Let's get some background on you and start with where you grew up.

I grew up in southern California, Long Beach and Huntington Beach. By the time I was 17, I was working in fine dining in Los Angeles.

How did you get into the food industry, was it family or your mom or dad?

Our family was always oriented around the table. My mom and dad are both great cooks and loved to entertain. I went to school to become an engineer and worked part time in a restaurant. I loved working there, but was failing miserably at becoming an engineer. (Laughter) I took one of those tests that help you figure out where your talents are and I scored well in the hotel/restaurant management program. At that time it really wasn't an option as a career. I did some soul searching and thought I should be doing something what I'm good at and enjoy it rather than making a living, or making money for somebody else.

A lot of the top chefs that we've talked to, felt that a culinary career, be it in the management end, food or wine, finds you, you don't find it.

I agree with that, I ended up in the wine business. I had a passion for it. I was 19, in a top hotel in downtown L.A., Checkers Hotel, Bradley Ogden was the consulting chef and some really top name brands at the time were all involved there. Wine purveyors were really excited to be involved and I was excited to meet them.

What did you do when you worked at this restaurant?

At that time I was hired in as part of the opening crew and was the morning Maitre'd. I did a food and beverage cost control project when I was going to Cal Poly and turned it into the food and beverage director, who was impressed with it. He said, "We don't have a beverage or wine comptroller/purchaser. We're doing it through the purchasing dept and they have no idea what they're getting." He handed me the keys and made me the wine steward. I kept it to myself that I was only 19. (Laughter) They didn't ask, I didn't tell.

Your slant towards wine happened immediately.

I enjoyed wine already by that time, I was exposed to it at an early age, everybody in my family likes wine. I continued to try and figure out what it was I liked about it. We drank very casual wine in my family, we didn't have money. There was this regal, mystery about some bottles and their price tags. I was like, "Wow, what is that?" It created a lot of curiousity for me. I continued to dig and try and figure it out and that's what I'm still trying to do.

That reminds me of us. We have this fascination with food and wine and fine living. When I say fine living I certainly don't mean monetarily fine living. I mean squeezing every drop out of every day and experiencing wonderful things.  Part of what we do is share our journey with our readers and they seem to enjoy it, just as yours do. You're still on the journey, even attending school now. Our readers tend to like being on that journey with us.

I'm able to create in a market like Los Angeles, where there are those who wish they had time to throw their entire lives into something they are passionate about, but they are kind of half way down the road. They're making money and they indulge when they can and escape to these opportunities to learn.

Chronologically take me through where you went next. You started as the wine steward at the hotel, what was next?

After the hotel I got an opportunity to work at Patina, which at the time (1991) was named the best restaurant in the country in a number of publications. The wine we were serving at that time was mind blowing.

Was it a case of 'right place, right time,' or did they seek you out or you them?

It was kind of the circle that I was running in. It was also more of a necessity. I was going to school and could only make money at certain periods of time. The school program I was entering wanted me to be there all morning and I was the morning maitre'd at Checkers. I had to leave that position to get a night job and make a little more money. Obviously, it was a better opportunity at a fine dining restaurant.

I've got to assume that that experience at Patina changed a lot of your thinking, not only about wine, but about food, presentation, etc.

It took the bar up a couple more notches. I don't know if the food was any better, but the type of clientele, Marv Jenkins was a regular, I got to open a bottle of wine for some pretty famous people. I was learning about the very best of the best and that kind of wisdom and exposure doesn't come from very many places.

No, and you can't get it in school either.

No. Nobody could afford to give you those experiences. I was able to really get influenced and exposed to some really special things.  Patina was also one of the first restaurants in the country to use Riedel crystal. Fine dining, which I feel is a lost art form right now, gave me this incredible passion for the business. While I have a lot of ambitions to continue to focus on the excellence and service in regards to food and wine, I still have this wonderful exposure to the casual side, the daily walk with wine. I enjoy encouraging all people to do it (food and wine) on that level, and wherever the journey can take you, it doesn't always have to be expensive like we said. It's why I have to understand the wine industry and the wine business.  I think the wine business is pretty crazy, pretty fun, pretty exciting on all levels. Creating something special at the accessible level is probably even harder than trying to make a great bottle of wine.

A memorable moment from working at Patina, funny or just the coolest thing that every happened.

I was waiting on Marvin Jenkins and he brought in a really old port, early 1900s. I had never seen a bottle that old nor had I opened one. I was young and had my fancy wine opener and stuck it into the cork, and began to twist down to the bottle. As I did that, a hairline crack appeared at the edge of the bottle and a little drop of wine started to come out the side through the crack like a little spot of blood.

Like you damaged and hurt it (Laughter).

Yeah, as the wine bled I started to sweat at an equally fast rate. I backed the corkscrew out of the bottle and excused myself to the kitchen, where a notoriously temperamental chef just looked at me.  He didn't ask many questions, he just needed a solution and he jumped on it. He grabbed a pair of tongs and put them on the fire. He got them red hot and cut the top of the bottle off. I had never seen that done before or since. It was exciting, I had to rest. He knew how to do it and what tool to use. He saved the wine.

It wasn't something you laughed about years down the road.

At that time, Wine Spectator was a magazine for the elite and for the wine industry. I knew it was special and he was special. I knew I'd be in a lot of trouble if he wasn't happy. It worked out well that night. I didn't last a long time at Patina, as we had a recession back then and I went on to other things. I kept thinking I was going to go to culinary school and ended up opening a little cafe with my family back east. I had an uncle who was in the ice cream business and I was passionate about coffee.

It seem like a 'fait accompli' that you were going to be in some sort of culinary field or in the culinary world.

To keep myslef employed and stay on the east coast, I went to work with my uncle. His business was struggling, he was the first manager and franchiser and had eight ice cream parlors. We turned them into little cafes. I created Seattle Joe's, which was coffee and sandwiches, with him.

That was the point in time when that type of cafe was starting to happen.

Yeah, we were all organic and hormone free, we were a little bit ahead of the time. This was in Albany, New York. It went over pretty well and we built up three (3) restaurants. He was able to sell-off the group and retire. It gave me the money to came back to California, which allowed me time to figure out what I was going to do next, that was 1995.

You said you were selling and educating your restaurants and your retailers. Specific brands?

I got a job with Kenwood and they really enjoyed my wine education style. I helped build the brand on premise, which they'd never experienced before, to the restaurant channel. We had launched a restaurant only brand at that time called YULUPA and it went crazy. I did really well and helped make money for them. It was a small team of really passionate people at that point and we pretty much doubled our volume in a year with that wine.

With that type of success and time spent, it qualified me to go work for Kobrand and they came and got me. It's the kind of the job I had on the dashboard when I started in the industry, it was were I wanted to get to. They had Tattinger Champagne, Chateau Burgandy, wines like Chateau Margueax, really high end wines of the world. It was a really great portfolio and also in the wine education spirit that they sold wine.

Did this take you out of the retail end and put you in the vineyards, enhancing your education?

No, my education paralleled my job. When I started in 1995, when I went to work for the distributor and started to learn about wine. Kind of a glorified blog at the time. Just a place for me to post the 10 things to know about this and things to do. Then I started offering a couple of classes, once a quarter, then I went to once a month, then maybe two a month over time. My reputation built up in southern California that I was a good teacher and I had a good teaching style and the public began to respond. I brought on one person as staff, and she worked very, very little (he chuckles). I'd sell wine during the day and teach wine at night a couple of times a week. I could sell wine during the day, and that was the job, but I could teach and keep the passion alive.

You have a love of partaking of wine, the enjoyment of having a glass of wine, and enjoy teaching people about that. From the beginning it was important for you to share that.

I felt I had been entitled to some insights.Also my family were all teachers and it kinda crossed paths somehow.

So teaching is 'in your genes.'

There are a lot of teachers in my family.  Opening a bottle of wine by myself is pretty boring. I'll enjoy a glass but it's so much more special when you can open it for a group. Quite honestly, teaching gave me the ability to open wines that I couldn't afford to open myself, and share them, which was ultimately the greatest joy I had. It was a way to facilitate my learning and my points experience. Teaching let me open new things. Learning about wines really grew because I enjoyed it so much and did pretty well at becoming a good teacher.

It started from a very basic standpoint of teaching, not the 5% of the population that knows a lot about wine, but the 95% of the population that either has very little knowledge or is run by emotions. Those who are  very confused, or off put by wine. My basic class is called Wine Camp, which is a one day, two hour instruction to wine class, where we use a California perspective to teach people about wine. We are making wines that are to be compared to French classics like Chablis and Burgundy. We finally broke away from that shadow and started making very California wines. I think that happened over the last 15 years.

I write Passport to Wine and Spirits for GGM and in no way am I knowledgeable about wine in term of the specifics, like you said, that European mentality of wine. I've learned and continue to learn because I like it. I like to explore the different nuances of why one wine is different from another. We are talking to the 95% percent like you are. Sometimes we get a little technical, but we always try to keep it as, making wine accessible.  For example, I love port, but didn't know anything about the technical aspects. After I wrote the article on port, I was much more educated and that's our purpose; to bring that information to the 95%. During the course of doing research for various wine articles, you'd be shocked at the amount of references to "this is the 'Napa Valley' of South America or Europe, etc." California has become a benchmark.

I think there are a lot of reasons for that and putting myself out there as an instructor, there is no greater way to be a student. You learn by publishing an article (on port) and I do the exact same thing when I teach a class on it. It gives me an opportunity to dive in a little deeper and find out the whos, whats, wheres, whys, whens and hows. I do that with every step I take. German Riesling, South African wines, Australia wines, you really have to know how to taste them. For me, I need to know where it came from and how it got there, the cultural thing. I incorporate the learning and reading with a lot of travel. I've traveled all over the world now, I just got back from a month in Europe, where I spent 7 days in Germany at a wine institute, tasting a 100 German Rieslings a day. 

Were you barrel tasting?   

We were doing it all, but mostly German wines you don't drink from the barrel because they don't use much barrel. We were tasting mostly bottled wines, different vintages, different vineyards expressions, different soil types. I spent most of my time tasting Riesling because that was my first trip to Germany and it's the number one wine of Germany. I believe it should be the wine of Germany, it's the most special wine that they make. There is just a lot of misinformation about Riesling. It's not sweet. The Germans drink all the dry wine, and the reason we know their wine as sweet is because they don't sell the dry and ship the sweet over here for us to drink.

We're big fans of Gewürztraminer. We just attended a wine festival in Tampa and one of the tastings was Riesling. Only one was the typical 'American perception' of what a Riesling is, in terms of being sweet. The rest were dry.

Watch out in the future because that's going to come around. The Germans have a problem, they can't supply the world with enough dry Riesling right now. These wines are magic.

I know you are partial to Napa and focus on California, but of all the places you've visited since you began doing LearningAboutWine.com, which region or area really wowed you?  Or do they all have something about them that is special?

It's like trying to pick your favorite child. I will tell you that from the very beginning when I worked at Kobrand, one of my first encounters was to meet Claude Tattinger, who is one of my icons. Going to Champagne, and the history of champagne and how it's changed with wars and time, the prestige. I freaking love champagne.

You hit my particular nail directly on the head. One of the favorite article I've written to date was our January feature on champagne, not only the wine but the region. If I had a choice of one hundred of the top wines or a champagne, I'd probably go for the champagne every single time.

Some of the greatest experiences of my life have been involving a premier bottle of champagne, a great place and with great people. When you put champagne into the equation the memories and the quality of the experience just gets escalated so rapidly. Let me share a quick story:
 
When I was a little kid my father's favorite bottle of wine was Tattinger La Francaise. When he had a special occasion, a bottle of Tattinger ended up on the table, so I always had this mystique about Tattinger. So here I am, going to work for the company that sells Tattinger, and I get to work with Claude Tattinger! It's as exciting as the wine industry can get for a young wine enthusiast. I worked for Korburnd for 7 years, Claude and I had to do many different things during that time. Apparently he was somebody I really wanted to impress and in the end he asked me to think about him if I were to leave Kobrand and work for him. That was one of the highest compliments. I didn't take that opportunity and I hope I never regret that, but it was pretty cool. He handed me his business card and I put it on my wall. He is just a class act, and when you look into his family, he is just such a diamond. The family, the history, the nobility, the fact that he owned the Crystal company, various real estate holdings, a massively successful guy.Yet, he still had the ability to teach you through his everyday existence how to be a class act.

Is he the most infleuntial person in this business you've met to date?

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Yes, I still reflect on those experiences and try to emmulate him in my walk. 

That says a lot and if I interpret that correctly, your admiration has nothing to do with wine.

To me, he is just the right person to represent what wine should be, definitely at a prestigious level. He also owned Bouvier, which is a $10.00 a bottle sparkling wine, and one of his holdings was a restaurant. This all changed in the last couple of years, he sold everything in France. To his credit and a wonderful outcome, he sold it at the peak of the market. Then was able to have the resources and the family interest to buy back the champagne house.

Smart people make smart decisions.

He owned a restaurant Le Grand Véfour, and during his ownership, with chef Guy Martin, it was a 3 star Michelin restaurant. It's a restaurant that Napoleon dined at, in the heart of France and a very prestigious place for years. When I would go to Paris, with just 3-4 weeks notice, I tried to call and get in there without calling Claude to get me a table, and it was always full. Claude made me promise to go there someday and said, "When you do, I'm sure you'll take a beautiful lady with you to lunch, because it's the right place to dine on a Friday, at lunch. Everyone is civilized, relaxed and you won't be rushed. You sit down and order a magnum of champagne and you spend 3-4 hours dining in this magic environment and it will be a great meal."  It was exactly that, one of the great food and wine experiences of my life. The wine was incredible, the food fantastic and it had been one of my life's quests to eat at that restaurant. Claude recently had a stroke and is coming up on 90 years of age. I was able to send him a note that I had been there and dined with a lovely lady for lunch with a magnum of his champagne. It was one of the best experiences of my life.

Let's talk about the .com. Tell me about the experience of starting it up, how it's doing and how it has transformed.

1995 wasn't exactly the boom era of the .com. It was the beginning and there wasn't a lot out there, nobody knew where it was going to go, and how it was going to work. I knew enough that I wanted to do something there. I could have picked any name I wanted to, Wine.com, Learn.com, it was all available, but I picked LearnAboutWine.com. I was told by my stepfather, who was a very intelligent man and worked with computers, that if people wanted to search online and want information, to just put a name in there that they'll be able to search and find. Learn About Wine was born and we were the first wine education site in America, to my knowledge. There were wine shops already that had their online stores, where they had little things to learn about wine, but we were just dedicated wine education.

I started posting little comments with a very humble first website. Overtime we contacted designers and got ideas. We grew from one class a month to what we do now, 150 events a year. They are changing all the time as I figure out what makes sense, sustainable, stalwart too, with classes, 15-30 people at a time.
We've taught over 50,000 people about wine, 30,000 of them have taken our Wine Camp class. We maintain a database of over 26,000 people and try to work wine into our lifestyle events and also work with small restaurants. We do high end tastings of wine and also very casual learning experiences, top values, top picks from around the world, wines under $20. We like to get people to meet some of the winemakers, taste new things and exercise their minds and their palates. The classes are designed to make you a better taster.

What's the biggest change you've seen in the wine industry?

Just since 1995, I've seen wine fold into the cultural fabric of America. We see where people can get into the wine industry making just 3 barrels of wine. It's because of our culture here, the economy, the way people think about wine here and we're going to continue to see that expand here.

There will be more people making wine, more wineries opening and more vine planted. I'll make an outlandish comment: A couple of years ago there was a date on the calendar, I'm not sure what it was, there was a licensed, bonded winery in every state in America. In 2015 there will probably be a vineyard or a winery in every zip code in California.

That type of growth could bring us closer to the European model where we drink locally and become more regionalized. Drinking a local wine which will be good for the world. I think other places in America will do the same thing, it's happening on the east coast as well. I think the drink locally concept will be the next phase.

Where do you see the wine industry going on the whole?

As a student in the Master Wine Program, I am looking at things in a totally different light now. I see there was a lot of consolidation in the last 5-10 years and I see that completely unraveling. I think that will hurt the infrastructure of the wine industry for the next couple of years as that settles out.

Do you think in the long term that's a good thing?

In the long term it will create another cycle of consolidation at some point. They'll probably do it a little smarter the next time. Basically every time a big company buys a successful brand, it just took it out of the set of wines that were fighting in a particular competitive area and moved it to another, creating a vacuum, bringing in a new wine. It perpetuated this cycle where a brand would grow and they'd become a grocery store brand and then they'd get bought. It started off being hip, young, small and being in all the restaurants. Then it got pulled right out of there when the big company bought 'em up. It's interesting to see that, a big company buys it and blowsn it into a big store like Costco and it disappears from all the restaurants. Then they'd sit back and ask,"Why aren't we still in all the restaurants?" You can't be all things in the wine industry.That's what I love about wine, that truth about wine. It keeps the wine industry humble. You determine what you want to be good at and try not to take too much. You'll grow and expand to a point where you won't mean anything to anyone. You've got to focus if you want to be a specialist. You've got to be passionate if you want the buzz of the wine consumer and you want to be highly regarded. You can't do everything.

I'm not looking for brand, but rather for varietal. Give me two recommendations, a red and a white, that our readers should be paying attention to.

(Long pause by Ian) A number of wines came into my mind at the same time. Right now what we are seeing is such a wild time with this current economic environment. There's going to be huge downward pressure on a lot of these high priced wines. Wines that are $60 and up, are all of a sudden $49.99, that's going to push everything in the $40 range to $30 and so on. At some point there is going to be a category that is going to disappear.

You can't take a $4.00 wine and make it any cheaper. Unless you change the name to Ripple. (Laughter)

In some ways they still do that, they stop making the expensive wine, they put that juice into something else. The wine industry fixes itself so quickly. I don't think there's going to be a need for us to all find something new. I think we'll find new things to drink because of the change in price point. We'll be able to appreciate better wine for fewer dollars for quite a few years and that's good for the wine industry too. Whenever you can get a better wine in the bottle, you are going to increase the size of the marketplace. Just think, two years from now how much good wine will be available. There's wine sitting in bottles, in barrels, in inventory. It's just going to blow up the wine industry in the US. We are already seeing huge growth, as far as the number of consumers, With all this quality we've got sitting around it's not going to change. That's going to be the most exciting part to watch. I do think it's the 'local area' wine that's going to be in a good spot in a few years from now. If you're making good wine in your neighborhood, whether it's Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia or Malibu, California, there's just a lot of invention going on and those wineries are going to be the places to drink in the future.

Are you a fan of blends, or do you prefer to stick to a varietal of grape? (He laughs) That's kind of an evil laugh.

(Laughing) I love learning on both sides. I can't answer with one.or the other, I like both of them. I remember being in Mexico, talking to the top wine maker, from the Guadalupe Valley in Mexico, some incredible stuff coming out of there. I asked him what is Mexico going to become known for? He said, "Think about Mexico, it's a mosaic, and those are the types of wines that we are going to become famous for. The wines made in that philosophy. Blending to create a wine of our place." Some places need a blend, and then you go to Oregon and they don't need a blend. They're pure. Oregon Pinot Noir is on fire. The whole country is loving Oregon Pinot Noir. Pinot Noir in general is very popular, but they're seeing some crazy growth up there.

What's the Oregon Pinot Noir our readers should be trying?

If you are going to start somewhere, you should start with the best winemaker and that is Patricia Green (Patricia Green Cellars). She makes $16.00 bottles of Oregon Pinot Noir and $60.00 bottles and they are all good. She is one I would follow. The Bergströms (Bergström Winery), they have an uber right style. I love some of the syrahs I see coming from the northern Oregon/Washington zone. There's no shortage of great wine from up there, that's for sure.

There seems to be a resurgence in Rosé.

That's because rosé is a great wine. It went away when the backlash of white zinfandel came around. We've now identified white zinfandel and separated it in the marketplace into these wild fruit blends. The true dry rosé that we're all supposed to chase is coming to the forefront. Rosé is not only a wine that's great for summer and warm weather product, but it also helps improve wine quality with our big reds. They can saignee some juice and increase the skin to juice ratio in the tank and make more compelling, big reds, because they make a rosé.

I'm learning from Ian Blackburn, that's pretty cool.

(Chuckles) It's not always the way it's done, but when you look at a lot of wineries, they're able to make a little rosé and put it in the bottle quickly. They can sell it and get some cash back quickly, as they have a 2-3 year investment in some of these reds. They can get a same vintage return with a rosé product. It's fresh and delicious. They're able to get some reward back quickly by making, let's say, a $20.00 bottle of rosé, from a vineyard that makes more expensive reds. It can be good money, a good value and good drinking. It makes a lot of sense in these tough economic times to drink a lot of rosé. It's really the right wine for the time.

I had gone away from rosés and that's just simply because of how I was raised. I'm Italian, my dad had the gallon of Burgundy, the gallon of Rosé and the gallon of Chablis. It was either Paul Mason, Gallo, or another one I can't recall. I had been turned off to Rosé.

Maybe Almaden (Laughter) My grandparents, they never drank anything fancy. In fact, when I tried to get them to drink something fancy they didn't appreciate it, they liked the sweeter wines. Something else to look for with those big bottles, is the quality is actually getting better and better. There is so much gallonage available, you're going to see great wine end up in a box.

That's interesting. I just read an article about great wine in a can.

We make the wine in a can, about a 10,000 gallon can. Why not sell it in a can, it's a good idea. 

We've also noticed that screw tops are coming back.

That's not a fad, that's definitely the future. I usually make a lot of comments in my class to get people to relax about screw caps. They have so many benefits. Cork is bark from a tree and it was a solution from 300 years ago. A screw cap is better for a lot of wines, it keeps the wine quality higher, short term. They don't know about long term benefits yet. Short term, if you put a fresh, bright, pretty wine and stick the bark of a tree in it for 8 months, it's going to take away from that pure, fresh quality. 
Definitely there's no future for great French whites to be corked.

What are you feelings about aging? There are some people who believe you need to keep a bottle of wine corked for years and years. We opened our bottle of 2002 Darioush Shiraz last year, we had it about 6 1/2 years. There are those who say there is no purpose to keeping it that long, and then there are those who say it should be cellared. Is it specific to the wine or is there a general rule of thumb our readers should follow?

The thing I say is "The more you spend on a bottle of wine, the longer you need to wait to drink it." Anything that is under $20.00 is really made to drink right now. Don't wait to drink it because it's thin, blended, put in a bottle for early consumption. Over $20.00 you have a couple of years of shelf life that will probably benefit it. Once you get over $50.00 you're definitely in a holding spot, where you better have a cellar. Wineries can't afford to sit on them, they need to liquidate them and recoup their investment. They can't really sell the wine when it's ready to drink.  
A lot of wines do drink well in their youth, but the real optimal point is somewhere down the line. People say, "How do you know when that is?"  The more you spend on it, the more you should learn about it before you drink it too. You can't appreciate a $60.00 bottle of wine just on the price. You need to understand where it came from and who made it, how they made it and what they made it for. Once you get all that information you can probably determine when it's going to be the time to open that wine. A lot of wineries will tell you on their website when they expect their wines to peak.

It's a good idea to follow the suggestions of the vintners themselves.

Yes, and with very little effort in today's wine world, you can go online and find out when to drink the wine.

This is a question is about aeration. We are going to be doing a live webcast testing for a select group of individuals, say 30-40, with 8 participating vineyards, of Vinturi's new aerator for white wine. We will also be testing an  Eisch breathable wine glass. What is your opinion of these products good, bad, otherwise?

I think the businesses that surround the wine industry make it a fun journey. I think there are always things we can do to further the enjoyment of wine. I think aerators are smart business. I think they've made a killing in the market without any competition. This white wine aerator is another round. It'll be a varietal specific after that. My first encounter with the aerators was a good one. I particularly think an inexpensive bottle of wine benefits from the aerator more than a higher quality wine that will probably respond better to time in a decanter, 1/2 hour to 45 minutes. It knocks out some of the dings that might have occurred in transport.
Wine is asleep in the bottle. Think of the way we are when we first wake up, we're a little foggy and need a little time to get our mojo going. These aerators help some of these wines that are pushed along a little quickly into a bottle, to relax and show off their best side.

So, aerators are wines' cup of coffee.

Yes, I think they are. They're espresso for wine.

How about the Eisch breathable glass?

I need to learn more about that product. I've tasted with it before and I was impressed with it.

So were we.

I think that's the next evolution in glassware. The Riedel family did a lot to take it to where it's gotten. Now new ideas come in and build off of that. Really standing on the shoulders of giants, off the Riedels, the ability to build that business. So now some new ideas can come along and take it even higher. Hopefully they can keep the glassware cost down at the same time.

I think these are around $25.00 a glass. We've turned our chefs and a lot of  friends on to these glasses. They've been blown away by the differences.

Word of mouth is going to be the best thing for these types of things.

We're thrilled to have them be a part of our testing/tasting event. A live broadcast will send the message quickly.

If the quality is there, they'll find the customer waiting for it.