Who's afraid of sweet wine?🗣️🍷

Michele Thomas, who edits this magazine, shares a relatable story of overdoing it on cheap, sweet wine as a young person. She avoided sweet wines for years afterwards, until a bottle changed her life. Read on for that story, in today’s essay (below).

The best conversations happen right after you stop recording. I started chatting with Michele about how sweet wines are underrated (by some) just after I turned off the microphones for her podcast interview. We were full of ideas. We were like ding ding ding.

“This is good, Michele,” I said. “It sounds like a series!”

“Yeah….but who would I write it for?”

We sat quietly with the state of legacy journalism.

Then I declared, “You can write it for Modo di Bere!”

A few months later, we created a magazine about local culture through drinks and dialect. Today we’re publishing the first piece of Michele’s sweet wine series.

Michele’s Bed Stuy Somm column will devote the next few months to demystifying sweet wines and their glorious history. However you feel about the sweet wine category, we’re all going to learn a lot!

Now we’ve published thirteen issues!

Can you believe this is our thirteenth issue? That we now have three columnists, and contributors this cool?

I hope our pride in arriving at this moment inspires you to take a sweet idea you have kicking around and just go for it. ❤️ 💡

We’ve been working hard on this little corner of independent media, and enjoying the process very much. You may have noticed this special issue took us an extra week to get born. I hope it was worth the wait, and that you love reading these essays as much as we love writing, editing and publishing them.

With your help, we’ll keep this delicious thing going!

Travel Show Update + Quick Follow Favor!

The team is moving seriously into post-production on Modo di Bere TV, the travel show that I’ve been filming with Emilia Aghamirzai for the past two years.

I know I’m all “go for your ideas,” and I mean every word, but that doesn’t mean that my desire to make films didn’t feel like declaring, in my late thirties, that I want to be an astronaut when I grow up. Thankfully, documentaries are as collaborative as writing turns out to be, and my collaborators won’t let me keep our light under a bushel.

As we show this project to various people who can help us kick it out the door and onto your screens, we need to demonstrate interest and anticipation from our audience.

Can you take a moment, like, right now, to subscribe to our channel at youtube.com/@mododibere?

And maybe even get a few people around you—coworkers, roommates, lovers—to take out their phones and subscribe on to @mododibere YouTube, too? I bet they’d enjoy our pilot episode in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Then you’ll all be ready when the first season of Modo di Bere TV drops—and every subscriber helps more than you know. Thank you!

The Borderless Music of Ou

The third season of the Modo di Bere Podcast is going out on a high note with the return of of Ersilia Propseri, composer of the Modo di Bere podcast theme, and her bandmate and producer Amy Denio, who translates for Ersilia in the English version of the episode.

Listen in English

Ascolta in Italiano

The occasion: Uranio, Ou’s latest album, and the latest iteration of Prosperi’s unconfine-able musical identity. This band is dynamic in every possible sense of the word. They sing in many languages, play all sorts of instruments, and find language in the voices of animals, from armadillos to turtles to turtle doves.

Modo di Bere’s true message is that biodiversity is everything. While this interview was recorded a while ago, I feel this is the perfect moment to publish it, and the perfect moment for these songs. Among other timely and essential topics, the album protests cruelty towards migrants, rigid thinking, and war games that disrupt wildlife in Prosperi’s ancestral home of Sardegna.

I met multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Amy Denio when I had a house concert venue after college. Bringing her from Seattle to Nebraska to perform was my first official grant as a budding impresario. Years later, when I was looking for music that would express this podcast’s multilingual energy, I thought, I bet Amy knows someone.

I heard Ou’s album Pisces Crisis and knew that this was the music for the show. I was full of suspense that they might say no, leaving Modo di Bere to settle for some imperfect alternative! Luckily, Ou said yes, to sharing their music with the podcast, and to participating in two stimulating interviews featuring many songs from their vibrant catalogue.

Here’s a link to listen to my first interview with Ou, from Season One, in English and Italian.

And you can watch the new interview, in both languages, on YouTube!

(Note: the podcast and the forthcoming travel show are two separate YouTube channels, @mododiberepodcast and @mododibere respectively. Adding a video podcast this season has been a great work of which we are very proud!)

Season 4 of the Modo di Bere Podcast will be released in a few months, but don’t worry! We’ll continue to release bonus episodes for our Patreon Supporters at the Podcast Lover level and above.

Without further ado, here is the latest edition of Bed Stuy Somm, the column that our editor, Michele Thomas, writes for this magazine. For the next few months, Bed Stuy Somm will be dedicated to the social and culinary history of sweet wines.

Sweet Wine Part 1: Drink What You Want.

by Michele Thomas

Back then, like many new drinkers, I didn’t know that wine could have a “reputation.” In my early 20s, I was somehow more sure about lemon drops and Jagermeister. Wine was its own thing. Wine was something you had in church, people’s homes, or restaurants, if you were rich. 

My second job out of college was writing and editing at a small newspaper service. My boss was like an elderly version of Peggy Olson from “Mad Men.” Every so often, after we put an issue to bed, she would summon our tiny team into her office for what she called “Fireside Chats,” during which she’d chain smoke slim cigarettes and dispense advice over bottles of cheap, sweet, bubbly wine. “No dead soldiers!” was her rule, meaning no one could leave the boss' office while a bottle was open. As a result, I showed up to work with a raging hangover once a month for nearly 2 years. Sweet wine became synonymous with sharp-eyed old ladies with a thing for F.D.R. references – and something I avoided for the next 15 years.

I changed jobs a few times before I landed a position researching and writing about food for a culinary school. I was suddenly surrounded by chefs, sommeliers, foods and wines from every corner of the globe. Restaurants had become part of my life. I enrolled in the school’s wine program. One Christmas, a few colleagues and I decided to celebrate a few weeks early.

One of my classmates, a pastry chef who also worked at the school, made baked Alaska. Another nicked foie gras from the culinary student kitchens upstairs. Six of us pooled our money to buy a small bottle of Chateau d’Yquem, one the most prized wines in the world. We had just learned about d’Yquem, a sweet wine producer from the region of Sauternes whose prestige dates back hundreds of years. Thomas Jefferson was a fan, having imported barrels direct from the winery in the early 1800s. 

The bottle, just 375ml, was outrageously expensive. Time seemed to slow as my friends poured the bright golden liquid into glasses. Would this wine live up to its hype? Would I like it? 

We toasted our good health and tipped our drinks back. I was immediately seduced by aromas so decadent they felt like a sin. Honey, ripe pear, lychee, quince, ginger, a touch of clove. The wine didn’t so much coat my palate as enrobe it. It was smooth and soft, sweet, but somehow still savory, mouthwatering, mysterious. To call it magic would be an understatement of shameful proportions. It was epic. Biblical, even. This wine didn’t just change my opinion on sweet wine. It changed me. 

Now a decade into my wine career, I remember my Chateau d’Yquem experience as the one that helped me to really understand what is so special about wine. I know now that the production of sweet wine dates back to ancient civilizations. It was the wine of kings and nobility, stolen as spoils of war, traded across empires for hundreds of years. Yet, at some point, ideas shifted. Sweet wine developed a bad reputation in the world of fine wine, as if it went out and got too drunk at some fancy cocktail party Saturday night and set all the hoity toity folks gossiping.  

What happened? Well, it depends on who you ask. Not everyone looks down on sweet wine. In fact, sweeter wines are quite popular around the world. To demystify the misperceptions around sweet wines is what this series is all about.

When guests come into the shop where I work now looking for sweet wines, it usually goes one of three ways:

“I’m looking for a wine to go with pasta, but nothing too sweet.”

Or, “My [friend, mom, girlfriend] likes sweet wines. Not me though, ew,” accompanied by a nervous laugh.

Or, “I’m looking for something sweet, I know it probably sounds silly to you.”

“Not at all, drink what you want,” I say to that guest, offering the very first lesson I learned in wine school as reassurance. Scott Carney, Master Sommelier, said it with a shrug of the shoulders just minutes after my cohort took to our seats at the International Culinary Center. (The I.C.C. has since closed.)

I had been excited and terrified to study wine. I grew up in the housing projects of East New York, what the hell did I know — what could I know — about fine wine? The minute Carney spoke, I felt myself relax and breathe normally again. “The first rule of wine study,” he said. “Let people drink what they want. Your job, my job, is to make sure they have a good time.”

“My job is to make sure you have a good time,” I tell my customers today. I hear them sigh, see their shoulders drop with relief that  I’m not judging them for their choices. Drinking sweet wine is okay. Sweet wine is as good as any other wine. Sweet wines are, in fact, delicious. Chateau d’Yquem, anyone? 

Sweet wines can be made artisanally or mass-produced, carefully or cheaply, just like any other wine. After nearly 10 years in the wine business, I have some ideas about the ways people say “sweet wine,” and what they really mean. 

Some folks think of sweet wines as syrupy, cloying, cheaply produced and cheaply packaged, in frosted glass with labels just a bit too shiny. It’s the stuff that poor, simple, unsophisticated people drink. When they say,  “I don’t want anything sweet,” what they often mean is “I have taste. I’m better than them. I’m not like them.” Snobs who look down on sweet wines and those who drink them rob themselves of the magic of discovering something delightful. 

I welcome and encourage customers who like what they like, even if they are sometimes hesitant to ask for it. I do my best to help them find something wonderful to drink, no matter the sugar content. At their best, sweet wines can be as complex and nuanced as the people who enjoy them. To me, sweet wines are worthy of exploration and respect. After all, what is hospitality if everyone’s not welcome at the table? 

Michele Thomas holds an MFA in Creative Writing from St. Joseph’s University. She holds a Certified Sommelier credential from the Court of Master Sommeliers. Michele works full time as the General Manager and buyer for Greene Grape Wine & Spirits, in Brooklyn, NY and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Edible Brooklyn, and Activist Philanthropist.

She has taught English and Creative Writing at the Girls Write Now, Legal Outreach, Fordham University, and St. Joseph’s University, written science books for middle grade children and is the co-author of Culinary Careers for Dummies, with Annette Tomei and Tracey Biscontini (Wiley).

Formerly the executive editor for curriculum at the International Culinary Center (founded as the French Culinary Institute), Michele is currently working on a memoir of her adventures in food, wine, and family.

Fact-based news without bias awaits. Make 1440 your choice today.

Overwhelmed by biased news? Cut through the clutter and get straight facts with your daily 1440 digest. From politics to sports, join millions who start their day informed.

Sign up now!

Please move or drag this message into your primary inbox to make sure you see the next one.

The 🗣️ and 🍷 emojis are in the subject line for easy searching.

Did this email make you think of an idea you wish you could get out into the world? Whisper it—i.e. reply to this email—and I’ll write back and encourage you.