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Joe Winger:

Just to touch on background a little bit, you were the winemaker and founder of a very successful urban winery, the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

Then you chose to move on to where you are now at The Ordinary Fellow.

What was that transition like for you?

Ben Parsons:

The Infinite Monkey Theorem was really about disrupting the wine industry and trying to make wine fun and relevant and accessible.

We were the first ones in the U.S. to put wine in the can. We started kegging in 2008.

It was really about creating these urban winery spaces, just a tap room for a craft brewery in a city where everyone could come down and enjoy.

After 11 years of taking that to a 100,000 case production distributed in 42 states, there was a really good opportunity for me to get back to what I wanted to do, which is being in a vineyard.

Even though that might sound like a cliche, there is something quite romantic about farming and being surrounded by nature and really trying to make the very best wine you can from Colorado fruit that you grow and putting it in a bottle versus buying someone else’s wine and putting it in a can, they’re like two very different things.

I had an opportunity to take over a vineyard in southwest Colorado down in the Four Corners just outside of Cortez, where the Four Corners meet.

It was in disrepair and hadn’t been pruned in four years. So I got back in there and now it’s looking really good.

So that’s taken 4 years. Yeah it’s relatively small. It’s 13 acres of Riesling, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon.

Sits at 6,000 feet elevation. So very high for a commercial vineyard. And it’s beautiful.

It sits on a national monument called the Yucca House, which is an un-excavated ancestral Pueblan ruin from between the 10th and 12th century.

Starts at Mesa Verde, which most people are familiar with for the ancestral cliff dwellings from the Pueblans down there. It’s just a beautiful location.

Yeah, two very different things, but kind of coming full circle almost as to what I got me into the industry in the beginning, back in the late 90s.

And now back there, but doing it on my own.

Joe Winger:

You chose to be in Palisade, Colorado making your wine.

Tell us a little bit about the region and why someone should come visit you in Colorado?

Ben Parsons:

Palisade is beautiful. It’s on the Western slope of Colorado. It’s about a 4 hour drive West of Denver over the mountains.

About 4 1/2 hours East of Salt Lake City.

It’s an American Viticultural Area designate called the Grand Valley and it’s pretty stunning.

It’s known for its fruit. It’s actually known for its peaches, believe it or not. Some of the best peaches grown anywhere in the United States. Arguably the best.

But it’s a very small microclimate.

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Today’s conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For the full, un-edited conversation, visit our YouTube channel here.

So often we talk about food and wine and it’s usually for dates, romantic nights out, date night, anniversaries, vacations.

Today we’re going to get to the source of what those date’s are actually about. So with us is a dating expert, Andrea McGinty from 33000dates.com.

So just to start things off, what inspired you to become a dating coach?

Andrea McGinty:

You mean what inspired an accounting / finance major to become a dating coach?

I started this when I was in my 20s. So this is the 1990s.

There’s no Google yet. There’s no online dating. It’s going to happen in the late 90s, but it hasn’t happened yet. At that point I was living in Chicago and I was getting married and five weeks before the wedding, he called it off and it was like – boom!

What do you do? First I cried, of course…

Anyway my friends started fixing me up on dates, still in your 20s and you know how those dates go,

They know someone that’s single, so they think you should like them, blah, blah, blah…

After some of those dates I was really thinking about it and I thought, it’d be great if there was a place you could go, like an executive recruiter for your professional life.

The same thing for your personal life.

And of course, there was nothing like that at the time. Even in high school and in college I fixed up two of my suitemates. They’re still with their husbands that I fixed them up with.

I was already good at this and I thought I could start this.

Anyway, fast forward.

I started a company in Chicago called It’s Just Lunch. Where people meet for lunch. We do all the work.

Fast forward, 15 years later, it’s still the same.

[At my first dating company, It’s Just Lunch] we had 110 locations globally and then I sold. Timing was perfect because online dating was coming out of its infancy and it was a mess it at first, just the scammers, the crazies, the horrible stories,

I thought, “Oh, wow, there’s a need. People have no idea what to do online and how to date.”

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