00:01
Peter Work
I picked Bacchus by Jakob Mattson because Bacchus is the god of wine and celebration.

00:09
Peter Work
What I see in the picture is the harvesting, getting the grapes, squeezing the grapes, turning the grapes into wine. Of course it doesn't happen in a matter of seconds. It's a longer process, picking those clusters, squeezing the clusters, creating that wine, that one day will end up being part of Bacchus's party. And the picture, it's such a symbolic expression of what we think wine is about.

00:34
Peter Work
Bacchus is what defines a lot of what we do. When we make our wine here and the wine is being used for celebration, that is what Bacchus stands for.

00:44
Peter Work
Now Bacchus was also the name of our first dog, a Chocolate Lab, that we got just a few months after we bought the property. And Bacchus was the dog we had when we went through the transition moving up here. Bacchus went from city dog to farm dog, coming up here, running around. So Bacchus has always been an important part of our life up here. 

01:11
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today our guest is Peter Work, a Danish winemaker and businessman. Welcome, Peter.

01:35
Peter Work
Thank you so much. Great to be together with you.

01:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's very nice to be here because we are actually in your place. So maybe you should welcome us. We're at Ampelos Cellars in Santa Barbara County in California. It's a lovely winery in Lompoc. How did you end up here in 2002? You and your wife both had corporate careers, and then September 11th happened. How did you get the idea to open a winery?

02:04
Peter Work
Yeah, so it is, of course, a very long story. I will try to make it short, but it's fun to talk about this, talk about myself and Rebecca. So it started out with a long corporate career. I was a Price Waterhouse management consultant for many years, a couple of years in Copenhagen and London.

02:20
Peter Work
And then from '88, I've been in the United States. They moved me to a project in Los Angeles in 1992, where I met my wonderful wife Rebecca, and stayed there for a couple of years. I was headhunted into the Walt Disney Corporation, where I was in charge of IT, strategic IT, for five years.

02:41
Peter Work
And then in '99, Rebecca and I and some of our friends did a startup. We were six of us that had a great idea and some venture capital and started Exult in the spring of '99, taking it on the stock exchange the next summer in 2000.

02:57
Peter Work
We lived down in Los Angeles and loved coming up to Santa Barbara. You guys drove up here today. You saw the beauty driving by the ocean, getting up in the valley. It's gorgeous and green and hilly and pretty. So we loved coming up here and spending weekends up here. We said, what about buying a little piece of land?

03:14
Peter Work
We started looking around and before we knew it, we found this place here. It's 82 acres, 33 hectares, totally untouched land. There was nothing on it except for a long driveway and a well with a pump from actually a Danish company from Grundfos. And we just had a crazy idea about maybe one day we could have a vineyard.

03:35
Peter Work
We had absolutely no qualifications. We couldn't keep our house plants alive in our house back then. Now we have 46,000 in the backyard and they're doing just fine. So that was how it started out that we just bought the lands.

03:48
Peter Work
We were smart enough to recognize what we were not smart at and to find help. So we immediately hired a vineyard consultant to help us to get the project started. So that was how we got the thing going. Just a crazy project.

04:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And one thing is getting the idea and another is actually making it happen. Looking back, how did you do it and what made you succeed in doing it? You said you got consultants to help you. So that was a good start.

04:14
Peter Work
Yes. I think that we had very much confidence from the startup company we did in '99. It turned out to be a $3 billion company in less than two years. So we just figured that, hey, if we can start this and make this successful and be all over the world, then we can probably figure out how to get a little vineyard to hang together.

04:33
Peter Work
But like you were just saying there, it was also a lot about finding people with the right skills to help us, to guide us, to mentor us along the way. And that's how we built it up. So that's how we started the farming plant, the vineyards, with a fantastic vineyard consultant and his people.

04:50
Peter Work
And then later on when we harvested for the first time in 2004 and wanted to start making wine out of our crop, out of our yields from here. Then we also had vineyard wine making consultants that helped us out along the way. We've had friends helping us out with creating a brand, packaging and the whole deal about how do you get the words out to people about what we are.

05:16
Peter Work
But I think one of the very important things is when you do something like this, you have to define what is it your brand is going to be about, what is it that you stand for, what is unique about you, how can you differentiate yourself, which was the reason why after two years in '04 and '05, we then decided to take a jump into organic and biodynamic farming, and later on sustainable farming and regenerative farming.

05:42
Peter Work
And we do believe we are still on the forefront with this. And that's really part of our identity and what we stand for. It's very conscious green farming and natural winemaking.

05:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I will ask you a little bit more about that later. Our listeners cannot see where we are at the moment. It's really beautiful and serene here. How would you describe the location to them, your winery and the surrounding land?

06:06
Peter Work
I think what's very unique is the geography where we are. So if you look at where we are, just a little bit north of Santa Barbara, about two hours from Los Angeles, you take the globe and turn it around to Europe, you'll see we're south of Europe. We're south of Portugal and Spain.

06:22
Peter Work
We're like Northern Africa, which is not a place I would plant Pinot Noir. We were in Morocco last year and that is definitely not a Pinot Noir area, but we can do it here. Why? Because just about 20 minutes west of us, we have a fantastic air condition system called the Pacific Ocean. And the Pacific Ocean brings down the cold water up from Alaska.

06:45
Peter Work
Another thing is that where we are, typically the west coast is north-south coastline, so it's western facing. Where we are, there's a break in it at Point Conception. So as you drove here today, you were driving east-west, and it's a southern facing coastline all the way into Malibu and into Santa Monica.

07:03
Peter Work
And the same thing happened with the mountains. So the mountains here are east-west mountains, which creates these wonderful valleys out to the cold ocean. So that provides us with this very fantastic cooling effect from the ocean. So that is one thing that's unique about where we are.

07:19
Peter Work
Secondly, the weather in general is very predictable. We were talking a little bit about rain as you arrived here. Our rain comes in the six winter months. The six summer months, which is April through September, we never see a drop of rain.

07:33
Peter Work
And that's fantastic because that is a growing season where we don't have the risk of the rain coming in or hail or you hear about all those destructions that happens in France and Germany and Italy, with the rough weather they've had the last decade. We don't have that here. It's very ideal growing conditions.

07:49
Peter Work
And then the final thing is, the soil, because it's very important with the soil conditions that we have. That's where the vines are growing, that's where they get their nutrients from. And the soil is determined by the rocks underneath it, and they were created here about 20 million years ago. So this was at the bottom of the ocean back then, and that is what defines the soil that we have. So we have very good soil types that are absolutely ideal for Pinot Noir.

08:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Were you into wine before you opened the winery, or did you just enjoy it like the average wine drinker?

08:25
Peter Work
I was definitely on the other side of the table. I was on the consumption side. Both Rebecca and I, we just loved good wines. And when Rebecca and I met, I knew a little bit about wine because my parents enjoyed wines and we would often go on vacation trips like Germany or France, and my dad would love to go and do a little wine tasting and I thought that was exciting to do that.

08:45
Peter Work
As I studied, I worked in the evening at a hotel restaurant and learned about wines there as well. So I had this curiosity and when Rebecca and I met, she wanted to learn more. So we really started learning together, traveling together, taking classes to find out what wine was about. But I had no idea about the process of making wine.

09:05
Peter Work
I mean, I was educated in Denmark, and I remember I had to take a chemistry class and organic chemistry was completely boring and irrelevant. And now I think it's the most exciting thing to understand chemistry.

09:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is a winemaker? What do you do? We all think we know it, but maybe we really don't. What would surprise us in this process of making wine?

09:27
Peter Work
So our world consists of two main parts, a vineyard and a winery. Vineyard is farming and the winery is converting grapes into wine. On a daily basis, Rebecca and I, we split our time between those two things. A good winemaker is involved in what happens in the vineyards, maybe not every day, but is out there taking a look at the vines as they develop.

09:49
Peter Work
Right now, we just had bud break here last week. So the little buds are starting to come out. That already gives us an early indication about how much yield we're going to get out of it this year. So you want to be out there and see what's happening, talk with the people, work together with them.

10:04
Peter Work
As you go through the shoot growth, as you go through the flowering, as you go through the variation, the color change leads up to harvest. Now, once you get to harvest, that is where the winemaker makes the most important decision, which is what day to pick the grapes, because harvest day is when the grapes have got pretty much everything inside of them that will turn into a good glass of wine, hopefully.

10:27
Peter Work
So then the winemaker will follow the grapes to the winery, and that's where the production starts. That's where the grapes get de-stemmed, they'll get crossed or pressed for white wine or whatever, and then you monitor and control the fermentation process as it goes on for two to four weeks.

10:46
Peter Work
And then after that, if it's red wine, you press it out and it goes into barrels and you do the barrel aging. You keep an eye on it, you check it out as it goes through the barrel aging and you make the final blends and bottle it up and that's it. So really the winemaker's job is to follow the grapes on their journey from the development in the vineyard and all the way through the process that happens in the winery.

11:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And when you, in the beginning, said, talk to the people, the people working in the field, or who do you talk to?

11:17
Peter Work
Yes, the people in the field. So the way we run our ranch here is that we have two permanent guys. Two wonderful Mexican guys have been here for many years. They are here throughout the year and take care of things. And then we have a vineyard consultant and his company has got a thousand people and he will bring in people as we need it.

11:35
Peter Work
Right now we got two of his people that are helping my two guys out in the vineyards. When we prune, we might bring eight of them in. When we harvest, we may bring ten of them in on the harvest morning. So that's how we run it here.

11:49
Peter Work
At the winery, I've got an assistant winemaker that works there throughout the year. And during harvest, we have what's called a cellar rat. That's the official title. So it's basically an intern that we can get to do the most dirty job and work his tail off for two and a half, three months or so. And then, of course, Rebecca and I are always involved in what happens at the winery.

12:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you are the first vineyard in the US to be certified organic, biodynamic and sustainable. What made you decide that you wanted to do biodynamic and organic grape growing?

12:22
Peter Work
Yeah, another great question. What happened was that after our second harvest in 2005, we sat down with our vineyard consultant, Jeff Newton, and asked him, what can we do to improve the quality of the clusters of the grapes? Not that there was anything wrong with them, but how can we make them even better? Because we realize that whatever that grape is, that's gonna result in that glass of wine.

12:46
Peter Work
Jeff said to us, we've been doing a little bit of organic and biodynamic over at Beckmen. Let's go over and take a look at that. And we did that. And we started reading Rudolf Steiner, the father of biodynamics. We started reading Rudolf Steiner's work from 1924, when he wrote his agriculture presentation. We didn't understand all of it, but there was a lot of it that really resonated very well with us.

13:11
Peter Work
We decided, hey, let's take this vineyard to the next step and implement biodynamic principles. And when you are doing biodynamic, by definition, you're also doing organic. So we started doing that in '06, in the spring of '06. And it was actually a really funny story because I had built these owl boxes to get owls.

13:29
Peter Work
Owls are great to have in your vineyard. They'll take care of the mice and some of the gophers and whatever. So I built these 11 owl boxes and we had never seen an owl in them. And I turned them towards the north and I put them higher up.

13:43
Peter Work
The day we did the first biodynamic application in the spring of 2006, my foreman came and said, hey, I want to show you something. Come over here, look up there. And that was the first time we saw an owl in an owl box. And it was just a sign something is going on here, which is cool. So we did that from '06, got certified in '09. It takes three years to clean your soil and get a lot of things out of the pesticides, out of the soil, etc.

14:08
Peter Work
Sustainability made a lot of sense. Sustainability will also focus on your employees. How do you take care of them? It'll focus on the social aspects. How do you interact with your neighbors? It will focus on financial sustainability. It will focus on, where's your energy coming from? Are you using renewable sources? This is why we converted to 100% solar power.

14:29
Peter Work
So we felt that those three things went hand in hand. And in '08 we were one of the first vineyards in the US to get sustainable certified. So with that, like you said, in '09 we are the first, at least in the US, to be organic, biodynamic, sustainable certified.

14:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And it sounds romantic and idealistic. But I can imagine that it was hard work to become certified. Is it one of the best things you did?

14:53
Peter Work
There's definitely been no regrets about that, because what these three different certifications are about, what the principles are about, is best practices, especially with sustainability.

15:05
Peter Work
I'm on the board of directors of the California program, I've been a chair of it for a number of years, and that is where we really learn from each other as farmers. And we help to raise the bar by learning from each other to keep on doing things better and better all the time. And it just doesn't stop by saying, now we're there. No, we'll never get there. We'll keep on getting better.

15:24
Peter Work
I think it's important the way that we've been changing the way we've been thinking about things like energy, like I mentioned solar power, the way that we are thinking about working together with Mother Nature, because Mother Nature has got so many wonderful forces that we can leverage from and take advantage of.

15:43
Peter Work
I'll give you a great example. I love this story. So about 12 years ago, we started having problems when we picked the clusters that some sections would have this white sticky dew, and it's a little insect called a mealybug that would make this sticky dew. And we only had maybe a hundred clusters that had the problem. We picked about one million clusters a year here at the ranch. So we were just afraid it would escalate.

16:07
Peter Work
We could spray bad insecticides to kill these mealybugs. But we found out that the mealybugs have this symbiotic relationship with ants. So the ants would protect the mealybugs against ladybugs or some of the other enemies. And then the ants would get back some of that sticky dew that they like to eat.

16:25
Peter Work
Therefore, if you can get rid of the ants, you would indirectly eliminate the mealybugs. Who likes ants? Guess what? Chickens love ants. So we brought in chicken coops. We had three chicken coops. We would get up to 200 chickens in the summer. And the chickens would go out and go after the ants.

16:42
Peter Work
And within four years, we had completely eliminated the mealybugs. This is an example of how we constantly have to learn to work together with Mother Nature, in a partnership with nature.

16:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When one reinvents oneself, one is bound to make mistakes. What was the biggest mistake you made in your wine career?

17:03
Peter Work
Maybe we should have started a little bit sooner. We were way up in our 40s when we got this going. But there really hasn't been any major mistakes in what we've done here, and I think it's not that I don't want to be honest about it. That's what we really feel about it, is that we had done a lot of things right, but also because we've had great advisors with us all the time.

17:24
Peter Work
I think what's also important, and I meet a lot of winemakers, I meet young winemakers, where it's their first career. It was not our first career, it was our second career. And we had really reached that point in our early 40s where we had made it. We had a little money in the bank, we technically could have retired. So we were not nervous about, are we going to be successful?

17:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you then bring all your experience from your previous jobs to the new one to make it succeed so fast?

17:53
Peter Work
I think it's a lot about being open-minded, to listen, and to learn. One thing was that we were not nervous about getting into this because we had already proved that we were successful in our career. So even though it was a completely different space for us to get into — we didn't have knowledge about working with soil and plants and irrigation system, et cetera, or the winemaking aspect of it — we were not nervous about it. We just knew that, hey, we'll figure it out.

18:25
Peter Work
We are curious people. We like to learn. And we spent quite a bit of time taking classes and studying and we were going to conferences, et cetera. But the other thing was, as I mentioned before, we aligned ourselves with smart people with good consultants that really helped us to move forward.

18:40
Peter Work
And there's just something to be said for when you create a product that is something that you can enjoy, like a glass of wine. And it is just so incredibly rewarding to sit around that table with friends and have a glass of wine and say, see that block of vineyard right out the window? That's exactly where this came from.

19:02
Peter Work
And that you have created it from the planting of it, the taking care of the vines throughout the year, and the harvesting, and the fermentation, and the aging, and the bottling, that it is so self-rewarding when that happens.

19:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I can imagine. And your brand, which is called Ampelos, is Greek for wine. It has been described as a soulful brand. What does this mean? What is the soul of wine and how would you describe your brand?

19:34
Peter Work
So first about the word Ampelos. My older sister Anna married Fotis Papadopoulos, and now you know where he's from, right? He inherited a little piece of land on a little island, Folegandros in the Cyclades, and they moved over there. Rebecca and I ended up getting married on the island.

19:50
Peter Work
So when we planted the vineyards, Fotis said to Anna, Peter and Rebecca have got a vineyard with vines. The vines are called ampelos. And we then built a little boutique hotel on the island of Folegandros and they decided to call that Ampelos. We heard the name, so the Greek name for the vines. So we took that over here and that was just a really great start of building the brand.

20:14
Peter Work
We think that making wine is a very privileged job. We think it's the best job in the world. First, because working with Mother Nature is incredibly rewarding. I'm out there right now looking at bud break and checking the tiny little, it's called inflorescence. That's what's going to end up being the clusters. And they're three millimeters long right now. But it's just cool to see that and see how they develop.

20:36
Peter Work
It's so rewarding, especially that morning when you're out with the guys picking the grapes. And then as you go through fermentation, you can start smelling what it's going to turn out to be once you're done with fermentation, you can start tasting it and you get an idea about what the end product is going to be.

20:52
Peter Work
And then of course, what is incredibly rewarding is when you have made that bottle of wine and it goes out to people, customers, and you get these emails and I get them throughout the year, especially after Christmas. I get emails with pictures. Look what I opened up with my family on Christmas Eve? And he has a 10-year-old bottle of Ampelos Pinot Noir, and it's just so rewarding to feel that this is what you created from the moment that we planted it. And I think that's really where the soul is. It's in there in the product.

21:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is making wine an art form in your opinion? Could you compare good wine to good art?

21:33
Peter Work
Absolutely. Absolutely. I was thinking about it the other day. So, to farm and to make wine, those two different aspects of what we do, is a combination of two things. And I've said this for many, many years, it's art and science. It's those two things that are combined. You cannot be a good farmer, you cannot make good wines, just based upon numbers, based upon chemical analysis. You have to use your senses and that's where the art comes into the picture.

22:04
Peter Work
So when I bring grapes into the winery, I want to know what the pH and what the acid and what the sugars are like, because those are chemical components I need to work with during fermentation and later on. But that is not necessary or it is not the most important part of what makes a good glass of wine. You taste it and you say, oh, it tastes like this and that. So it is just as important to use your senses in order to analyze those grapes.

22:31
Peter Work
I'll give you some examples. So for instance, when we are getting close to harvest and we are deciding, should we pick tomorrow, Rebecca and I will go out there and we'll look at the vines, we'll look at the colors of the leaves using our senses, our eyes. If they are turning yellow, it's getting there. If they're all green, the factory is still going. There's still carbohydrates coming out of the photosensors.

22:52
Peter Work
We will take some clusters, feel them. Are they hard? Are they getting soft? That's again using your senses. We will then start tasting them, chewing them, we'll spit out the skins and see how the skin releases colors, again, senses. We will then taste and say, hey, this is something you can extrapolate to one day become a really good glass of wine.

23:14
Peter Work
So that is where the art form comes into this. It's about having good basic components, chemical components, but it's also about having some wonderful colors, tannins, flavors, etc. to work with. And then as we bring the grapes into the winery, now we start making the wine. And that is where we got the canvas, we got the colors, we got all those things ready, and now we're going to put it all together, make a nice painting out of it, make a nice bottle of wine out of it.

23:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I have a feeling you did very extensive research. Did you research the history of making wine too?

23:48
Peter Work
Yeah, actually, my nephew gave me a great book. I think it's called The Short History of Wine, and it was a PhD project, a Canadian guy did, I think it's 400 pages. And that is a history of wine. It's great reading. I've got a lot of wine books. I've got a ton of wine books. We've done a lot of that reading. I listen to podcasts about wine all the time.

24:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
On one of your wine bottles, it says, "These wines are for those who want to live life to the fullest." What does that mean? How does one live life to its fullest?

24:17
Peter Work
It's a line from our new product line. So a few years ago we created a new sub brand that's called Funky Town. And it's a line from the Funky Town label. And what we wanted to do with Funky Town was to get a little bit away from the more classic Ampelos wines, the Pinot Noir, the Syrah, the Grenache, the Viognier that we are making, and do something very, very different.

24:39
Peter Work
It's a white grape called Clairette Blanche that hardly anybody knows about. It's an Albarino fermenter of the skin, it's an orange wine. It's a piquette-low alcohol wine. It's Carignane. So these are wines that are different, unusual, but we made those because we found that there are a lot of younger generations, Gen Z, and millennials that really want to get into new things and try different things. And that's what it's about too.

25:05
Peter Work
And at the same time, it's also about what Rebecca and I have done in our life. That's why when you look at the front label, it has two skylines. It has a skyline of Copenhagen and the skyline of Anchorage, which is Rebecca's hometown. She's from Alaska. So we believe that we are living life to its fullest coming from those two very different backgrounds and moving to California, do a startup company, buy some land, and just start from scratch and creating this brand.

25:31
Peter Work
I mean, isn't that living life to its fullest? Like you were saying, when you came here looking out the windows and oh my God, could you imagine waking up to this every morning? I think that's living life to its fullest, to just take this wonderful piece of land and turn it into a great farm.

25:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
An Alaskan and a Dane in Southern California.

25:49
Peter Work
Go figure that out.

25:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is that the philosophy behind the brand and your company too? How would you describe your philosophy?

25:57
Peter Work
So the philosophy has really developed over time. We didn't have this in mind when we started out. It was really created when we moved up here, started living here. We realized that not only were we owners of a piece of land, a little bit of the earth we are in charge of, just a tiny little bit. And we could do bad things or we could do good things.

26:20
Peter Work
We actually have a responsibility to take care of this little piece of the earth that we own here. And that was when things really started rolling. Because you spray pesticides in pretty much every vineyard in the world. They're great pesticides. We are all organic certified. It's fungicides. It's all we spray. We don't spray herbicides or insecticides. So there are good things and bad things you can spray.

26:42
Peter Work
And we were saying, hey, we're spraying these fungicides and how do they impact us and our horses and our dogs? And that was where we said, we got to be more responsible about what we are doing here. And when we now look at the soil color of where we have been farming for 20 years now, and we look at the soil color right next to it where we have not been doing any farming, it's amazing how we can see how we've been healing the soil.

27:06
Peter Work
And that is so self accelerating and rewarding because once you get there, and you can see that you have an impact on the soil, then you want to do more and more of it and do it better and better all the time. That's why we're still constantly challenging ourselves. How can we do things better?

27:22
Peter Work
Just a couple of little examples. Packaging. So the wine goes into a bottle, right? Glass. We're used to it in Denmark. We see all these scratched Tuborg and Carlsberg bottles because they've been used 10 times because they just go back and get rinsed and reused. We don't do that in the United States. It turns out that most of the glass that's being used here is made in China or in Mexico. God knows how that happens.

27:43
Peter Work
We decided years ago, let's look for US-made glass. How about glass made in California to reduce the footprint of transportation? And what about reused material? So up north in Modesto in California, there's the world's biggest winery, Gallo. They have their own plant, where they reuse the recycled glass material, they melt it. And basically 65% of the glass we are using is recycled material.

28:08
Peter Work
We don't use foils, the metal on the top of the bottles. It's a waste of metal. It doesn't break down in a thousand years in mother nature. We use a type of cork that is the most efficient use of the bark material from the Portuguese oak trees. Our labels are printed on recycled paper material.

28:26
Peter Work
So, just examples of how we constantly try to see how can we do things better, especially with the issues we got right now with CO2 footprint and carbon sequestration, all these things that we're becoming more and more conscious about. That is also where we constantly ask ourselves, how can we do this better?

28:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Going back to the wines themselves. You said you make Pinot Noir, Syrah, and Grenache. What is your favorite?

28:49
Peter Work
Oh, it depends upon if you're asking me or Rebecca.

28:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'm asking you!

28:54
Peter Work
I think that Pinot Noir is the most amazing wine in the world. I think Pinot Noir, it's beautiful, elegant, a lot of finesse, just a balance in a great glass of Pinot Noir. I know that the most expensive wines in the world are Pinot Noirs from Burgundy, which I love. I just can't afford them. But definitely my passion is about Pinot. But I should also say that we constantly try new things.

29:17
Peter Work
Last night, we had a bottle of Xinomavro from Peloponnese in Greece, from Naoussa, which is absolutely great. It's a red varietal. We love to try new things. And if you go into the wine cellar here, we have 700–800 bottles in there. You will see all kinds of strange things, probably grapes you've never heard about before, because we like to learn and experiment.

29:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How do you like your wine, and what is the perfect moment for wine drinking?

29:45
Peter Work
Like tonight?

29:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Like every night?

29:49
Peter Work
Oh yeah, we enjoy wine every night. It depends upon the situation. Different situations call for different kinds of wine. And that's what we always try to find, hey, which wine would work great in this situation right now? We all know that for celebration, champagne works great, right? We all know that, hey, if you got some good cheese, Chardonnay works great with good cheese, right?

30:10
Peter Work
And there's always been this thing, fish, you gotta have white wine. I love Pinot Noir to salmon. Rebecca's a salmon snob because she grew up in Alaska. So we eat a lot of great salmon here, but we always do that with Pinot Noir. And if you have something a little heavier, then you get a good bottle of Syrah or Grenache with that. So I think it's more about the situation. Also, what do you feel like in the moment?

30:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have a wine club.

30:34
Peter Work
Yes, that's what we really are trying to do is we want our customers to feel that they're part of the Ampelos family and being Ampelos friends and that's why we call it "Filos," which is a Greek word for friends, right? So it's really about our friendship with our wine club members. We want them to feel that they are connected to us. We want them to feel that they can reach out to us.

30:57
Peter Work
During COVID, we did a lot of virtual wine tastings over Zoom. We did between 85 and 90 virtual tastings. We even did a series of eight virtual tastings with Denmark. The Danish customers that bought our bottles of wine and then we would sit and open them up together, me on a Zoom session in the back of my pickup truck somewhere in the vineyards.

31:18
Peter Work
I'll be sitting here at 8:30 in the morning drinking Pinot Noir with them back in Denmark. We want our wine club to feel they have a connection with us. They can come out here and visit us. We'll show them around. We'll have a glass of wine together with them.

31:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you mentioned Denmark before. Where are you from in Denmark, first of all, and what brought you to the United States in the first place?

31:40
Peter Work
So I was born in Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, and then at three months old, my family moved up to Ålborg, where I lived until six years, and we moved to Århus. My father was a high school professor in Marselisborg in Århus. So I went to my primary school and I went to a gymnasium (high school) in Århus. And then I moved back to Copenhagen to start my studies at DTU. And I also got a degree from Handelshøjskolen. Then I worked in Copenhagen for some years until I moved over here in 1988.

32:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And I assume you have two passports now, a Danish and an American?

32:18
Peter Work
Yes, I was so lucky with the dual citizenship, so in 2017 I got my US passport. And as a matter of fact, I was just at the Consulate down in Los Angeles to get a new Danish passport, and it should arrive here within the next two hours with FedEx.

32:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Fantastic. When looking at your passports, what do each of them represent for you?

32:40
Peter Work
I will always feel that I am Danish and my heart is in Denmark in so many ways. Whenever I land in Kastrup, I always get tears in my eyes. Because it's coming home for me, to come back and drive into Copenhagen and go over to Funen where I will see my brother-in-law, to Århus where my brother lives. And coming to Denmark is special. And having a Danish passport makes me feel that I am definitely Danish.

33:08
Peter Work
And I've had the great opportunity of being allowed to come to the United States. I came over for the first time in '81 to study, to supplement my Danish education with a study on the East Coast. I started at grad school, econometrics at Princeton University, '81–'82. And then later on, I wanted to come back for a few years and the United States let me come back in 1988.

33:34
Peter Work
And I've been here ever since. For me, the fact that I've had this opportunity to study in the United States and for many more years to work in the United States and had a reasonably successful career, I just feel that the United States have been very nice to me and have been giving me these opportunities. And that is why when I could get my US passport, there was no hesitation that I definitely wanted that, because I also feel coming back to the United States is coming back.

34:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, I know the feeling.

34:03
Peter Work
You know the feeling.

34:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, I do. What kind of foundation do you think that Denmark gave you to succeed in the United States? What are the values from Denmark that you brought along that you think were part of your strengths here?

34:17
Peter Work
There are different parts of it. I think in Denmark we are good at discovering things. I think we are good at traveling. I think we are good at having a curiosity for things abroad. My father spent a year traveling around the United States, working here and there, way back before I was born. My older sister spent a year in New York way back many years ago. My other sister, as I mentioned, lives in Greece. So there's been this thing in our family, we like to travel.

34:47
Peter Work
We like to go places and discover things and challenge things around us. I think as Danes, we are open to many things. We like to discover. We have that, like I said, curiosity, we want to try things out, but also we have a lot of self confidence, which I think is very important. We're not afraid of jumping into things and trying things out.

35:10
Peter Work
So it got built into my genes. It was built into my genes through my parents and I saw it in my siblings as well. Then I saw it in my friends. I have a lot of very successful friends in Denmark. The world is open. You just got to go out and try it.

35:26
Peter Work
I remember many years ago when I went to Handelshøjskolen, Carsten Mørch, who was a jægersoldat and he one day came in to give a guest lecture, and he put three concentric circles up on the board. In the middle, a green circle, outside of that, a yellow circle, and outside of that, a red circle. And he said, green circle is where you're confident, that's the home, that's where you want to be. The yellow is where you're challenged, the red is where you're afraid to be.

35:50
Peter Work
You want to get back in the yellow, back in the green. The more you push yourself out in the red, the bigger your green circle gets. I've always had that on my boards in my office, showing that to the managers that work for me in my different jobs and saying, don't say no, that you can't do that, just push yourself out. And I think we're good at doing that in Denmark.

36:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And my final question to you, since you talked about being split between two countries and feeling at home in both places. In many, many years from now, because you're still young, where would you like to get buried? Where would you like to see yourself for eternity in terms of where you will rest?

36:28
Peter Work
It is very interesting, because I ask myself sometimes, and we talk about it as well, and we're not quite sure, because exactly that thing, being split. We just got back from a two week trip up to Alaska, which is Rebecca's home, and saw parts of Alaska she hadn't seen before, and it was actually fantastic.

36:47
Peter Work
We went to this dog race called Iditarod. It's like a thousand mile race with 16 dogs pulling a sleigh, and there was actually a Danish woman that was participating in this. Unbelievable. But I could feel with Rebecca being up there that she felt so much like coming home. So, I don't have the answer to where we're gonna rest. But what I know is that even when we are gone, the wines we created will still be both in the United States and in Denmark.

37:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a lovely thought. Well, Peter, thank you so much for having us in your home in Southern California. We really appreciate you participating in Danish Originals and that we can be here with you.

37:27
Peter Work
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Fun time.

37:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you.

37:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Peter Work chose Jacob Matham's Bakkus som vinens gud, or Bacchus as the God of Wine from 1616 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.