▷S4E4 How to Swirl with Glasvin Founder David Kong

David Kong, Glasvin founder (0:00)

DK: 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, I'd only take it out for special wines. That's not the point. The point is to try to use great glassware 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 (0:23)

RTB: Welcome to Modo di Bere, the podcast about local drinks and local sayings. I'm 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.

DK: Thanks for having me.

RTB: Yeah, I'm a fan of these beautiful glasses, which we're going to talk about, the Glasvin 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?

DK: Yeah. So I grew up in Canada, and from a very young age, I realized I enjoyed food a lot. My parents didn't really like food that much, 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 was now allowed to drink because I was above the age cutoff, and, you know, I started trying some of these things, and 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.

Canada's wine and drinking culture (1:49)

RTB: What is the drinking age in Canada?

DK: 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 18, 19, they go over to Montreal to drink.

RTB: And where did you grow up?

DK: 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.

RTB: Wine drinking culture.

DK: Yes, yes.

RTB: And there's also some wine production in Canada as well.

DK: Right. There are — there's great ones in Ontario, and there's also great ones near Montreal, funny enough, I guess in Quebec. I don't actually know exactly where in Quebec they are, but yeah, they're really into that Natty kind of style in Quebec, and so they have some very nice Natty winemakers there.

RTB: I have been to Montreal one time, and I found it just really, really wonderful. I'd love to travel in Canada more.

DK: 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.

RTB: So you got into food, you got more and more into wine, and then at what point were you like, "Okay, I'm gonna make wine glasses"?

From hedge fund to wine glasses (3:24)

DK: 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 a hedge fund at the time, and it was very obvious that this was not going to end up working out 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 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 get to like revenue effectively."

The shower idea for Glasvin (4:10)

DK: And so, yeah, it was just like a random thought one morning. 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? Because 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. Yeah, right. Yeah. So the idea was very obvious, it was just like, how was I going to accomplish that. It took maybe a year from having that idea to having the product on the market.

RTB: So did it start with a question, like, "Would it be possible to make a less expensively priced hand-blown glass?" Or did you already believe that or know that you could?

DK: 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. And I didn't think about, like, because now we have a slightly less expensive glass. So I didn't think about that at first. So 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 it was going to become. It was meant, like I said, it was really meant 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, but congratulations.

RTB: Yeah, tell me more about having this idea in the shower. I would like to have a less expensively priced hand-blown 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?

Bootstrapped, no investors (6:02)

DK: 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, 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 totally out of thin air.

Why hand-blown glass? (6:44)

RTB: 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?

DK: 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: if you have nice glasses, you could probably buy slightly less expensive wine and it'll taste even better, right? So even from a monetary perspective, there's nothing that's more important than the wine, other than the wine glass that you're using. And so your options really are, okay, do I want this $80 glass, or do I want the Glasvin $40 glass?

RTB: Right, right. Yeah. So what is it about it being hand-blown that makes the wine taste better? That makes the experience nicer, right?

DK: 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.

RTB: 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?

DK: 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 rating on that wine is just gonna go up like 20% or something.

RTB: I see, I see. Well, I think we need to put some into these hand-blown wine glasses.

DK: I think it's because it's so thin and light, so it's not as heavy, and so you don't have to think as much about the act of lifting. And when you're drinking wine, you're obviously drinking little sips, you're just coming back and forth like a thousand times at night, and, yeah, and then swirling, and things like, just the entire experience is entirely — it's an easy swirl.

RTB: Yeah. So we're having a Chianti Classico Monteraponi from 2022.

DK: 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 a lot of Chianti.

How Glasvin cuts the price (9:53)

RTB: 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 glass, and how did you accomplish that?

DK: So we're basically about half the price of our competitors on the high end, and then our lower end is like an extra 30% less expensive, and they're both hand-blown, it's just the less expensive one is thicker. It's so nice, it's not as nice, but that's why it's 30% less expensive.

RTB: Yeah. Wow. So how were you able to make it cheaper?

DK: 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, because they're going away from 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.

DK: But the other main thing is we are a direct-to-consumer company. So basically 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, you know, 30 people working for them. We have — I'm one person working for them. So there's no overhead, everything's super efficient, 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.

Word of mouth marketing (11:24)

RTB: 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?

DK: No, no, no, we didn't — literally didn't do any marketing, it just caught on. The people who like wine glasses, who like wine and like wine glasses, some percentage of them work for restaurants. And 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 Michelin stars — Gabriel Kreuther, two Michelin stars; 63 Clinton, one Michelin 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, 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 quote-unquote marketing, like, for example, the way you found out about me was effectively us marketing, because we give out these glasses for these festivals that you were at.

Meeting Ian D'Agata (12:35)

RTB: Like I said, I definitely have tried your glasses before, but I was at the Ian D'Agata event. He's my Italian wine grapes and vines hero. He had a beautiful small fair in New York, and there were your glasses, and I was like, you know, tasting 14 different Nascettas at the masterclass and just being like, "Oh yeah, this is a really pleasurable experience."

DK: Yeah. So we sponsored that event, and 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 these events basically help us achieve that.

Choosing your first glass (13:10)

RTB: 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 — you know, you're taking some notes, you're finding out 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 a hand-blown wine glass before, how is that going to potentially elevate their experience?

DK: Yeah. So I'm going to steal something that one of my competitors said, I think it was Riedel, which is something like, if your glass is about the price of the bottle that you're buying or you usually drink, that's probably a pretty good place to start. So if you're between 20 and $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, I'd only take it out for special wines. That's not the point. The point is to try to use great glassware every night, when you're drinking just your everyday kind of wine. And that's what we built our company based on.

RTB: And that's why it caught on so much, because it just did not exist, and people were like, "Oh my God, here's this beautiful glass." And it was less expensive before me,

DK: 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 we have.

Machine-made vs. hand-blown (14:52)

RTB: 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?

DK: There's different levels of machine-made. A lot of the machine-made stuff is just a mold, and often it'll be molded differently, and then those just glued together. That's a lot of the stuff that's out there, and they're really not very nice. Then there's, you know, higher-end ones that don't feel like a mold. I don't actually know how exactly they're made. And then there's really high-end machine-made glasses, which are — they're basically trying to make it kind of like a hand-blown glass. It's just that a machine is kind of hand-blowing it, effectively. So those actually end up being quite nice. Obviously hand-blown glasses — like, you're basically blowing the bowl, and then you're attaching this stem, and then you're stretching the stem, and 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 — sorry, hand-blown glasses for like a pretty good price, you know? So it's not like — you would think it would be more expensive if a human were actually making this.

RTB: Right. But actually, you were able to find a way to make —

DK: Well, even my competitors, like even at $80, it's like, "Okay, that's not horrible for a person making it." Like effectively what it's telling you is that one person can make like a glass a minute or something, you know.

Traditional crafts and Venice (16:14)

RTB: 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 — 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 the glass and 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.

A glass tastevin from Marc Kornbluh (17:00)

My friend, Marc Kornbluh, who is — I believe Kornbluh Glass — I'll put the link to his Instagram in the show notes. But he made me this, he makes hand-blown glass, and he made me this glass tastevin. Yeah, that's cool. Yes! This is this very nerdy old-fashioned 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.

The Italian sommelier tradition (17:29)

You see it too with the Association of Italian Sommeliers, they wear like a metal tastevin. And 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 sommeliers, and they have these great outfits. And actually, the first time I saw someone wearing the tastevin with the — it was like a metal one — and this beautiful, 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, in Italy. And I was like, wow. And then, you know, I got more involved with Italian wine events and saw these sommeliers wearing these tastevins, 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.

RTB: So I love this idea that you were able to make the 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 — maybe 20 or 30 years ago, I don't know that much about the history of it, I think it was Riedel — 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 Friuli-Venezia Giulia — I was able to, for the Modo di Bere TV show, 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 wondered sometimes if the closeness to Venice also had something to do with that, as well as sort of the moment in time.

RTB: But, you know, I've also talked to people who said, "Look, wine is great in everything, but actually — " there's an interview with Michela Musolino, 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 the moment. And I've heard other people bring this up too — people would come to a restaurant with their own wine glasses in a little suitcase, like, "I can't possibly drink out of whatever wine glasses you have here."

DK: Those are my customers, by the way.

RTB: Yes, yes, yes.

DK: We actually have great packaging where people can put their glass into.

RTB: Okay, and, you know, you got a wine suitcase.

DK: Yeah, well, it literally comes with the purchase. So you don't have to —

RTB: Carry it around.

DK: Exactly, and that's a great form of marketing for us.

RTB: I don't know how you feel about this, because I basically, when I was in Friuli, I was 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 like in just the general way that people get turned off from wine, from it being this, you know, luxury product, or this ivory tower, or something like that.

David's wine glass pet peeve (20:57)

Do you want to hear my pet peeve? Yes. Okay.

RT hates those little glasses (22:41)

RTB: 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 — 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, right? 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 it just — I don't get it, and it drives me crazy. Why are we doing that?

DK: I actually think that came from European wine bars, actually — it's these little small glasses.

RTB: Okay.

DK: 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 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, actually, we have a collaboration with Raj Parr, where it's kind of like a short-stem glass, it's a little bit smaller, it's meant to be like a tasting glass. They are

RTB: Cute. Yeah, this idea of the tasting glass. Yeah, but then the opening is so small. Right, you know.

DK: Which is not good.

RTB: It's not good, and we need to fix that. To me, they look like a sherry glass. Right. But what I feel like — I need to study more and learn why sherry glasses are tiny like that, but, I mean, if it's a really small diameter — which, like, if you're listening to this and you're like, "Oh my God, how could I possibly get this right?" I will tell people who are intimidated by wine glasses to start: you just need a stem. Yes. The wine glass needs to be — you see, not blue or something — right. There should be an opening here that's — yeah — not too small. Like, that's why people now say not to drink sparkling wine out of a flute, because a smaller opening prevents aromas. So 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.

DK: I mean, I didn't invent these dimensions, but this is basically what a universal wine glass looks like.

RTB: Right.

DK: If you don't know what you like, you can drink sherry out of this, and it'll taste perfectly fine.

RTB: And this is where the experts have come to it. You know, I think there was some fatigue. And now most companies have the advent of the universal wine glasses. Yes.

DK: 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, 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 totally fine and 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 very confusing for people. I forget which — Harvard, HBS person, whatever — called it the paradox of choice.

RTB: Yeah.

DK: That's what we want to stay away from. We think simpler is better, it's also better for pricing and all that stuff as well, if we have fewer SKUs, it's just so much less confusing for our consumers.

The stemless glass trend (24:40)

RTB: So yeah. Yeah, yeah. I noticed there was a big trend of stemless as well, and for a while it wasn't just wine bars with little bitty sherry glasses, but it was all the new restaurants. It's 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 — I mean, the stem 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, level one is always like on the table, which is fine forever, you know?

Learning to swirl (25:28)

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

DK: Me how to swirl.

RTB: Everybody does it a little different. Yes. I remember when I took my first sommelier class, which was the course, which was the Sommelier 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 can believe it, 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.

RTB: And I just remember not knowing how to swirl — I'd never eaten arugula before I moved to New York City. And, like, I was not a fancy person. And 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 stick the actual smell molecules — to get them out of the glass and into your nose, so you can smell them better.

RTB: 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 — 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's watching me do this, you know. What's

DK: Your swirl like? Watch this, without me — honestly, I don't even think about it. But actually, try to do this with a thicker glass, you're not even going to be able to. But this, you could actually just do with two fingers, because it's so thin,

RTB: You know. It's tiny — actually, like, I feel like I'm just — Alright, 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 — yeah, this is really easy to swirl. Because because the

DK: Majority of the weight in this glass right now is actually the wine, so you're literally just — you're not even worried about the glass, like everything else — there's more weight in the liquid there than the entire glass.

RTB: It's like invisible, it's like a unicorn.

DK: 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.

RTB: So you're literally, with this beautiful, delicate, light, hand-blown glass, you're really actually letting people just focus on what's inside.

DK: Exactly.

RTB: That is so easy to swirl, I hadn't thought about that as a selling point, but now I'm like, oh —

DK: Also, like, I heard some sommeliers don't even swirl that much, because I over-swirl, 'cause I'm just like a fidgety person, but somebody was like, "No, you're just supposed to like flick it like that."

RTB: That is honestly a really fair point, I do think we overdo it, it is almost kind of like a nervous energy thing for everybody. Yeah, I think 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."

DK: Yeah, that's fair.

RTB: Right, like you might not need to oxygenate it, if it's already perfect, then you're just kind of beating it up and 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 for a while — it depends on what it is. Yeah, it might be perfect before you even move it, and if you just — you know, then you might have just knocked it out of a nice moment, right?

DK: You know, I would just say this falls into the category of, like, don't let the little details worry you too much, it'll be fine, just however you do it, it'll probably be fine. You know, the two most important things are the wine has to be good, and the glass has to be good, and everything else is just minor.

Glasvin's full lineup (29:37)

RTB: Well, this is a good wine glass. I'm really happy that you, at Glasvin, 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 of 2025, as we're recording this. Sure.

DK: 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 the one I was saying — or maybe it's 60 now, I had to double-check — but that's the one I'm saying that's like a little bit thicker, and it's still really nice, like you'll still get some of that hand-blown experience, but it will feel different than this. It's heavier and thicker. And then, in each of those lines, we have bigger glasses, like we have the Bordeaux and the Burgundy, bigger glasses. And then on top of that, we have cocktail glasses, so we have 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.

Bordeaux vs. Burgundy glasses (31:30)

RTB: Yeah, that's awesome. Could you explain to us the difference between a Bordeaux and a Burgundy glass?

DK: Yeah, Burgundy is just usually a bigger glass, effectively, you could just think about it like that.

RTB: So Bordeaux being this blend of usually Cabernet and Merlot, always a blend from the Bordeaux region, and then the Burgundy being Pinot Noir

DK: Yes.

RTB: For red and typically Chardonnay.

DK: Yes. So I call them 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 the aromatics kind of get released. I think the sweet spot for a lot — well, this is definitely the sweet spot — this is our

RTB: The sweet spot.

DK: 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 — you don't even need to go even bigger than that, it'll work for basically every red wine.

RTB: My feeling with wine always is that the purpose of more education, more information, should be the increase of enjoyment. Yes. 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 —

DK: Don't put it on top of your stove.

RTB: 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 right.

DK: And I won't take credit for, you know, because this trend really started — I want to say something like 2010-ish, 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 worth it, it's going to break 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 the 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.

Restaurants carrying Glasvin (33:51)

RTB: 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 a boomerang around, what are your plans for that? Is that still your dream, that people will have it at home?

DK: So we're about — I think probably like 60% restaurants, 40% consumer, 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, 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, you might accidentally break one the first time you wash it, because you're just —

RTB: You've never done

DK: That before.

RTB: The delicate touch.

DK: So every time, almost every time someone tells me it breaks, it's because their relatives or something was helping them wash it, and they're just like — they didn't even realize you need to wash these a little bit softer.

RTB: Gonna be a little more gentle. Yes. What is the care we recommend?

DK: Just using a dishwasher, bottom rack, stem facing up, not touching anything. Obviously it's really not going to 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.

RTB: Listen, $40 for a delicate, like, unicorn-weight, hand-blown wine glass that I can put in my dishwasher, that's —

DK: Once you know what you're doing, it's going to last, 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.

RTB: 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.

DK: 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 passionate about, obviously, but also that you know really well. I knew more about wine than anything, with the exception of 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.

RTB: But you were able to go into business around a product that you were personally passionate about.

DK: 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."

RTB: So maybe the surprise for you was that it was restaurants that really took off.

DK: Yes. That was your direct consumer. Yeah. And I don't know if "surprise" is the right word, it's just — I didn't even think about it. But if I thought about it logically, yeah, it would make sense that restaurants would.

Glasvin around the world (36:46)

RTB: So what are some of the restaurants around the world where people will find Glasvin today?

DK: Definitely our strong spot is the US, and within the US, our real strong place is 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.

RTB: So congratulations. Yeah.

DK: But actually, that's funny, we should bring up this — because this is the sommelier of Cote and Coqodaq, and they're one of our newer, awesome customers, so if you ever go to Cote or Coqodaq and you see their logo on the side of the glass, that's our glass.

RTB: 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.

DK: Yeah, I mean, our other big cities 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 clients 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 a lot in Canada, I do Canada myself all over the place.

RTB: Well, congratulations and thanks for making this happen. Yeah, something that I'm personally excited about. So cheers.

DK: Cheers. Thank you for having me on this. Yeah.

David's favorite wines (38:13)

RTB: 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?

DK: 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.

DK: 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 Northern Rhône and Napa, and like all those that everyone else likes. I actually — I'm not a big Riesling fan, which is one place I think I diverge from traditional tastes, and I'm not as big into some Rieslings and some white Burgundy as other people, and I think I'm really into some of these — I guess we can't even call these up-and-coming anymore, because everyone knows about them — but 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. Yeah.

RTB: Yeah, me too. I know, it's — I got to blame Italy, I just got sucked in and obsessed.

DK: I think with modern winemaking, 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 as long as there's, like, limestone, whatever, you can make very, very good wine basically anywhere in the world.

RTB: So technology has really advanced both viticulturally, so growing wine, and also with vinification. Right. 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 swept you away, you're probably gonna want a hand-blown wine glass. So, you know, fair warning. Luckily, you can get one.

DK: They're available for sale.

How to order Glasvin (40:27)

RTB: And accessibly priced. 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 — guide us through purchasing your wine glasses, whether you're a person or —

DK: 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, glas.vin, and there's 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 anything goes wrong, you just reach out and we'll deal with it.

Talking tariffs (41:02)

RTB: So, I'm sorry, I've got to ask you this, but what about tariffs? So you're making your wine glasses in Asia — are your prices about to double, what's gonna happen to you?

DK: The thing about tariffs is no one knows what's happening with the tariffs, 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 — through all the inflation, we haven't raised the price of this glass to our restaurant customers at all, still — it was started at $20 a glass, still $20 a glass, this is 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.

RTB: Well, I really hope that some of the worst-case scenarios with 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 worrying about

DK: Wine glasses, like, we're worried about 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 for a ride, but, yeah, like, the cost of your wine glasses is probably not going to be the main thing you're worried about.

RTB: Right? Yeah, yeah, I'm interested — what are your questions and feelings about wine glasses? Because people have emotions about this. So write to me — you can write to me on Instagram, you can comment on this video, you can send me an email through mododibere.com. I want to know how you feel about wine glasses. Are you really loving a stemless glass, because you feel 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.

Blind tasting wine (and music) (44:00)

Okay, I can't believe I'm drinking at 11 in the morning, I love it. I should have made you blind this — would you have got it?

DK: No, I don't think so.

RTB: Yeah, 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 Sommelier Society, 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.

DK: I'd love to, coming through New York. I think my percentage getting Nebbiolo right is pretty high, my percentage getting Chianti — Sangiovese, right — is very low. And honestly, it's one of those wines that people generally don't bring to blind tastings, so you don't want to guess Chianti unless you're 99% sure it's Chianti, because it's much more likely that it's like Piedmont or something like that.

RTB: Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Now, I love a good Chianti. 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, right? It's like music — 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 too. We can study and we can discuss things, and those things are important for the knowledge of the world, but at the end of the day, I mean, there's just — nothing, you know?

DK: Well, for —

RTB: Me, I love my research. Right, it's sensual research.

DK: The similarity with music for me is — one activity I enjoy doing aside from blind wine tasting is like blind music guessing, so it's like, like Béla Bartók, you know, can I tell that it's Béla Bartók even though I've never heard that song before, because it's kind of stylistically similar. So Mozart is very stylistically similar, I find, like all his songs kind of sound like da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, like, it's basically kind of versions of that, and Beethoven has its own style. Yeah. So that's what you're doing with the wine,

RTB: Effectively — you're giving me a dinner party idea. Okay, so we're both — what if we had a —

DK: Okay, blind wine and music pairing.

RTB: Like, yeah, so somebody puts — right, what if we had a little dinner party and it was both blind classical music —

DK: Let's do it, I could cook for it.

RTB: Oh my God, yeah. Do that. Yeah.

DK: I do press dinners at my apartment in Chelsea, so we could do this, this will be like a version of that. So,

RTB: All right, listen, if you're a classical — sorry, wine — if you're 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 — get in touch. Yes, please, you can come to this dinner that we're planning. Yeah. [music] [laughter] 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.

DK: 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, Asians, I think, really love wine, and they see it as this cool thing, whereas, like, in many ways, like in America, wine is kind of like not as cool as craft beer or spirits or cocktails and stuff like that. Yeah.

RTB: I mean, the statistics are bearing that out.

DK: Exactly. That article talks about these Asian people, and they're literally 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,

RTB: Different way to

DK: Describe it. But it really reminds me of the idea of compression — 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.

RTB: 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 a 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, than 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?

DK: I think we covered everything, I think we had a very lengthy and pleasant conversation.

Outro (48:38)

RTB: Thank you. Yeah, thank you for coming on the show, David.

DK: Yeah, anytime, I'd love to come back sometime.

RTB: 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 cheers! I'm so glad I can put them in the dishwasher. So cheers again, thanks to you.

DK: Thanks for having me on.

RTB: 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. Support us on Patreon.

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