As my career has progressed, the margins on my resume have grown smaller and my work history has grown more condensed. The more you've done with your life, the harder it gets to tell a story in a single page, so I built this CV.

I can sum up the past decade of my career as a happy accident. After graduating from journalism school at the worst possible time to do so, I moved to New York City. My only plan was to find a job fast enough so that I could stay. After burning through all my savings, I fell into bartending and mixology, which progressed naturally to wine, something I'd accidentally been trained in since youth.

Three years before my first shift at September Wines, I had just gotten my first wine store job in Bed-Stuy and I stumbled across the little boutique during a disappointing shopping trip to the Lower East Side. It was the first time I'd been in another store like Bed-Vyne: most of the products not only came from smaller importers--but largely the ones I was already working with. I told myself that in three years, I would be managing the place.

Exactly three years later, in my first week working there, I was promoted to Buyer. Six months later, in the middle of the pandemic, I was promoted to General Manager.

Some achievements copied and pasted from my resumé :

-Utilized previous experience to bring in new SKUs with higher margins while ensuring successful legacy SKUs retained a presence

-Greatly reduced the high turnover in a store with a notorious reputation for it by being an advocate for my staff

-Assisted in a transition of ownership and subsequent expansion focused on increasing delivery operations and spirits offerings

-Handled hiring for all new talent, wrote job postings, conducted interviews with applicants, and made final hiring decisions

-Refocused store selections to better-fit local clientele, expanding selections of natural wines and skin-contact whites

-Handled all contacts with distribution reps, retained ordering autonomy, and scheduled all in-store tastings and sample meetings

-Enacted pandemic precautions and rigorously enforced them, making sure to be up-to-date on shifting compliance measures

I have never had a paying job in my life longer than my time at September Wines. Since starting, I have faced more challenges than any other time in my life: a pandemic, a secretive change of ownership, the deaths and health scares of loved ones, multiple unprovoked assaults, and perhaps worst of all, the price of a slice of Lower East Side dollar pizza changing to $1.50. In spite of all that, I'm proud of what I've achieved there because I don't believe anybody else would have lasted longer under those conditions. After years of trying to believe it, I finally know I can handle whatever challenges life throws at me.

Natty Wine Rag was started out of my appreciation for wine education and my distaste for pretension in the industry.

The goal of Natty Wine Rag is to present intermediate-to-advanced wine knowledge with a more satirical and globally-conscious tone than my contemporaries while keeping the information accurate and informative.

Currently taking a break from posting while I build out an open-source CMS through Drupal to optimize layout and SEO.

Pigpen Brand may very well be my life's proudest achievement: an all-inclusive lifestyle brand for the, shall we say, "more filthy" segments of the LGBTQ+ community. 

Apparel and merchandise have already been manufactured, with more to come after a sold-out first run.

The expansion plans include additional apparel lines, "nail polish remover" to go with our "video head cleaner," protein broths, event pop-ups, and a charcuterie bar with separate day and night concepts.

In September of 2020, inspired by the personal and global horrors surrounding me, I began to write short horror stores as a hobby. The stories developed somewhat of a cult following and by the end of 2021, I launched PulpMacabre.com as a tool to easily share portfolio samples of some of my work.

The end goal is to get a 2-3 book publishing contract, beginning with the collection Pulp Macabre and followed up by the novel Blood & Wine, which is also in the works.

I'm still looking for a better pen name than Robert Azrael.

I first encountered Free Range when I was still selling Manhattan Moonshine, years before I started working there. The owner had firmly but politely rejected my sales pitch: "It needs to be brown if it's going to sell. Great bottle though."

After a disappointingly brief stint as a sommelier for Salt Bae's Nusr-Et Steakhouse, I applied for the Assistant Manager position, unaware what store I was applying to.

While I had less control over selections, the role required substantially more communication with the vendors than my previous ones--including all reorders on staple SKUs. I also got my best education yet here regarding New York's chaotic allocation game--learning which rare products can sell themselves if you get your hands on them.

I initially accepted my position at Grain & Vine thinking I had applied to be manager, but ended up being grateful that all I was expected to control was the wine buying. I collaborated with management on keeping SKU selections tight, profitable, and exciting.

The open concept of the store gave the team a lot of creativity in the merchandising department, and displays had to be updated on a daily basis to maintain the aesthetic. 

It was also incumbent on me to make sure that weekly in-store tasting were consistently booked.

While Bed-Vyne had a more "indie" focus to its spirits offerings, Grain & Vine leaned heavily on major Bourbon producers. I still to this day have never worked at another store that successfully obtained an allocation of Pappy Van Winkle 23 Year.

I got my job at Bed-Vyne while helping a broker friend show apartments in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. After showing off a unit on Rogers Ave, we stumbled across a store called Vyne Yard (now owned by the legendary Andre Mack.) The then-owner Sandy was impressed enough by my wine knowledge to refer me to her brother Mike and the other owners of Bed-Vyne. 

While I initially applied to be a bartender at their sister bar, Bed-Vyne Cocktail, they rightfully assessed that I wasn't the right fit for that space, and offered me a job at their wine store instead. The manager went on to work at Flatiron Wines and a transitional manager was put in place for a few weeks before she moved on to Irving Bottle. 

In the absense of management, ownership took back over the day-to-day, and expanded my role to include buying. With my new responsibility, the first major change I made was overhauling the merchandising of the store, utilizing wasted space to double the visible selections on the shelves and increase regional representations. The strategy paid off and sales increased. 

I commuted 90 minutes via bus each direction on a daily basis for almost two years to work there, and I never complained because the work was so fulfilling. Bed-Vyne isn't just a wine store, it's a community, and I owe them my whole career. 

My transition out of the service industry and into retail began with a commission gig selling a premium, award-winning white dog whiskey. 

The company's owner had claimed the lucrative territories of Williamsburg and Manhattan, making me the sales rep for the rest of the outer boroughs.

The product no longer exists, but not for a lack of trying to sell it.

My time in the service industry taught me that being just good is never enough. In order to be happy and successful in the field, you have to have achieve a degree of excellence in the spaces you're working in.

I know how to mix drinks and I know my recipes, but the fine balancing act a bartender undertakes is more complex than that. Maintaining atmosphere is paramount to mixology skills. I have the utmost respect for those who are not only good at providing service, but genuinely enjoy it. The work is never as easy as it seems.

I came to the decision to major in journalism much like any high school honor student who doesn't know what they'll do with their career yet: I based it on my current skills and my dream job; the dream job being "film critic" and the skill being writing. (The first thing they taught me in J-school was not to use semicolons, which was a shame because I'd just gotten really good at it.)

During my freshman year, half of the local newspapers in the United States went bankrupt and my class' job prospects only got bleaker as we realized we'd be competing with industry veterans willing to suffer reduced salaries to stay in the only industry they knew.  Local print media would never recover and the industry only saw a rebound in 2016, by which point I'd unofficially retired from the business.

Before then though, I got to interview tons of cool artists and musicians, review movies and nightlife events, and even write prophetic editorials about censorship and the impact of streaming media. It was a lot of fun while it lasted.

For an old compilation of largely-dead links to my best clips, visit this page.

Certifications & Training

NYC Department of Health Food Handler's Certification (2013)

Life Scout, Boy Scouts of America (1995-2007)

• Trained in First Aid, CPR, Water Rescue & Wilderness Survival

• Order of the Arrow (2004)

Driver’s License (2006)

NAUI Certified Scuba Diver (2003)

Languages

English, Spanish

(Foundational Wine Vocabulary: French, Italian, German)