better nose than any of us. He loves to be in the cellar because of the cool temperature. And as I said probably in the beginning, intertwining personal and the professional. Having him around most of the day when I’m here in the Valley, or just having him come with me, he’s a very good boy. It certainly adds a lot of happiness to what we do and it, it helps with the craft of The Vice.
You mentioned that Tori has a fashion background. What was the transition from fashion to to wine like?
Her transition was similar to mine. It was more of a hobby, part time fashion project and part time helping The Vice. And then last year, we had a baby, our first baby. After she went back to work after her maternity leave, she realized that she wanted to focus on the baby a little bit and also full time on The Vice.
Where do you see The Vice in 5 years? What can we look forward to?
Thank you for asking. The vision since day one was to be an international brand. Today we are in four international markets and 14 states in the U. S. But this secret fantasy that I’ve had since day one about creating The Vice was for the French to drink The Vice.
The French don’t drink American wine. In fact, if you are from Burgundy, you probably don’t even drink Bordeaux, or you don’t drink Sancerre, or you don’t drink Provence. They’re into their own wine regions.
Globally where we will be 5, 10, 20 years, I don’t like to really put deadlines and time limits because the passage of time does things that, it’s very subjective.
The last three years were great for our business. If anything, it spurred us to grow more than we expected. Our long term goal with The Vice is to leave a legacy in the valley and for the brand to inspire the next generation of people to be the voice for a fresh voice in Napa.
From a sales perspective, we are at 27,000 cases. We want to be at 100,000 cases. We want to be in a million cases. But most importantly, we want to maintain the quality and the integrity of the wine that we make.
Younger audiences are booking for healthier wines
There is a lot of formula wine. Wine that has probably 30 ingredients you and I can’t pronounce because it’s not FDA regulated and you know they make it taste consistent year after year and there’s a lot of chemistry that goes into it.
Our wines are very simple. There are two ingredients, grapes and a little bit of CO2 to maintain stability. So long term for us is to continue to be a true craft wine, real wine that’s good for you if you drink it in moderation.
How can we shop your wines? How can we find you?
Thank you for asking how you can help. I see myself as an ambassador of Napa Valley, so I encourage you to please discover Napa and keep it as the leading wine region in the world. We are a one stop shop for Napa Valley. We have the most diverse portfolio of Napa Valley wines at a great price point.
Please check us out, www.TheVice.com. Please follow us. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. Fun fact is that our corks have my phone number on them. You can text me, call me, DM me, FaceTime me. If I’m not in an awkward situation, I’ll pick up. But I’m very accessible. I’d love to I’d love to hear from you.
I’d love to answer your questions. I’d love to help you discover the wine industry, but specifically Napa. I’d love to help you not only discover it and enjoy it as well.
That is incredible. So thank you. I really appreciate your time.
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Taylor Swift Annc ‘s “Eras Tour” plays Los Angeles Aug 4-5
Taylor Swift launches her “Eras Tour” in March 2023, with national tour dates set through August and to include two shows each in both the New York metro area and Los Angeles.
Swift announced the tour dates today on Instagram. International dates will be announced later.
“I’m enchanted to announce my next tour:
Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour
a journey through the musical eras of my career (past and present!),”
she wrote on instagram.
“The first leg of the tour will be in stadiums across the US, with international dates to be announced as soon as we can!”
Swift also announced that her opening acts on the tour will include Paramore, Haim, Phoebe Bridgers, Beabadoobee, Girl in Red, Muna, Gayle, Gracie Abrams and Owenn.
“Feeling like the luckiest person alive because I get to take these brilliant artists out on tour with me,” she wrote.
“I can’t WAIT to see your gorgeous faces out there.
It’s been a long time coming.”
The tour kicks off March 18 in Glendale, AZ, where Swift launched her “Reputation” tour in 2018. Over the spring and summer, Swift will play 20 cities for 27 dates, including May 26 and 27 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ, outside NYC, and wrapping up for a two-night stand Aug 4-5 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. See the entire itinerary below.
Tickets go on sale to the general public Nov. 18.
The “Eras Tour” is being produced in-house by Taylor Swift Touring and promoted by the Messina Touring Group.
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Beverly Hills: Shelea Pretty World: Through the Eyes of Alan & Marilyn Bergman at Wallis Annenberg Center June 25
SHELÉA Pretty World: Through the Eyes of Alan & Marilyn Bergman at Wallis Annenberg Center June 25
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts Presents SHELÉA Pretty World: Through the Eyes of Alan & Marilyn Bergman Saturday, June 25
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Singer, songwriter, and keyboardist Sheléa, whose versatile and powerful voice transcends the boundaries of musical classification, returns to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts with
Pretty World: Through the Eyes of Alan & Marilyn Bergman
on Saturday, June 25, 2022, 7:30 pm. This special evening features Sheléa, a protégé of Quincy Jones, performing songs written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the Oscar-winning married couple whose lyrics to songs such as “The Way We Were,” “The Windmills of Your Mind,” and “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” have earned them induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
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Palm Beach Post proclaims Sheléa, who brought down the house at The Wallis’ gala in September, “will sing the lights out all night long on anything you throw at her.”
With widespread comparison to the vocal expertise of legendary Whitney Houston, and the piano prowess of Alicia Keys, it is no surprise that artist and actress, Sheléa has garnered endorsements from the likes of Stevie Wonder, Mary J.Blige, Missy Elliott, David Foster, Queen Latifah, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Hudson, Quincy Jones, and more. Blending traditional pop, jazz, R&B and soul, Sheléa brings a contemporary edge to classics, and a classic touch to contemporary pop standards.
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LA’s Historic Hollywood Venue The Magic Castle adds New Executive Chef Benoit “Ben” LaFleche.
With years of making a name for herself as a vocal powerhouse, having performed twice at the White House; Library of Congress; Carnegie Hall; the Kennedy Center; and more, 2020 marked her acting debut as Dorinda Clark in The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel.
The Lifetime biopic drew 2.7 million viewers and “was the strongest original movie for all television for 2020 across key demos including both broadcast and cable.” With the film as the top social trend across all television, Sheléa’s name was prominently found leading the charge.
The Wallis is closely monitoring the ever-changing local health and safety environment carefully and addressing known health factors at the moment.
Should plans change and any performance be required to be postponed or cancelled or if venue capacity limitations are instituted, ticket holders will be notified immediately with options for their purchased tickets per The Wallis’ ticketing policies.
The health and safety of patrons, our staff, and artists inside and outside our venue are a top priority for The Wallis, which is requiring all patrons to provide, upon entry, proof of full vaccination or a negative PCR test result within 48 hours or a verifiable Antigen test within 24 hours from your performance date, along with a government issued photo ID.
Facial masks, covering both the mouth and nose, are still required at all times while within the venue. The Wallis’ health and safety protocols are also subject to change at the venue’s sole discretion or in accordance with LA County and City of Beverly Hills regulations. Our current Health & Safety Protocols and updates may also be accessed at TheWallis.org/Safety.
Tickets, $29-$79, are on sale now. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. To purchase tickets and for more information, please call 310-746-4000 or visit TheWallis.org/Shelea.
About the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is a dynamic cultural hub and community resource where local, national and international artists share their artistry with ever-expanding audiences.
The campus, located in the heart of Beverly Hills, CA, is committed to robust and distinctive presentations and education programs curated with both creativity and social impact in mind. Distinguished by its eclectic programming that mirrors the diverse landscape of Los Angeles and its location in the entertainment capital of the world, The Wallis has produced and presented more than 300 dance, theater, opera, classical music, cinema and family programs since its doors opened in October 2013. Hailed as “au courant” (LaLa Magazine), The Wallis was lauded by Culture Vulture, which proclaims, “If you love expecting the unexpected in the performing arts, you have to love The Wallis.”
Its programming has been nominated for 79 Ovation Awards and nine L.A. Drama Critic’s Circle Awards. The campus itself, a breathtaking 70,000-square-foot facility, celebrating the classic and the modern, has garnered six architectural awards.
Designed by acclaimed architect Zoltan E. Pali (SPF:architects), the restored building features the original 1933 Beverly Hills Post Office (on the National Register of Historic Places), which serves as the theater’s dramatic yet welcoming lobby, and includes the contemporary 500-seat, state-of-the-art Bram Goldsmith Theater; the 150-seat Lovelace Studio Theater; an inviting open-air plaza for family, community and other performances; and GRoW @ The Wallis: A Space for Arts Education, where learning opportunities for all ages and backgrounds abound.
Together, these elements embrace the city’s history and its future, creating a performing arts destination for L.A.-area visitors and residents alike. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is led by Chairman of the Board Michael Nemeroff and Executive Director & Chief Executive Officer Rachel Fine.
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