The Bright Lights of Hospitality
If you are notoriously restless and wondering how to lasso yourself, start a wine zine, then launch an import company and position yourself as the only sales rep for the first year of its existence.
You’ll live in the tension between needing to travel internationally and being the only person to feed the 54,556 square miles of buyers in your backyard. It’s a healthy dose of masochism, and a proven law of physics.
So we bring you New York Vol. 1, the new Glou Glou, at once wild and domesticated — a travelogue contained within New York, the place we’ve chosen to call home, a decision we’re constantly reminded of as we duck between trucks, children and other cyclists on the bike path, late to an appointment across the Williamsburg Bridge (with a thrilling climb ahead) or stuck in a tangle of traffic because we didn’t learn from LA and decided to drive that day, only to encounter $70 parking in Hudson Yards or a three hour trip upstate with bottles that misbehave like kids spilling around the backseat.
With Issues 1-4, we’ve horshoed our way from California down to Tecate, across to Mexico City, up to Champagne and now back to the Empire State, seeking cohesion in the characters who form the glou of this place, one of the most vibrant natural wine markets in the world.
Future issues will sprawl out across the globe but New York will remain an ongoing saga, punctuated by volumes, since now we have a wine import company that roots us in the stories unfolding here. Since New York is a gritty, pulsing microcosm of the world at large, those stories resonate nationally, often globally.
Sometimes we feel like we moved here just to keep track of the coming apocalypse. Remember when all we had to worry about was a government shutdown? That was a pain in the ass at the time but actually kind of lovely looking back. Then came the 25% wine tariff hike, the threat of 100% tariffs and nuclear war (neither of which, thankfully, came to fruition) and now the threat of a pandemic (coming, un-thankfully, to fruition).
To whom do we turn when our creature comforts — the things we use to get through these other things — are threatened? Slashed in half? Shut down, perhaps never to reopen?
Existentialism points us to the people in these pages: the bright lights of hospitality, the ones who guided us, personally or figuratively, through the quandaries of modern life before any of these obstacles surfaced, before they had to shut off their own lights, shutter their doors. That is to say: the people who had a framework for navigating the actual world through the lens of the wine world. What once seemed a first world problem, when subjected to the 2020 Stress Test, distills to a very human problem :: finding meaning amongst chaos.
As one of our beacons says, “if you manage to formulate the problem, you already have the answer.” All you have to do is turn the page.
-Jennifer Green, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. March 21, 2020
Presented in partnership with the Service Workers Coalition.