▷S4E4 How to Swirl with Glasvin Founder David Kong

English

Sep 27

David Kong loved drinking wine out of expensive handblown glasses but hated the sinking feeling every time one got broken. He wanted a handblown wine glass at a more accessible price, so started his own company to make it exist! David is a lifelong foodie and classical music fan who always wanted to start his own business. Now he sells his Glasvin wine glass line to restaurants and wine lovers all over the world.

Rose Thomas identifies wine glass shape as a hot button for consumer anxiety as well as an opportunity for personal expression. David and RT talk about how much you should spend on a wine glass, how wine glasses are made, the purpose for different wine glass shapes, and how swirling just hits different in a light-as-a-feather handblown glass.

Check out David's glasses at glas.vin
Follow Glasvin on Instagram instagram.com/glas.vin

They also discuss how blind tasting can be a great opportunity to learn from people who have a different culinary and agricultural background, and have an idea to host a dinner party where people blind taste wine AND classical music (identifying the composer and piece). What do you think, should we have that party? Do you know anyone who could blind taste wine and classical music? Let us know who's got that skill set in New York!

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RT's glass tastevin is by glass artist Marc Kornbluh: Instagram.com/kornbluhglass

The book that we reference around 38 minutes is Wine Girl by Victoria James.

The key is to be able to use it every night and not, not like buy something expensive that you feel like, Oh, I don't want to break this because, you know, and only take it out for special wines. That's not the point. The point is to try to use great glass where every night when you're drinking just your everyday kind of wine. And that's what we built our company based on. Welcome to Modo di Bere, The podcast about local drinks and local sayings on your host, Rose Thomas Bannister. My guest for the show today is David Kong, the entrepreneur behind Glasvin, a new company that makes hand -blown wine glasses designed in New York City that are now being used in top restaurants around the world. David, welcome. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I'm a fan of these beautiful glasses, which we're going to talk about the glass vint glasses a lot. But first I want to know what's your story? How did you get into wine? And then how did you end up starting a wine glass company? Yeah. So I grew up in Canada and I, From a very young age, I realized I enjoyed food a lot. My parents didn't really like food that much They they weren't very good at cooking and so I kind of started cooking for myself And I met some people that also liked food and this was like this is all like high school kind of time and then in University, I guess I started I Was now allowed to drink because I was above the age Cut off and you know, I started trying some of these things. And I mean, it took a little bit of time, but after a while I was like, yeah, if you like food, you're probably gonna also like wine 'cause those two things just kind of pair with each other. - What is the drinking age in Canada? - It's 19 where I'm from. It could be, it's 18 in French, Canada. And so a lot of people actually, when they're 19, 18, they go over to Montreal to drink. - And where did you grow up? - I grew up in Toronto, which is not the best wine region, unfortunately, but it's getting better and better. So every time I go back to Toronto, the wine culture is just so much better. And by contrast, Montreal is one of the best wine areas. So a lot of people from Ontario just do weekend trips to Montreal just to drink like super, super good wine. - You're wine. Wine drinking culture. Yes, yes. And there's also some wine production in Canada as well. There are. There are. There's there's great ones in Ontario. And there's also great ones in Montreal, funny enough, near Montreal, I guess Quebec, I don't actually know where in Quebec they are. But yeah, they're they're really into like that that Natty kind of style in Quebec. And so they have some some very nice Natty wine makers there. I have been to Montreal one time and I found it just really, really wonderful. I'd love to, I'd love to travel in Canada more. It's so close to New York too. So you could just literally do a weekend trip and it's so fun. And if you like skiing, then you can go up and do some runs and then come back. It's a great place. So you got into, you were into food, you got more and more into wine. And then at what point were you like, okay, I'm going to make wine glasses. This was around 2018, end of 2018, the Fed raises interest rates and stock markets go down like 10 % or something. And I was at hedge fund at the time and it was very obvious that this was not going to end up working very, very well. So my options were to go to a different hedge fund or do something on my own. And I've always wanted to own my own business. So I actually stopped working and started my own business and I actually started a software business. So this was early, early 2019, a few months into starting that software business. I'm like, okay, well, this is, this is going to take a while. This isn't going to make me any money anytime soon. I was living in New York at the time. So I was like, okay, let's see if there's any faster ways to, you know, get to like revenue effectively. And so yeah, it was just like a random thought one morning. I was maybe it was like in the shower or something, when I'm like, "Hey, I should do this glassware thing." And the idea was simple, right? 'Cause the idea was that, okay, there's these nice glasses, they're hand blown, and I've seen them at all these nice restaurants, and I love using them. I only exclusively use those, but they're too expensive. And every time I break one, I'd feel like crap because it was like 80 bucks a glass, right? So the idea was very obvious. It was just like how I was going to accomplish that. It took maybe a year from like having that idea to having the product on the market. - So did it start with a question? Like would it be possible to make a more excessively priced hand -blown glass? Or did you already believe that or know that you could? - I knew I could. I knew that I could from various things I already knew, but I didn't know how great it was going to be, I guess. Because when I started, first of all, I wasn't even thinking about restaurants. And now that's like 60 % of my business is restaurants, right? And I didn't think about like because now we have like a slightly less expensive glass. So I didn't think about that here. So, and when I started, it was only one glass. And now we have like 20 different glasses, we have cocktail glasses and all that stuff. So yeah, I didn't know how prolific that it was going to become. Like I said, it was really meant to be at the time to be a way to make a little bit of money while I was working on the software business. Now this is bigger than the software business. So I mean, we'll see what happens. - Well, congratulations. Yeah, tell me more about having this idea in the shower. I would like to have more excessively priced handball and wine glass to use for myself at home to what you just described now, where you have all these products and you're in restaurants around the world. What happened between those two moments? So we're a bootstrapped company. We don't have any investors. I own 100 % of the business. It's my own money at stake. So I don't do anything ultra, ultra risky. I just move very slowly. If I'm emailing a lot of people and they're all saying, hey, like this is really nice, but it's too fragile to be used in my restaurant. Well, you know, I'm thinking, okay, well we should make a thicker version of our glass. So that's what we did. Little by little, we just add a little bit more to our product offering. And everything we add is really based on what our customers are asking for. So I know that I'm not taking a tremendous risk by doing something like totally, totally out of thin air. - Mm -hmm, mm -hmm. Okay, so why hand -blown glass? Why was that so important to you as a wine drinker and why did you focus your company on hand -blown wine glasses? - If you're serious about wine and you really like wine and drinking good wine effectively, there's almost nothing else that you're gonna use. You're going to use a hand -blown wine glass. It is just so much nicer and better. So put it another way. It's like, if you have nice glasses, you could probably buy slightly less expensive wine, it'll taste even better, right? So even from like a monetary perspective, it's just like, there's nothing that's more important other than the wine than the wine glass that you're using, glasses. And so your options really are, okay, do I want this $80 glass, or do I want the glass bin, $40 glass. Right, right. So what is it about it being handblown that makes it the wine taste better or makes the experience nicer? The key is that it's thin and it's light, right? And it's very hard to achieve those two qualities in a machine made glass. There are some people that can do it, but it's very, very rare. There's probably only a few factories in Europe that can do that. - Cool. I mean, it is very thin and light. Is this more about user experience or is there something in the physics of it that actually improves the wine? - I'm confident it's not the physics. It could be like a placebo effect or something like that. But yeah, you can ask anyone, like try it in this glass, try it in like a normal glass and the wine, the rating on that wine is just gonna go to go up like 20 % or something. - I see, I see. Well, I think we need to put some wine into these hand -blown wine glasses. - I think it's because it's so thin and light. So like it's not as heavy. And so you're not, you don't have to think as much about the act of like lifting. And when you're drinking wine, you're obviously like drinking little sips or you're just like coming back and forth like, you know, a thousand times at night. And yeah, just like, and then, and then like swirling in and things like just the entire experience just is entirely that is an easy swirl. Yeah. So we're having a a Chianti Classico Monterraponi from 2022. Well, it's just great because we just did the convivio event, which is this big Italian wine festival two days ago. And yeah, we drank drank a lot of Chianti. Well, I have had wine from your glasses at restaurants and wine fairs and did find it to just be a pleasurable experience for sure. How much were you able to, let's say for your entry level line or maybe your main glass and then going into your entry level line, how much were you able to cut down the price of the handphone glass and how did you accomplish that? - So we're basically about half the price of our competitors on the high end, and then our lower end is like an extra like 30 % less expensive. And they're both hand blown. It's just the less expensive one is like thicker. It's so nice. It's not as nice, but that's why it's 30 % less expensive. Wow. So and how are you able to make it cheaper? Well, we have a few major differences versus our competitors. One is we make it in a lower cost jurisdiction. So we make it in Asia, whereas our competitors mostly make it in Europe. And you can see our competitors kind of going that way as well, 'cause they're going away from like central Europe to more like Eastern Europe. And so they're trying to lower their costs there as well. We just went very, very East instead. That really helps. But the other main thing is we are a direct to consumer company. So basically one and it's me, and I'm the person that does everything between the factory and the actual end consumer. And you'll see our competitors, they go through importers, distributors, their companies have 30 people working for them, we have me, one person working for them. So there's no overhead, everything is super efficient, everything, all the shipping is extremely efficient. So a lot of these direct -to -consumer companies, Yes, they don't have a retailer or distributor or whatever, but then they spend 50 % of their revenue on marketing. And so 50 % of what you pay on this glass is just basically paying for the marketing that you're getting. Our best marketing channel is restaurants. So we sell this stuff to the restaurants and then you go to the restaurant, you see the glass and you come and buy it on our website. And so that's free marketing. So yeah, all those things let us have a much stronger offering at a better price. So how did you initially get the word out to the restaurants about your glasses? Did you just kind of run around and show it to people? No, no, no. No, we didn't, literally didn't do any marketing. It just, it just caught on. The people who like wine glasses, who like wine and like wine glasses, they, some percentage of them work for restaurants. And so, So we got it into a few restaurants to start, probably like two or three restaurants in the first year, but they were some good restaurants. They had some mission stars, Gabriel Kruthor, two mission star, 63 Clinton, one mission star. People who own restaurants or work at restaurants also go to their friends' restaurants and they see our glass and they're like, "Oh, like, can I buy that? Oh, that's a good price. That's half the price of what I'm currently paying." And so it just kind of snowballed I would say from there. Now we do do some kind of like quote -unquote marketing. Like for example, the way you found out about me was effectively us marketing but because we give out these glasses for like these festivals and you were at. - Like I said, I definitely have tried your glasses before but I was at the Ian Doggada. - Yes. - Who's my Italian wine grapes and vines hero. He had a beautiful small fair in New York and they, there were your glasses and I was like, you know, tasting 14 different Nasheta's at the masterclass and just being like, oh yeah, these are, this is a really pleasurable experience. Yeah. So we sponsored that event and, and then that event is very, like we're really focused on professionals. So these events, I mean, if there's some consumers there, that's obviously fine, but really what I'm trying to do is make sure that every single person who buys wine in New York City knows who I am. I mean, you might have known me before, but like these events basically help us achieve that. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so let's say you're more of a $20 to $40 bottle of wine person. Are you kind of on the cusp of, and you know, you're taking some notes, you're finding about some stuff. You've got your independent wine store where you go and you ask a lot of questions and you listen to this podcast. Let's talk to that consumer. You have a wine glass for them. If they haven't tried hand -loan wine glass before, like how is that going to potentially elevate their experience? Yeah. So I'm going to steal something that one of my competitors said, I think it was retail, which is something like, if your glass is about the price of the bottle one that you're buying or you usually drink, that's like a probably a pretty good place to start. So if you're between 20 to $40, okay, let's say $30. Yeah, there's glasses on my website for about $30. The key is to be able to use it every night and not, not like buy something expensive that you feel like, Oh, I don't want to break this cause, you know, and only take it out for special wines. That's not the point. The point is to try to use great glass where every night when you're drinking just your everyday kind of wine. And that's what we built our company based on. And that's why it caught on so much because it just did not exist. And people are like, oh, my God, here's this beautiful glass. And it was it was less expensive before me. If you had 30 ish dollars to spend, you would be buying a nicer machine made glass, but it's just materially worse, in my opinion, to what what we have. Talk to me about the process. I mean, hand blown, I think people have seen glass blowing, you know, like each of these glasses is handmade, basically, right? Absolutely. As opposed to what's the process for a machine -made glass? There's different levels of machine -made. A lot of the machine -made stuff is just the mold, and often it'll be molded differently and then actually... effectively. So those, those actually end up being, being quite nice. Obviously, like hand blown glasses. Yeah. Like you're, you're basically blowing the bowl and then, and then you're attaching this stem and then you're stretched the stem and it's, it's like a very complicated process, but they're very, very good at pumping out lots and lots of glass. So you can actually get machine made glass, hand blown glasses for like a pretty good price, you know? So it's not like, uh, like you would think, you would, you you would think that it would be more expensive if a human were actually like making this. - Right, but actually you were able to find a way to make this. - Well, even my competitors, like even at $80, like it's like, okay, that's like not horrible for like a person making it. Like effectively what it's telling you is that like one person can make like a glass a minute or something, you know, otherwise, yeah. - I really love, you know, kind of traditional crafts and stuff. And it's definitely a part of caring about wine. You get interested in barrel makers and the people who are making the vessels and everything. And it kind of fits into people who are nerdy about wine or could also start to get nerdy about the glass. In fact, I got to go to Venice a couple of times, which made me, of course, really interested in glass and the history of glass. And then I have a friend Actually, back from Nebraska, where I grew up and went to college. Okay, so talking about nerdy things. Okay, so, oh, okay. My friend, Mark Cornblue, who is, I believe, Cornblue glass. I'll put the link in the, to his Instagram in the show notes. But he made me this, he makes hand -blown glass and he made me this glass taste of him. -Yeah, that's cool. -Yes! This is this very nerdy old fashioned like sommelier thing that was like, "Oh, I'm gonna taste the glass wine from this little glass." There aren't very many people. It really is something that isn't really in use anymore since actually you can smell and taste the wine better in this. You see it too with the Association of Italian Sommeliers. They wear like a metal taste in it. I love those guys. I think if I get another certification, I might try to do it in Italy because they're just so amazing, the Italian Psalms, and they have these great outfits. And actually, the first time I saw someone wearing the taste of it with the, like, it was like a metal one. And like this beautiful, like, long black vest, floor length apron that goes all the way around. They just looked like a priest or something. And I thought it was just a person making kind of a goth fashion statement at the Italy and I was like wow. And then you know I got more involved with Italian wine events and saw these psalms with wearing these taste events synchronized pouring and I was just like wow you know it just feels like this art form. This is fairly arcane but a really fun item so thank you Mark. So I love this idea that you were able to make pleasure of wine more accessible by creating this beautiful glass at a much more accessible price point. But, you know, it's interesting. The questions that I get from people who are getting into wine often involve glassware and there's a lot of emotion around it. There's a lot of kind of fear, like, am I doing it wrong? It's interesting because I think it was really quite some time ago that maybe 20 or 30 years ago that I don't know that much about the history of it. I think it was Riedl. There were some wine glass companies and also the expert advice was that you had to have a different wine glass for every style. You had a burgundy glass and a Bordeaux glass and this glass and this glass. The wisdom was you cannot enjoy the wine unless you have the exact right bowl shape. I've spent some time in wine regions where people really got into that. Specifically for You Leave a Netsuit Julia, I was able to, for the Moto DuBare TV show, to spend time with producers who probably really came into their own around that time and invented their own glass shape specifically for their own wines. And I wonder sometimes if the closeness to Venice also had something to do with that as well as sort of the moment in time. But you know, I've also talked to people who said, look, wine is great and everything, but actually there's an interview with Mikayla Mussolino. She was like, at the point where she started to feel like it was too much, you know, sort of disconnected from her understanding of this Italian farm product was in the moment. And I've heard other people bring this up too. People would come to a restaurant with their own wine glasses and a little suitcase like I can't possibly drink out of whatever wine glasses Yeah, those are my customers by the way. Yes. Yeah Because we actually have a great packaging where people can put put a glass into the okay And yeah, you've got a wine suitcase. Yeah, well what comes literally comes with the purchase So you don't have to carry it around exactly and that's a great form of marketing for us I don't know how you feel about this because I basically when I was in for Yuli I was like drinking out of these beautiful glasses that were custom -made for each wine and just these aromas jumping out at me I was like oh you know what there is something to this I didn't feel like it was all just a way to sell more wine glasses but then on the other hand I do feel I do feel like in just the general way that people get turned off from wine from it being this, you know, luxury product, you know, or this ivory tower is something like that. Do you want to hear my pet peeve? Okay. There's a lot of ways I feel really passionately that we could make wine less pretentious and more accessible, bring new wine drinkers into the wine world, but I feel like there's this nod to some of the faults, pun intended, I guess in wine culture, I feel like there's this weird masochistic reaction of wine bars in New York City, hot take, serving wine in these little tiny sherry glasses. And I feel like we're just kind of punishing ourselves or acting like the fancy wine glass became the symbol of taking ourselves too seriously. And so what really strikes me is when I go to a place with a great wine list and the food is taken really seriously and served really well and then I'm served in this weird tiny little glass and and it just I don't get it and it drives me crazy which why are you why are we doing that? I actually think it's that came from European wine bars actually it's these like little small glasses okay and I'm not sure why they went that way but it might be a space constraint thing where you know obviously it's nice to have a longer glass but this also takes up a lot of space also I've seen small like smaller stem sizes in Japan which also makes sense because they also don't have very much room there if the stem is small and it's still like a nice glass we sell some glasses like that where you have a so we actually have a collaboration with Raj Par where it's kind of like a short stem glass it's a little bit smaller it's meant to like a tasting glass. They are cute. Yeah, this idea of the tasting glass. Yeah. But then the opening is so small. Right. You know, which is not good. It's not good. Which we need to fix that. Yeah. To me, they look like a sherry glass. Right. But what I feel like you've, I need to study more and learn why sherry glasses are tiny like that. But I mean, if the really small diameter, which like if you're listening to this and you're like, oh my God, how can I possibly get this right. I will tell people who are intimidated by wine glasses to start. You just, you need a stem. Yes. The wine glass needs to be white, see, not blue or something. Right. There should be an opening here. That's not too small. Like that's why people now say not to drink. Sparkling went out of All you really need is a glass that's big enough to get your nose into that has a stem where you can appreciate the color. I didn't invent these dimensions, but this is basically what a universal wine glass looks like. If you don't know what you're eating, you can drink sherry out of this and it'll taste perfectly fine. And this is where the experts have come to it. I think there was some fatigue and now most companies will have the advent of the universal wine glasses. Yes. Oh, thank God. Yeah. So there's a pushback for sure against that theory. It's also like I'm not against the idea of having like, you know, a red wine glass and a white wine glass and a burgundy glass, maybe if it's really big or like not a flute, but like a tulip thing for champagne. I think that's like totally fine and like totally valid. But what I do have an issue is if you go on one of these people's websites. And literally there's like 300 different items on their website and it's just glasses. That's like very confusing for people. I forget which Harvard, HBS person, whatever called it the paradox of choice. That's what we want to stay away from. We think just like simpler is better. It's also better for like pricing and all that stuff as well if we have fewer skews. Just like so much less confusing for our consumers, so. - Yeah. - Yeah. I noticed there was a big trend of stemless as well. And for a while, it wasn't just wine bars with like little bitty sharing glasses, but it was all the new restaurants. This was maybe 10, 15 years ago. I really felt like people were making me drink my wine out of like a candle votive, just this tiny little thing. And I felt like that was a way of saying, "No, we don't take ourselves too seriously. you know wine is fun. There was something about the stem that I mean the stem is is really functional in terms of mostly not getting fingerprints all over your glass but also you know to do the little swirly thing or you know like level one is always like on the table which is fine forever you know but I will say so the swirling thing also really trips people up when they first get started in wine and anyway you can teach me how to (laughing) Everybody does it a little different. I remember when I took my first Somelier class, which was the course, which was the Somelier Society of America, which is based here in New York. Still my favorite certification. I'm now an instructor for them. They meet actually in a much chiller space. Now we meet in a much chiller space. But when I took the course, it was at the university club. It was at nine in the morning. If you relate, you had to walk, you know, to the front of this room with the chandelier, there was like a dress code in the building, and it was like, oh my god, sort of exciting, but very intimidating. And I just remember not knowing how to swirl. I'd never eaten arugula before I moved to New York. I mean, like, I was, I was not a fancy person. And this, this swirling thing really, you know, was kind of intimidating for me. So I really like encouraged people to just swirl on the table. And the reason we do this is to open it up, and mostly to, to stick the actual smell molecules to get them out of the glass and into your, no, so you can smell them better. But this is how somebody taught me and there's lots of different ways to do it. So if you wanna do an in the air swirl, they told me to take these two fingers and pinch here but then use the rest of my hand to support it. And then the way I was taught was a little bit of a wrist, like a little bit of almost a figure eight, but not like bow, not like a witch's cauldron. So now I can do it. Now it's very second nature, but it was not. And I would often, you know, kind of spill and feel like everybody doing this, you know. What's your swirl like that without me? Honestly, I don't even, I don't even think about it. But actually, like, try to do this with like a thicker glass, like you're not even going to be able to. But this, like this, you could actually just do with two fingers because it's so thin, you know. It's tiny. Actually, like I feel like I'm just giving it. All right, listen, I was already a fan of your glasses because they're pretty and they're pleasurable to use. And it's just nice to have around. But I have to say now that we're talking about this, this is the easiest. I'm just it's yeah, this is really easy to scroll. I'm because because the majority of the weight in this glass right now is actually the wine. So you're literally just worried about the wine like everything else is actually there's more weight in the liquid there than the entire glass. It's like invisible. It's like a unicorn. Exactly. That's how we want people to feel. And so when people don't know about our glasses, they first use it, they pick it up. They're like, whoa, like it's just like a mind bending kind of experience for them. So you're literally with this beautiful delicate light hand bone glass. You're really actually letting people just focus on what's inside. - Exactly. - That is so easy to swirl. I hadn't thought about that as a selling point, but now I'm like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. - Also like, I heard some lia's don't even swirl that much. Because I over swirl, 'cause I'm just like a fidgety person. But like, somebody was like, no, you're just supposed to like flick it like that. - That is honestly a really fair point. I do think we over do it. It is almost kind of like a nervous energy thing for everybody. - Yeah, - But it does become this habit. I had someone say, don't just swirl, smell it first and see if it needs to be opened up. - That's fair too. - Right, like you might not need to oxygenate it. If it's already perfect, then you're just kind of beating it up and like knocking it out. - Yeah. - 'Cause it's this oxygen cycle of like, when we talk about it being tight versus open, we're talking about oxygenation. And if the wine's been open open for a while. It depends on what it is. It might be perfect before you even move it. And if you just hear it go, you know, then you might have just knocked it out of a nice moment. Right. You know, I would just say this falls into the category of like, don't don't let the little details, you know, worry you too much, like it'll be fine. Just however you do it, it'll probably be fine. You know, the two most important things is the wine has to be good. And the glass has to be good, and everything else is just minor. Well, this is a good wine glass. I'm really happy that you at Glass Fan have made this wine experience of this hand -blown glass to be more accessible to people. So tell me about the different glasses that you have and tell me how much they cost at this point right now as 20 .5 is where recording this. Sure. So this is $80 for two. So $40 a glass. We have a less expensive one. I think it's currently 55 for two. And that's, that's the one I was saying, or maybe it's 60 now. I had to get a check, but that's the one I'm saying that's like a, like a little bit thicker. And it's still really nice. Like you, where you feel you'll still get some of that hand blown experience, but it will feel different than this. It's heavier and thicker. And then we have, in each of those lines, we have bigger glasses. Like we have the Bordeaux and the burgundies and like, you know, bigger glasses. And then on top of that, we have cocktail glasses. So we have like little coupes and martinis and whiskey glasses. And so we have a full range of whatever glass shape you could possibly want. We probably have it. Yeah, that's awesome. Could you explain to us the difference between a Bordeaux and a Burgundy glass? Yeah, Burgundy is just usually a bigger bigger glass effectively. You could just think about it about it like that. So Bordeaux being this blend of usually Cabernet and Merlot always a blend from the Bordeaux region and then the Burgundy being Pinot Noir for red and typically Chardonnay for white. So I call it those because that's just how people call it. But really it's not like you can only drink a Bordeaux out of a Bordeaux glass. You could drink a Bordeaux out of this glass. You could drink a Bordeaux out of a Burgundy glass. It honestly doesn't really matter. They're just bigger. So the bigger the glass, the more like the aromatics kind of like get released. I think the sweet spot for a lot, well, this is definitely the sweet spot. - This is the sweet spot. - Like top selling product. But I think a lot of people, if they like reds or whatever, I think the Bordeaux glass is just perfect. But we call it the expression. And that's like a really like, you don't even need to go even bigger than that. It'll work for basically every every red wine. My feeling with wine always is that the purpose of more education, more information should be the increase of enjoyment, more pleasure, more joy, more appreciation of this beautiful, unique product. If I had a really chunky, short, thick glass with a small opening, you know, I mean, things like serving temperature are also really important. It's really just about like, take good care of your wine. Don't, you know, put it on top of your fridge. - Don't put it on top of your stove. - Right, yeah, right. What I would love for people to get out of all this information is not here are the rules and you're doing it wrong, but wine is so special that people have been working together for centuries to perfect the wine and the service. And this, you know, moment in time that you have here was available to us because you saw this hole in the market and you've been successful because you were right about that. You were like, people want this, I want this, other people are gonna want this too. I'm gonna make it, but in a way, to find these proportions and everything, it's this process of technology, observation, scientific method over the course of centuries through tradesmen and also, you know, people who enjoy the finer things in life to come together to get us this moment where we can have something like this, right? And, and I won't take credit for, for, you know, because, because this, this trend really started, I want to say something like 2010 ish, I would, I would say it probably started in Europe and then it came to the US where people are just going lighter and lighter with their wine glasses. And yeah, people realize that this is, this is, this is worth it. It's, it's going to break up a little bit more for sure, but it elevates the experience so much that the return on the investment of having some glasses break is so much higher. Again, back to that example of this makes that wine taste 20 % better. So why would we not put that investment in? I came a little bit later, but I guess my contribution was to help make this a trend among a much wider group of people and make it more affordable for a greater group of people. - Tell us about some of the restaurants that you're in now. You're having a lot of success with restaurants. I want to hear about that. But do you also want to find a way to reach consumers at home? Are you hoping that's kind of boomerang around? What are your plans for that? Is that still your dream that people will have it at home? - So we're about, I think probably probably like 60 % restaurants, 40 % consumer, which is, which is a great ratio. I'm happy with that ratio. I don't even control the ratio, right? It's just like who buys glasses for me effectively. But yeah, I'm very happy to serve both markets. Obviously, like the consumer side, like there's more education that we need to do and we're there to help where, yeah, like if this is the first time using a glass like this, like you might accidentally break one on the first time you wash it, because you've never done that before. - The delicate touch. - So every time, almost every time someone tells me it breaks, it's because like their relatives or something was like helping them wash it. And they're just like, they didn't even realize like you need to wash these in a more, you gotta do a little bit softer. - Gonna be a little more gentle. - Yes. - What is the care? - We recommend just using a dishwasher, bottom rack, Stem facing up, not touching anything obviously, it's really not gonna break. We're in hundreds of restaurants in the US and they're all in much, much harder dishwashers than the one at home. - True. - So, and if you have any issues, you just email us and we'll help you deal with it. - Listen, $40 for a delicate, like unicorn weight, hand -blown wine glass that I can put in my dishwasher, that's-- Once you know what you're doing, it's going to last for, I mean, it's still a consumable product, like all glassware is going to break at some point. But yeah, if you know how to take care of it, it won't break. Well, I think they're really beautiful. I'm just also excited to see in terms of careers in wine, you know, there's a lot of different things you can do. Yes. I mean, there aren't that many people like me, probably. So I don't know if I'd call this a career path. But yeah, I think the key is just to do something that you're that you're passionate about, obviously, but also that you know really well. I knew more about wine and more about wine than anything, with the exception of like that one industry I was covering at a hedge fund. But that one industry, it's not, it's not like you can start a business in that industry. So this was like the closest thing to that. And so I just started two businesses in a field that I knew better than most other people. - But you were able to go into business around a product that you were personally passionate about. - Exactly, so I didn't have to do any market research 'cause I'm like, this is, I would buy that and I know like 50 other people that would also want to buy this, so. - So maybe the surprise for you that it was restaurants that really took off. - Yes, that was not. - Before directing consumer. - Yeah, and I don't know if it surprises the right word, like it's just like, I didn't even think about it. But if I thought about it like logically, like, yeah, it would make sense that restaurants would. - So what are some of the restaurants around the world where people will find Glassman today? - Definitely our strong spot is the U .S. and within the U .S. are real strong places, New York City. We're just like everywhere in New York City. I would say we're probably in like half of the restaurants that we would want to be in. - Congratulations. - Yeah, But actually, it's funny, we should bring up this book because this is the sommelier of Coat and KokaDak and they're one of our newer awesome, awesome customers. So if you ever go to Coat or KokaDak and you see their logo on the side of the glass, that's our glass. That's so cool. That's so cool. But you're also in some restaurants around the world, so tell me about some of the cities where people will see glasses. Yeah, I mean, our other big would be like Los Angeles, we have a lot of great clients there, Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, like, I mean, all the big cities, we definitely have some major, major clients outside the US, outside the US, especially in places where they don't speak English, I need to get help. So I'm not as close to those, but I know we're in a lot of great restaurants in Spain, we're in some restaurants in the UK, we're definitely in a lot in Canada, I do Canada myself all over the place. - Well, congratulations and thanks for making this happen. It's something that I'm personally excited about, so cheers. - Cheers. Thank you for having me on the block. - Yeah. I'd love to hear about what wines you're excited about. Are there wines or regions that are just your thing that you always reach for or maybe something new that you're interested in lately? - I'm a very experimental drinker, so when I started, I actually, well, I started in Toronto and I was trying to just learn how to blind taste wines. And that was like a part of my life. And then I started going to Paris more and I started getting into natural wines. And so I had this big natural wine phase and then a little bit later, I kind of came back to traditional wines, still loving natural wines, but just, yeah, so I'm very experimental. I like the stuff that everyone else likes, like Burgundy and Champagne and Northrone and Napa and like all those that everyone else likes. I actually, I'm not a big like Riesling fan, which is one place. I think I diverge from traditional tastes, and I'm not as big into like some Rieslings and some white Burgundy I'm not as into as other people and I think I'm really into some of these like up -and -coming, up -and -coming, I guess not, we can't even call these up -and -coming anymore because like everyone knows about them but like Grenache, I love, I really, really love Grenache. Nebbiolo, a big fan of Nebbiolo, especially some of the newer kind of Nebbiolos, the Nebbiolos people are making in like a Burgundian style. I'm still unfortunately very, very Eurocentric with my wine consumption, which should probably be fixed. Oh yeah, me too, honestly, I got to blame Italy. I just got sucked in and obsessed. I think with modern wine making, you can basically make good wine almost anywhere, as long as like the soils, and they might figure out a way for that as well. But like as long as there's like limestone, whatever you can make, like very, very good wine, basically anywhere in the world. So technology has really advanced both viticulturally, so growing wine, and also with vinification. We've learned so much. The science is just boom, and the technology. Once you get into it, it's just like, for me, it was just like a river that I knew was gonna sweep me away. But once it's swept you away, you're probably gonna want a hand -blown wine glass. So fair warning, luckily, you can get one. - They're available for sale. - An - Accessible price plan. So tell us about your website and how people can order your glasses. - Yeah, absolutely. - And what's the experience like, you know, you mail it to people, what guide us through purchasing your wine glasses, whether you're a person or a restaurant. - Pretty simple, you just, well, yeah, if you're a restaurant, you just email me and then we'll go through the process. But if you're a consumer, then yes, just go on our website, glass .vin, G -L -A -S, dot, V -I -N. And there's like shipping estimates on there so most things can arrive within like a few days so it's pretty efficient shipping and yeah just put an order in and then if um you know anything goes wrong you just reach out and we'll uh we'll deal with it. So i'm sorry i've got to ask you this but what about tariffs so you're making your wine glasses in asia yes are your are your prices about to double what's gonna happen to you what's so how's that the thing about tariffs is no one knows what's happening with the tariffs so therefore I have no answers for you. We don't price based on our costs. We price based on the value that we deliver to our customers. We don't think of it as like, hey, if our costs go up 20%, then all through inflation, we haven't raised the price of this glass to our restaurant customers at all. Just still, it was started $20 a glass, still $20 a glass. This is, that's the wholesale price, by the way, for when you buy a lot of glasses as a restaurant, and we haven't increased that even once. And obviously, there's been a lot of inflation in the last five years. I mean, obviously, if our costs go up and everyone else's costs go up and all other wine glasses go up in price, then we're going to have to increase our prices too. But it's too early to make any major decisions. Well, I really hope that some of the worst case scenarios with the tariffs don't happen. I mean, I realize that even the discussions have done a lot of damage certainly in all parts of the wine industry, but I really hope that everything works out for all of our sakes. Yeah, and no one's worried about wine glasses. Like we're worried about like our iPhones costing 2X, you know, so we're just like a little apostrophe at the end of the sentence that, you know, we might get taken around for a ride, but yeah, like the cost of your wine glasses are probably not going to be the main thing you're worried about. I want to know how you feel about wine glasses. Are you really loving a stemless glass? Because you feel like it's like, hey, I just don't care. Are you really intrigued by this and you're going to go buy this today? We have stemless glasses as well, by the way. So that's no good excuse to not buy glasses. All right, talk to me. OK, I can't believe I'm drinking 11 in the morning. I love it. I should have made you blind this, which you have got it. No, I don't think so. You've got to be really kind of in training for that. Even though I'm teaching it, I teach blind tasting to people at the Samoyed School, but they're in training all the time, you know, they're really sharp. I do meet with a blind tasting club. Maybe you can come sometime whenever you like coming through New York. - I think my percentage getting like Nebbiolo right is pretty high. My percentage getting Chianti, Sandro Bezi, right? Is very low. And honestly, it's one of those wines that people generally don't bring the blind tastings. So you, you don't want to guess Chianti unless if like you're 99 % sure it's Chianti because it's much more likely that it's like Piedmont or something like that. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, no, I love a good Chianti Costco. The world is just so much more diverse, biodiverse, really the wine from every single hillside can give you a different expression. If you want to really study and nerd out, then you start to make a map about it. But the map is not the hill. It's like music. And I've got my piano here and I've got some sheet music on there. That piece of paper is not the music. It's a record, it's a tool, but the music is alive and it's living and that's kind of the way it is with Wine 2. We can study and we can discuss things and those things are important for like the knowledge of the world but at the end of the day I mean there's just nothing you know for me I love my research right it's it's sensual research the similarity with music for me is one activity I enjoy doing aside from blind wine wine tasting is like blind music guessing so it's like like Bella Bartok you know can I tell that it's Bella Bartok even though I've never heard of that song before because it's kind of like stylistically similar. So like Mozart is very stylistically similar, I find. Like all his songs kind of sound like like da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da. Like it's basically kind of versions of that, and Beethoven has its similarities. Yeah, the style. Yeah, so that's what you're doing with the wine effectively, even though it's - Well, you're giving me a dinner party idea. Okay, so we're both, what if we had a, Okay, blind wine and music like yeah, so somebody puts right What if we had a little dinner party and it was both blind? Classical music. Let's do it. I could cook for it. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, I do press dinners at my apartment in Chelsea. So we could do this will be like a version of that So, all right, listen if you're a classical wine fans who could Sorry classical wine if you're a a music fan or a musician who could reasonably well guess blind taste classical music, as well as wine, you know, even just kind of in a fun way. Yeah. Get in touch. Yes, please. You can come to this dinner that we're planning. Look, If you're kind of interested in this stuff and you think it might be nice to try out a fancy wine glass, this is a sort of thanks to David, a lower investment way to be like, oh, do I need that? Do I need that in my life? I think I do, actually. - So there's a really great article. It's called "Intelligent Life," but they've rebranded the magazine to 1843. It's part of "The Economist," and they talk about blind tasting. And there's basically a yearly competition between Oxford and Cambridge. And so they do a big blind tasting feature on it. And you look at the team, and everyone is Asian. Okay, so I don't know if it's because Asians are good at blind tasting wine, or if it's just like, I mean, obviously, like, Asian, I think Asians really love wine. And they see it as this cool thing. Whereas like in many ways like in America, like wine is kind of like not as cool as like craft beer or like spirits or like cocktails and stuff like that. - I mean, the statistics are bearing that out. - Exactly. That article talks about these Asian people and they're literally like using Asian descriptors for these wines and they're like, no, no, it's not what you're saying because you've never had this dish before but this is what it tastes like and it's like a really fun, different way to describe it but it really reminds me of the idea of compression so like even though all these people might have different descriptors at the end of the day we come down to like what it is so fundamentally if you and I can agree that this is a Pinot Noir from Oregon or whatever then it doesn't even matter what your descriptors are what my descriptors are we're talking about the same thing and if the wine isn't from Oregon and it's actually from Burgundy, that's okay as well, because there can be Burgundy wines that taste like Oregon wines and vice versa. Anyway, that's why I love blind wine tasting. - You know, I think there's a thing about a certain kind of privilege too, which is who has to look something up. I think it's good for all of us to have to look things up. - Right. - You know what I mean? Like if you're reading a tasting note and it's dish from Asia or a flavor that you haven't heard of and you have to Google it, well, enjoy it. You know, enjoy that. It shouldn't always be the other way around. Honestly, it's so much less boring that way that it's like everything tastes like apples and pears and cherries and, you know. This project is really about getting people to try new things and learn new languages and learn from new people and try new flavors. So is there anything else that you wanna add? - I think we covered everything. I think we had a very lengthy and pleasant - Thank you. - Yeah. - Thank you for coming on the show, David. - Yeah, anytime. I'd love to come back sometime. - Oh my God, yeah. I love our idea of doing a classical music, blind tasting combo. That sounds really fun. You don't have to drink wine out of a hand -blown wine glass, but if you want to, you might not go back. I feel like my wine glass collection has been a bit of a mishmash. I mean, I certainly had some nice glasses, but I think they've mostly been machine -made. I'm thrilled to have one of these in my house, I think it was something that I associated with. I go to the nice restaurant and I'm seeing these more and more, but I'm definitely enjoying these. Definitely you're going to have a little place in my cabinet. So I'm so glad I can put them in the dishwasher. So cheers again. Thanks to you. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, you're so welcome. And to all of our listeners, thank you. Wherever you go and whatever you like to drink. Always remember to enjoy your life and to never stop learning.