Episode 6
· 44:59
An archive is a collection of records and honestly made wine to me is a record of a time and a place. That growing season in that specific place with the weather from that specific year as being expressed through the plants, grapes, and then through the winemaking process. So archive has a bunch of different wines in the basement, are records of different years in different places No. All over the world.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Hey, everyone. Welcome to Tasting Notes Toronto. I'm Alex Abbott Boyd. In this episode, I sit down with Josh Correa of Archive Wine Bar in Toronto. Now if you live in Toronto and are the kind of person who gets excited about discovering new and delicious wines, probably Archive does not need much of an introduction.
Alex Abbott Boyd:In the episode, Josh shares the story of how he went from being a teacher to opening Archive, how his travels in Europe inspired the bar, and his approach to building a wine list that tries to have something for everyone. We also talk about what he believes has kept archive thriving for more than twelve years. Here's my conversation with Josh Correa.
Alex Abbott Boyd:How's it going, Josh? Thank you so much for being here.
Josh Correa:Oh, you're welcome. So for people who might not know,
Alex Abbott Boyd:could you share a little bit about who you are and how you came to be in wine and hospitality?
Josh Correa:I'm one of the owners of Archive, which is a little 28 seat wine bar in Downtown Toronto. We've been doing it for twelve and a half years now. It'll be 13 in November. How I got into food and wine is I started working in a restaurant after university just to make some money to go traveling, fell in love with food and wine, ended up trying a number of different things out. One of them was being a teacher and then decided to go back to restaurants and then was working for other people.
Josh Correa:And so was my brother. And eventually we decided that working for other people wasn't going be as much fun as working for ourselves. So we opened up our own place. And what really got me into wine was just working in restaurants, food culture, kind of pairs with wine culture fairly well on the other time. And then when we were opening archive, the inspirations were wine bars from Paris and other places in France, then tapas bars from Spain.
Josh Correa:So small plates and I'd be then generally just having a good time eating and drinking. It was sort of the inspiration for archive.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What was that first restaurant that that kind of lit the flame for you?
Josh Correa:Mean, there were there were a bunch of tapas bars in Sevilla, Spain. There's a you know, there were a number of them there that I went to on a trip in 2003 where I stayed there for about a month. And then yeah. Pretty much most of the good sort of French wine bars that I've ever been to have also been an inspiration.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What what did you like about the ones in Spain?
Josh Correa:About the tapas bars in Spain? Just just the this sort of culture of eating and drinking. You don't drink without eating something, basically. Like, so you have a couple beers and then you have a little snack and you have a couple more beers and then you have another snack and you can keep doing this. So while I was in Souvia, I got to go to the they have something there called the Feria, which is their spring fair.
Josh Correa:And they set up they've got a special section of town. They set up tents called casettas. Some of the casettas are smaller, some are bigger, and people get very dressed up and then go visit casettas of their friends or their family or their neighborhood. There's even an anarchist and communist casetta, which lets everybody in. And just this sort of culture of eating and drinking and dancing and repeat.
Josh Correa:Do do that all and then repeat and repeat and repeat until four in the morning, and it's a time.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That sounds like a blast.
Josh Correa:Yeah. Was a good time.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What did you study in university?
Josh Correa:So in university, I studied plant biology with a minor in biochemistry. So pretty pretty science focused. So the science part of wine doesn't really scare me. But
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. It actually seems super topical for someone that wants to dive deep into wine nerd dom. Yeah. What did you think you'd do with that degree initially?
Josh Correa:Initially, I was gonna save the world by genetically engineering plants to be better, but then I found out the only people you can get a job with when that kind of degree is like Monsanto or some other evil company. That's a debate for another time. Not that you couldn't use genetic engineering in a responsible way, but using it to spray more pesticides just doesn't seem like a good idea. I'm not a farmer, so I don't have to make those tough choices, but it seems to me like the vineyards I've been to and the farming I've seen, I'm much more, much more drawn towards the vineyards that look like green pastures, I suppose, that happen to have grapes growing in them versus the ones that looked like blasted moonscapes with little grapes sticking you know, with grape vines sticking up out of them.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Oh, for sure. This is totally random aside, but I have heard exciting things about GMOs in vineyards recently. How do we maybe splice in some heat resistance into some into something with climate change? Or disease resistance.
Josh Correa:I mean, because yeah.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I feel like that's how you could support organic agriculture, is if you could make the vines more
Josh Correa:disease resistant. Not like human beings haven't been modifying our crops genetically for tens of thousands of years at this point. It just, type of way people talk about genetic modification, just direct genetic modification instead of genetic modification through breeding or selection. But yeah, you can do good things with it if you choose to. It's just expensive and it takes time.
Josh Correa:And whether we'd be better off doing more breeding instead of trying to splice in disease resistance or drought tolerance to already existing grapes. I mean, maybe it's better that we did some more breeding. With grapes, it takes a long time because you probably got to make the cross and then grow them out and then it takes ten years to see what's going to happen and if the grape's coming from this new cross are any good and stuff like that. But maybe that's another route to go. Hybrids are a thing.
Josh Correa:And I can tell you that all my I I tried to grow vinifera in my backyard while all my old Portuguese and Italian neighbors have grown hybrids, and their vines look a lot better than mine in terms of like the grapes that are produced every year, just because they don't have to spray and they're more disease tolerant, especially the diseases we have here, the powdery and the downy mildew being the two worst ones. So again, everybody loves their grape. Maybe it's time for some new grapes.
Alex Abbott Boyd:To take things back, you graduated university with a science degree. You were thinking, you said you did teaching a little bit. How did you end up suddenly in Spain and France enjoying wine bars? Was this during school?
Josh Correa:No, this was after school. So I was moving away to school in Vancouver, and then I moved back to Toronto where I'd grown up and then started working, needed a job because I wanted to save up to go traveling and ended up in a restaurant. And then while I was working there, I actually, that's when I went to Spain. I was actually working at Turoni at a location that no longer exists up at Yonge And Balmoral, so just South Of St. Clair there.
Josh Correa:And I was, I was literally just doing that to make money to go away and travel. So then I made a bunch of money and then I went away and traveled. And then I came back and continued working there.
Alex Abbott Boyd:When was it? This would
Josh Correa:have been like, I started working with Turoni in 02/2001, beginning in 2001 or end of two thousand in that timeframe. And then I think it was 2002 or 2003 that I went to Spain and got to go to the Feria and hang out there. Buddy of mine, he works in film, works crazy hours, and then had three months off. So he decided to rent a place in Sevilla, I got to go stay in his place with him. And he had he had friends who lived in Sevilla that he had met on previous travels, so hung out with them.
Josh Correa:And they took me around to all the wine party not to wine bars, but that time it was more bar bars and but to the tapas bars and to the feria. And then came back, worked at Trony for a little more, went to teacher's college while I was working there. Then did five years of teaching high school before deciding that I had had enough of that. The kids are great. The other teachers are can be good or can be bad.
Josh Correa:Parents are interesting. And the bureaucracy of the whole institution is more than I wanted to deal with.
Alex Abbott Boyd:You will get summers off though, for travel. I imagine that
Josh Correa:was an appeal. Summers off was an appeal. You're stuck going to work on the same days everybody else is going to work. You're stuck traveling on the same times that everybody else has time off. Right?
Josh Correa:Whereas restaurants allow you a little more flexibility. When, so my, my day off is now when everybody else is at work and it's lovely because I go, I don't have to line up for things. And since we're traveling too, you're not stuck only traveling during the summer, only traveling during March break, or only traveling during Christmas when prices it's high season and prices are high.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. But you don't have to convince me. I lasted one year after college working for someone else before I quit and started my first business. Yeah. So so was it at Tironi?
Alex Abbott Boyd:Is that where the kind of the spark of, like, interest in wine started to develop? Yeah.
Josh Correa:Yeah. Because it's an Italian restaurant and they're serving a lot of wine and I was a bartender. So I started to learn about the wines we were serving and that got me into learning about other wines and trying wine. Then at a certain point, it was actually while I was teaching, I decided that I was going to try new wine every day. So I'd go to the LCBO and look for things that I hadn't tasted.
Josh Correa:What's this bottle? What's this grape? You know, sort of that search for something new.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What was it about wine that appealed to you then?
Josh Correa:It seemed like a little more of a classy drink than just chugging beer. And wine to me is interesting because the broadness of the flavors that it can get like wine is a very wide group of flavors that you can eat. You can have. I would actually argue that wine is the single drink with the most flavor experiences you can get from it. You know, you can go anywhere from something that's like clean, crisp, and minerally dry white wine all the way through regs to big full bodied things with some residual sugar in them, the palette of flavors that you can get from wines, I think broader than any other beverage.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Oh, for sure. Love to I love to tease my friends that are into whiskey. Yeah. That it's like a wine drinker who only drinks Bordeaux. Like Yeah.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Because the entire spectrum of the whiskey flavors is almost just like one one wine.
Josh Correa:All tastes it all tastes like barrel. Yeah. Yay. So yeah. And not to hate on it.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I like whiskey. People are welcome
Josh Correa:to come to archive and drink whiskey too. But yeah. I mean, basically, flavor palette for whiskey is much smaller, it's gonna have a lot to do with what barrels are being used as opposed to what went into the whiskey itself.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. So you're working at Tarrone, you're getting into wine. Later on, you're working as a teacher, you're trying a new wine every day. Was that your whole way of sitting about wine? Did you ever enroll in something like WSET or
Josh Correa:After or Buddha Master after getting out of teaching, went and worked for La Bretho as a manager there. And while I was doing that, I did take a wine course from the International Sommelier Guild. I challenged their level one because I knew enough to do that and then just did the level two course. But other than that, I've read a lot. Sommelier courses and stuff are great for wine.
Josh Correa:Wine education courses are great. It's a very structured way to learn about something. So some people need that structure to go to a class, to do the whole note, to do that kind of stuff. And if you need to have the pin or the certificate saying that you're a sommelier, because you're going to go work for corporate restaurants or hotel groups or stuff like that. They can be a good thing to do.
Josh Correa:But like a lot of other learning, if you have the self discipline to sit down and read a book or to research stuff yourself, you don't have to pay the money per course. So most of what I did was, was really just like, oh, I'm trying this wine. Let me go online and read about it. Oh, that sent me down this rabbit hole reading about this region. Now I know something about, you know, Galician wine or whatever region.
Josh Correa:So that would be more how I gained my knowledge for stuff. And obviously, like the science side of making wine wasn't a great leap for me, but it was more, yeah, more just learning about what grapes were aware and that kind of stuff.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What were some of your favorite resources?
Josh Correa:The Encyclopedia of Wine. I tried to read that thing cover to cover. I got about halfway through and then got bored and just started looking up things that I was interested in. So that was a great resource. Probably the book that I still look at the most is Wine Grapes by Jensis Robinson, or the Jansis, as I call the book.
Josh Correa:And that's a great resource for, because she's got all the grapes that make commercial wine listed in there for her. That's what she's trying to do anyway, whether it's actually all of them or not is in Russian, but that's a great resource. And then the internet is amazing. The need to memorize a bunch of information about wine is not that you don't need to know something, especially if you're getting up in front of a group of people or at the table or something like that, but that information is relatively easy to access because you just Google the wine and somebody's written something about it on the Internet that you can whether the producers put up tech sheets or the importer has something on their website or the wine shops have something on their website, you can find out pretty much anything you want to know. And somebody's gone through Wikipedia and basically put in all the information that's in The Wine Grapes by Jancis Robinson into Wikipedia and then is updating it as well with as new information about doing genetic testing to see relatedness and stuff like that.
Josh Correa:Working out family trees for grapes.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I use GuildSOM, but that's expensive.
Josh Correa:It's a
Alex Abbott Boyd:good thing to look at Wikipedia.
Josh Correa:I'm sure GuildSOM is also very good and there's lots of good things on there, but even the free resources on the Internet are they're fairly broad and fairly available. So getting into how archive came to be, you mentioned one
Alex Abbott Boyd:of the inspirations was some of the wine bars and tapas bars you'd seen in Spain. But Yep. Could you tell the whole story of how the wine bar came to be? Yeah.
Josh Correa:I was I was working at Lovretto and was getting done there. My brother was working for Liberty Entertainment Group running clubs, and he wanted to leave there. So I actually went and worked for a couple buddies of mine who owned a restaurant called Ortalou, which is no longer there up in Dewardale. Then me and my brother started looking for spaces, found the space where archive is, decided that it was the one. As we were both finishing up at other jobs, started renovating and getting it ready.
Josh Correa:And it took us about nine months to get it all done. Long renovation. Should anybody Anybody think you've opened me up a restaurant or or doing something like that just to give yourself two or three more months than you think you're gonna need?
Alex Abbott Boyd:But it's a it's a great location. There's some great spots around here, Bar Vendetta, which is probably the black hoof when you
Josh Correa:moved Yeah. It was the black, it was the black hoof at the time we opened this.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What was it about the location though that made you
Josh Correa:know that this was the one? We both live in the West Side Of Toronto, so looking for a place that was relatively close to home. So we have this sort of area that we were looking in. This, at the time we opened, this neighborhood was still relatively cheap to rent in. It wasn't as expensive as College.
Josh Correa:It wasn't as expensive as Queen Street. Wasn't as expensive as Ossington, which had already started to blow up by that point, but also was downtown enough that it felt down, you know, it felt like you were downtown.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What about the size? Did you have a certain size that you had in mind for this?
Josh Correa:Yeah. There's times that I wish archived could be about 10 to 15 seats bigger, but most of the time I'm pretty happy with the size. It means we can run service with just two people, a cook and a server, and then on busier nights, have more people in, more people working. But the thing about a small restaurant is there's a limit to how much money you can make, but there's also the money you can lose is also more limited in that, know, if it's a slow night, I'm only paying two people instead Whereas of paying if you have a bigger restaurant, you have to staff it as if you're going to be busy, because you might get all 100 seats filled at once, so you have to have the staff to deal with the 100 seats. But then if you only have 25 people in for the night, you're losing money on that.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That makes a lot of sense.
Josh Correa:Maybe less to gain, but less to lose is the nice thing about a small restaurant.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Right. And what was the inspiration for the name? Archive?
Josh Correa:The name Archive sounded like a good idea at the time. Also, I keep a lot of wine here. An archive is a collection of records. It could be photographs. It can be whatever.
Josh Correa:And honestly made wine that's well made without a lot of additives. To me, it is a record of a time and a place. So it is that, that growing season in that specific place with the weather from that specific year as being expressed through the plants, grapes, and then through the winemaking process. So archive has a bunch of records of year of different wines in the basement, a bunch or has a bunch of different wines in the basement, which are records of different years in different places all over the world.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I love that.
Josh Correa:And was it you
Alex Abbott Boyd:knew right from the beginning that you would be building a deep cellar for the restaurant?
Josh Correa:Well, no. The at the beginning, I just wanted to keep up with it, Stupid cake, some money. Was as we were growing that I was like, oh yeah, it was something I wanted to do. Whether we were going to get to do it or not was another story. It was only as the business started doing well and like, oh yeah, we can start, instead of just having stuff by the glass, we can start putting away bottles to have by the bottle.
Josh Correa:And then that grew and grew and grew until we have 500 something bottles, different bottles that you can choose.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And going back how many years, what year did you open? 2032.
Josh Correa:I don't know. I'd have to go downstairs and look. I don't think there's still any wines left from when we opened because I've slowly over time gone pulled up stuff for Sunday Fundays or pulled them up for special nights and stuff like that. But there might be. Maybe there might be tucked away in a corner down then.
Alex Abbott Boyd:For someone who hasn't been, how would you describe the food and the wine and
Josh Correa:The the vibe wine is, there's a lot of selection. We can find a wine that you'll like. So I'm, the vibe here is usually pretty mellow. It's meant to be a relaxing space that brings enjoyment to people, little escape from the outside world, glass of wine, little snack to eat, that kind of thing. We try to keep the music.
Josh Correa:We do do some DJ nights and the music will get turned up later in the night sometimes, but generally we try to keep it at a level where people can talk. Cause I figure if you're going to have a glass of wine with somebody, you probably want to talk to them. And then the food is basically small plates. We do have some bigger items, like a pasta now on the menu and a veal schnitzel. But mainly it's smaller things, meat and cheese boards, duck riads, smaller portions of things that go with wine.
Josh Correa:So I'll steal recipes from wherever the Romans build roads because I find that food, the food has grown up with wine. And so they go together and people always ask me like, what's a great pairing? And I'm like, well, you take the wine from a region and you match out the food from a region. And surprisingly enough, those two things that evolve together, they go really well together. Basically, we try to keep the food interesting, but really it's there to accompany the wine.
Josh Correa:So we're trying to make dishes that go with wine, and we'll go with as broad a flavor palette of wines as we can get.
Alex Abbott Boyd:This might be taking it a little bit back to when you were thinking of opening, but what was inspiration for doing a wine bar with food rather than, say, a slightly bigger restaurant that just had a killer wine program?
Josh Correa:I wasn't as excited about making a food match. Because it was about making a wine menu. I mean, restaurants do well during dining hours, but bars do better after dining hours. You know, between the end of dinner and 2AM was when you're going to see a lot of people. It was trying to have a business that wasn't just 6PM to 9PM, but it could be 3PM till 2AM.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That makes total sense. And it goes back to what you were saying about the inspirations in Spain too.
Josh Correa:Yeah. And people stay out late, have a few drinks, eat a little bit, have a few more drinks, eat a little bit. So it's a civilized way to go about your alcohol consumption.
Alex Abbott Boyd:No. I love it. So you you mentioned you've got 500 bottles. Yeah. You mentioned you've got a wine for everyone.
Josh Correa:I'll try you,
Alex Abbott Boyd:how do you go about thinking about curating the list? And are there certain things that are especially important to you, as championing either Ontario wine or natural wine? How I choose wines and how wines go
Josh Correa:on the list is quite honestly, a lot of what's on the list is stuff that I like. And then at the same time, as I'm tasting wines and trying new wines, I might be like, this is not for me. I don't want to drink this, but I know people who would like this wine. And so having flavor profiles that aren't necessarily ones that I go back to again and again, but I know these flavor profiles are going to please someone else. And I don't have to love every wine.
Josh Correa:I have to think every wine's well made and it's good, but part of picking wines for other people is picking wines that they like and not wines that I like. Oftentimes when people are asking me like, what's good on the wine list? And what do you what's your favorite wine on the wine list? I'll I'll honestly tell them that this is my favorite wine, but just because it's my favorite doesn't mean you're gonna like it. What I like might not be what you like, and that's okay.
Josh Correa:Let's But find you something that you like.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Do you have any set questions or techniques for trying to figure out how you can best get someone the bottle that they're really gonna enjoy? Yeah.
Josh Correa:I've basically broken it down into a flowchart where I can ask someone about three questions and figure out what wine they want. So the first question is red, white, sparkling, like establish the broad type of wine that they want. And then if it's red wine, so I'll ask them if they want it light, medium, or full, and fruity or savory. And that gives me a little grid in which I can narrow down what they actually want. So if they want something full bodied and savory, maybe they're going maybe we're doing something like a madarine or like a arica or something dark and rosy.
Josh Correa:And if they want something that is full bodied and fruity with some vanilla to it, well, maybe well, they can't write they can't have it right now, but we used to have a California Cabo on the menu all the time. It could be that person's go to wine. If you want something that's light and fruity, there's generally a Gamay on the list and so on and so forth. And then with white wines, it's like, do you want crisp, clean, and minerally, or do you want fuller and rounder? And crisp, and minerally is fairly easy.
Josh Correa:That's, there's a whole, not that you can't have really good wines in that category, but like that's your Pinot Grigio or equivalent. And then if they want it fuller and rounder, then you're asking them, do you want it with oak? Are you a lover of oaked, ugly oaked Californian chardonnay? Well, that takes you into one realm, or do you want something without oak that's still fuller bodied, and then maybe we're going to the Southern Rhone or certain Italian white grapes and stuff like that. Over time, I've worked it out so that I can figure out sort of what they like.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What role does Ontario wine have in the
Josh Correa:program At the beginning, we cut about half. Half of our by the glass stuff was Ontario. It's gone down a bit since then, but we still have a lot of Ontario wine. I love Ontario wine. However, it's not always the easiest sell.
Josh Correa:The baby boomers still look at Ontario. Anything from Ontario is horrible, and I won't touch that style. But that's a very boomer opinion. And the Gen Xers are a small cohort, but some of us like lighter bodied wines and some of us still like the big full bodied wines that the boomer parents liked. And then I find the millennials and the Gen Z who are now starting to get old enough to drink are much more open to Ontario wines and to lighter bodied styles of wine.
Josh Correa:But, yeah, when we opened, we had a lot of Ontario wine, had to deal with a number of customers who were very unhappy with me about.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Were they gone? Were they unhappy with the idea or even with the taste after they tried it?
Josh Correa:Both. We had a woman I remember in, like, the first week we were open, we had a woman get angry at us for not having a California chardonnay and be like, I can't believe you have the all these Ontario wines are all shit and walk out. Wow. Yep. I mean, she was on the older side.
Josh Correa:Might be might have been from a generation that likes big, oaky California Chardonnay. Couldn't believe that we'd be a wine bar without one.
Alex Abbott Boyd:How does the demographics of
Josh Correa:your clientele land? It's about 70% women. Groups of women are much more likely to go out together and drink wine. There's many guys who, when they're getting together with their guy friends, are going to watch sports and drink beer, which is fair enough. I will occasionally watch the sports ball.
Josh Correa:And there's a very broad age range, everybody from baby boomers all the way through to newly minted 19 year olds, although we don't get many newly minted 19 year olds here. Generally it takes a few years of drinking before you get into wine. But I would say there, while there are people who are older than me coming in and drinking wine, it's definitely far outweighed by the number of people who are younger than me. You know, 40 all the way through to mid twenties would be sort of the core demographic of who's doing the heavy lifting in terms of wine drinking at archive. And then we get lots of dates.
Josh Correa:And then due to the fact of having a lot of dates, we've also had a lot of one year anniversaries and then engagement parties. So it's interesting in that respect where I've got to see all the way from first date to being married and having their first kid, and then we'd be usually disappear for a couple of years before they show up again once the babysitter can take care. That's beautiful. So that's the sort of the date night demographic is definitely a big one.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What are your thoughts on natural wine? And has it been something that has evolved in your list? Is it something that's important to you? How do you think about that?
Josh Correa:You know, natural wine is pretty loaded and some people say it as a pejorative and some people say it like it's the holy grail. The most important thing to me in wine is honesty. So whatever you're adding, whatever you're taking away, cool, but you should tell your customer or you should tell the people drinking it and buying it. It's one of the reasons that I think the EU's push to put labeling or ingredients labeling on wines is one of the greatest things in the world. And I think it should be on all wine.
Josh Correa:Wine is a feed product, then it should be treated as such. And if you're going to put something in the wine to make it a better wine or whatever, you should tell people that you're doing that so that people know what they're consuming, ascension. Human. But definitely, the best wines that I've tried are the natural wines. The ones that are most expressive of a time and a place and that give you the most sort of feeling and emotion to them are wines like that, that have been made honestly.
Josh Correa:And you know, if you've to add a little sulfur, add a little sulfur, but tell me, I'm going to judge the wine on the wine in the glass and how that tastes to me and whether I like it or not, or whether I think it's saleable or not. I do want to know how it's made, but I don't actually care how it's made. I care how it tastes at the end. Yeah. My job is tasting wine and selling wine to people who are going to taste it.
Josh Correa:If you've got to, if you've to do a little something to make it taste good, then fair enough. But, again, be ready to tell me that you've done that.
Alex Abbott Boyd:You know? Yeah. That makes total sense. And I feel If you do find a really special delicious wine, it's almost by definition gonna be natural for the for the reasons that you Yeah. You hit on that you can't tell that story of that place and time as well if you're covering things up.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. So I'm gonna shift gears entirely. Yeah. You touched a little bit on your Sunday Fundays, and I've also been to several of your Tasting Tuesdays. Yep.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I guess could you just share a little bit about both of those, how So they came to
Josh Correa:Sunday Funday, it was just after COVID's finished and wanted to do something on Sundays to get people in and just like, well, I've got all this wine at the basement. Some of it where I've only got a bottle left and not going to bother putting it on the list or I was saving. I put some bottles away because I wanted to see how they aged. And now I'm going to start bringing that stuff up. So I basically people are like, what's the Sunday Funday wine going to be?
Josh Correa:And I'm like, I don't know till Sunday. And I usually don't know till about 02:30 on Sunday when I go down to the basement and I pick something that I you like tasting that day. So that was the origin of Sunday Funday was pull up something that's been aged and is cool
Alex Abbott Boyd:and we'll try it. Have you developed a following, like people who love to come for Sunday Funday?
Josh Correa:Oh, there are. Yeah. And it's a lot depends on which wine it happens to be. I'll post about the wines and there's definitely people who will come in just because they saw the post and they want to taste that wine that day. So yeah, I would think there's at least a small following of people.
Josh Correa:And then the Tasting Tuesdays started off because I was like, oh, we should have a staff tasting group. But when are we gonna do that? Because this is Paul. There's always one of us working. So there aren't many days off as a whole staff.
Josh Correa:So when are we gonna do it? Well, if we're gonna do it while we're open, we should probably include customers in it too, because we don't, I don't want to just have the staff all in the corner tasting wine and then going customers. So then, yeah, that's what the idea for Tasting Tuesday. So now it's like, let's just have a tasting group.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And when was that?
Josh Correa:When was it was about a year and a half ago. I I could look back on the Instagram feed and see But, the first yeah, been doing it for about a year and a half, maybe almost two years now.
Alex Abbott Boyd:How has it begun? My perception into maybe three or four is that it's already kind of a really important part of the wine community. Like, see young psalms from across the city and other agents just having a great time and getting to know each other and trying some fun wine. Yeah.
Josh Correa:And it's Psalms, it's servers, it's wine agents, and then some wine nerds, some wine nerds from outside the industry come and join as well. There's a broad range of knowledge and stuff, but everybody's here just to have fun doing it too. Generally, as most things at archive, we try not to have it be snoopy. Like we want to talk about wine and be into wine without being pretentious about it, without being condescending to people or anything like that.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Do you think you
Josh Correa:strike To that me, that's how wine is most I don't know. You just talk about the wine and you don't don't yuck anybody else's yum. Talk honestly about the wine, but you don't have to make like, it's it's all just stuff I looked up on the Internet anyway. So why am I gonna feel like I'm superior to you because I memorized this piece of information that you didn't the best way to learn about wine is drinking wine and then learning a little bit about that bottle. And then keep doing that, and after a couple 100 bottles, you'll know something about wine.
Josh Correa:Yeah. But just trying to keep things not not being pretentious about wine. Because wine can be very pretentious and very snobby. Hard not to specifically not be that way about it. So that's really helped with getting people into the wine, like, you know, getting to talk at the tasting Tuesday and to make a guess and to go out a limps.
Josh Correa:Because on oftentimes, you're in a bunch of you're in front of a bunch of strangers and you're like, I don't wanna sound like an idiot. I'm not gonna say any of that. But then there's me guessing the wine being the loudest in the room, guessing the wrong wine all the time. And then maybe that peep makes people feel a little more comfortable about Well, throwing things out
Alex Abbott Boyd:just the nature of the wines that people bring. I don't think most master psalms would know how to I blind taste half the wines because people bring such unique and weird
Josh Correa:Yeah. And I mean, there's that cheap. Like, you'd get some very testable wines and you'll get some stuff that's less testable. The most important thing as you learn many new things is to realize that what you don't know is even more than what you know. There definitely can be a lack of humbleness when people get a certain amount of knowledge under their belt.
Josh Correa:Yeah. That isn't necessarily
Alex Abbott Boyd:helpful to learning more. Switching gears just a little bit. Yeah. Has your taste evolved since opening up Archive?
Josh Correa:Oh, My taste has evolved since getting into wine. When I first started drinking wine, it was the early two thousands. We were still drinking heavily oaked Malbec. And definitely over time, I've moved away from both extraction and much more towards light bodied reds. And now I would even say I probably drink a lot more white than I do reds, about 70% white, 29% light bodied reds.
Josh Correa:And there's only a time of two a year where I'm gonna want a big full bodied one. And it's usually the middle of winter with stew or something, some big meaty dish, like braised meaty dish like that.
Alex Abbott Boyd:So I I know you might have just tried to answer this with what I'm in the mood for. Yeah. But what maybe what are some of your favorite grapes or regions
Josh Correa:or Guinea. If I was to pick one red grape that I would probably take over all the others, and it's not that it's better than anything else. It's just gheme can be anywhere from when it's young, it's fun, it's fruity, it's fresh, it's very glue glue. And then as it ages, it goes, if it's well made, it can go through this pinot ing process where it becomes like, becomes more like pinot noir. So you can go anywhere from just fun, easy drinking blue blue wine to a very, awesome age.
Josh Correa:It gets much more serious. And then it's also you don't have to wait twenty years. Like, properly aged Nebbiolo is lovely, but who has twenty five years to wait?
Alex Abbott Boyd:And the money to spend.
Josh Correa:And and, well, and the money to spend. Right? Beaujolais, the prices have creeped up, but they're still not, there's still not Burgundy levels of prices or Bordeaux level of pricing on them. And in a relatively short time period, five, like say five years, you can go from a just released Fruity Fresh bottle of wine to something that is showing age and development and is exciting for that reason. So the aging timeframe is shorter, which I like about it.
Josh Correa:In cuisine, you can actually see things before waiting twenty years for no cuisine. And it has a broad variety of flavors that can be associated with it, which is why I like it. That being said, I also love Pinot Noir, also love Chardonnay, also love Chenin Blanc. There are not many grapes that I dislike. There might be some ways of manipulating those grapes, turning them into wine that are not to my taste.
Josh Correa:There's something good to be said about every grape, maybe. For sure. Although not maybe not Concord and maybe not Bacconnoir or Marechal Voge, but that's another story.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Concord grape jelly.
Josh Correa:Well, that one yeah. You're right. But I've landed for making wine.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. Wine can open doors to incredible experiences abroad, and you mentioned that you'd been to Barossa. Yep. What are some of the most special trips that you've been on?
Josh Correa:The trip to I got to go on a trip to Australia with Wines of Australia. That was a lovely trip. I've gotten to go to Portugal a couple times on wine trips. Those were also very good. Italy once, Northern Italy once on a wine trip from the Valpolicella region.
Alex Abbott Boyd:These sponsored trips or all all sponsored?
Josh Correa:Or All these were sponsored trips. And basically how it works is if you're a wine buyer, the consortio or, like, the consortium of growers for a region will get money from the EU in order to bring psalms over or wine buyers over to experience what it's like there. Then you go I call it getting on the bus because you fly there and you get on a bus and then they take you places and you get off and taste wine and then get back on the bus and go to the next place. And you generally see on the sort of the consortia run trips are you're generally going to see a broader variety of wines. You'll see everybody from big industrial producers down to small, more natural producers.
Josh Correa:And it's definitely an interesting thing to do. And if you're a young song, I would definitely suggest you go do it. There's also going to be a limit to the once you've gone and seen a big tank farm, how many do you need to go to the next place in the world and see another tank farm there? They're going to look they're going to big industrial winemaking looks like a big industrial process. And it's generally not going to be that different from place to place.
Josh Correa:It's more going to be the small artisanal level of growers that are doing things that are really unique. And that's more what I'm interested in seeing now. So the trip that I've been doing, I think I've done it now for seven years, is in the Loire Valley. There's a bunch of tastings at the January, February that I like to try to get to every year, but that's a personal trip. That's not consortio rap trip.
Josh Correa:That's the one that I much prefer because there's the Renaissance to Appalachians tasting, which is Nicolas Jolie's group of all organic biodiagnostic growers. Who are making things fairly natural. And then on that same weekend, also have L'Div, which is all this serious natural, the more natural of, they might be organic and biodynamic at the same time too, but definitely leaning into the low sulfur stuff for them. And then there's, there's also the levy du loire, which is the actual official big tasting that all these other tastings have grown up around. But I think I was there last year and there was something like 60 tastings set up over the course of this one weekend, like to the point where you can't get to the mall.
Josh Correa:But that's the way that I get to see the most producers that I want to see in the shortest amount of time. So that's my current favorite. Okay.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That sounds great. Well, you know, early February is also wine Paris. So I almost felt like you could just pop up to Paris afterward and kind
Josh Correa:of just And a lot of wine that's what a lot of people and wine agents do is still go it's the following. Wine Paris is usually the following week, or the week following, or maybe the week and a half following the Dive and the Renaissance Appalachia stays thing. So yeah, quite often people will just go over for two weeks and stay for all through that. And then you could probably see most, depending on the kind of wine agency you run, you're not going to see all the Australian producers there, but you're going to get most of the producers you want to see from Europe at these tastings. Especially, you know, especially the DIV has grown to be very big with people from all it's not just a Loire Valley tasting longer.
Alex Abbott Boyd:So staying in business for a restaurant or a wine bar as long as you have it is really an impressive accomplishment. What do you think what do you think are the keys to success? And what do think has kept you going so long? Stubbornness.
Josh Correa:But but that People obviously, people coming and buying stuff from us. But yeah, I mean, it also, I think it takes having the stubbornness to get through the tougher times and believe that it's going to get better. COVID was real tough. And there was definitely some thought during COVID of just shutting it all down and why am I even doing this? Coming back from COVID was, I told people that it was at least as hard as opening.
Josh Correa:It was like reopening and rebuilding after a year and a half, two years of being sporadically open and only outside and only with social distancing. It was really coming back and having to build up a client base again. It was like starting from scratch doing that, which I hope I never have to do again. But yeah, you got to have a vision. You got to do things.
Josh Correa:You can't be stubborn in doing bad things and you can't be stubborn when it's time to change, to make things better, but you also do need some stubbornness to stay open when you to let the good things happen and stuff like that. That'd be why. Okay. But that's my idea It's the perfect answer.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What advice would you give to someone who's kind of just starting out in wine now? It's a bit of a tricky time, I would say in
Josh Correa:the wine industry. Advice for someone just starting out is wine's the greatest thing in the world. Just be ready to try it all. Yeah. Hopefully, you're someone who is into trying new things because wine has a whole you can try all the new things and never run out of new things to try with wine.
Josh Correa:Other than that, taste again, taste as much as you can. Taste as many different wines, as many different styles. You can decide whether you like them or not as a personal choice, but don't get caught up in that when you're deciding what to buy for other people or what to suggest to other people. If somebody likes something, then you should allow them to like that.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. I mean, that's what hospitality is, right?
Josh Correa:Right.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Looking ahead, what's next for archive?
Josh Correa:I need to get together my online store. The next big thing that I need to do, I've actually picked up some grapes from where the old Portuguese people go and buy them from Machado winery there, and I'm making some wine in my kitchen that will likely be cooking wine once it's done. And then in a couple weeks, the grapes from Niagara will start to come in, so I'll get to go down there and make a couple of couvets, a cold white wine and a cool red wine for 2025.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Wine area are you partnering with?
Josh Correa:So I work out of Theory Anthropy. They're very nice enough to let me just have a couple tanks in the corner. I go down and do the work, keep the wine there so that I can legally sell it, because the wine I make in my backyard, I'm not allowed to legally sell. Yeah. And I appreciate the way that they make their wines and the way they do things, and it's really nice that they allow me to go in there and do a little bit of, do a little bit of stuff.
Josh Correa:So I'm looking forward to that. And then other than that, what's up? Archives just trying to do its thing every day. At a certain point you want to just have the machine run and if everything's rolling along smoothly, you don't necessarily need
Alex Abbott Boyd:to keep tweaking things. Of course, that's the dream.
Josh Correa:Yeah. I mean, not that you don't have to change, but I wouldn't say there's anything drastic. I'm pretty happy, Dirkov. I don't think there's any drastic changes or drastic new things that are gonna go on.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Well, thank you so much for your time.
Josh Correa:Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me. Thank
Alex Abbott Boyd:you for listening. Now if you enjoyed this episode, I have a quick favor to ask. Please hit that subscribe button. And to the many of you who already have, thank you so, so much. Producing this podcast has been just a ton of fun and meaningful and really exciting, but it's also been a lot of work.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And the way you can let me know that you're enjoying it and that I should keep it up is hitting that subscribe button. Plus, I've got a lot of exciting interviews lined up, and I would hate for anyone who's enjoying the podcast to miss one of them. Until next time. Cheers.
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