When I was 17 I landed my first ever job, serving over-extracted, over-priced coffee at a drive-thru franchise in Perth. It was my first taste of early mornings, observing the merit many people seem to bring to the phrase ‘don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee’, with conversations cut short in open yawning mouths. It was fumbling my way through barista basics, learning the choreography to espresso brewing with the customers in cars idling outside, and on several occasions sending the wrong drink to the wrong person when I (often) found myself out of rhythm with the dance.

After a calamitous 2 months of work I was sat down on a stepladder mid-shift, where my manager fired me on account of being ‘too slow’ and was promptly sent home 4 hours early. Though my younger self was crushed at the time, it’s a funny story almost 10 years later. With my debut to the working world swiftly cut short at the drive-thru, I was determined to bounce back and prove myself as a capable, competent, efficient employee.

Somehow this was the beginning of 9 years in coffee, moving slowly but surely from Sunday brunch cafes in Perth suburbs, to the heaving specialty shops in the heart of Perth city. By the time I decided (somewhat impulsively) Melbourne was the place for me, my barista skills were well established, and I felt ready to put them to the test in the world’s coffee capital. I jumped in with nothing but a gut feeling that this city is where I am supposed to be, and when I found myself working behind the bar at Market Lane within my first month of moving, I couldn’t have asked for a softer landing.

It’s funny, I never saw myself working in coffee for long enough to just about qualify for cumulative long service leave, the years just passed on by. Without realising, the barista role I so desperately craved to prove myself in was somehow the only thing I was fully qualified to do.

It was a sunny Sunday morning at the Queen Vic Market last year when I decided it was finally time for barista work and I to part ways.

Picture it with me:
There’s an everlasting line out the door.
The EFTPOS reader is broken.
We’re training a new staff member.
The main espresso grinder insists on giving us inconsistent shots despite our best efforts.
A customer has gladly accepted a coffee that wasn’t for them.
There are coffees sitting waiting to be run, the table number has been left at the counter, no one can recall who placed the order.
There are dishes piling up.
There are tourists taking aesthetic photos of us for Instagram.
There’s someone coming up to the coffee machine asking if the coffee beans that list hazelnut as a tasting note have added hazelnut, telling us they can’t have hazelnut because they’re allergic.

The average mildly annoying hallmarks of a busy weekend service. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then it happens.

I’m clearing up dirty dishes, I’m resetting the table layout the customers insisted on moving themselves to fit their party of 8, all that remains on the table is a half-drunk latte, it slips off the plate when I pick it up and the cold milky leftover liquid falls perfectly onto my foot. Having recently rediscovered the Merrell Hydromocs in my shoe collection (for those unfamiliar, think the Inner North’s answer to Crocs) and insisting they’re a suitable work shoe, my sock is immediately saturated. It’s so busy I have no choice but to squelch through the rest of the shift.

And that was all it took.

I’d decided definitively that it was time to look for the next thing, but where to start?

Of course I’d previously thought about moving on from barista work. Seeing my peers graduate their degrees and getting their “grown up” jobs, the feeling of being left behind in the big race of life starts creeping in. It felt like I’d spent my early twenties wistfully meandering through life I’d forgotten to pick something “career worthy” to wholly apply myself to. No one talks about how daunting it feels to leave hospitality after committing so many years of your life to it. The barrier to entry in the hospitality industry is so comparatively low, which is a fabulous thing, but it makes applying for anything outside of the niche you’ve carved out for yourself feel impossible.

The voice of your inner saboteur can be boisterous and convincing.

It’s easy to picture your job application being read by a room of big meanies all saying:
“You don’t have the right skills, you don’t know the right people, you don’t have any qualifications, why would we take you seriously?” That’s if they even give you the time of day at all, we all know how looking for a job can feel like screaming into an endless well of nothingness.

This easily could’ve been my experience stepping from coffee into wine, and I’m so glad it was nothing of the sort.

When I applied for this job, my wine experience could be pretty well summarised into knowing I love a pet-nat in the summertime and a pinot noir in winter, and how sick it was growing up in Perth’s Swan Valley wine region. I arrived at my interview with the search “wine knowledge for beginners” still open in my phone browser, hoping a quick read on the tram would compensate for all I was yet to know.

What I did know is how coffee and wine are two sides of the same coin. Both tell intricate stories of place through taste, serving as means to foster community and genuinely connect with people we would never otherwise cross paths with, all made possible through a devotion to agricultural practice. I knew, as a Gemini, I could comfortably yap to anyone and this would be an asset working at a shop like Crooked, and hoped my willingness to learn could outweigh the inconvenience of training someone so green to the industry.

Evidently, this would be enough to secure me the job and successfully move out of full-time hospitality to full-time ‘doing whatever we need to assist operating a wine store’. Playing records and pouring our signature latte glasses of wine on Friday nights, I often get comments of ‘you must have the best time at this job’. I always confirm it’s true, it is as fun as it looks and I love that I get to do this.

Now it’s been a few months into my barista retirement, 5am alarms are a distant memory and my socks are entirely milkless.

As I suspected there are endless things to learn about wine, it’s evident I’ll be a student indefinitely with our sensational shop manager Jordi as my mentor. By industry standards I’m still far from qualified to sell wine full time and I doubt I’ll ever have what it takes to forge a career as a sommelier. But by Crooked standards, I can confidently tell you which orange wine will taste the best when shared at Edi Gardens, and what it means when something tastes like ‘cool girl energy’ or ‘botox’.

And you know what? To me that is a far greater accomplishment.

Claire Daley (she/her) is the personality hire at Crooked Drinks, a little wine store on Smith Street in Collingwood on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung poeple of the Kulin nation.

I was perched on my pedestal, across the street, watching a large wine chain insert their freshest iteration across the road from our year-old independent wine shop. I lost nights of sleep after I found out they were moving in. I’d ebbed and flowed between panic and firey determination for months.

On their coldest of opens, I was transfixed by a young man in the window, deep in conversation. A deep focus, unbreakable eye contact, his body gently leaning into the conversation. But I was drawn to his right hand. Between his fingers, he balanced a piece of stemware. Even from my vantage point I could tell it was one of those wafer-thin ones, dainty and fanciful. He started with a quick roll of the wine and held it up to the light to assess its colour. Then the roll turned into a swirl. Like a Swiss scientist arriving at CERN on Monday morning, they flick the Hadron Collider on, start it firing, get it up to speed (I assume it needs a little warm up and I refused to do further research because my analogy will fall apart). The wine glass picked up speed, the liquid starts perfectly swirling in the glass. Ten seconds of heavy clockwise rotation, a pause, a nose inserted into its opening, a little head nod - then change to a counter clockwise swirl. The confidence is building, the juice is clinging to the side of the glass seemingly mocking science and those Swiss scientists. All the while holding this seemingly interesting conversation. It was perfectly synchronised and choreographed.

For the sake of clarity and cuntery, we’ll now refer to this young man as the Performative Swirler (PS).

LOTS of people like wine. Lots of people drink wine very regularly. A diminishing amount of people love wine and are also interested in learning about wine – because the barrier for entry is seemingly too high-minded. People are understandably intimidated. And the blame is squarely at the feet of the Performative Swirler and the pseudo-expertise that he was attempting to project. Our dear PS was suggesting to his audience that he knows wine, consciously or subconsciously, by performing the dance. He knows the intricacies and jargon of wine and if you have the prerequisite knowledge (or the confidence), you may engage - you may join the performance.

If not, you’re not allowed in. You’re stuck buying the varieties you know how to pronounce. You’re condemned to consumer anonymity at your local ASX100, supermarket-owned bottleshop (it’s a huge reason why they exist so prominently in Australia!). You get cold sweats when you’re obliged to bring a bottle to a dinner party. You mumble something unintelligible about your wine choice and everyone laughs and a hockey-masked Performative Swirler chases you in your dreams.

Lets quickly breakdown why you would swirl a glass of wine:

• Are you a judge at a wine show tasked with professionally assessing a wine based on a rigid set of criteria? Then yes, swirl away, get that nose in there, Greg is already on his third wine.

• Do you smell petrol? Fumes? Struck match? Go on, give it a quick swirl, you might be able to swirl off the volatile compounds.

• Do you just love the smell of the wine? Sure, give it a lazy twist in the glass and savour a sniff, but let’s not get weird about it.

• Have you ever been poured that awkward taste test at a restaurant after you’ve ordered a bottle? Well yes, you’re smelling for corkage (it’ll smell like wet dog), not basking in your wine choice, you’ve already bought the bottle, silly.

That’s it.

It’s this type of performance, the high-toned ‘intellect’ of our PS that makes it so intimidating for people that like wine, to start loving and learning about it.

The wine industry naturally produces professionals, making a living off and authenticating their objective opinions on wine. Much of the history of commercialised wine was built around brand, validated by it’s heritage or ancestral affiliation. We bought Bordeaux and Burgundy and Chianti. We buy Yarra Valley Pinot Noir and Anjou Chenin and Beaujolais. And to maintain that value, people need to make industry folks believe and perpetuate its reputation for being valuable. This is the genesis of our Performative Swirler - where, in conjunction with selling the wine’s value, he’s also selling his own value to authenticate his opinion.

Taste is inherently subjective.

Always.

Nothing can taste objectively good or bad - it’s always linked to our experience and environment and culture and mood and weather and if-we-had-a-fight-with-our-partner-this-morning (infinity etc).

If I taste an orange wine and taste candied ginger - and you taste the same wine and you taste ass - we are both equally correct.

If you like the taste of Jagermeister and its 56 herbs and spices, that’s awesome - LOVE that for you. If I taste Jagermeister, it tastes like shame and pretending to like beer at my first boy/girl party. Both are equally valid assessments of taste.

Regrettably, Australian wine consumers have been uniquely subjugated, our tastes suppressed and moulded to fit Big Industry. It’s Parkeristion of Australian wine in the 80s. It’s Tall Poppy Syndrome. It’s our evil Supermarket duolopy. It’s a growing precariat class and a shrinking middle class. It’s the mere-exposure affect. It’s wankery and classism as a selling technique.

The result: it’s disappointing love child, the Performative Swirler.

Wine is remarkably romantic and loveable. It’s an agricultural product made by human hands, that involves thoughtful farming and environmental practices, passion, creativity, culture, heritage and hard work - which is expressed with an astonishing degree of variability and variety - and will give you a nice, warm buzz. It’s equally sad that people use it as a cultural measure stick, insufferably over-intellectualised to a point that denies people social access to a product that arguably is the essence of humanity and community, an unrivalled social lubricant.

If you’re holding a wine glass and feel your wrist loosen, stawp. There this a way to enjoy wine and be curious AND not be a twat.

Our simple homemade recipe for enjoying wine:

1. Learn the winemaker's name. The human, the face. Learn to love the wine and the winemaker’s story. Go meet them at a local tasting or at their cellar door. It’s more romantique!

2. When asked to describe a wine, start with ‘it’s yummy, I love it’. If you have the technical wine knowledge to know why you like the wine, wow that's cool, but keep it on the inside, save the jargon for your trade tasting. Give people space to agree with you or express their own opinion.

3. Stop buying wine from supermarket-owned chains. They are irredeemably evil corporations that bully grape growers, small wine producers and independent wine retailers. They’re the reason ‘natural wine’ is in quotation markers. Industrialised, frankensteined wine is the blip in wine history - they’ve just peddled it as the norm, for enormous profits.

4. Buy a wine you can’t pronounce. Drink it, google it. Learn how to say Gewürztraminer and Assyrtiko.

5. Invest in some anti-swirl technology. Pour your wine into a coffee mug, into a stem-less something with no shape. It’s for your own good.

Dom Garreffa operates Crooked Drinks, a silly little wine store on Smith Street in Collingwood on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung poeple of the Kulin nation.

Picture this.

You are a cocktail bartender working in a lavish open dining-room in an iconic Melbourne CBD venue. You wanted to progress from your previous job, they gave you a chance.

It’s lunch service and your first sitting trickles in. For context, this is your first role as a bartender of this caliber–you’re eager to please, and a little bit out of your depth. You have an ounce of hope to hold onto. You are tired.

You’re dispensing, which means making drinks solely according to a docket. Each docket must take no longer than 7 minutes to reach the table.

The first tables’ drinks get run through the system, the dockets spill out, you’re doing ok. A few more spit out and you’re all of a sudden in the thick of it.

The room is alive with the chatter of guests and the humming of the kitchen behind you. You’re working the next round. Stirring a martini, building a highball, prepping tins to shake.

Ordered chaos.

Someone’s index and middle finger slides between your butt cheeks, over your pants, very close to your anus and wiggles them.

You freeze up and your round comes to a halt.

What plays out from this very action comes a stage of your life full of confusion, unworthiness and self-compromise.

Your whole being pings into alarm and turn quickly, to see it’s the sommelier.

You know it’s wrong but you say nothing. A sense of panic kicks in. You have to dump a part of your round.

10 minutes later, another touch. The dread kicks in.

All you can think about is how cruel it would be if you did that to someone at work. They know I’m gay. How would that make them feel? But then two words appear in your mind’s eye, ‘boys club’.

You tell the assistant bar manager a week later. He takes it nonchalantly.

“He does that to all the boys in the bar”.

Another week goes by and it happens again. The defences kick in.

I stop in my tracks.

“Can you not thanks!”

“Woah woah, this is normal in France. It’s a sign of respect”.

You are hurting.

Fast forward a little while.

You inform the venue manager of what has occurred. A meeting between the sommelier, yourself and the venue manager is arranged.

An apology is given, the seriousness of the situation is realised.

“Do you want to proceed with charges? It’s your call, or it can be an instant dismissal”.

“No”, you say. You are content.

A short while later.

You explain to management that you want to transfer to a floor role in wine, to be out of the bar. A reasonable request.

You tell a couple of workmates what’s gone down, and how you desire to move into a wine role.

You are called for a meeting.

The beverage director, the head sommelier and the bar manager are all sitting in.

The beverage director begins.

“Now, firstly, I’ve heard you’ve been telling people you’re going to join the wine team. This is simply untrue, for now. For starters, you can’t go around telling people things loosely, like “I’m going to be a part of the wine team”. If you want to be a part of the wine team, a certain level of trust has to be instilled. Our discounts and partnerships, details of our guests, what they drink, our margins.

Also, you’ve put your hand up for this role in the bar and now we are hearing you’d like to move to the floor. How can we know that you’re not going to want to move again, and again, if you don’t like that role”.

At this point, you’re in tears. Because seemingly no one at this table knew what had gone down in the bar a few weeks prior.

Or, they didn’t care to acknowledge it.

You resign a day later.

Congratulations. You made it this far.

My intention to write this is not to shit on anyone but rather an exercise in introspection. I’ve done a lot of it particularly around these events. I was listening recently to a podcast called ‘Gay Men Going Deeper’(for which I highly recommend to anyone and everyone). In a lot of their content they talk about minority stress.

Minority stress is the chronic, high-level stress faced by stigmatised minority groups—particularly LGBTQ+ individuals—due to prejudice, discrimination, and systemic inequality. This model explains that unique, social-based stressors, such as harassment or concealing one's identity, cause severe mental health disparities (e.g., anxiety, depression) compared to the general population.

If you ask me as a cisgender, white gay man , ‘do you feel minority stress?’, I would hesitate to say yes. Because it is much less an overall feeling for definition on the word, but rather an hard to actualise wheelhouse of micro-aggressions, stereotyping, trained thought, auto-piloting, and inadequacy all shaped by internalised homophobia spanning your life. Rough, huh.

Because the truth is.

Gay men give into masculinity too much, are the renowned over-achievers, the stubborn perfectionists, the chronic over thinkers, the lone wolves, the beautiful and the mysterious. All because by pure design they grew up and aged in a world that rejected them from the get-go.

The actions of this co-worker from my story earlier, perceived as normal by other men in the bar team compromised my hard work to get where I was, and it fucking hurt. I gave up on myself and my talents too quickly in that instance because of it. It goes without saying that women and femme presenting people face and reckon with the fallout of harassment in the workplace all too much. Forever disappointingly, they make up majority of the statistics

I still try to trick myself that these feelings of guilt around the events come from an inadequacy with Me.

But, the world we occupy is a minefield of complexity. I am gradually evolving. To see the lack of discourse between my managerial team, that bar bros (and all men) still need to keep their hands to themselves, to accept my radiant and radical queerness, to practice safe sex, to be humbled that things sometimes don’t work the way you want it to, to slow down, to love more fiercely, to communicate (although this isn’t always going as planned), and to quietly acknowledge that I am my own best advocate despite the anomaly of my queerness.

As my grandma Phyllis always said “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".

Let’s all give a bit more of a fuck about everything. Internally and externally!

xx

Jordi Yeates (he/him) manages Crooked Drinks, a little wine store on Smith Street in Collingwood on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung poeple of the Kulin nation.

Always was, always will be.

(Suicide Help Line call 1300 651 251)

(Sexual Assault Crisis Line call 1800 806 282)

Extended reading on the impact of sexual harassment in hospitality https://media.unitedworkers.org.au/uploads/2023/04/230331_hospo_submission-sexual-harassment-a4_IM_v1.pdf

Enter Morgane Pavri-Rieme. After releasing her debut ‘Haoma Vins’ rosé, a succulent cabernet rosé washed with riesling skins, I sat down at Clover in Richmond with Morgane to discuss her 2025 release, life experiences and her family’s roots in Zoroastrianism.

Jordi: Firstly, congrats on releasing and selling out of your rosé.

Morgane: Thankyou.

Jordi: Help me understand the name Haoma Vins, where does that originate from and why you felt compelled to use that as the brand name?

Morgane: So, Haoma in the ancient language, Avestan, is the name of a certain plant that the Zoroastrians used to cultivate and extract the juice from to drink before certain ceremonies and prayers. It’s meant to bring you prosperity, good health, good fortune, fertility, all the good stuff really. Trying to find a name for a brand has to be the hardest part of winemaking. Choosing a name that’s not your name is hard, and you know, I was trying to find a way to embody the two cultures where I come from. My mum is Parsi, so Zoroastrian, and my dad is French, hence the Vins.

Jordi: Was that always part of your vision for making wine to include some sort of family element, or did that come after you started making your first wine?

Morgane: Hm, I don’t know. I mean it just came kind of naturally when you’re trying to think of something that’s not your own name – how do I still kind of present myself without using the main identifier?

Jordi: I’m just imagining, as a creative person myself, I always have to overthink things.

Morgane: Oh, yeah!

Jordi: As we do in any sort of field I guess.

Morgane: For hours, my commutes up to the Valley and back, just… thinking about it. Every combination of names, words, it’s draining.

Jordi: So what exactly is Zoroastrianism and where did it come from?

Morgane: Zoroastrianism is one of the first monotheistic religions originating in Persia. But during the Arab Conquests of Persia in the Middle Ages around the 10th century, Zoroastrians had to convert, die or flee. You had a mass exodus where some Zoroastrians ended up in Gujarat, India where they were allowed to settle as long as they adopted the local language and dress. This ethnoreligious minority are referred to as Parsis.

Jordi: And did the diaspora change over time or did people just stay? Obviously they moved from India around the world?

Morgane: The biggest Parsi community is in Mumbai, but there are some all over the world, including Hong Kong which is where my mum is from.

Jordi: I must say after we met and I tasted your delicious rosé, and I asked about your wine label, Zoroastrianism was unknown to me at all. I found it interesting that you brought Freddie Mercury into the picture as he was Zoroastrian. That was kind of a hook for me, as I’m a musician, I’m into his music. That really stuck to me. That night I went into a wikipedia hole on the whole thing. Am I illiterate of the religions of the world or is it quite niche?

Morgane: It’s quite niche. I don’t think a lot of people would be aware of it existing. But its influence can be seen in all the big monotheistic religions, so most people would find the concepts and structures of Zoroastrianism quite familiar.

Jordi: Such a weird anecdote but I remember in 2001, when I was seven-ish, watching that Simpsons episode where Lisa becomes a Buddhist. I remember specifically being filled with a sense of awe and wonder at having the autonomy to do that - that seemed cool you know. Now it feels like people have fallen out of love with spirituality full stop, maybe apart from glancing over a Jay Shetty book. And I feel like we’ve snuffed out the essence of the spiritual, as a fullness.

Does Zoroastrianism inform your spirituality now?

Morgane: I grew up with ‘good words, good thoughts, good deeds’, my grandma was quite religious, she would recite her prayers every day at 4 o’clock. I wouldn’t say I’m particularly spiritual but I do like how religion can provide a template on how to go about difficult things, like death and grief for example. What prayers have to be recited, how to prepare the body, what foods to eat etc.

Jordi: I’m pretty adamant that for people our age or younger it’s their Co-Star that’s driving a lot of spiritual intention when they start their day.

Morgane: We’re becoming more and more individualistic whereas religion kind of calls for collectivism.

Jordi: Totally, I mean we’re kinda collectivist in the sense that astrology is huge, and that people feel compelled by it for their own agendas. The community and the writing sets the pretence for our individual interpretations.

Morgane: I think we like the idea of having some other beings having some kind of say in what’s going on in our life. If someone’s having a terrible time, they can just go ‘oh that makes sense, my Saturn is in return.’

Jordi: Do you think it’s a good thing that people can look at a Co-Star and get a sense of meaning out of it, or purpose?

Morgane: I think if it comforts people, definitely. I think everything in moderation. When I worked in hospo I remember people would come in on first dates, and straight of the bat someone would be like ‘what’s your star sign? What time were you born?’, you know. Don’t meet someone with all these preconceived ideas of them based on the times of their birth. Give them a shot! But in saying that if it brings comfort in other parts of their life and security I guess, then why not?

Jordi: Ok we should probably get into wine now, haha. Tell me a little bit about the journey to releasing your wine. Is it the first one you’ve ever released?

Morgane: First one, yes, that I’ve ever made. I had been wanting to play around with grapes for a while. Obviously when you’re making wine for other people, there’s definitely challenges, but also you’ve got ample help because the head winemaker knows the way they want the wine to turn out, or they’ve worked with a parcel for so long that they know how it’ll usually behave during fermentation and beyond. So you’ve always had to follow instructions. Then, to be able to get a little bit of fruit and fuck around with it and actually be responsible for it is a completely different mindset. Ideally I want to grow my own grapes one day, but that will come later. So, I just got some Cabernet, because I love Cabernet - make Cabernet great again! But also because it’s not as expensive as other varieties around the Yarra. I really like a more tannic, textural kind of rosé, so I decided to give it a shot with cabernet.

Jordi: I mean with the cabernet as the grounding point, how did you decide, you know, that it was going to be a rose hands down? And especially with seasoning it with riesling skins. How does that come about? Were you fidgeting with it and you’re like, ooh does this need that? Is there something amiss here?

Morgane: Again, I’m buying such a small amount, it got picked to be made into red wine, so it came in riper than you would for a normal rose. I pressed it directly off skins, no maceration, and tasting it, it really needed something to hold it up, some kind of structure. How can I build some kind of structure into the wine? Right. Obviously at Mac Forbes we do make a lot of riesling, and we’d pressed it the day before. So I asked if I could steal some of the skins. I just threw a couple of buckets in and tasted it everyday until it was at a point that I was happy with.

Jordi: Well it sold really fast. And then you sold out so quick! I was like fuck yeah! What else do I need to ask you? Ah yes.

What was your first ever ‘Aha’ moment when you were getting into wine culture. When did working with wine people and eventually making your own wine become apparent to you?

Morgane: My first ever ‘aha’ moment was WSET 2. J

ordi: Same *chuckles*.

Morgane: And we had a sweet Alsatian gewurz.

Jordi: Ah yep, was it Rosacker? Mader?

Morgane: It was probably Mader. I had just learned about writing tasting notes. Every time I smelled it and tasted it I saw something new in it. I was blown away with all the things you could write about one little glass. In wine production, I think it was my first full vintage working these crazy hours. But you just wake up every morning like it’s an addiction. You’re just so ready to get out of bed and attack the day even though your hands and your whole body is so heavy and sore. It’s this insane giddiness. It’s the best. You’re also having big dinners and drinking things with people who care as much as you do. You wake up, you’re a little bit hungover, and you’re like ‘ fuck yes! I can’t believe I get to do this.

Jordi: That word giddy. Such a weird thought, but I just thought about when you get your first car. You wake up in the morning and you’re excited to make it yours and take it out. The way you described the process of making your wine kinda made me think of that.

Morgane: Yeah, it’s your baby! My first car was a Kia rio and I was so excited. And then it starts fucking up in some way and you’re like, what are you doing?

Jordi: Totally! It’s like a by-gone era where you polish it, vacuum it out, change the oil, car freshener - the works. Then the engine light comes on and you’re like farkkkkkk.

Morgane: Yes you really do attach yourself to your wine, it’s a thing, you personify it. It’s actually really interesting.

Jordi: I realise you were recently overseas. Looked fab from what I saw on Insta. Where did you go, what was your favourite bite and bott?

Morgane: So I went to France to see my family, my dad is in Montpellier, and my grandparents are in the Jura, more the cheese making Jura than the wine making part. But when I landed I went straight to the Loire Valley to see an old colleague that worked with us at Mac Forbes last year. He’d recently started his own winery, found this old winery with cellars carved into limestone, it’s insanely beautiful. He’s just doing Chenin so that was very cool to see his first wine in barrel, and to be on a similar journey of making our own wines.

Jordi: And favourite gastronomic moment?

Morgane: My grandfather was a cheesemaker and used to make Comte. He sold his caves to a guy who started curing ham in them. I finally got to taste some of that ham, that felt really special.

Jordi: Repurposing a space but under the same umbrella of enjoyment.

Morgane: Absolutely. Just to know where that pig came from, where it was cured as I was eating it.

Jordi: Thankyou for sharing that.

Just to wrap this all up, I just wanna acknowledge the first time we met you just rocked up in the shop, holding your rose by the neck, no fancy wine case, no tech sheets, you just came as you were.

Morgane: Did I just rock up? We had an appointment!

Jordi: We did! But just the way you showed up was memorable and honest. I think it was notable because as we know the wine industry has inclinations to be very structured. I just remember you swanning past the shop window and I was like ‘Fuck. Yes!’. Thanks so much for chatting with me.

Morgane: No, thankyou for having me!

You can keep up with Morgane’s vinous life on instgram @morganeptr.

#drinklouder

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