Welcome. Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly. We continue our stay in Rome, Italy, where they have a museum dedicated entirely to pasta. It starts with the invention of dried pasta, which, of course, allowed it to be stored indefinitely and shipped all over the world. And one of the best places to get pasta, Ramessa. Rochelle. Right. Lindsey.

Exactly, exactly.

Visually, what do we see when we walk in the store? Are we opening the door and we get the bell on the top of the door dinging?

We love to call the restaurant. We say roscoelizing. It's easier to say it in Italian, but like rocheolizing, basically, which is taking. The whole room is covered from floor to ceiling, more or less, with different wines, foods, our gastronomy, extra virgin olive oils, semi dried cherry tomatoes, all different jars, tuna, all sorts of possible things you can imagine to eat and drink that kind of just kind of hug you around the space when you walk in, both at Salumedir shole and at Remese. That's kind of always been the concept is not having kind of like, you know, decor, such as, like, pictures. Well, actually, we have even those two because we have a. The mother of Alessandra's son is an artist, and she has done some of our superhero paintings. So we have a fat Batman who's going into it. We have drunk Spider man, who had too much crude to drink and got tangled up in his own web instead of saving the world. So there's a variety of collection of superhero prints that we have on the wall. So actually, we just kind of COVID you from floor dealing with creativity and delicious foods and wines, et cetera.

Being one of the co founders, I imagine that you're qualified to do pretty much everything, but what's a typical day like for you?

I mainly run the wine and food tasting dinner at this point, but I also do a lot of other type of digital work. I manage the Richole wine Club, which is more, obviously, a lot of more computer work than it is from being physically in the restaurant. We go and travel quite often, so we're. I mean, I don't know how many times per year we're traveling throughout Italy, going to visit winemakers to select new wines for the wine. Also, because all the wines in our wine club get a video of the producer. Every bottle has a QR code on the back. That was an initiative I implemented during COVID because I became obsessed with QR codes so that people could, while they're drinking the bottle, just scan the QR code and have direct access to see where the wine was made, see the winemaker who made it. Learn a little bit about wine. They also can know which grape it is, how to pair it, when to drink it, by the whole story of how the wine was made. Try to make that as easy as possible for someone to access when they're drinking the wine, instead of going to a website or getting out a brochure that we put in box.

Looking at the website, the picture looks like the main dining room. It is filled with wine from floor to ceiling, all sides. I bet you know every single one of those, don't you?

Every single one. Maybe not, because we are four people that choose wines, and one of our colleagues is. He loves natural wine, so he sometimes finds these little, little tiny producers, some of them his friends and people that we get connected to. And so some of those bottles, Gaetano is more the master of, but, yeah, more or less the rest of them. I mean, we have, I don't know how many bottles between Richoli, probably some 60,000 bottles in our cellars, so it's hard to know all of them.

Now, when you say natural wine, is that a category? It's a category that's very. The French are trying to put some parameters around it, but it's a term that's used a bit as people please. So there's not really a proper definition around what makes a natural wine. As some people would like to say, a natural wine is vinegar. A natural wine wouldn't stop at wine. It would keep turning if you just let it be, and no one stopped and intervened in the process, it would turn into vinegar on its own. So, anyways. But the general concept between natural wine is that nothing is added in and nothing is taken out. So the wine is made just to be a pure, true expression of the terroir of the region. And that is it. And those are the main words. We don't use the word natural wine so much at Rimasa, we use the word artisanal wine, like our wines are all made from small producers. In general, yes, we have the big stuff for when people come in and want to do a high end tasting, like Sasicaya and ornalaya and all the that we like to joke about. But basically, more of our 90% of our wines are from small producers that manage their own. We don't even have to use the word estate farm, because all of our producers just farm on their own property. But they usually make about, I don't know, 20,000 to 50,000 bottles maximum per year. Some of them even less. And those are the wines that you don't have to worry that they're adding in all the additives because they don't mind if one bottle is different from the other. It's when you have the wines, obviously, that are being made in the 10 million, 20 million, 200 million per year that every single bottle has to taste the same. Those wines are the ones that have to be manipulated to always be giving civic taste to the mass market. The best five minute wine podcast. Don't forget my favorite part. Please, please like and follow.