0:14 okay so we're streaming wait i just dropped my water [Laughter] down the wrong pipe hold on wow it's amazing how water will do that never happens with wine water i definitely have issues with this is why you should drink wine yeah yeah i'm not in the water business okay no no i think i think we we talked about that before so [Laughter]
0:50 so uh welcome to the third season of the way to wow show uh that we've subtitled how people make money so this season we're going to be talking to a number of people like my guest today who have found remarkable ways to make a living and you know with the way the job market is these days and the way businesses these days i think a lot of and i think a lot of people have kind of taken stock during the last year and a half or two years and decided you know do i really want to continue doing what i'm what i'm doing professionally
1:26 um i can i'm going to have a guest on at one point who worked for a law office for years and years and years and just decided i don't want to be doing this anymore and so he he he changed his path so we're going to be talking about that once a week we'll be live and you'll be able to join the meeting or you can join it streaming on facebook on um twitter on youtube live as as well as i think we're on linkedin live as well and you can put questions and comments in the chat and we will respond to them
2:01 so with that as an introduction i want to quickly move on and talk to our guest so jeff morgan is the um founding winemaker and co-owner uh i think at this point with your wife jody right yes yes yeah of covenant wines and they're based in berkeley california uh so northern california and in my estimation jeff is the premier kosher wine maker in the world um if you if you've had covenant wines or one of the other uh labels that that
2:37 jeff and his crew make uh you you know what i'm talking about um and i'm gonna uh you know kind of print them a little bit um because i really want to want jeff to tell his story but um for those of you who are used to you know kosher wine of 40 50 years ago ak aka mana chevitz which you know is really just uh you know cough syrup with a lower alcohol content this is not kosher wine today and this is certainly not covenant kosher wine and i think the um the sign of that is um
3:12 not so much the the the wine ratings but the fact that many non-kosher restaurants serve jeff's wine so he's really at the top top top of the wine business many fine restaurants including several in new york i believe is that is that not right yes and around the world but probably the most famous restaurant that we're in is the french laundry which is in napa valley california oh okay well there you go uh the infamous french laundry unfortunately in some circles um but anyway and uh so you know jeff and i have been friends uh for a while now and interestingly enough
3:48 he started his professional life as a jazz musician and so um one of the reasons i wanted jeff to be the premier guest on season three is he can talk directly about this idea of starting in one place professionally and and moving through almost a series of of professional endeavors and and ending up uh it's something doing something that he really deeply loves and um and i would argue too um is is doing a tremendous amount of good uh you
4:23 know here in the world um i can tell you that covenant wines got me through the last couple of years so uh without further ado jeff morgan coming from uh somewhere in the caribbean right yes i'm currently in uh on the island of virgin gorda which is uh in the uh country of tortola british virgin islands um my wife and i got married here 34 years ago at my mother-in-law's house and we're visiting my mother-in-law to celebrate that 34 years of marital bliss and by the way i want to thank you for that that generous uh introduction kevin um
5:01 um we um i just wanted to let uh your listeners know that we have a winery in berkeley california that's our main winery but we also make wine in israel and our israeli wine is called covenant israel and we've been making wine in israel since 2013. so we've been there almost a decade as well that's right excellent so can you tell us wait can i can i please a lot allow me to interrupt i'm jewish yes because you're talking about you know um
5:38 maybe changing careers or the you know how uh covet has for giving us perhaps time to uh uh not be as active on the outside perhaps be a little more uh internal uh in terms of our reflection and um i think that um if there's one thread in my own uh professional life it's that i've never done anything professionally that i didn't want to do so i wanted to be a musician uh when i was a teenager and eventually i became a musician and i was a professional
6:13 musician for 15 years until one day i realized i was more and i was in france um working in monte carlo i was the house the band leader for the king of monaco's um house band and um that was circa 1987 and um had a great band but i found i was more interested in what i was drinking after the gig than during than when i was playing during the gig so i thought i love wine maybe i should just be a winemaker and uh the other sax player got the gig with the rolling stones anyway so you know it was like what am i going to do now so um
6:50 i i think what i want to share with your listeners throughout this podcast is is the importance of following your heart following your nose following your brain following your personal muse whatever that might be because you can do whatever you want figuring out how to do it is not so easy but not doing what you want if you're lucky enough to know what you want and that's probably the most important element of this discussion is uh in my opinion um a tragedy a personal tragedy you may not succeed but if you don't try you definitely won't
7:26 succeed so you know right before we came on i was talking to um a friend of mine he's actually the fellow who recruited me into the navy and after he got off active duty um he decided he wanted to go into uh robotics um actually he's kind of in the biomedical field and he was telling me that um he he was with one startup and uh you know they did okay um and then his wife got pregnant and so he made the
8:01 absolutely you know sensible decision of immediately turning around and doing another startup right but it's where it's where his heart was um and that that company got acquired by a larger company so it was a lot of hard work and it was it was not easy but i think because he really wanted to do what he did it gave him the perseverance to continue on this path that eventually led to him hitting i'm look he's he's two for two on startups i don't think there's too many entrepreneurs who can claim that kind of record maybe elon
8:36 musk or somebody like that so i'm going to have you back up a little bit um because i think some people will be interested to hear this how did you become the band leader for the prince of monaco i mean to become successful as a musician is i think a dream of a lot of people um what what do you think were the elements of of uh the elements to your success that allowed you to get to that point and that's that's an impressive accomplishment well we have a word in yiddish it's hutzpah and if you don't know what futsba means
9:11 uh it means uh i guess having balls okay you know daring to go where maybe other people wouldn't dare go or maybe just throwing caution to the winds and saying i'm gonna i'm gonna go for this and uh the monte carlo happened after i'd been when i was 19 very briefly i i dropped out of college so i could go study in the french national conservatory system in nice for a year well i stayed for five years and um i was classical flutist and i picked up the saxophone
9:47 and moved back to new york and i was playing in new york you know a lot of gigs i'm making pretty good money um but um i i was working a lot with one of my my best my actually probably my best friend in the world mr frank amsalem who is now a very famous french jazz pianist we both were in conservatory together back in the 70s nice he moved to new york we were working together and one day frank says to me you know jeff there's a really good gig in monte carlo and i said what do you mean he goes well i think that uh i've worked in the band there they're always looking for something american
10:23 but if i call them they won't talk to me because i'm french you call them you speak french and they listen to you so in those days we didn't have cell phones this is 1986 no cell phones no nothing i spent a lot of money on that long distance call to the artistic director of the casino the grand casino in monte carlo which belongs to the royal family and but i knew the name of the person i was looking for and i speak pretty good french so i said you know you don't know me i'm jeff morgan i have this great band in new york are you interested in in hiring a band from new york and he said oh as a
10:59 matter of fact i'll be in new york in two weeks maybe you want to audition so i said great we made the arrangements i hung up the phone and they said okay frank we gotta we better put a band together we had nothing you know it wasn't so easy he came we did the audition we had a 20-piece band we had all the arrangements we sounded great and um you know bernard bernard leon the uh artistic director who was actually a jazz impresario in paris also very well
11:35 known wow yeah i had a great band i mean they're all like great musicians and famous recording artists whatever he goes you know i don't think this is what i'm looking for and i go but you have something that's a little more you know lively because we had like a swing there everybody so i said all right we can do that i said but it was too late you know you you so um very quickly i i would often go back to france uh in the summertime to visit my friends there i'd lived there for five years i'm a
12:10 french wannabe and jody my wife and i would always go back to monte carlo because we would we were a niece monte carlo is like a whopping you know 12 kilometers away and um we'd go visit bernard at the casino we'd hang out we became friends and when he would come to new york looking for um looking for um talent we would get together in new york and it was very nice and um eventually about two years later we're in monte carlo how you know listening to one of the bands at the casino and i say bernard when are you gonna hire my band he goes well you're gonna have to give
12:45 me what i want and i said well what do you want and he said i want something a little more lovely but by then i knew what they wanted so so so we did it again wow and um i don't know how vanessa got on this but we're gonna have to get rid of her yeah let me get rid of her yeah we didn't do that one in monte carlo um and um anyway so um we did the we we i knew what he wanted he came to new york and um it was great and we um we got the gig we went to monte carlo
13:21 and we were there for uh four or five months and then that was when i had my epiphany that i really was more interested in what i was drinking than when i was playing so um so we came back speaking of your friend whose you know wife was you know got pregnant well jody got pregnant i decided i wanted to be a winemaker and the whole family on both sides said what are you doing what are you doing you're making a good living as a musician why this is what i want to do so jody likes to say that i have the dreams and she supports the dreams and helps make it possible and i i do have to say that in
13:57 all difference to my wife or anybody who has a a supportive partner it's very helpful because it's hard to do this stuff all alone but when you have somebody who believes in you uh it makes a big difference absolutely so um if i recall um in between um being a jazz musician and being a winemaker weren't you also a wine journalist well so what happened was we came back to um
14:32 we left came back from france and um i kept playing for another five years because i was making pretty good money as a musician but i wasn't making i found a job in a little winery in long island new york where i made seven dollars an hour and uh i would make way way more than that playing music uh so i was kind of going to the city on the weekends playing and then living out on long island and um after a few years um i was exhausted i mean i had a five and a half day job making wine not kosher wine by the way just wine and i learned a lot and i was also working really hard
15:07 as a musician and i quit the winery and jody who has all my best ideas said why don't you you know be a wine rider you always are complaining about you know wine riders who don't know anything about wine writing about wine and so i said yeah i can do that because of course as we both know ignorance is bliss and um so i started writing for a local newspaper in the wine country where we lived i started writing obits and that was a great education it really was great way to learn how to write and
15:42 um and then i wrote a little column on wine and eventually i worked my way into um the new york times you know that's just one of those lucky things you know i heard they were looking for a stringer that's a part-time writer who will write for almost nothing and write long articles that hopefully will actually make sense and i wrote a i read a long piece on long island wines for the new york times i wrote a couple of other pieces for them also and uh one of the editors of wine spectators saw my byline and um knew me because we had gotten pretty
16:18 good scores and reviews for the wines i'd help make in long island earlier so he called me and he said hey are you the same jeff morgan we knew who was making wine and i said yeah he said well we didn't know you were a writer and i said well when you met me two years ago i wasn't but now i am and they said great we have a story for you and i said really what kind of a story and they said well we want you to write about kosher wine for passover and i was quiet and then i said you're kidding right and i left and they said what do you
16:54 mean and i said well i've never had a good kosher wine in fact i've never had much wine at all that's kosher and i don't know anything about kosher wine or kosher anything in fact i wasn't even bar mitzvahed and they said but you're jewish right because 30 years ago people could say that and they wouldn't get arrested so i said yeah i'm jewish but like no jewish education nothing i don't know anything so um they said well fine you we just want to make sure you're jewish because last year the guy who wrote this article was not jewish and he gave the wines bad reviews and we were accused of anti-semitism so this year you say what
17:30 you want but you're jewish we're safe and um you know knock yourself out this is your foot in the door morgan and he was right um so that was the former managing editor of wine spectator thomas matthews who is still with the magazine and not in that position and apparently they like this story i was a five page spread on kosher wine i did a lot of quick research a lot of photographs and they let me write other articles about other things in addition to kosher wine and uh three years later they asked me
18:06 if i wanted to be the west coast editor uh in the san francisco office so uh we moved out there in 1995 and i was there until just about 2000 when i decided i just wanted to make wine again i was tired of writing articles about wine and so we moved to napa valley and i started a little wine company called solo rosa it was the only winemaker i knew that was stupid enough to only make rose back in those days when nobody wanted rose it's tough to be a leader uh a trendsetter because uh
18:42 yeah so we lasted about eight years but but then there was so much competition and that we we couldn't we could we either had to grow big or get out of town but meanwhile then i uh tasted in 2002 a really great israeli wine when we were living in napa valley uh dumandu castel uh with ellie abed zakan who is the owner founding winemaker and owner at castel in the judean hills loved the wine and i was tasting it with a number of other jewish wine makers in napa and we all agreed it's fantastic and one of them
19:18 um a guy named leslie rudd who had a very famous winery called rudd rudd winery in napa uh said to me wow like that's better than matashevitz that i grew up with and i said yeah it is as a matter of fact and i had written about kosher wine for eight years for the wine spectators so i knew that essentially kosher wine was um was the um there is no kosher wine making protocol you can have really good kosher wine you can have really bad kosher wine and it really depends on you know who makes it and how they make it but there's no requirement like
19:54 boiling it or any particular ingredients the only requirement is that uh someone who is uh sabbath observant um touched the juice or the wine even the grapes can be handled by anybody so so anyway um we decided that we were going to try to make a kosher wine from napa valley that was good as the israeli uh castel and that was the beginning of covenant uh our first vintage was 2003 and by the way don't try this at home uh because you
20:29 need a lot of money uh i didn't have a lot of money that's the one thing i forgot to mention in my follow your muse speech there um if you need a lot of money look for the money first because if you find your muse and you don't have the money to follow up and do what you want to do you're not you're just going to get frustrated so leslie was um a fairly successful businessman um and um and a nice jewish boy from wichita who loved wine and um and loved um jewish
21:04 culture and uh and uh our jewish heritage and so les um had the capital to uh lend to the business uh when we got started and um so we were able to start it's very expensive to make napa valley cabernet if you're wondering maybe why it costs so much is because it costs a lot to make it and um we were able to get started with 500 cases of wine now we make 8 000 cases of wine in berkeley and we make another 2 000 in israel so we've grown um but without less i never would have been able to start this program
21:39 so i want to back up just a little bit um when you were talking about um getting into writing and you said well um you you kind of you lucked out um do you think when i said that literally yeah i said you need that or you got lucky so do you think it was really luck or was it you know a combination of of um i don't know for one of a better term personality traits you know you know being involved with
22:14 the business um you know taking the up because i think a lot of us think about look i see this with a lot of lawyers by the way so lawyers successful lawyers doing well they want to move into something else but it means a huge pay cut and it sounds to me like you were willing to take that pay cut in order to make that transition in your career and and that's not an easy thing to do it takes it takes some takes some guts right and like you said it takes a family that will support you so i mean were there discussions about that um you know and and likewise writing i mean
22:51 i think a lot of people would like to write but you know especially these days you can write for free forever and and never never get paid right so um how do how did you come to terms with those issues that allowed you to make those those changes well first of all when i say i got lucky um you know there's another cliched phrase that says you make your own luck and you do or if you're going to get lucky you need to be in the right place at the right time with the goods to deliver because otherwise you're not going to be
23:27 lucky so that's one thing and i i think i i've been ready for the opportunities that have arisen whether i knew it or not i've been ready um in terms of the uh your lawyer friend i know a lot of successful lawyers who are really unhappy i don't know one successful lawyer who's really happy but i know gobs of them who would trade places with me if they could still make the money they make as successful lawyers so therein lies the rub uh if you're driven by money or if money is that important to you or your
24:02 lifestyle or maybe your needs i don't know maybe you got six kids and they're all going to like harvard so you need some money but um i i think you should stick with the day job but personally i i'm not driven by money yes i need money i like making money um i want to make as much money as i can but that's not the driving force behind anything i do i'm driven by the desire to create something beautiful something i believe in whether it's music or wine or books my wife and i have actually
24:38 written 10 cookbooks also so we're you know i call i like to call ourselves cereal cookbook authors and we've done well with the cookbooks too so um i think if you if you follow if you have a passion for something that you can at least make a living at potentially you should follow that passion um and you know i did i didn't take a salary uh at covenant for 10 years but i had to make money um i had two kids in college so what do you do i we did other things you know i i made wine for other wineries i was consulting winemaker i was a bow wine
25:14 maker for another a winery and jody and i wrote 10 books in 15 years actually that also helped pay the bills and so um you've got to find ways to make the money to do what you want um but like i said if money is the end if you're really passionate about making money well then do whatever it takes to make the money i mean i'm not going to criticize you for that um that's fine too if you love making money it's very exciting i mean my my late partner leslie rudd who had the red
25:49 winery and he was very successful businessman what he really loved was making a deal i mean that's when he really lit up okay that was his thing and he was great at it and he became a very wealthy man because of it um i don't have that talent i mean you know i just don't and uh but it's not where i'm driven so really um i think it's be true to yourself follow your muse uh don't be afraid or don't be afraid of being afraid actually i mean i'm always terrified i wake up i'm the most courageous man i know because i'm terrified all the time and i still go i still go and you know take go the
26:24 distance i do have a quick story to tell you i can i tell you one more story absolutely i mean it's a little i'm sorry i i can't help myself because i i spent my whole life trying to figure out trying to figure out how to do it but there is one important story i have to tell to share with you and that is when i was it wasn't quite so easy to become a wine writer as oh i get the call from the wine spectator so um i was in the olden days before instagram before all the the new age of writing and you're right the world has
26:59 changed kevin i mean it's a different world for writers but um i couldn't get arrested i mean i had a lot to say but nobody was listening and i had an uncle in new york who was the editor of the village voice and he was also a pretty well known um in publishing circles and i went to see uncle tom and i said well tom i can't get arrested nobody i'm all my my articles are getting rejected i don't know what to do and he said you know i can't help you with this jeff i don't know anything about wine or food i do know about publishing and i do know
27:34 about getting ahead in life and i can tell you that it's very simple you have to go to the right parties and i said well how do i get invited to the right parties he said i can't tell you that either but at the right parties you're going to meet the people who will open the doors to where it is you want to go so somehow i got invited to a party that probably changed my life it was um it was at the james beard foundation i somehow i was writing a little bit for you know the local newspapers and whatnot in long island and um
28:10 got invited to a dinner uh with some famous chef and there were all these people there and they sat me down at the press table and i was sitting next to a lovely young woman whose name i believe was emily and i said i'm jeff morgan she said hi i'm emily whatever my last name is and i said what are you doing she said i'm the food editor for elle magazine and i said really well i'm i'm uh i'm she said what do you do i said i'm a wine writer and um she goes uh well that's funny you know we're looking for a wine rider we're looking for a wine letter she says it l
28:45 and i said well that's great you know where do i apply she said well we have a problem i said what's the problem she said my my editor the managing editor i said what's wrong she's french and i said uh she's french what part of france is she from she's from nice now nice is where i lived for five years nice is where i learned everything i know about living nieces was my especially back then that niece was my second home and so i said well why don't you arrange for an
29:20 interview and i'll you know we'll see how it goes so she said okay so next week uh she's got me in the two o'clock slot i go up to the office in manhattan and sure enough she's there the editor and she looks at me sternly and she goes okay um i you know who are you what do you want i said to her bonjour and she goes wait a minute you speak french i said yeah i speak french educated in france i lived in lived in nice she goes oh she goes you know which we we shared the five
29:55 minute you know requisite chit chat and then she goes okay what's the best place to get la in nice now is the traditional nisswa crepe made with chickpea flour and the best soca i happened to know in nice at the time was the che people by the port near where i used to live and where i used to go all the time for my soccer with a little wine and so i said of course it's shi people she goes you have the job she never said she never said let me see your writing she never said do you know anything about wine she never said anything she
30:30 said you know people sucka you got the job and so that was actually sometime uh around when i was also getting into the new york times that was l was really my first exciting major international gig so you know you never know you just build on you build on your life experiences now i'm sorry i've been interviewed i've interrupted you many times i'm going to let you talk go for it kevin so the point of this is for you to do as much of the talking as possible so it's it's perfectly fine for you to interrupt me um
31:07 you you know you you mentioned um that um you know you were prepared for the opportunities that came your way um how how intentional was that preparation and how did you i mean you told the story about your uh i think was your uncle who's the pup who we've been publishing how did you learn what you needed to do to prepare to enter these new fields okay well that's a very good question and i have one quick anecdote to tell before i answer more fully
31:43 so my father who died three years ago at the ripe old age of 95 uh had a very interesting life and uh one day a few years before he died he said to me you know jeff looking forward nothing made sense but today looking backward it all fits together and um i think he was right i think most of the preparation is unintentional because you don't know what life's going to throw you you don't know what kind of curveballs you're going to get you don't know what kind of opportunities you're
32:19 going to get so i think perhaps the most important thing is to um pursue excellence in whatever uh your interest is or whatever your interests are i mean you know i want to be a musician so i i practiced a lot and i became a pretty good musician i i don't think i'm i'm not a genius and uh you know i did okay but um but i think when i realized i'd kind of hit the the ceiling for what my abilities were and i was pretty good but i'm still i still play but um i thought well
32:55 maybe i should try something that i love equally that maybe there's more opportunity for me as and i i didn't know i was going to actually become a very well-known wine writer at the time and a well-known wine maker i didn't know i could even make wine i just knew i could drink it but i looking back as my father would say everything i've done has prepared me for what i'm doing right now sitting here talking to you do you think that um the the the experiences you've had in
33:30 your life the things you've learned um have you had to in essence kind of repurpose them as you've grown and and and changed your professional outlook over the years um you know what i'm saying i used to work with uh people coming out of the military for example so military life on the face of it seems so different than civilian life but in the real in reality a lot of the stuff we do is is not so different it goes by different names or whatever but a lot of the things that we we do we did the military they have
34:06 tremendous applicability in civilian life but there's got to be kind of a perspective shift in order to see them in that new context so what was anything like that part of of what you had to do and and um i know is this question making sense yes absolutely i think no i think it's it's it's it's a good lead-in to to something i think is really important for anybody who's either wants to make a career change or somebody who's just pursuing a career i think you have to be prepared to
34:41 uh be flexible and not adhere to some fixed or rigid vision uh uh regarding what it is you want to become or what it is you want to do i mean talking about you know i'm i i do make some pretty good kosher wine but um uh that was never my original goal um i i really i was not educated i have no jewish education or at least i didn't growing up um and um i kind of realized as we tasted that israeli
35:17 castella wine i realized that okay it's pretty good but when leslie rudd said maybe we can make a really good kosher wine from napa valley i thought i don't want to do this i don't want to make christians that's the last thing in the world so we actually spent about a year talking and arguing about this and then when he said uh and you're not going to make any money until the business is profitable i really didn't want to do it um but then
35:52 uh the more i thought about it the more i realized i was probably never going to get the capital together to uh to create that napa valley cabernet in the sky that i wanted to do i knew i could do it the way i wanted to do it native yeast unfiltered unfined just like all the great cabernets from napa that i well many of them not all of them are made that way but um and i i thought okay i guess i'm gonna have to make it kosher and um and so um i think there are ancillary benefits uh if you're flexible
36:29 for example okay i found i had a business partner who had you know could help us get started but uh as you know kevin i also was able to reconnect or connect with um the jewish community in a way that i i hadn't uh experienced um prior to um making covenant and uh this has been a beautiful thing i had to work with religious you know jews in the cellar at herzog winery down in the central coast and i did that for five years until i was able to kind of work out how to do
37:04 it myself with just one other assistant who's now my winemaker my uh at covenant california jonathan hayden and um you know i you know being around observant jews i realized i'd missed some pretty serious uh connection which was ironic since my winery was called covenant i i had missed the connection with our jewish culture and our jewish heritage that um i wanted to pursue as well as the the goal of making a great wine that
37:40 happened to be kosher so as you know as a result i i i well i was inspired to go to israel in 2011. uh when i got there i realized i needed to make wine in israel because i felt really at home there and of course um i actually at the age of 60 founded in myself to join a synagogue and i joined the modern orthodox synagogue you know which is really kind of surprising to everybody including myself i finally got bar mitzvahed only 50 years late at the age of 63
38:15 and um you know um my one of my daughters zoe um made aliyah eight or nine years ago married an israeli guy whose name is guy um and um and uh you know we have a much more um uh powerful connection to our jewish roots as a result of this winemaking thing so i like to say that wine brought me back to judaism so most of you can probably see this
38:50 graphic over my shoulder so this is the um three pillars of attainment and we're operating right here in the finances realm but if you think about it any of these realms can expand our lives into other realms of our lives so this is the spiritual pillar up here identity family god right it sounds to me like your professional journey i think this is true for many people perhaps it doesn't stay confined you know to its one little niche right it expands itself into other areas of our lives
39:26 well yes i would say that um in uh now that i'm 68 it's occurred to me that um everything is connected and that everything is one and this may be a jewish concept or a buddhist concept or i don't know what concept but it seems to be the way things are and um quite frankly you know we were supposed to talk about you know making money on this show we haven't done too much about that i can tell you that um you know i've had good years and less good years um i can't tell you 35 years ago i was a street musician in
40:02 new york making you know 2 000 a year so um i've been like at the bottom of the um of the financial pyramid and um after 20 years of you know 20 maybe more than that almost 25 years making wine you know we figured out how to make wine that people really love to drink uh because they value the quality we have in our bottle um we've uh identified certain markets obviously it's kosher wine so um the the the religious uh
40:39 communities around the world uh jewish religious communities uh certainly appreciate our wine but we've also you can find our wines in in tokyo we sell a lot of covenant in tokyo and they never even asked me if it was kosher um you know it's kind of a non-issue in taiwan we sell our wines also i don't know if it's an issue in mexico or brazil or canada or many of the other europe where we sell our wines i tend to think that a large percentage of our niche market is in the jewish and probably religious
41:15 community so that's great um but we also are growing and we're certainly establishing a beachhead in just what i call the normal uh wine front um you know i i did taste for eight years the greatest wines in the world as a reviewer at the wine spectator that was a great privilege for me and uh what i'm trying to do now and i think sometimes we do succeed is uh to make wines as good as my favorite wines that i had the privilege of tasting as a world
41:51 reviewer worldwide reviewer and it's it's it's it's um very rewarding to me to know that people appreciate what we do and will pay up to 200 a bottle for a great nappy cabernet but i realize everybody can't pay that and we also make uh we make about 25 different wines and uh we also make some terrific wines that cost 20 or 22 bucks so it's it's it's uh what the wines cost and people often ask me that why is this one twenty dollars why is this from 200 well sometimes it
42:26 cost me 10 it cost me 10 times as much to make that napa cabernet and i make very little of it so the 22 dollar zinfandel from lodi is much less expensive for me to produce and uh therefore i can pass those savings onto the consumer it doesn't make it a less good wine but it's uh different it's kind of apples and oranges so that's a good segue i have some of your wines here and i i feel like you know we should show folks some of what you've made so you were talking about your uh your great uh napa valley uh
43:02 cabernet so this is uh this is a solomon lot 70. this is a 2017 i think and uh this is kind of a legacy of your first wine is it not yeah uh the 2017 i believe was um the salomon is uh usually or is is always our best cabernet and the best barrels and it doesn't necessarily come from one vineyard but i think that was the last year that we made uh wine from leslie's vineyard uh not exclusively but there's a lot of rud uh in there and it's uh that wine now costs uh if
43:38 you buy the 29 or 2018 which is um what we have for sale now it's cost 200 that one would cost you more so it's good that you bought it then we don't have any more so you can't buy it anymore anyway so it's collector's side yes open it with a good phone so and then um this is a let's see this is the chardonnay lavon this is also covenant this is a 2017 as well that comes from a single vineyard uh on sonoma mountain it's a beautiful vineyard 100 chardonnay um that's a um 42 wine so um
44:15 not nearly as expensive as the 200 uh napa cabernet yeah i realize i'm out of your sparkler is is this the base for your sparkler or is it a different sharpness it's a different chardonnay base for the covenant uh the cuvee uh blanc de blanc chardonnay and then uh you'll notice this this one has the top off because this is the bottle i polished off last night at dinner this is the tri proprietary red so this is another uh label for you basically yeah i mean um i i have to admit i i
44:51 can't help myself i keep coming up with very jewish labels my marketing team keeps telling me that if i want to get out you know i want to expand our horizons i got to stop doing jewy stuff but i'm sorry i can't so the tribe obviously we have the tribe we have covenant we have the red sea red season actually it's just a red sea it's a play on words but you know it's perfect uh passover wine what's that this is part of your wine club um this is i think these are the the lawnsman is your wine club wine right yeah lanceman wines
45:26 we make three different wines under this lanseman label lansman of course means um a people or a person who shares a community culture a geographic origin with other people of a similar culture and so in yiddish lansman is a jew in polish allowanceman is a pole in german a lonzman is a fellow german but um we're using the yiddish here but that doesn't mean but whatever anyway we make um lansman cyril lansman pinot noir and lansman cabernet franc just for our club
46:01 members right and i've actually got one uh like a field blend i think it is that's from a few years ago now that's from a few yeah we were doing a field blend which was just a various uh grapes from the same vineyard that we picked at the same time okay here's another jewish name this is the shama which means um which means soul yeah whether you're jewish or not you got an ashama so that's also our best not napa cabernet so it's it's our best barrels of not cabernet from not napa okay yeah this is let's see this is uh
46:37 2016 proprietary red this is a uh petite verdo malbec and syrah so that's a that's a nice plan and then you mentioned you have a winery or you make one in israel as well so this is the the covenant israel right well so that's on our second vintage that's the 2014 covenant israel syrah it's a delicious wine by the way um and i was you know pretty gung ho when i started this project and i said well let's just slap that the map of israel on this label and it's obviously covenant israel is the name of the brand we write it out in the back of
47:13 the label but here it's obvious to me so um i thought this was a great idea and um so did a lot of people but um you know politics are complicated especially in israel and um for those of you who know or care you'll see that um it didn't really cut the west bank uh the territories as we say uh out of this map so this is what i would call my idea what israel is today but um i got a lot of flack oddly enough in israel not so much here in america and uh the political discussions about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing became more important than the
47:49 wine so um 2015 we changed that label that's a serious collectors and item uh kevin you should i guess this is unfortunately this label is a little bit damaged but this is this is the current uh no well that's that's the blue sea from israel um but no that's not what we we have uh that that's our kind of our forty dollar line the covenant uh with the map that's uh that's a seventy five dollar wine and then we have a more expensive cabernet also that it's a it's a more abstract classy thing that nobody knows what it
48:25 is and uh you know we know so but it since we changed the label we've been much more successful with everybody as opposed to just those who you know have a certain political vent and that's really you know wine for me is something that's supposed to bring us together not drive us apart so um i just didn't think of it when i came out without the label yeah look i i think you know part of the theme of all of this is is um everything develops and and it grows and it changes as time goes by right we learn we learn we do certain things we learn lessons and hopefully the next iteration is a better iteration and and
49:01 we you know move and go up from there so we're we're coming up to the end of our time so i want to take just a few minutes to review um some of the key points that i think you've made so that the people watching this will have an opportunity to maybe embed some of these um some of these ideas that you shared with us uh better in their minds so one of the first things that i recall you saying is that one of the keys to your success um is is it continues to be jody you have a you have a
49:36 wife a partner who really supports you and believes in in what you're doing and and in the professional path that you've chosen um so that i think was a key point and i'm you know it occurs to me um and we maybe we need to do another show on this you know how do you get your partner on board right because that that could be uh that could be a tough uh a tough sell sometimes um that you have to um not be willing or if you have to know what you really want if you really want money and wealth then that's gonna
50:12 that's gonna require a particular path if you want um if if fulfillment professional fulfillment artistic fulfillment is more important than wealth so then that might allow you to take another path um a third point i think that you made was you were fortunate enough to have always in some way or another have been prepared when opportunity came your way and in essence therefore made your your own luck or you made your luck um and and and i think the the sort of
50:48 overarching was that you you have you have hutzpah you have the the sort of uh attitude that you're you're you're going to go out there and give it your best shot and i i mean i think you know you've explained you know sometimes you fell flat on your face but you were willing to get up and brush yourself off and you know kind of try it again and and see if you can do it better the second time um does does that sound like a a fair have i been a good listener to your uh you know to to to what you said and and what do you think about those points and is there anything you would change or add to them
51:24 yeah you're you're a very good listener kevin i can tell you're a rabbi and um and uh you know i'm just thinking about um you know we've all had this uh serious challenge of cobit over the last two years and um um you know are we gonna a lot of us have been you know seriously affected by it if not hell you know in terms of health in terms of our businesses especially for for example in the restaurant business or other businesses that rely on tourism it's been a pretty much a disaster um and so the question is you know how
51:59 do we get back up how do we how do we carry um i've you know been trying to build my winery in israel for almost 10 years and um you know i was i've been on the verge of success but the deals have just fallen apart and then with kovid like it all went to hell and i've just tried to stop worrying about when and how i'm going to succeed and just i've kind of adopted more of a
52:34 faith-based approach in that as long as the desire is there i'm going to continue to push to achieve my goals and uh regardless of whether i succeed or not i think i said earlier in the show um if you don't make the effort you're definitely not going to succeed so you know i'm giving it my best shot i i don't get quite as anxious and nervous as i used to um when i was a younger man maybe that's just because i've got more experience now some things do get better with age
53:11 that would be wine and maybe common sense and um so yeah i mean you got to get up and uh go for it i i think a lot of young people have a greater challenge just trying to figure out what they want to go for that's um i've seen that in a lot of young people that i work with or deal with they just they're kind of rudderless and this covet thing has made them even more rudderless i don't have any clear-cut answers for what to do about it but it's just
53:47 something to be aware of well if you have uh other times during the show you've given me the perfect lead in so next week i'm gonna be doing a presentation based on the book that i wrote uh the eight deadly sins of job hunting and i'm gonna be talking about how to develop something called unique unique value proposition and and this is um a a system if you will that i created to help military people make the transition from whatever branch they were in the army the navy marine corps air force whatever to civilian
54:22 life by figuring out three key things and that is what are they good at what do they love to do and what is their demand for um in the marketplace so um in order to find or either of a viable job or a viable business idea all three of those need to be present otherwise you either have a job that you don't like or you have a really cool hobby and uh so i'm going to be talking about that next week and hopefully um that will help some people get a better handle on what it is they
54:59 really want to do um i i think if you'll you know pardon me for phrasing this way perhaps one of the greatest blessings of your life is you've known that um where it came from is is probably a topic for another day unless you've got a a little you know three or four minute anecdote that you can wrap up the show with um but but i i i know i have struggled with knowing what i wanted to do um for for most of my life and uh yes i'm raising my hand i have the three-minute anecdote okay good so i'm gonna so i'm gonna turn over the floor to you to wrap up the show okay
55:34 so it has not always been that clear to me okay it is it is sometimes it is sometimes it's not but when i was making that transition from music to wine i was unhappy as a musician and jody and i were taking a couple of days off in the country somewhere and when it was time to come back to new york i knew i had some gigs i didn't want to play and i said jody i don't know what i i can't do this anymore i can't play these gigs i'm not happy and there's a big boulder in the stream going uh by the house we were saying i said
56:09 i'm getting on that boulder not getting off the boulder until i figure out what i want to do with the rest of my life which you know everybody would love to know what to do for the rest of their lives but at least i knew i needed to make a change so that was good so i sat on the boulder for about an hour nothing happened i really was like okay nothing's happening second hour i started to hear the water pushing by me and it was whispering something and eventually i realized it was whispering why
56:45 that was my eureka moment i jumped off the rock i ran to jody and i said i know what i'm going to do i'm going to become a winemaker i did not get a very positive reception uh with at that point however um what i'm saying is if you know you need to make a change take the time to think about it take the time to meditate on it take the time to go to a quiet place and let the water the wind the trees let them talk to you or god whatever it is and you'll you'll find your way
57:20 excellent well on that note i'm kevin bemel host of the way to wow show and my guest has been jeffrey moore jeff morgan of covenant winery and jeff thank you very very much for joining me today and sharing your thoughts on on how people can uh can make money in their lives especially from a source of passion and we'll be here live every wednesday at 12 30 p.m pacific time so please watch for our social media posts and if you're on my email list watch out for an email so you can
57:55 join us live and or you can watch the replays on uh on our facebook channel the way to wow show channel um i'm sorry i mean on our youtube channel and um thank you all for watching jeff thank you so much uh mazel tov on your anniversary and enjoy the rest of your trip in the caribbean thank you kevin it's been a pleasure being on the show okay sorry i talked too much i know no no no no no
58:30 absolutely not absolutely not i got a lot to say i'm older than you i got like what 18 years more to talk about you know than you so are you 50 yet only only 7. i'm 61. oh really you look 50. thank you thank you that'll hold me a good stat as i look for uh you know mrs bevel number three [Laughter] all right well listen um listen i hope that you know um that worked for you and