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Véronique Rivest

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2016-07-24
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2016-07-24
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  1. “Our nose is like a muscle. It's one of our most amazing sense we have. And yet it's the one we use the least. We're so dependent on our eyes that we completely underuse our nose. We think. We all can smell. We know we can smell. We think we're good at, oh yeah, I know what coffee smells like. I know what basil smells like. But try smelling those things blind. Not knowing what it is. And you'll be surprised at how very common smells everyday smells people won't recognize once you're blindfolded because we're not used to developing our smell memory. And that's anybody can do it. It's just an exercise. I've been doing it my whole life and I still do it. I'm far from being. How do you do it?”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “We finally get to taste. Go ahead, taste. So, and the nose taste. So, on the nose, we're looking for aromatics, we're looking for oak influence, we're looking for minerality in the aromatics. What kind? Is it more fruit? Is it floral? Is it spicy? Is there a lot of non-fruit aromas or is it just a big fruit bomb?”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Exactly, the more ordinarian. And so they actually pulled out these guys. They don't call their wise kava. That's why I said, so it's made in Catalonia and Pinedes in the region. They're actually in the heart of the Kava production region with cava grapes, but they pulled out of the Appalachian. They don't call their wines cava because they don't want to be associated with a bran that also has a lot of really low quality products. Right. So that's the long story on these guys, Ramento. So they now call their wines Conca de Rio Danoya, which is actually a geographical designation. It's the land where they are, where they grow their grapes and make the wines.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Well, you have a certain Tayud du Sangs, you know, a certain protocol to follow in terms of elaboration. The Greeks are allowed to use, you have to make it a metrancienne, right? The whole elaboration is all, but still it wasn't sufficient to ensure the level of quality they wanted for the product. And there's a lot of really low quality CABA produced. So the standards of the Appalachian are not sufficient to.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Higher because they thought there was too much low quality, a lot of really cheap supermarket wines. Anybody can just live.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So, a lot of really good affordable sparkling wines are made under that denomination, and they work with local grape varieties, maccabeo and varelada, three white grapes. There's a few others also, but those are the three main grapes used for cava. So it's not champagne-like it. It's not a champagne lookalike. They're using different grapes. It is made, though, in the traditional method. We're not supposed to say champagne method anymore. But so in the same way as champagne is made, which is considered the best production method for giving the better quality sparkling wines. But kava is a huge appellation with millions and millions of bottles made. And this produces a producer I like a lot called Rapentos. And they've been working really hard to try and get the Standards for CAVA”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “So, this is, I know what it is, right? So it's a kava. Well, it's not a kava, but it's from that region in Spain where we make kava is a big, big, big industry.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And yet, it's not that different from food, right? We're dealing with taste, so there's obviously a lot of subjective personal preferences, but it's, you know, first, okay, do you like it or not? Why do you like it? Okay, yes, the vocabulary is not there, but like for not everybody has a chef's vocabulary for food either, right? And you develop that as you go, but you have to start to jump in to say what you think. It's by expressing your thoughts and tasting with others that can help you kind of, you know, put the right words on what you're thinking. That you'll get there.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “And the other thing is people are so afraid to say when you ask them, okay, what are you smelling? Everybody is so there's been so much intimidation throughout the years with wine that people feel incompetent. I always say, if I give you a plate of food, I give you a dish and most people will say if they like it or if they don't. And if you ask them why, they'll probably be able to say why they like it or they don't. Give them a glass of wine and ask them their opinion. They're totally scared.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “So, when we're smelling it, you look at the intensity, sparkling wines are usually unless it's made with a naromatic variety, are usually more discrete. They're not super big on the nose, right? They don't jump out of the glass at you. There's always a certain finesse in the sparkling wines.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “A few sparkling wines, specialty sparkling wines made in certain countries that have their own grapes, and then they're the ones that are made according to the champagne model, which are made in Champagne, but all over the world, in Canada and the United States and Germany everywhere. So at least we're not dealing with 2,000 grape varieties. Usually when we're dealing with sparkling wines, right? Right now, we're taking it down somewhere. So something we're going to look at when we're doing a sparkling wine is from the aromas and the taste and the quality of the bubbles, trying to define is it a wine that's been made in the champagne tradition or is it something else?”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “It doesn't have any faults. And then we're looking at intensity. The intensity of the aromatics, because some grapes are much more aromatic than others. There's some highly aromatic grape varieties like Gibralstrominer, Musca, Vionier. So when you have a very intensely aromatic wine, already you've eliminated a whole bunch of others. Right. You know, it's going to be. In sparking wines, there's usually a limited number of grapes that are used to make sparkling wines worldwide. There's probably lots and there's always somebody somewhere doing something weird with an unheard of grape variety. But a lot of sparkling wines are either made with the champagne grapes. So I'll sharing e pinal noir mostly. Then you have the wines of, the sparkling wines of Spain, the cavas, which have their own grape varieties. Prosecco in Italy. So there's these pockets of”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I don't know why. Any wine can be corked. Pork can be corked. Sparkling wine can be corked. But there's this, every time I have a cork, sparkling wine, people so often, oh, I didn't know sparkling wine could be corked. Yeah, of course. Any wine. Anything that's closed with a cork, a natural cork closure can be cork. So the wine is clean.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Can vary, it's not always the same. And see, we have a sparkling wine. A lot of people, I don't know why, think sparkling wine cannot be cork.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “By smelling a lot of corged wine in the wine bar I have, every time we stumble or wherever I am, if I'm doing an event and there's lots of people helping, if I have a bottle of corked wine, I always keep it and make people smell it. Because so many people don't know what a cork wine smells like. So people confuse cork and oak. So it's a very distinctive smell, and you just need to smell it a few times to kind of memorize that smell, and then you'll instantly pick it up when it happens. Because it can be very, just a quart of wine can vary tremendously in the intensity of its faults. Some wines are so badly cork you open the bottle and people 10 feet away will smell it. Oh my God, it's corked. Others, there's going to be three of us pouring over the glass. It's not perfectly keen. Something's wrong. Something's off, but it's not so.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “First thing you're going to look at is the one clean. Looking for faults. Are there any faults? Is the wine corked? Is it oxidized? Is there something wrong with it? How do”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “That we swirl it around definitely to aerate it, but as the wine is coming down, you will watch the tears. It's something I didn't pay attention to for many years because you need glass in a perfect state, right? There shouldn't be any residues, soap, there shouldn't be. So it's not the most trustable source of information, but it's something you can look at. Then, of course, so we know it's ros ⁇, we know it's sparkling, that's all we know for now, right? It's a very light hue. Some ros ⁇ s tend to be much darker, so it could be different grape varieties, could be different styles of winemaking, etc.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Combination of sugar, of alcohol, of body, usually the thicker the tears, the slower they are to form and to come down, the more full bodied the wine will be. It could be an alcohol, it could be in sugar, it can be a combination thereof.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “It's lovely, see? I feel like a pro now. So it's got bubbles. Bubbles can also be, it's not necessarily sparkling wine from the amount of bubbles here and there. It's not a lot continuous, but still it's more than if it was wine with just a little bit of CO2 trapped in it. That could also be the case. Think of Vinovere, certain wines, wines that are bottled very young or can be bottled with a little CO2 in them sometime voluntarily to give them a bit more of that freshness of that spritz to it. But this looks like it is a fully sprinkling wine. We can look at the, you know, when people swirl their glass around, when we talk about legs on a wine, so the tears that come down. So when you swirl it around and you see the wine coming down on the inside of the glass, can tell you about viscosity of a wine.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “So, first of all, we're looking at three things eyes, nose, and palate. And the visual examination of a wine is something a lot of people overlook, but it's full of clues to what the wine could possibly be. So we have obviously”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “And the more we know about wine, about the people who make it, the region it comes from, it really adds to the pleasure of tasting.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “You're supposed to enjoy That's the most important thing, and that's what anybody serving you should worry about the most, right? That's it. We're there to make sure people have a good time. So enjoying it is the basic thing. Then you can completely geek out about it, and we love to do that, right? And people are more and more into whine. And I truly believe that pleasure increases with knowledge.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “So, geology, climate questions, winemaking, which is essentially chemistry, all the great varieties of the world, all the wine appellations of the world. So the theory is immensely vast. Nobody will ever know anything, but they can ask us anything. It's all fair game.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Wine and tune matching. It's a huge part of our work, right? So being familiar with not only French cuisine, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Mexican, knowing the great cuisines of this world and being able to do wine and beverages matches, because it's not only wines. Somebody should be familiar with every beverage alcohol, spirits, liquors, peers, sake, as much in terms of blind tasting as production, elaboration, different styles, and pairing. And then the biggest part, the third part, other than tasting and service is theory. We're basically supposed to know everything, and the theory is just so vast and continuously expanding, right? I mean, we're way past the days where there was France and Italy is wine producers, China is the sixth or seventh world's largest producer of wine today. Brazil makes wine, Thailand makes wine. So knowing everything about grape growth,”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Become very, very trendy, a bit like the chefs. There's all this kind of almost rock star status. Celebrity. You would be one of those people, right? I hate that kind of the some of ye's are servers, first and foremost. So somebody who calls themselves the Semede and has never worked in the restaurant business in their life is not really a Semade. He's a server. So wine specialized server. I always tell when I'm training young people that are starting, I say, if you find serving the slightest bit degrading, change business right away. This is not, you should thrive on serving people. That's the basic thing to start. So service is part of the competitions can be anything from how do you serve a no bottle of Bordeaux, how do you open a double magnum of champagne and serve it to how do you deal with difficult guests, right? So it's a lot of tact and diplomacy.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Not the finality, I'd say the analytical tasting. It's analyzing the level of acidity, of sugar, of alcohol, of tannins, being able to qualify the tannins. Are they ripe, unripe? Does it come from a hot year, from a moderate year, from a cool year? What kind of soil type might it come from? Has it seen oak or stainless steel or clay amphoras? If it's been in oak, was it new oak? So these are all things that take years and years of tasting training. And basically blind tasting is deductive reasoning. That's faster. You gather a whole bunch of, yeah. And the tasting, so that's how complex a tasting can be. And the tasting is still just one part of the competition. I'd say competitions are always threefold. There's the tasting, there's obviously service because we are service people, even though the world, the wordge has been”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “And they're trying to do that. And it just blew my mind that So I think that's why people remember that because there is something impressive about it. But what's really important, two things. It's not just a guessing game. There's really, really serious knowledge needed to back up a tasting like that. Oh, of course. First of all, in the tasting as such, you're not going to get that many points from guessing what it is. It's kind of fun. We all love to do it. Right. And it's very showy and flashy. Exactly, right? But the most talented people in this business also learn humility very quickly. And we're the first to recognize that no, it's not easy. No, we don't guess it right every time. People going around bringing, oh, I always get blind tasty. They're usually not very knowable. So the guessing what it is part is fun.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “What's involved in the competition? We could talk hours about just that, but I love talking about it because for so many people, so many competitions are strictly tasting contests. The number of times, and I hate that, but I'm in public events and I have people walk up to me and stick a glass under my nose and say, what's that? Now we say, I'm not a circus animal, you know? So I guess it's what people remember the most because it's the most impressive. People are always very impressed by somebody who does a blind tasting and says, okay, this is a penal mauf in burgundy from such village from that year. I remember watching.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “But in this industry, I think there's probably still a lot, and more so in North America, because we're not as, you know, it's not as all compartmented into strict academic programs.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Oh, there's two big questions. So, how the path has evolved? I mean, they're still in. But it's much more recent that we have officials, some NAA training in schools in North America. We see it now more and more. I think we've had it again in Quebec for a certain time because of our links with France, because of many ways we have more resemblances. It's slowly starting. I'd say in the last 10 or 20 years, we've seen more official programs for training seminars in North America. But there's also a lot still to be, well, I was going to say like every other train, no, I hope there's not a lot of surgeons that learn, you know, that are self-taught.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Again, as I said, curiosity is something that really defines me, and so I would read everything. It's just like when I was at the winemaker in France, I was always asking questions about everything. I would read everything I could get my hands on. And so when I came back from France, I was in 94, went back to the restaurant industry, got a job also at the LCBO, started working, quickly, became a product consultant. And I saw an ad go by for some Lee competition. And I thought, huh, I had just been back six months in the country. And I thought, what better way to find out who's who, who, who, who, who, who, who's doing what? What's going on? I had been away for so long and I had heard great things about the restaurant and the Samagi scene in Quebec, but was disconnected from it all. And so I signed up for that competition. I thought, you know, if I'm going to go, I might as well do it, right? There were 60 people doing the semi-finals and six finalists.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “And when I came back, I was working in restaurants in France. I came back here. I went directly to restaurants. It was kind of my comfort zone and just kept evolving in restaurants. I think that it's an industry I really liked and that I felt comfortable in and I felt good in. And it's the first time I didn't even know what a CMD competition was. I didn't give myself the title of Samarie and I am. I mean, even though I took every class I could during my whole life, I followed every class I could on wine, but at the base I'm self-taught.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “That's a good question. Again, there's such a kind of a seamless flow to everything I did that there's no real defining moment. I think it all kind of falls together. But after those seven years in France, when I came back to Canada, I was seriously, the obvious choice was a restaurant job because, again, the good thing about it is that there's always work when you work in the restaurant industry, right? So it was an easy thing to fall back onto. But I was starting to think, okay, maybe I could become a wine buyer for the SAQ or the LCBO. I didn't know how things worked back then. It's not as simple as that. I started thinking of wine as more of a possible career.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Anything, but I really, really appreciated the food and wine culture. And being in Alsace, since where I was for seven years, one of the best places to eat and drink. It was, I really felt in my element. I just loved being around the winemakers. When I was working at this winery, I was constantly, you know, had my nose into the winemaker's lab asking everybody questions down the cellar, asking really, really curious.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “No, it really fed it in a way, I guess. I always thought I was a citizen of the world, my mom's German, my father's French Canadian. We've always traveled a lot as kids at something my parents instilled in all of us. My brothers are still great travelers. And I thought I had no particular attachments to Canada. And it takes that. You have to live elsewhere to realize how good you have it at home, right? And it did, that time I spent. So there was always this opening onto the world and European culture in particular. So it's not as if it was something new. It felt kind of natural. And in Quebec there is this strong links, cultural links to France. So it wasn't like a big shock.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Sounds cool, you know, and I had been in restaurants for a while. I basically fell in love with the restaurant industry with the service industry, the restaurant industry as a whole, and with wine and food. But every time I say that, I'm like, who wouldn't, right? So it's really just all these combination of jobs I held, of people I met, and all of a sudden I kind of realized, okay, this could actually become A real job. I wasn't very glorious in my family when I wanted to be a waitress. Today it's well seen. They're kind of happy about it, but there's no illumination. It just kind of happened.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “How many hours do we have? You know what? I never had a real, it's not as if I woke up one day and I decided I wanted to become a Semidier. It's really something that happens through different jobs, experiences, trips, people I met. I actually started working in the restaurant industry at about 16 years old as a student job and my studies have been completely non-wine related. I did a BA in modern literature and languages with studying languages and then an MBA in international trade but all that time I was working in restaurants. I ended up going to France for a year of study turned into a seven year stay and looking for a job there I found a job with a winemaker and I thought well.”

    2016-07-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #12 Véronique Rivest: Wine Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT