By the way ‘woman in a Belgian bar’? Is there something special about Belgian bars that Americans know but we Belgians don’t?

Thanks for trying my wine, Gary! Truth be told, we lucked out with it. Stayed in Montepulciano and happened to stop at the Poliziano winery for a tasting and picked up some wine to be shipped backed.

Going to pop the Asinone for our 5th anniversary. 🙂 Glad you liked it, you can find it on some wine lists around here but it’s still relatively hard to find.

I like every vanyiac except, Brandon, Anti, Coupe, Jen, Ottawa B, and Kahuna oh but I love Wine Lush like an mentally unsound sister.

I’m sorry Gary for all the people that complained about what you did with putting up the exclusive up on Facebook. I know that you put your heart and soul into this and ask for very little in return a comment and friend you up. That is not too much to ask I have been a “Lurker” for a few months and I just needed to come out after all of this and say I am sorry for all those ungrateful people out there that have to complain to you about a video that they get for FREE. I love the show and you have opened my eyes to a whole new world. I was not a wine drinker before but the is changing. Thank you for everything you give to the wine world.

How do I get the rest of the Mollydooker review. I joined facebook as instructed, but no links. I am a new viewer and enjoy the reviews very much. Although I have trouble with the video playback most of the time, I do manage to get most of them…….Webpage is very hard to navigate for someone not familiar with the jargon.

QOTD: It’s pretty cool. Who would have imagined it 18 months ago?

Since you mentioned third grade on garyissorry.com, just want to know: were you the class clown?

Can’t blame you for being pissed. You give an aweful lot to us. It is so easy to take it for granted. THANK YOU. I really like these viewer request episodes.
Please do them more often.

Brilliant!
I went on the scavenger hunt and laughed my butt off!!!
I love what your doing with the wine world and I tell everyone about this show, because it is exactly what we need to make this a healthy and exciting adventure into wine.
I know it’s gotta be hard on you sometimes, but man you make it soooo much fun!
Thank you Thank You Thank You for everything you do.
Remember, for every pissed off reply you get, there are 1000’s of people happy with what you are doing.
Thanks Gary,
Joe

Great Great show.. But not in my price range, and probably other Vayniacs too.
Apparently the people on your staff really don’t know what were all looking for in value. I’m a little disappointed about that.

Though the wines sound like they would be great to drink!

MB

Just like Ryan D, I was at Poliziano in Montepulciano for the 04 harvest and picked up some of the 2000. I haven’t had any yet, but I didn taste it at the winery. Fabulous. Great to see that you liked it too!!

Hey Gary
1st – Great Friday on the couch, although I watched it at 7am on Saturday with my wife, my morning coffee, in my pre gym, blog reading ritual. haha Both of those reds sound phenomenal, DEFINITELY not in my everyday drinker price, but a special weekend wine. ALso the late harvest Chenin, sounds rocking. We are planning a desert wine and port party, because we hate to open a bottle of desert wine for just us, it is so hard to get through even the 375ml bottles for 2 people after dinner and a already 1 bottle of wine. That said 30+ bigidee bones for a 750ml bottle of what sounds to be a damn good desert wine sounds good to me, it will definitely make the list at our party. (whenever we plan it that is)

2nd – I would like to say as a loyal Vayniac for about 140 episodes now, how ridiculous I think it is that people are criticizing you about your show. IT IS FREE!! They don’t have to watch if they don’t want to, they don’t have to do the social network stuff if they don’t want to, but it IS GREAT, I mean GREAT that you are reaching out to those communities, younger wine drinkers. I personally am not a huge fan of the myspace/facebook sites, although I have been on corkd for a while because it revolves around wine. I did in fact sign up to see the bonus footage, because I wanted to, and took the 30 seconds to sign up for facebook. I even told my friends who are on facebook to friend me up and then check out the bonus footage after I told them again to start watching you even though they are not fanatical about wine like me, because I told them that is the best part, you don’t have to be. It is just plain funny and entertaining, if you love wine, that is just a bonus.
Also, I loved the treasure hunt web search you did. How did you keep a straight face for “snooty Gary”?

Gary, my wife (the infamous lurker) and I would like to say, PLEASE DON’T CHANGE A THING ABOUT YOUR SHOW. We both look forward to watching it after our work day and the occasional Saturday morning. 🙂

Keep ROCKIN’ THE HIZZEE FO SHIZZEE

J DUB

PS, I am sending this to your email also cuz I want you to feel my love twice!

Wow!

I guess Gnerd doesn’t know how to put a knot in his tie 🙂

THAT WAS AWESOME!!!!!

I guess I am one of the 20somethings that shouldnt be drinking wine!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAH THANKS GARY FOR EVERYTHING! Was great…keep up the great work…you are changing the wine world, Im just lucky to have found the site…

I am curious though…what wine does go with cupcakes??? was that the QOTD?
joking…but serious what wine goes with cupcakes? Im thinking a riesling…

Great stuff. I signed up for Facebook for the bonus episode and ended up getting another bonus, seeing what my old high school buddies are up to. Gary, thanks for making it so easy to build a community. I hope the business is reaping the rewards of the purple cow.

I have an apology to make to Gary. I am not a sneezer. I don’t spread the word about wine to others. When I go out, I drink scotch, bourbon, and beer. I am not shouting about wine from the rooftops. I am a quasi lurker because I am not in the community.

I will try to do better.

Great shows, and thank for the wristband!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DamB! That was freaking hilarious! I would actually love to see “wine nerd” visit the show from time to time. I nearly lost it when I saw the “has gary jumped the shark” printed on the screen! I had the volume up a bit loud and a customer walked in while you were giving the number – funny looks!

Dude, your show is fantastic. I’ve been sending more and more customers to watch it. Even though 99% of what you taste isn’t available in Ireland, I send them because of the way you do it and the fun you help bring to wine. I’ve been trying to explain to my customers that wine isn’t snobbish, and I think that watching some wacky American dude play with WWF figures is the perfect way for them to understand.

Every day when I get to work, I look forward to watching your show. It rains a lot here and watching your show is always a good way to get me excited and keep the energy up for all of our customers.

Keep bringing the thunder, man!

And you won’t have jumped the shark until I see a syndicated commercial on Irish TV with a cheesy narration saying, “tonight at 8 on a very special Wine Library TV.”

BTW: I’d love to hear your take on guys like Michel Rolland and the whole Mondovino thing.

This is my 10th episode and they keep getting better! You’ve really inspired me to a) drink wine at all b) taste the hell out of it and c) talk about wine with others.

BTW, your production values are great. Sounds great, looks great, keep kicking butt!

Sir Gary, you are the King of the Internet. We are not worthy. (Cue the Alice Cooper clip from Wayne’s World.)

Great to see you bounce back with an awesome episode.

Ingenious “dot com” treasure hunt and heartfelt passionate pleadings! Glad to see you are not compromising your dreams and ideals because it inspires others to stay true to theirs. I especially appreciate the fact that you encourage everyone to trust their palates and not a critic’s wine score. That is the one thing about the current wine community that is bothersome. The influence of a critic on the wine markets brings to mind sheep following a herder instead of blazing their own trails.

Keep making waves, blazing trails, pushing buttons, becasue change is good!

Sweet Show! Gota Love Fridays.

Thanks for trying the Conn Valley

Sweet Show! Gota Love Fridays.

Thanks for trying the Conn Valley

And you call this a job? I never have that much fun at work!

Gary, we all know you have a great sense of humor (hence you being a JETS fan) and are quite inventive, but this scavenger hunt you put us on was over the top brilliant. I was laughing my ass off. Great job to you and the crew.

Dear Gary,

After the episode on Thursday I must admit that I was somewhat disappointed. While I do enjoy some online social networking and interactions, I generally avoid creating accounts on sites such as Facebook and didn’t want to in order to get the bonus material. That said, it’s your show, you can do what you want, etc. etc. etc. and I wasn’t about to stop watching WLTV because of it.

It’s Saturday morning and I just finished the “scavenger hunt”. Heck, I haven’t even watched Friday’s real episode yet, and even though I really should be packing for a trip that I’m leaving on in less than an hour I felt very, very moved by your assortment of videos and felt that you deserved a comment. (Not that I owed you a comment, but that you deserved one. It’s a big difference in my book.) I’ve run through several different kinds of comments in my head: being generally supportive of you, empathizing with your situation, helping to justify why you should be able to do whatever you want, and so forth.

As I’m sitting here writing, though, I think the best comment I can give you is something else entirely. I’ve been a math teacher for a few years and it’s a relatively thankless job at times. What I find most rewarding about it are those moments every now and then when I can see that I’m actually having an effect on a student, that I’m reaching someone and making some kind of impact on his/her life. Maybe it’s something big, maybe it’s something small, and maybe it’s something that doesn’t have anything to do with math. However, knowing that I’m having some effect on someone in some fashion for some amount of time… Not to be too full of myself, but those are times when I feel like a hero. It maybe only lasts a second or two, but for that second or two I’m on top of the world and no one can touch me.

So here’s my comment to you, Gary: the top five ways that you and WLTV have affected me. I hope that in reading this I can be the person who makes you feel like a hero for one or two seconds today.

#5: Your podcast is a way of inviting you into my part of the world for 20 minutes a day. There are times when I’m all by myself and I feel like I need a bit of company, and I’m glad to have someone as dynamic, entertaining, and fun-loving as yourself to be with me when I need a bit of a human touch.

#4: I’ve gotten my mother a birthday present that she’s absolutely going to love. I just made my first online wine order ever this week (through WL, of course) and bought four different Italian wines for my mother to enjoy with friends. She loves entertaining and sometimes feels that she doesn’t have anything “good” to serve them, and now she will.

#3: You’ve taught me more about wine in my first month of WLTV than I ever thought possible. I’d always viewed wine as being something you need to study, something you have to “be in the know” about, and something that’s completely opaque to anyone who’s not a “wine person”. You opened a door of understanding that I didn’t know existed for someone like me.

#2: I’ve laughed at more of your episodes than I can count. (Well, being a math teacher I probably count, but it’s still up there. 🙂 ) I absolutely adore the show where you throw dimes into the glass to “see if good old American currency, though down against the Euro, can make this wine taste any better.” You can be incredibly hilarious when you want to be and laughter is a highly valuable gift in many ways. If I watched your show for the laughs alone it would be worth it, and even many of your scavenger hunt episodes brought me to tears (in a good laughing-so-hard-I-can’t-help-it way, of course!).

…and last but definitely not least…

#1: In general, in my day to day life, I don’t go around worrying about whether or not I’m macho enough, if I’m a “manly man”, or anything like that. I am who I am, I do what I do, and I’m getting better all the time. Go me.

That said, I have felt completely emasculated walking into the wine section of Safeway, or just going through the doors of BevMo, and I don’t even want to think about walking into an upscale wine shop. I don’t drink alcohol and because of that there’s something unknown and scary about wine. I don’t get wine, I don’t understand wine, and I feel completely incompetent and useless when in the presence of it.

The number of times I’ve wanted to get a friend or family member a bottle of wine, gone to a store that sells wine, and felt completely and utterly paralyzed just staring at the monolithic walls of bottles… It’s downright embarrassing. I hear dozens of voices in my head telling me to give up, that I had no business buying wine, and that I was inevitably going to buy something crappy that everyone would hate. Only one voice said “C’mon, Jared, get it together! They’re just bottles of glorified grape juice that have been rotting in barrels for a couple of years. Are you going to let yourself be paralyzed by rotten grape juice?”

Apparently the answer to that was “yes”, because I did.

I remember the first time I walked into a wine section after I started watching your podcast. Armed with a list of three wines that you rated 91 or higher on WLTV, I strode confidently into my local BevMo with the intention of buying them as gifts. I was going to win the wine game this time! I walked up each aisle over and over, and after four laps I decided to ask for help. An employee ran the wines through their inventory and told me that they didn’t have any of them in stock.

Do you remember being on your first roller coaster as a kid? You climb into the seat, your parent pulls down the safety bar, you listen to some announcer telling you not to stand up because you might get decapitated, and then the first ascent begins. You can hear the clank-clank-clank of the machinery hoisting you up higher and higher and it sounds angry and menacing. You can see the ups and downs (and upside-downs) that looked like fun when you were waiting in line, though now the track seems to have transformed itself into a dark and sinister mass of tentacles. Your stomach does cartwheels, pirouettes, and an entire ballet of nausea as the horizon of the first downhill approaches. You silently curse your parent for pulling down that safety bar because otherwise you could jump out onto that narrow safety scaffolding and save yourself from what must surely be a horrifying death.

Being told that none of the wines I’d written down, none of *my wines* were in stock brought me right back to that exact same feeling. The haunting voices came back. I was again the helpless gazelle surrounded by cabernet lions and chardonnay leopards. The door of the store looked very, very inviting, my safe haven on the Savanna of Vino. But then something else came through all of the noise… “Are you going to let yourself be paralyzed by rotten grape juice?”

Huh. That’s a very good question. And you know what, self? I think I have an answer for you:

“Not today.”

I told myself that I’d scour the shelves one last time and just buy something, anything, for my friends. In the end I felt I did rather well: I found one wine which was from the same producer as one of the ones I’d written down, another which won some local awards, and another one which just seemed expensive enough that it had to be good. (Yeah, I know, if I’d really learned anything from your show I wouldn’t judge based on price.) Walking out the doors and breathing in the fresh air I’d felt completely spent. I can’t remember the last time buying anything was as draining. I didn’t care at all about the hit to my wallet; all I wanted was to stay upright long enough to get home safely.

Maybe it’s a bit cliche because of all of the Mastercard ads, but knowing that I can now walk into a store, buy wines that I might be completely clueless about, and come out unscathed… It’s priceless.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Mr. Vaynerchuk, for helping me to be a little more of a man than I had been before.