 Hello, my name is Matthew Horky. My partner in crime and I have been traveling around the world for food and wine for the last three and a half years. Some call us digital nomads, some call us location independent, some call us wine gypsies. This is the story of our most epic year yet. Here's what one year on the wine road looks like. So here we are actually back to where it all started. The very first episode of Exotic Wine Travel was filmed right here. Hello and welcome to Exotic Wine Travel. I wanted it to be exactly like Wine Library TV. You're welcome to Wine Library TV. I am your host Gary Bae, NerdChuck. Oh, hello, hello, welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. When we started the YouTube channel, I wanted it to be simple. I'm just using an iPhone. We're not going to edit. Very spontaneous. After a while I realized that that didn't work. So we upgraded the camera, we started editing the videos, and from then our trips and our invites just took off. 2018 actually started out with a big bang. That winter we actually found out that both of us had received fellowships to the Wine Writer Symposium in Napa Valley. After the new year commenced, we got on a plane and we flew to Detroit, Michigan. When we arrived in Michigan, we had lots of wine waiting for us. We received about 100 samples of wine from Santa Barbara County. We were also promoting our electronic book, Sipping Santa Barbara Recommended Wines and Producers. And after about a month, we knew we had to jump in the car. We drove across the USA in the dead of winter, taking IAD to Napa, California, home of the Wine Writer Symposium 2018 and Premier Napa Valley. The week was filled with learning, tastings, and parties. The highlight of our young wine career was probably in Premier Napa Valley. The first evening, everybody was asked to do a 30 second to a minute video and the videos were popping up on the screen and we were all watching them. Stephen Spurrier, the British man famous for putting together the judgment of Paris. He was a little bit bored watching the videos and then our video came up. He just turned around to me and went like this. The week closed with the Premier Napa Valley auction. We caught some bad weather on the drive back to Michigan but made it home safely. We went back to my parents' home in Michigan and we finished up our video series on the wines of Santa Barbara but it wasn't long before we were on the road again. What does baby think of New York? The reason we were in the US is we were hired to do a master class in New York City. Before we stopped in the Big Apple, we went over to the garden state. We had met a guy named Drew D. Mantel. Drew was a wine enthusiast and throughout the week we tasted our way around New Jersey and Manhattan. He took us to Philadelphia and gave Shireen her first taste of Philly cheese steak. The Croatian wine master class was the real reason we were there. Shireen and I delivered a class to a packed house that included representatives from the wine enthusiast, wine spectator, wine and spirits and decanter magazine. After finishing the master class, we flew to Europe. I went to the south of France for Lenguodoc Rusi on week while Shireen went to Italy for a natural wine event. It was our first time traveling separately since we started this lifestyle and it gave us some much needed breathing room. After a perspective week long apart, we arrived back in Croatia for our biggest and most ambitious project of the year. So sit back, relax and join us as we go Cracking Croatian Wine! Our book Cracking Croatian Wine had been out for almost a year. It was selling every single day but not, we were frustrated not selling the level we wanted so UC said you know what, we're going to put together a travel video series and bring the book to life. Over the course of a month, we toured the entire country and recorded a 12 part food and wine series. We wanted to stretch ourselves and make an Anthony Bourdain style series. It was a hectic month that allowed us to show off the beauty of this country and promote our book and Croatian wines at large. It also gave me a chance to experiment with different types of shots. After wrapping up the shooting, we flew out of Zagreb to Puglia, the heel of Italy. Shireen and I judged at the Radici del Sud, a big competition featuring wines from all over the south of Italy. The competition also had an attached press trip which got us deeper into the Puglian culture and food which is stunning in its simplicity. The week came and went quickly and we were geared up for the heat of summer. After Radici del Sud, we had to finish up all the editing for cracking Croatian wine. At the last second, we chose to return to one of our favorite cities in the world, Budapest, Hungary. I hadn't booked accommodation because I was kind of uncertain where we would actually be. The only place available for four weeks to six weeks on Airbnb was on the outskirts of Budapest. The Outer Eighth District, it was actually known for drugs and prostitution in the past and you could definitely see some of that. There were definitely some people that were probably a little bit drugged out. You could see some street walkers once in a while. We didn't let that damp our mood during our time in Budapest. We got a lot of work done while getting deeper into the Hungarian food and wine scene. We were introduced to a number of new producers. In the meantime, we kept releasing our cracking Croatian wine videos. Our Brac and Hoare episode caught on and reached over 25,000 views on Facebook in just two weeks. Shereen already loved Hungary, but became even more enchanted with a colorful and endless variety of food. This is an experimental breed from my cheese maker. I wouldn't probably call it Brea yet, but it just tastes great. What do you think about the food here? And then we got an email, an invite from a really unlikely place. Romanian born, Mik Vassalaki, found out about us after buying our book on Corking the Caucuses. He since started a winery in Romania and invited us for a visit. You know, I'd been avoiding Romania for a long time because I had some friends that went and actually had unpleasant experiences. Our prejudices were shattered in our short time in Romania. It was full of good food and wine, in addition to the warm hospitality of the people. Little did we know, Romania would play a bigger role in the near future for us. We returned to Hungary when on a few seller visits thanks to Taste Hungary, including the first of our three visits to Tokai in 2018. Five star vintage in Tokai. Soon we were off to Italy again. This time we were going to the island of Sardinia. We went to the island to judge and take part in the Kelliarty International Food and Wine Festival. A highlight of the trip was a sheep roast in the highlands of Sardinia. It was scorching hot, but that didn't stop producers from showing us their traditional food paired with big, spicy canonow. At this point I have to talk about a good friend Fabian Linnae. We haven't met a lot of helpful people from the media side of wine, but Fabian is one of them. He's a one-man wine agency and has connected us with a number of press trips. During the last year we saw him about every two weeks. After Sardinia we flew up to Budapest for just a few days. We enjoyed my birthday in Budapest before heading to Slovakia for a two-week self-guided press tour. Our friend Peter Drotar got us a large toyota Hilux and off we went. I want to be in a truck! It was our second big wine trip through Slovakia in less than a year. We continued to be impressed with the quality of wines coming out of this country that, although has a long history of viticulture, isn't associated with wine. It was a hot and epic end of the summer, but pressure started to mount. So our business account was starting to get a little bit thin. We fought through the stress because we had a big fall planned. Before a series of big trips we stopped to visit a friend in Oradea, Romania. He treated us well and put together a number of epic tastings before we hit the road again. After Oradea, we took a flicks bus all the way back to Budapest to go on this four-day trip with Hungarian wines.eu. We had won a webwriting contest and our reward was a four-day trip through the wine regions of Hungary. I love wine. I love it. It was a chance to make even more Hungarian wine connections and we visited Tokai again. The trip ended with a big Hungarian wine tasting and luckily we bumped into a friend from the virtual world, SashoPapaVino.co. He offered to take us from Hungary to Slovenia where our next press trip was scheduled to begin. While all this happened, we got some great news. Luckily, I had overpaid taxes a few years ago and we got a tax return in so that kind of helped set us up nicely for the next few months. With that little bit of relief, we were able to enjoy two of the most memorable press trips of the year. The Vipava Valley was named one of the top 10 European wine regions to visit by Lonely Planet in 2018. It's home to breathtaking scenery and killer wines made from a number of unique local grapes. A few weeks after that trip, we headed to Porto, Portugal for Port wine days 2018. There, we celebrated the 2016 vintage declaration. It was a magical week for Shireen as Port was the first wine she fell in love with. What's your team look like after Port tasting? When we finished up with Port wine days, we went back to Kroa Shireen's apartment just to pound out some work. And we really didn't have anything planned for the end of the third quarter and the fourth quarter of 2018. And then all of a sudden, boom, things happened. Out of the blue, we got invited to a festival in Bosnia, Herzegovina, celebrating the local grapes Jalavka and Blatina. The event was immediately followed by an invite to participate in another press trip throughout Croatia. It was a great opportunity for us because a number of European wine magazines had representatives on the trip. It was an intense five day trip, which included late nights, early mornings and long bus rides. The morning after the trip ended, we had to take a nine hour car ride from Dubrovnik Croatia to Idria Slovenia for a festival on Pinot Noir. At this point, I think I have to mention Sasha Špiranets. Sasha is one of Croatia's most respected wine writers. He's been the most helpful person we've met in the wine industry. Thanks to Sasha, we were hired to speak in New York, take part in a number of Croatian wine trips, and he even engaged us to produce our latest video series. Hi, I'm Širin Tan. Welcome to Croatian Wine in 60 Seconds. Today, we're going to introduce two... Our crazy autumn continued as we were invited to judge the IWCB, marking the third visit to Romania in the year. We followed that up with a trip to Vienna for the Orange Wine Festival. Back with a better one, like, what the hell are you... This is... this is magic! It was an exciting few months, but the hectic schedule started to catch up with us. We had a great time at the festival, but we were really feeling the stress on our relationship because of the last three and a half years together every single day, or depended on each other for everything, for emotional, intellectual needs, and really started to take its toll. We had been in Europe for two straight winters, something that Širin was not very fond of because she doesn't like the cold. So after the one final show in Croatia, we decided to head back to Asia via Moscow. It's been two years since I've been back in Asia. It feels a little bit weird taking the metro. We stopped in Hong Kong to see some friends and attend two big tastings, a Pina Noir event featuring New Zealand Australian wines, in addition to James Suckling's Great Wines of Italy. On top of all that, we made time to indulge our craving for authentic Asian food that we were missing in Europe. We were feeling the pressure of returning to Singapore and seeing our friends and family, especially because exotic wine travel is yet to be successful as we want it to be. Even though that we felt the pressure, we knew that we had to go back. So here we are, we're back in Singapore, back where it all started. It kind of makes sense that we should be here after the best year that we've had in the wine industry. It's been an incredible ride. It hasn't been without its challenges this year. Definitely obviously a business not where we want it to be, stress on a relationship. Both of us, especially more me, put on a ton of weight during the last couple of years. So we're working towards fixing that. But the people we've met, the experiences we had, the places we've traveled, the wines we've tasted, have just been mind boggling, have been out of this world. So 2018 is coming to a close and we're looking forward to 2019. We're going to continue to push to bring you some of the best and most exciting content in food, wine and travel. And we're trying to push to the next level. This is the very first year that we felt accepted, that we're actually part of the wine industry. Sherene's in the corporate world and she gets asked a lot of times, even though she talks about sometimes she's missing the corporate world, some of those intellectual discussions and people ask her if she would do anything differently. And she always says, no, I wouldn't do anything differently. And that's the way I feel. I wouldn't do everything. I wouldn't do anything differently. It's been a wild ride and I hope you're there with us in 2019. Until then, drink adventurously, expand your palate and expand your mind.