Ray Isle Explains How Taco Bell Can Teach You About Wine

On this episode

In our Season 1 finale, Food & Wine's executive features editor Kat Kinsman catches up with her brilliant friend and colleague, Ray Isle, a few weeks before his debut book The World in a Wineglass arrives in stores. Growing up in Texas, the self-described "word-drunk kid" was years away from discovering the pleasures of fermented grapes, but he was clearly a born storyteller — and even ended up as a character in a famous novel. The F&W executive wine editor shared his winding, wonderful path to becoming one of the most trusted and beloved writers and educators in the wine business, the bottle that changed his life, why Morrissey is such a disappointment, and how fast food tacos can help you feel more confident when you're learning about wine.  

Meet our guest

Ray Isle is the executive wine editor at Food & Wine, and the wine and spirits editor for Travel + Leisure. He writes Food & Wine's monthly "Bottle Service" column and contributes regular print and online features about wine, spirits, and wine-related travel to both brands. His articles have also appeared in Departures, The Washington Post, Time, and more. Ray has been nominated three times for the James Beard Award in beverage writing and is a two-time winner of the IACP Award for Narrative Beverage Writing. His book The World in a Wineglass: The Insiders’ Guide to Artisanal, Sustainable, Extraordinary Wines to Drink Now will be published by Scribner Books in November 2023.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine's podcast, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Advice from the episode

Novel beginnings

The novelist, Larry McMurtry, was a friend of my family because he had taught at Rice when my father was there and had been in grad school at Stanford when my father was there. If you watch the movie Terms of Endearment, or read the book, the two kids — they're Debra Winger's kids in the movie, and the main character's Emma's kids in the book — are modeled on me and my brother. I'm the older one who's the grouchy, unpleasant one, and my brother's the young, cheerful, sunny one. It's like, wait a minute.

The grape escape

I had no idea if the writing and the wine would come together, I just knew that I was gonna get some kind of job in wine and keep trying to write and not be in the academic world. I remember being at Stanford, sitting in the office of the director of the program, which looked out over the quad, and his sort of arch nemesis walked by onto the quad. He looked at me and said, "Wouldn't it be nice if he just died?" And I thought, "Get me out of this place. These people are freaking [scary]."

Wine not

Early on when I was in D.C. I went to buy a bottle of wine, when I was just getting into wine at a store there. I wanted to buy Cabernet Sauvignon, and I said, "I want maybe one that's not too tannic." The guy who was the clerk, who was probably four years older than me at most, you could see the expression was like, "This guy's an idiot, he doesn't know what he's talking about in terms of tannins." You could see the sort of inward sigh of attitude and dismissiveness. And I just thought, if I'm gonna do anything with wine, that's not it. I'm gonna do the opposite, which is make people feel like they can ask any question about wine and feel good about it and not have that kind of pretentious, exclusionary BS attached to it, which drives me bonkers. Wine can be as complex as you want it to be.

It's just juice

A little bit of knowledge of wine goes a huge way. You can know a few grapes and a few things you like and you're good to go. It is fermented grape juice, you know? That's it.

Perfectly imperfect

You learn to buy wine by drinking it. As your level of knowledge deepens, your appreciation deepens. If you look at the percentages, the vast majority of wine that's sold is fairly generic. It used to be generic and bad, like in the early '70s, whatever. It's all made very well now. It's all processed beautifully and it tastes fine, but it's not interesting. It's more important to me that a wine has personality than that it's perfect, it needs to express something that's real, rather than just be kind of a perfectly made shell. Humans are interesting cause they're not perfect. I mean if you want perfect, I guess ChatGPT is on the way. I think we are interesting in our imperfections. It's the classic thing they say about beauty, that beauty is not perfection, beauty, like the people who are most beautiful are often somewhat off of what you would expect beauty to be.

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

Each week, you'll hear from icons and innovators like Guy Fieri, Padma Lakshmi, David Chang, Mashama Bailey, Enrique Olvera, Maneet Chauhan, Shota Nakajima, Antoni Porowski, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what's on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that'll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, TuneIn.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.