How it began, ended, and came back around Full Circle.
I visited San Francisco for the first time in 2004 and immediately couldn’t shake the beckoning feeling that I belonged here. I worked full time my last couple of years in college, played regular gigs with my band, and hustled side landscape jobs all to save money for the move. And about 6 months after I finished school, I did just that. After a three-day journey across the country, on August 8, 2008, San Francisco became my new home. While I finally had the zip code, I had no job prospects. This was the time when the US economy began to go full on Thelma & Lousie and drive itself off a cliff. Less than two weeks after arriving, I went mountain biking with a friend and ended up breaking my collarbone in half. It was one of the worst injuries of my life. I spent the next six weeks recovering while looking for work and trying to limit my daily Percocet intake to only two pills. Since I was still jobless, I was fortunate San Francisco had a universal healthcare system in place which took my hospital costs down from $5,000 to around $50.
The x-ray from my mountain bike accident
With the savings I had to hold me over running out fast and a short-term sublease about to expire, the heat was on to find a job. One day I got a call back for a wine broker position at a direct-to-consumer company in downtown SF. The sales director called just after lunch, and on that particular day, lunch consisted of a couple of Percocet with a joint to finish it – I was in a lot of pain. I don’t remember how the first part of that unexpected phone interview went, but I know it did not go well. The first thing I do recall was the person saying to me, “This is a sales job and I’m just not sure you're assertive enough for this role. We’re looking for someone who can really take charge on the phone.” That was enough to jump-start me out of my psychotropic haze and launch me into a sobering rebuttal where I assured her being assertive was no problem. I proceeded to confess how I had destroyed my collarbone only a week ago and was nursing a ton of pain with a fresh Percocet buzz. Then simply ended with, “So when do I start?”
It was my first real job in the big city with an office view overlooking Union Square. It felt like the real deal for the first 8 minutes it took to walk from the subway, past the doorman, and up the elevator to the office. That high ended pretty quickly as it began to feel like I was in that scene from Boiler Room where Ben Affleck is trying to motivate Giovanni Ribisi and all the new stock brokers in the scene, “Act as if…” The job wasn’t too much different; go one by one through a list of thousands of names, call the phone number and get past the gatekeepers, so you could sell the target on the $1,000 case of wine being pitched to them by a stranger over the phone. I commonly found myself saying, “What do you mean how did I get this number? You do like wine don’t you?” There were about twenty or so people to start and after two months only three of us remained.
I’m fairly natural at sales, but this was brutal. If it wasn’t for a few three martini lunches with an encouraging sales manager named Tino from the office, I wouldn’t have made it as long as I lasted. One night I went to a concert at the Fillmore, and in between songs, the artist told a story about how the best thing he ever did was quit his job and pursue his dreams in music. The next day I went into the office and resigned. I wish I could say that this story ends with me headlining the Fillmore the next week, but perhaps that story isn’t finished being written.
While the wine broker job helped me sharpen my ability to sell, it didn’t teach me about wine. But something about the wine spoke to me. I quickly went from enjoyment to a deep curiosity and being that I found myself in arguably one of the best places in the US to have a job in the wine industry, I decided that's what I wanted to pursue. After an unsuccessful attempt at trying to convince the manager of a local grocery store to let me take over their wine buying duties, I stumbled upon my local wine & spirit shop in Noe Valley and discovered they were hiring.
I ended up getting the job because the GM was impressed by the fact that when I walked in for the interview, I noticed he was having lunch and without missing a beat I told him I’d come back in 20 minutes when he was done eating. During the interview, he asked me some questions about wine, which I thought I did a good job of bull-shitting my way through. It concluded with him telling me that most of what I answered was wrong, but that he liked that I got out of there when he was eating his lunch. “I can teach you about wine. I haven’t ever been able to teach someone to know when to do that.” He asked me to come in on Saturday, thirty minutes before closing, so I could learn how to open and close the register. My first shift was to be the following day, all day by myself. The next 11 years were filled with a lot of fun, a lot of trial by fire, and lots of wine and spirits. The stores were known for wine well before I got there, but it was building the spirits program that allowed me to begin going to Kentucky to select single barrels of bourbon.
As time went on, and I grew within the company, I started to be more involved in management and operations and less hands-on with the buying and the customers. In the thick of it all, I almost lost myself. I struggled to remember who I was and how I got there in the first place. The best moments were on the road (or on tour as I called it), which I did fairly regularly for a good four-year stretch. I began inviting customers from the stores and friends from whiskey groups to join me in selecting barrels of whiskey, rum, and agave for the spirits program. My knowledge, passion, and curiosity for spirits continued to grow, but it was the relationships I formed with people I met along the way that really kept me there. Many people were customers at first, but then became some of my closest friends. That was probably the real reason I stayed, and probably why I stayed longer than I should have.
Through the years I managed to stay in touch with Tino, the sales manager from my first job in the city. One day I noticed Tino post some work made by an artist and long-time friend of his, named Gianluca Franzese. After looking at more of Gianluca’s work, I immediately knew that I had to collaborate with him on a piece for Subtle Spirits. His work embodies a complex approach to geometric shapes and shading by layering on real gold leafing and painting over it. This allows him to achieve an almost three-dimensional effect. I came to find out that his work was featured in some impressive locations like Tiffany’s in Milan and the Facebook HQ in California. I don’t think I would have been able to get him to sign on for the Subtle project had it not been for Tino helping to make it happen. After Gianluca was in, we began discussing ideas for the piece. We were inspired by a work in progress we saw at his studio that was an interwoven tubular-shaped wormhole design.
Thinking back to that piece I saw in his studio, It reminded me of the infinity symbol and the number 8. Among the casks I had set aside for creating a couple more blends was barrel #8, or more specifically the eighth barrel I labeled and put into inventory from MGP. This barrel #8 previously held the rye that was then finished in a François Frères Pinot cask before going into Quixotic. After I emptied the #8 barrel for Quixotic, I filled it back up with both bourbon (~75%) and rye (~25%) and let it continue aging. I really liked the combination of flavors the 95/5 rye and 75/21/4 bourbon mashes brought together, so it turned out to be the major component (25%) of this blend. It inspired me to continue blending both bourbon and rye together to create something more unique in profile than what could have been achieved with one or the other alone. The number 8 is an infinity symbol turned on its side, so I decided to go with the horizontal infinity orientation. Gianluca began the sketches for the piece, and I finished up the final ratios for the blend.
I began to think about the name. I didn’t want it to be called ‘Infinity’ because it usually gives the impression of random leftover bottles being unthoughtfully combined into one. I had a more specific intention. Then Facebook announced that it was changing its name to Meta and with it, a logo change that took an M, rounded it, and made it shaped like the infinity symbol. For me, that was a South star moment and I began to question whether I made the right decision to go with the shape in the first place. Shortly after, my partner and I were hashing out our release plan when we realized we were coming up on our 14-year anniversary of moving to San Francisco (08/08/08). Then it hit us – with just a simple twist to the right, our dilemma was solved. It was clear that this piece was meant to be in the shape of a figure eight the entire time. Sometimes when you’re chasing an idea around in your head you can circle the drain a bit. It can seem so obvious and then you hit a wall. If you’re lucky and can let go, you break through that wall. Just like the repetitions of the seasons. It all comes back around Full Circle.
As I sit here writing this, I am still in awe of how this came together. The level of coincidence is remarkable, and the depth of symbolism, while not forced, cannot be understated. Bootstrapping this brand on my own has been one of the more challenging, yet rewarding things I’ve done so far in life. I haven’t felt this freedom of possibility since moving here. Sometimes I’ll catch myself thinking about how far I have come since I first moved out here fourteen years ago, but it quickly fades into the feeling that I’ve really just begun. Like I’m starting all over again, and now I’ve come back Full Circle to where it all began.
8/8/2022 – Bottling day for Full Circle Cask Strength
Today is 08/08, and to commemorate that day we bottled 88 bottles of Full Circle at cask strength, 118 proof. The remaining 800 bottles are resting in tank at around 99 proof and will be bottled at the end of the month, for a grand total of 888 bottles. And if that wasn’t enough coincidence to complete this story, I crossed the 218,888 mile marker in my car just as we were getting back into San Francisco from the distillery. Seriously, I am not making that up.
Life is cyclical, and we’re just along for the ride. For me, I’ve been working on letting go and letting the story write itself. This time, it worked.
Read the Full Circle tasting notes.