Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen, also known as the World Wine Guys, are wine, spirits, food, and travel writers, educators, and hosts. Both judges on the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, they travel everywhere on the globe to taste more wines than ever. Writing for Wine Enthousiast, WInie Spectator and Robb Report, they also published wine books, the most recent being about white wines. We took some time to talk to that fun wine-loving couple.
YesToWine : “When did your wine adventures start ?”
Jeff Jensen “A while ago, my manager at the restaurant said, Jeff, we’d like you to be the wine steward. And I said, well, what does that mean? And he said, it means you come in every shift and you count the bottles. And when we need more, you order more. And I said, wow, sounds easy to do. So they sent me to school in Chicago, and I was one of Chicago’s first sommelier. The I wanted to do something a little bit different in the world of wine. And Mike and I talked about it, and Mike studied journalism at NYU, and we decided to kind of put together our skills as a sommelier, and as a writer. And our first article that we pitched, we landed was an eight page cover story for Wine Spectator magazine.”
YTW : “That start in wine was like you were shot out of a cannon, right ? “
JJ : “Yes, all of a sudden, people started contacting us. Wow. You know, you’re writing for Wine Spectator. We’d like you to come visit this region in France or this region in Italy. And we, learned a lot more about wine by traveling.”
Mike DeSimone : “I grew up in an Italian American family, and from the time I was very young, when we would have Sunday dinners, would sit next to my grandfather, actually sit on his lap, and he would always pour me a glass of Chianti in a, in a very small liqueur glass. So I mean, I actually started drinking and enjoying wine from, from an early age. After working in other businesses and other industries, I actually realized I wanted to be a writer. And over time, the thing that I knew about and loved the most was wine and food and travel. And so got into that, into writing about the three of those together. But I mean, it’s really, really distilled itself down to, to focus on wine.”
YTW : “How long have you been together ?”
JJ : “We’ve been together for 27 years, and, writing as a team for 20.”
Jeff Jenssen and Mike DeSimone
YTW : “So Jeff, you must know Mike’s favorite wine, then.”
JJ “Well, it depends on the day. I can say one of his favorite grapes is Syrah. So he loves a good, Shiraz from Barossa Valley. He loves a wonderful Syrah from the Rhone. And he also likes a good Syrah from California, from the Paso Robles area. But that doesn’t mean he won’t drink a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Riesling.”
YTW : “Mike, what about Jeff?
MDS “Jeff is a Pinot noir whore, so. And, of course, he loves Pinot noir from Burgundy. I think that we the thing that made us realize that we wanted to kind of really get a lot more into wine than we were, our first vacation together 26 years ago now was a bicycle trip through the vineyards of Burgundy. But of course, since that time, Jeff’s love of Burgundy has grown to include the Russian River valley in Sonoma and also now, of course, the Willamette Valley in Oregon.”
YTW : “Do you taste the wines together, and do you have sometimes big disagreements?
JJ : “Of course, we both have different palates. Sometimes when we’re just trying to pick a wine, for dinner, that’s when we have our biggest, you know, disagreements as to what we should have. But, often because, Mike is, the Spanish wine taster for Wine Enthusiast. Many times, he’ll taste 10 or 15 wines a night. For Robb Report, we taste together and we just decide which wine we’re going to put the cork back in and give it to our neighbors, or our doorman or our sisters or brothers. And then the other wines, the ones that have made the cut, we sit and we actually drink dinner that night.”
YTW : How do you proceed for your blind tasting ?”
JJ : “We’ll each set each other up and then we’ll, we’ll put out like, you know, 6 or 7 bottles and then, the other one, we’ll move them around. So we don’t know. When I’m setting them up one through six, I know what the bottles are, but then I turn around and Mike switches the bottles around. So it’s really a double blind. We don’t know what we’re tasting. So that we just kind of pick the best wines that we’re going to enjoy that evening with dinner. However, the one argument we always have is when Mike is cooking something Italian because he’s Italian-American. He is very opinionated about what wine is going to go with the Italian dish he’s cooking. I often go to the rack and go to pull off a Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa or something. And he’s like, this is veal parmesan, that’s wrong, we need we need a Zinfandel, or we need an Italian wine. We need a Barolo. But, that would be the only time we would ever disagree.”
YTW : “Let’s imagine you have to drink the same wine every day until the end of your life. What would it be”
MDS :“If I had to drink wine from one region in the world, it would be, as Jeff just said, persona. And the reason for that is because it’s one of the rare regions. It’s one of the rare regions in the world that makes equally good white wine and red wine. Many wine regions around the world, really. And even if they do two different things, they they specialize really in one or the other. And that said, I really, truly, I mean, I love red wine. And as Jeff said, I really do love Syrah, but I am a, I love white wine and I and so, like, if I had to drink one wine for the rest of my life, that would be Corton Charlemagne, let’s just make it clear, let’s not fool around here.”
YTW : “Let’s now imagine you’re in Dead man walking status and then you have one last wish for the wine, what would it be?”
JJ : “I would hope that we both live and die at the same time.”
MDS : “But if we commit a major crime together, we both are going to the electric chair.”
JJ : “I hope that the day I die is many years in the future, so I don’t want to drink something too old. So I would drink a 2045 Corton Charlemagne, because that gives me a long time to live.”
MDS : “I think my very last wine I would want to drink would be Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Échezeaux from 2020. That would be it.”
White Wine: The Comprehensive Guide to the 50 Essential Varieties & Styles
YTW : “There are so many books about wine, so why have you decided to add another one to the collection?”
JJ : “Our red wine book did fairly really well. And it won the Claremont International, best wine book in the world. And then when they had their 25th anniversary, they did a 25 year retrospective of the best wine books and ours, one out of the last 25 years. So we were very excited about that. And we started talking, between us and we said, you know, we really like white wine, so why not write a book about it?
MDS : “I think, first of all, people in general, people are eating lighter foods and there’s definitely a trend toward people eating more seafood. For rich people eating lighter foods, more salads, more plant based foods. So in general, just I mean, just kind of a general pairing idea. White wines might go better with those foods than red wines do. And a lot of that is that is that fine dining restaurants as well.”
YTW : “There are so many books about wine, how difficult is it to actually renew the genre, and how can you attract a new clientele with a different content?”
MDS : “The Oxford Companion and that kind of thing, The Wine Bible, those are all geographically based. Every single one of those books talks about wine, based on where it’s made. We actually turn that on its head and talked about the grapes. So we actually made it easy for people to learn more about the grapes, we give little interesting stories and history and anecdotes, pairing suggestions. Beginners can read our book, but we also know people who are studying for their certifications at Master of Wine read our book as well
YTW : “Looking at the business or the job of writing or talking about wine, it is evolving. So how do you see it in the future? Because now you have to diversify, doing some videos, writing stuff?”
JJ : “I think that, we’re going to see more wine being taught for social media. The TikTok user is generally, you know, in their teens, so that’s not a really good venue. But Facebook and Instagram, I think are really a good way to teach people. The young wine drinkers, they’re drinking less and they’re also not drinking wine. They’re drinking cannabis infused drinks, and they’re drinking malt liquor drinks. I think we really need to look at Gen X and even boomers, because those are the people who have money to buy good wine.”
MBS : “There was just a study put out by the Wine Market Council that actually showed that people, especially around 30, are starting to drink wine, even if they haven’t before. And so given the price, if you drink very cheap wine, if you drink your $7 bottles and then you can get something like a, you know, a hard seltzer, or even a beer or a cider that’s going to taste better than a $7 bottle of wine. But once you’re working and making money, you can afford to buy better wine. And they’re finding that actually around 30 years old.” The older millennials are actually drinking as much as older generations and in fact, they’re drinking at a higher price point. So I don’t think that the wine market is certainly not dead. It’s evolving somewhat. We really need as journalists to continue to find interesting topics and to write a variety of types of things. Our job as wine writers is to speak to the people, to sometimes speak to the people with the high level of knowledge, and other times to speak to the people who don’t have a high level of knowledge and bring them up to speed, catch them up on, on what’s going on in the world of wine.”
YTW : “How many new wines do you taste on a yearly basis? And do you ever get tired of this?”
MBS : “We tasted around 6000 wines last year and we’re on target to top that and taste closer to 7000 this year. And as long as we allow ourselves the time we don’t get tired. Traveling to a wine region and meeting winemakers and going out to dinner, I mean, that stuff is amazing and that stuff is fun. But also I like in providing service to our readers, but we’ve got to come up with the whether it’s the best wines from a Napa AVA or the best Barolo for example. Sometimes it can be a bit of a chore, but I’ll ultimately it’s really worth it when somebody when we meet somebody somewhere, a winemaker says, you know, you guys wrote about my wine and I sold out my entire vintage and we’re like, wow. So we’re doing so we’re actually pretty sure we’re like, mission accomplished, where we’re doing a service to the wine industry.
JJ : “It’s daunting at times, but I’m very blessed. I will never, never say that I don’t love my job. As my father used to say, it’s better than digging a ditch at home. It’s a great life and the fact that we can travel together really makes it very exciting. So, it’s a real privilege.”
eppered with engaging facts and figures, each chapter surveys one grape or blend, featuring all-inclusive at-a-glance information that tells you what to expect in the glass, suggested food pairings, and hundreds of recommended wines, from cheerful bargains to worthy splurges. You can buy it here on Amazon. Cheers !
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