Totally Uncorked

By Joel Stein

I want to hear crips talking about opera, strippers on Renaissance paintings, UFC champions on Finnegans Wake. And I want to hear a 31-year-old guy from New Jersey with a New York Jets spit bucket give his take on wines. Strangely, I'm not alone on that last one. Gary Vaynerchuk's daily 15-min. video blog has 25,000 viewers who click onto his site each day to hear him describe--as he did a few weeks ago--a New World--style Spanish wine as "not obnoxiously over the top and fake as many of these types of wines are. Instead of a full face-lift and boob job and suction and all of that, maybe this just got a nose job."

Vaynerchuk may be the best wine salesman in the country, but he's even more interested in selling himself. A kid who franchised lemonade stands when he was just 8, he built his Russian-immigrant dad's New Jersey liquor store into a business that rings up $50 million a year in in-store and online sales after reading Wine Spectator and figuring out that some people collect wines just like he collected baseball cards. In 1994, when the magazine named Caymus Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon the wine of the year, he persuaded his dad to let him buy a whole mess of it and sell it at cost. "I'm beating everyone else by 40%," he recalls. "Because everybody else wants to buy a boat. I want to be famous." He gambled on a full-page ad in the New York Times, changed the name of the store to Wine Library and taught himself enough about wine to impress the resulting flood of customers. "I was 19, but I looked like I was 11. It became a circus act because people wanted to hear me talk about Burgundy."

But you can get only so much attention in a store in Springfield, N.J. "I can't write, so I missed the whole blog thing, and I was pissed," he says. So when he saw Andy Samberg's Saturday Night Live video Lazy Sunday explode on YouTube, he got himself a video camera and started winelibrarytv.com Few people look quite so excited to be talking to a camera. He's more hyper than Emeril, more cheerful than Rachael Ray, more street than Bobby Flay and cockier than all of them combined. "Do I think I have that much charisma? I think I have more. I know I could be the host of SportsCenter in two years if I changed my show today to sports," he says.

Vaynerchuk has mastered all the Food Network tricks. He curls his palms to describe the "oak monster" he finds in so many barrel-aged American Chardonnays. He uses catchphrases like "pop, pop, pop" to describe the buttery-popcorn taste of some wines; overly sweet Shirazes are "RWC" (red-wine cocktails). He makes a rumbling sound effect when wines "bring the thunder." But some stunts are uniquely his own. He throws corks at the camera, spills wine as he shoves the glass at the camera to show the color and yells at "lurkers" who don't post comments on his site. He aggressively plays to the CKC (college-kid crew). In one episode, to teach viewers to train their palate, he took off his sweaty sock and sucked on it to demonstrate what he means by earthy Old World--red notes.

Only on the Web could Vaynerchuk review wine, not just because he describes one as the "kind of bottle you want to take on your date and hope she consumes the entire thing, and then it gets interesting" but also because he's trying to sell wine on the very same website where he's rating it--which, despite his deep knowledge and spot-on nose, reduces his trustworthiness. But, Vaynerchuk says, what people seek from him isn't individual reviews but lessons in how to enjoy wine. "There's always a wine bully. The one person who did read the Wine Spectator, who tells you what to drink and why the '97 is better than the '98. I want to punch the wine bully in the face," he says. "I want to make sure this generation of wine drinkers isn't elitist and snotty. I want it to be about family and bringing people together."

As cheesy as that sounds, he sells me. We're sitting in a restaurant in San Francisco, drinking an Austrian white that "feels like it's taking our tongue apart with a switchblade," but in a good way, and he's talking faster than I can write, touching my knee and dropping in my first name at key points, and before you know it, I want to drink whites at room temperature so I can really taste them, and hell, yes, I want to get my mom to try something other than Yellow Tail, and goddam, I do want to break up these stupid cliques of Pinot Grigio chicks and Pinot Noir snobs and Chardonnay old ladies. But mostly I just want to hang out with Gary Vaynerchuk. Which is all he was going for.