Modo di Bere TV Premiere! 🗣️ 🍷

It’s finally here! And I’m not talking about my 40th birthday. I’m talking about Modo di Bere TV, our wine travel show!!!

Get your tickets to preview the first episode in person, in Brooklyn.

On March 21, from 7-8 pm at Bar Camillo in Bed Stuy, we have 20 tickets for fans of the show to not only preview this episode before anybody else, but to enjoy a guided tasting of the wines from the show, a literal taste of Season One: Northern Adriatic.

I’ll lead you through an exclusive tasting of four wines from Movia and Radikon, the producers I interview in the episode! We’ll talk about a truly unique soil called ponca, World War I history, and how the rediscovery of forgotten techniques from Northern Italy changed wine lists around the world.

A few months before Season One is set to air, this is your chance to meet the newly expanded Modo di Bere TV crew and raise a glass to the borderlands of Slovenia and Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

If you want to join us for the second part of the night, we have a few tickets (sold separately) for my birthday dinner upstairs at Bar Camillo from 8-10 pm.

Modo di Bere TV Trailer Drops March 20!

Not in town? Never fear! Newsletter subscribers will still be the first to see the show’s new trailer—and we’ll show it to you a day before the public trailer drop on March 20 at noon. Read on to learn how you can celebrate Modo di Bere TV from anywhere.

Help our new crew film the next season: Piemonte!

The ticket sales from next week’s event will support our next shoot, a docuseries about Nascetta, a rare white wine grape, and the Piemontese farmers who saved it from obscurity.

We’ll travel to Italy to shoot this series over three days from April 13-15. Our crew has expanded: for the first time, four women are going on the road to shoot Modo di Bere TV, and we need to eat pasta, sleep in hotels, and rent a van!

Emilia and I can’t wait to travel on our next excursion with a second videographer, Food Network veteran Erin Althaus, and the podcast editor who has become our assistant producer, Giulia Àlvarez-Katz.

If you’re not able to attend next week’s screening in person, but you still want to support this project, and this crazy woman who waited to turn forty to publish her first film, you can make a one-time donation at buymeacoffee.com/mododibere.

A Dreamy Partnership

In late 2022, I had a fully formed idea for Modo di Bere, but I hadn’t started yet. Somehow, I decided the best way to transition from sales and service to starting my own media company was to go back to waitressing for a while. My years in hospitality were the fryer that cooked me, but this diagonal maneuver mostly emphasized why I had decided to change directions in the first place. While I’m pretty sure that was my last restaurant job, it had one incredible side effect: I met Emilia Aghamirzai.

I was behind the bar shining glasses when I overheard heard Emilia—cinematographer, marketing maven and wine-bar-fly—say that she likes helping women with their businesses.

“I have a business idea!” I said, cutting in on her conversation with the bartender. Emilia gave me one of the branded flashlight pens that she gives out in lieu of business cards. A few weeks later, over a leisurely meal at Dell’Anima, I told her all about my plan to share stories about culture through local drinks and local sayings.

I knew my idea. All my questions were actually just requests for permission.

“Should I start this cool podcast? In English and Italian?”

“Should I share all the videos of local sayings I’ve been learning from all over the world?”

“Should I publish my writing about wine and dialect?”

“Should I have a launch party?”

“Yes,” said Emilia, “Yes. And let’s also film.”

I’m not sure I even told her, then, that I’d secretly been wanting to make films for a long time. It sounded like the hardest, craziest thing I could possibly say out loud, like declaring in my thirties that I intended to retrain as an astronaut.

In January 2023, Emilia and I went to Jackson Heights, Queens, the most linguistically diverse place in the history of the planet, to film the pilot episode of Modo di Bere TV. I stuffed my podcast microphone into my coat pocket, and we interviewed people on the street about local drinks and local sayings.

Two years later, we’ve arm-wrestled innkeepers, jumped out of wagons and plucked the heads of catfish from bowls of spiritually spicy West African soup. We’ve filmed on motorboats, motorcycles and mules. We’ve conquered fear, equipment failure, illness and airline delays to film five seasons of Modo di Bere TV on three continents.

I can safely say there is no other wine travel show like this one.

I am so proud that we’ve moved into post-production this year, so we can finally show our work to you.

Thanks for your patience in waiting for this this newsletter, and the essays we publish here, to resume. LOTS of hours went into editing the trailer and episode one!

One more time:

Here’s that event link:

Modo di Bere TV Premiere + Wine Tasting

and the donation button to support our Piemonte shoot.

Thanks so much for supporting Modo di Bere TV.
Trailer drops next week!

Keep an eye out on Wednesday, March 19 for your exclusive newsletter subscriber peek at the new trailer. I hope you like it as much as we loved creating it.

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Do you have a secret dream? Tell Emilia!

Seriously, reply to this email and we’ll both tell you to go for it. ❤️🌹