Actor-sommelier Eduardo Porto Carreiro '02 offers straight talk (and a few wisecracks) about wine
Actor-sommelier Eduardo Porto Carreiro '02 offers straight talk (and a few wisecracks) about wine
A suave, charismatic man and a spirited, blue-eyed blonde fill the screen. He looks at her suggestively. "So, are you going to spit or swallow?" he asks. The innuendo isn't exactly subtle; it sounds like a script from B-grade porno. But there's something else afoot here. Eduardo Porto Carreiro '02 is a sommelier; Amy Christine is a vintner. They're talking about wine.
Christine and Porto Carreiro, friends who met on the Los Angeles wine scene, are co-hosts of an Internet-based show, "Drink This TV," which aims to change the way consumers think about the grape. Each episode is filled with irreverent humor and commentary that doesn't take itself, or its subject matter, too seriously. Christine is billed as the show's "wine nerd," Porto Carreiro as the "wine snob." In the Spit or Swallow segments, they taste flights of similar wines, offer opinions, and ultimately decide if it's good enough to swallow—or bad enough to spit out.
They were chosen, in part, for their divergent palates. They may offer up vastly different scores on the same bottle or give a wine the same rating while coming to opposite conclusions as to whether to spit or swallow. Meanwhile, interwoven with the humor is some genuinely practical information. "It's fun and interactive," says Stephen Mutkoski '67, PhD '76, the Banfi Professor of Wine Education in the Hotel school. "Anything that helps people learn more about wine is a plus in my book."
Mutkoski notes that over the last ten years, wineries have stepped up their Internet game with "excellent visuals, winemaker tasting notes, third-party ratings, and food suggestions." Drink ThisTV.com—which went live in early 2009 and is sponsored by liquor super-store BevMo—aims to take things a step further, with a professionally produced show that "broadcasts" on its own web-site. It isn't the first such show to tackle wine. But its combination of "he said, she said" banter and its balance of humor with advice seem to have struck a chord with viewers, as evidenced by praise in the San Francisco Examiner and Edible Los Angeles magazine. (The latter said it "has the potential to be something like the 'Daily Show' of wine TV—entertaining and informative, with a little something for everybody.")
Take, for example, a segment about merlot. Christine assesses the nose of one particularly undistinguished sample. "This wine smells like an octogenarian," she offers. Porto Carreiro pauses for a moment, looking at her quizzically before firing back, "How many eighty-year-olds do you smell in a day?" Christine clarifies: "It smells a little dusty." But such shtick can take the show only so far; ultimately, Porto Carreiro's knowledge is more important. His passion dates from his childhood in Rio de Janeiro, where wine on the dinner table was part of family culture. On the Hill, Porto Carreiro—along with 700 of his classmates and more than 30,000 Cornell-ians over the years—took Mutkoski's ever-popular Intro to Wines course.
Then, like so many aspiring actors, he headed west to break into Hollywood. To pay the bills while auditioning, he took a job as a wine clerk at Greenblatt's Deli, eventually working his way up to wine director at Grace, a posh L.A. restaurant. In his words, it was "a crazy coup" to become its sommelier at age twenty-three. It also unleashed a latent desire. "I thought that maybe one day I'd retire and start my own vineyard—crush grapes, get my hands dirty," he says. But then he began to wonder, "What if I could start earlier rather than later?"
Porto Carreiro cut a check for his life savings (which was matched by childhood friend Ben Feldman, a working actor in Hollywood) and Angelica Cellars was born. Using syrah grapes sourced from White Hawk Vineyard on California's central coast and making the wine at a coop in Northern California, they released their first vintage—2005—in fall 2007. This fall, fifty cases of the 2007 will hit the market; the small label has attracted a loyal word-of-mouth following, Porto Carreiro says.
But he hasn't entirely walked away from acting; he recently appeared in an independent film (Murderabilia, about a collector of serial killer memorabilia) and a play (American Guilt, a one-act about young adult angst), as well as on the vocal track of a forthcoming iPhone travel app. Meanwhile, his theatrical experience has come in handy on "Drink This TV"; he's comfortable in front of the camera and knows how to relate to an audience. (Christine, who also started out as an actor, is the winemaker for Black Sheep Finds in Lompoc, California.) "Even in this economy, people are still drinking wine," he says. "It's just a matter of finding cool and exciting wines that are a great value. It's about opening people's eyes to forgotten regions or less popular varietals, which tend to be easier on the wallet."
Each Spit or Swallow segment starts with Porto Carreiro and Christine tasting fifty or so wines that they then narrow down to five or six; in all, about five hours of behind-the-scenes work and twenty minutes of filming are condensed into a seven-to-twelve-minute bit. New segments are in the offing, including Whine of the Week (for example, about people who complain about sulfite headaches) and Kittens versus Cougars (about young versus old vintages). "To me, the best wines are the most honest," Porto Carreiro says. "For my palate, I'll take a northern Rhone syrah—when you smell one, it is unmistakable. And it just tastes darned good."
— Peter Bronski '01
{vimeo}4436588{/vimeo}
Spit or Swallow from the Creator (7:00)